Comparative Literature 106 Course Outline
Unit 1:
Lesson 1: Origins
Lesson 2: Welsh Arthurians
Lesson 3: Chronicles; Places and Archaeology
Unit 2: Chrétien de Troyes
Unit 3: Chrétien de Troyes, Part II
Unit 4:
Lesson 1: Merlin
Lesson 2: Gawain
Unit 5: Tristan and Isolde
Unit 6
Lesson 1: Other Versions of the Legend
Lesson 2: Italio Calvino
According to early Arthurian literary texts, Stonehenge was brought from Ireland by King Arthur's wizard, Merlin.
"A certain writer emerged in my own lifetime who took it upon himself to expiate the tainted past of the British. Weaving ridiculous fabrications, he showed the impudent vanity of extolling this people to heights of prowess far exceeding those of the Macedonians and Romans. He is called Geoffrey and he takes Arthur as his second name after the Arthurian fables which, derived from the ancient fictions of the British and augmented with additions of his own, he conveyed through the highly-colored rhetoric of the Latin language and thereby clothed in the honorable name of history."
The twelfth-century skeptic, William of Newburgh, on the historical basis of King Arthur:
The (Holy) Grail was the invention of the French authors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Always a topic of immense interest and mystery, the Holy Grail has been one of the most enduring metaphors of purity, valor, and occult knowledge in the Arthurian tradition. King Arthur's knights Perceval and Galahad are two of the most famous Grail knights, and movies such as Monty Python's Holy Grail and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade have adapted it and popularized it for modern audiences.