So, anyone with an opinion as to when and why Arthurian tales stopped being viewed as “contemporary” and started being a “period piece” of some sort or another?
Up to a point, the Arthurian stories of a given period would have their characters speak as contemporary and act as contemporary, none of that “old timey” nonsense injected into it. Instead, the attitudes and themes of the “present” would be projected onto the Arthurian material quite explicitly, with very little to no “old timey” window dressing.
When and why did this change?
I’ve got my own ideas but I want to wait to drop them (nothing brilliant, just want to hear what others think).
Hm. Well, Arthur was nearly always set into a golden era of the past, which for a long time was supposed to be contemporary with the Roman Empire. Writers projected behavior and themes of their present in the same way that embroiderers and artists pictured Biblical characters in contemporary settings and clothing, only more so. Chivalry, quests, and so on were the stuff of modern romantic poetry when Chretien de Troyes and others were writing, and they just added in new plotlines and characters.
I would guess that the change came around about the time of Malory, though. By then, the stories would have been somewhat outdated, and there was a large body of story to elaborate upon and retell. He set them all down in one book, which became the standard Arthurian storybook for quite awhile.
But hey, let’s not forget T H White, who did it all over again and used a lot of modern themes and language.
Not that I know a whole lot about this stuff; you’d have to ask my revered English professor.
There’s actually a passage in Malory where he refers to the followers of Mordred in particular as “new-fangle,” unless I’m remembering it wrong – I don’t have my copy at hand to check. In any case he’s drawing a distinct contrast between the idealized court of Arthur and the society in which he was writing (and England was largely a mess due to civil war in the late fifteenth century, when Le Morte d’Arthur was written).
T.H. White does something similar, actually, now that I think of it…
“Arthur, this world’s gone and passed you by,
Don’t you know it,
Don’t you know it.
Arthur, could be you were right all along,
Don’t you know it,
I hope you know it.
Somebody loves you,
Don’t you know it.”
Oh yeah, I remember that–he has Mordred wear those shoes with toes so long and pointy that they have to be tied to his belt so he can walk–just as good as a mohawk and piercings for annoying the old farts. IIRC, he wears NY black too (though that doesn’t seem to go with the shoe thing, so maybe I’ve got that wrong). Mordred also shocks the old guard in the political arena, not by his violence (that was there long before and was what Arthur’s plan was designed to address), but by being the first to use Hitler-like fascism/cult of personality/rabble-rousing speeches to gain followers.
Since we still aren’t sure who Arthur was or if he was a real person at all, I think it will be very difficult to say if any particular story speaks in a “then-contemporary” voice–any non-fiction pre-dates any of the real stories and the real stories are all mythological, to some extent. I don’t think we’ll be able to answer this one with any certainty.