Arthurian Legend

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Arthurnet Logs

Complete, searchable logs of the Internet scholarly conference “Arthurnet.” An excellent resource for the most current thinking of scholars and teachers, lively debates. You can search for subject matter (e.g., “historical Arthur”), author (e.g., “Malory”), or contributor (e.g., “Laura Hodges”).

Bibliographies

Arthurian and Other Medieval Websites

  • Arthuriana – Homepage for the International Arthurian Society and its journal Arthuriana, including The Arthuriana Pedagogy Page .
  • An Arthuriana Chronology and A Gazetteer of Arthurian Sites – Persons, events, works, and places associated with the Arthurian legends from A.D. 175 to the present, by Chris Snyder of Mississippi State University for Arthuriana.
  • Arthur from Scratch: An Arthurian Primer by Judy Shoaf
  • King Arthur Aloud: Arthurian Audio Files – Readings of Arthurian texts in medieval Welsh, French, German, and English. Part of the Arthuriana Pedagogy Page.
  • Camelot Project – A database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information. The project is sponsored by the University of Rochester and prepared in The Robbins Library, a branch of Rush Rhees Library. The Camelot Project has been designed by Alan Lupack, Curator of the Robbins Library, and Barbara Tepa Lupack.
  • Arthurian Resources – This site by Caitlin Green of the Oxford Institute of Archaeology provides a wide ranging and well organized survey of Arthur in literature and history.
  • Britannia’s King Arthur – A series of links from Britannia Internet Magazine, including a timeline of Arthurian Britain. A valuable site if used with care. The authors acknowledge that much of their material is supposition, but they don’t always distinguish between what is historically documented and what is speculative.
  • King Arthur’s Pedigree – Celtic scholar Chris Gwinn’s page of references to Arthur’s family in medieval Welsh, Gaelic, and Latin texts.
  • Pierre Kunstmann’s “Dictionnaire électronique de Chrétien de Troyes” provides an Old French-Modern French-Modern English dictionary of Chrétien’s lexis, a complete concordance and complete transcriptions of the five romances, including digital manuscript images of all five.
  • Tennessee Bob’s Chrétien Links – Links compiled by Dr. Robert D. Peckham of the University of Tennessee-Martin. Some web sites are in French.
  • Tennesse Bob’s Arthurian Narratives: Manuscript Sources in French Vernaculars – Dr. Peckham’s list of online French Arthurian manuscripts, including digital facsimiles. Organized into sections for Chrétien de Troyes, Grail stories, and Tristan romances.
  • Tristan and Isolt: Texts, Images, Basic Information (a subset of the Camelot Project)
  • International Marie de France Society – A site for Marie de France, one of the great medieval authors and the only major female medieval writer of Arthurian material known so far. The site includes performances of Marie’s “lais,” manuscript sources, an Anglo-Norman dictionary, and links to related scholarly societies.
  • Lais of Marie de France – Online translations of the most famous Breton Arthurian tales with annotations by Judy Shoaf and other notable scholars.
  • The Lais of Marie de France Study Guide – A guide prepared by Paul Brians of Washington State University.
  • Oxford Arthurian Society – The Arthurian Society exists to explore the figure of King Arthur in history, literature and legend. The society was founded in 1982.
  • The Book of Aneirin – Llyfr Aneirin is one of the “Four Ancient Books of Wales,” and its poem Y Gododdin contains the earliest surviving reference to Arthur.  This is a digital facsimile from the National Library of Wales.
  • “The Mabinogi and The Mabinogion“ – A discussion of the meaning of the words and the nature of the work by translator, John K. Bollard.
  • The Book of Taliesin – A digital facsimile of one of the earliest Arthurian texts, housed in the National Library of Wales. The Book of Taliesin (Peniarth MS 2), dating from the first half of the fourteenth century, contains “Preiddeu Annwfn,” which refers to Arthur and his warriors going on a quest for a spear and magic cauldron, an analogue to the Grail story.
  • Manuscript Illuminations and Book Illustrations Relating to King Arthur from the British Library – Images, mostly medieval, from various manuscripts and books in the British Library. Click on each image individually to enlarge.
  • Two Manuscripts of The Lancelot-Grail Cycle – Images from Yale’s MS 227 and MS 229, two of the finest examples of illuminated Arthurian manuscripts. Held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
  • Images from an illuminated manuscript of a Dutch version of Lancelot, the Haagse Lancelotcompilatie or Roman van Lancelot, with a description of the manuscript and the work.
  • The Douay-Rheims Bible – A Catholic translation of the Vulgate Bible into English, often closer to the Latin text that medieval authors would have known than any more modern translations, Catholic or Protestant. If a student can’t read the medieval Latin Vulgate itself, this is the translation to use. Also available at Intratext Library, which contains a built-in concordance for many of the words.
  • The Catholic Encyclopedia – An excellent first stop for research into Catholic doctrine and the history of the medieval Catholic Church.
  • Bernard of Clairvaux’s The New Knighthood (De laude novae militae) – The prologue and first five chapters of the defense of the Knights Templar by the early 12th-century Cistercian mystic, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. His ideas of a new, spiritual knighthood influenced the earliest stories of the Holy Grail. The translation is by Conrad Greenia.
  • Medieval Sourcebook – Fordham University’s website with links to translations of many medieval texts.
  • The Labyrinth – A prime site for all medieval resources on the World Wide Web.
  • The Online Reference Book (ORB) for Medieval Studies – This is an archived version of the site originally edited by the late Kathryn Talarico and no longer maintained at the original URL, the-orb.net. Though it was available until July 2015, this link is to Archive.org’s December 23, 2012, snapshot, because more of the links are still active as Archive.org sub-pages. Especially useful for students are the entries in the ORB Encyclopedia, the Textbook Library, Of General Interest, and E-Texts. Scholars will be pleased that Jim Marchand’s “What Every Medievalist Should Know” is intact.

Online Articles and E-texts

  • “Some Notes on Merlin” by Scott Middleton and Linda Malcor, authors of From Scythia to Camelot (in PDF format).
  • Essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte Darthur (among other medieval texts) from the Luminarium Anthology of Middle English Literature. (Note that student essays are marked with an “s.”)
  • The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a book by R. Allen Shoaf, originally published in 1984, now available in its entirety on the Web. Includes a bibliography.
  • Stories of Sir Gawain Texts of popular medieval tales of Sir Gawain with commentaries and brief bibliography from the website of TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages). Works include The Greene Knight (a version of SGGK), The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle (a version of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale”), and Ywain and Gawain (a Middle English version of Chrétien’s Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion).
  • The Medieval Review, both a browsable and searchable collection of electronic reviews of books on all medieval subjects, literary, historical, and cultural. A good way to find out about new books on Arthurian Legend.
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