The Figure of Arthur
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Book Overview
Charles Williams died in 1945 with this book unfinished: a prose history of King Arthur that follows the figure from the thin record of post-Roman Britain into the great medieval romances.
The Figure of Arthur was Williams's attempt to explain why the Arthurian story took the shape it did. He begins with what the earliest chronicles actually say, then watches poets and compilers enlarge it across fourteen centuries - Guinevere and Lancelot, Merlin, Gawaine, Morgan le Fay - and puts one question at the centre of his reading: does the king exist for the sake of the Grail, or the Grail for the sake of the king? The opening chapters were read aloud to J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before Williams's sudden death, and Lewis edited the surviving text and brought it out in 1948 in Arthurian Torso, alongside his own commentary on Williams's Arthurian poems.
Williams (1886-1945) spent most of his working life as an editor at Oxford University Press, writing poetry, plays, novels and theology around the day job. He is remembered now as the third of the Inklings, the Oxford circle he shared with Lewis and Tolkien, and for the two Taliessin cycles that this study was written to accompany.
This edition features:
Williams's unfinished prose history of the Arthurian legend, the last major project of his lifeAn account of how a shadowy war leader grew into the central figure of medieval storytellingThe Grail argued as the heart of the whole matter, by a writer who was also a lay theologianEssential background for the Taliessin poems and for readers following the Inklings beyond Lewis and TolkienCustomer Reviews
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