Arthuriad

By Frank Salvidio

The legend of King Arthur has been part of the literary fabric of Western culture since at least the time of the early sixth-century Welsh poet Aneirin—principally through Geoffrey of Monmouth's early twelfth-century Historia Britainum, the late twelfth-century romances of Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d' Arthur (fifteenth century), Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and more recently, in America at least, the narrative poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot," with its emphasis on the illicit love affair of Lancelot and Guenevere. Indeed, so prominent has the legend of King Arthur been in Western culture that before he turned to the Bible to write Paradise Lost, John Milton is said to have considered the Arthurian legend as the subject of an epic poem about the journey of the English people into Christianity. Now, in his Arthuriad, award-winning poet Frank Salvidio retells the story of the internecine rivalries that culminated in the tragic end of Arthur's attempt to found an ideal kingdom based on Christian principles and protected by a brotherhood of Christian warriors—the Knights of the Round Table. The Arthuriad tells the story in a series of dramatic monologues in which all the dramatis personae offer self-revealing recollections of the part each played in the tragedy of Arthur's failed attempt to establish Christian civilization in a pagan world. What emerges is the story of unrestrained human passions undermining the spiritual aspirations on which Arthur sought to establish his ideal kingdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645444831

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Publications Coordinator Nicole Reefer of Page Publications Inc. for her patient assistance throughout the preparation of this book. I should also like to thank Page’s Art Department for creating the book’s striking cover, which is based on two lines from Sir Bedivere’s account of the passing of Arthur. And I would be remiss if I failed to thank my daughter Rachel, whose responses to the Arthurian legends, read when she was in high school, prompted me to write the poems which eventually became this book, thus making her, however inadvertently, the book’s Effective Cause.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MERLIN THE MAGICIAN—prophet to Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, mentor to Arthur, and wizard to the Court at Camelot; he made the fatal selection of Guenevere to be Arthur’s Queen and proposed the quest for the Holy Grail to redeem both Court and Kingdom. His influence and authority declined after the arrival of Guenevere, and he himself disappeared after he fell in love with the sorceress Vivian.

MORGAN LE FAY—Arthur’s half-sister, the Queen of Gore, called Le Fay because of her powers of sorcery; Arthur’s implacable enemy with unmatched powers of seduction and