Arthurian Fan Fiction

Knight Reading in Bed, Bruce Linn 2003
(The Crying Globe)

I hope you won't mind if I share yet another piece of my recent thinking and writing, particularly about my teaching.  Next week I will be presenting this material with a few of my Arthurian Literature students to a group of new faculty at UMB and I would love to hear your thoughts.  It isn't focused directly on HEL, but it certainly is informed by a new and controversial genre of digital English, fan fiction, which is a rapidly expanding catalogue of literary works on the internet.  The writing below (which is just a draft - with obvious gaps), and the assignment it describes, was inspired by the following question: what happens when students don't just analyze texts, as third person observers, and instead inhabit them and write from the points of view of Arthurian figures?
  One of the most entertaining, but unfortunately little read, Arthurian romances is the fifteenth-century Middle English poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. It recounts a story familiar to those who know Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, one of the most famous selections of his larger Canterbury Tales. The plot of each is almost exactly the same. A knight finds himself in a bind from which he will only escape if he can answer the enigmatic, and implicitly sexist, question: what do women want? The answer, according to both tales, is "sovereignty," or authority over their husbands and their property. Yet, the way that each arrives at this answer is remarkably different, quite simply because the anonymous writer of the Wedding composed his version as an adaptation of the folktale that Chaucer's widely known tale made famous.¹  Many pieces of literature have been produced this way, as a response to previous texts, but I want to suggest that Arthurian literature is exemplary in this respect. The Arthurian canon was produced, and is continually being produced, as a revision or elaboration of a basic plot that revolves around the exploits of England's legendary king and his knights of the Round Table. As I will demonstrate, Arthurian literature is one of the earliest and most long-standing examples of what we call fan fiction today.


For example, one of the most fascinating changes that the Wedding-poet makes – at least from this writing teacher's point of view – is the insertion of an ethnographic research project conducted by knights. Believe it or not, one of Arthur's most loyal vassals, Sir Gawain, recommends that he and Arthur answer the question of "what do women want?" by surveying the countryside like a couple of chivalric anthropologists. He says:

Ye, Sir, make good chere;

Lett make your hors redy

To ryde into straunge contrey;

And evere wheras ye mete owther man

or woman, in faye,

Ask of them whate they therto saye.

And I shalle also ryde anoder waye

And enquere of every man and woman, and get whatt I may

Of every man and woman answere,

And in a boke I shalle them wryte. (182-90) ²

Arthur immediately accepts this writing assignment and leaves Gawain to interrogate every "man, woman, and other" [what is meant by "other" is an intriguing question – maybe a dwarf, incubus, or giant?] (197). After discovering that some women want clothes, while others desire the pursuit of lusty men, he reconvenes with Gawain to conduct a kind of medieval writing workshop.

Syr Gawen had goten answerys so many

That had made a boke greatt, wytterly;

To the courte he cam agayn.

By that was the kyng comyn withe hys boke,

And eyther on others pamplett dyd loke. (207-11)

Their individual writing projects become a collaborative endeavor, in which they collate their pieces of writing to determine the best answer to the question. Given the tendency in Arthurian romance to emphasize deeds over words, this instance is striking in its depiction of knights who attempt to write their way out of a problem.

The more I've read and taught this poem, the more I've become convinced that this knightly writing project provides a pedagogical model for one way to enrich and complicate readings of literary texts. After all, this scene forces us to consider Arthur and Gawain as not just knights, but knights who write. We must then ask: how did they write? In other words, did they write in the third person, the normal mode of Arthurian literature? Or more intriguingly, did they write in first person, a perspective rarely employed in Arthurian narration? These questions are left unanswered in the poem itself, but the prospect of an Arthurian text written in the voice of an Arthurian character has been too irresistible for me to ignore. As a teacher of literature, I often ask students to analyze, via traditional literary analysis and often in third person, the psychology of literary characters, but rarely do I encourage them to step into the text itself and become those characters. In other words, what happens when I ask students to assume the perspectives of literary characters rather than simply identify them?

For the past two years, I have tried to answer this question by asking students to respond to course texts from the points of view of Arthurian characters on a course blog called The Roundtable.³  During the first week of class, students select Arthurian figures ranging from Lancelot and Guinevere to the Giant of St. Michael's Mount and Morgan le Fay. Before contributing to the blog, their first task is to learn as much as they can about their characters by reading the course texts in which they appear and conducting research on the web and in scholarly journals. Once they have a basic understanding of their characters, they compose blog posts and comments about the course texts as we encounter them from week to week. For example, while we were reading Chrétien de Troyes' Lancelot this semester, the student who played the role of Guinevere composed a post that took issue with the ending, which, according to Chrétien's text, had to be completed by one Godefroy of Lagny (198). As Guinevere she offers a new ending that she claims is the true one:

My Valiant Lords and Sweet Ladies of the Round Table, . . A terrible lie has been fed to you. The ending of the good cleric Chrétien’s story was erased and rewritten by the wicked Godefroy of Lagny. Now, Godefroy himself acknowledged that he wrote the ending but said he had Chrétien’s approval. Not so! The gentle Chrétien passed from this life to the next believing that the true story of Lancelot’s love for me, his queen, would go down in history as the greatest love story ever told. So, you ask, what really happened? Lancelot was indeed rescued from the tower by Meleagant's kind sister and (like most of the other women in the story) asked for Lancelot's love in return. However, Lancelot DID NOT respond by pledging his heart, body, aid, and possessions to her. Instead he promised to free her from Meleagant's tyranny (by causing his death) but that his love was only for his queen (the same answer given to all other women in the story). . . Love indeed ruled me over Reason and I outwardly rejoiced. . . Why, you ask, would the vile Godefroy have changed this ending? He felt that the pure but tragic love between Lancelot and me was shameful and should not be recited to future generations. He changed it in an attempt to make Lancelot seem more honorable and less sinful.⁴

By condemning Godefroy's interpolation as sanctimonious drivel, this student challenges the notion that the love between her character Guinevere and Lancelot is cast as sinful throughout the romance, a position that demonstrates a nuanced reading of Chrétien's celebration of their affair in the earlier episodes. Even more striking, however, is the fact that this post operates simultaneously as both a commentary and an elaboration – that is, the student comments on the course text by revising it.

This revision provoked a number of comments, including one by Sir Gromer Somer, a brash and begrudging knight whose lands have been seized by the Arthurian court in aforementioned Wedding. He retorts: "My Queen, you do Godefroy a grave injustice. He merely sought, as a man should, to make you appear more fit for Lancelot. A woman ruled by Love is a woman who cannot make decisions, and women MUST make decisions. He honors you above all other women by suggesting that you alone are ruled by Reason, the masculine trait, and as such are indeed worthy of Lancelot."⁵  This response not only recognizes Sir Gromer Somer's hostility to Guinevere and women in general, but also engages in a debate about the duality of love and reason in Chrétien's romance. In addition to such sophisticated textual analysis, such heated exchanges on the blog often resulted in the creation of new rivalries and alliances, in which adulterous queens and headless giants could find like-minded companions or unexpected adversaries.

The emergence of new plots on the blog was a surprising phenomenon, but when I considered the historical development of Arthurian literature and the dynamic genre of fan fiction, I realized that these elaborations and revisions were perfectly natural manifestations of canon formation and online role-playing. In particular, fan fiction, or texts composed about popular media by their fans, became a compelling heuristic for considering a way to extend the blog conversations into full-blown writing assignments. After all, in the last decade fan fiction has become a rapidly expanding catalogue of texts, especially on the Internet. The archive on Fanfiction.net, the most popular of the fan fiction sites, contains almost a half-million Harry Potter texts alone.⁶  I soon realized that with a little nudging, my students, who were already produced mini-fan fictions on the blog, could write longer pieces in which they revise course texts from their characters' points of view. The blog would then become the dressing room for students to try on their characters, to see how well they fit, to determine which adjustments needed to made, and ultimately to figure out how they should behave when they go out in public. The fan fiction assignment I developed asked students to extend their writing beyond the blog to create new episodes, alter well-known scenes, or even fill in missing sections of course texts through their characters' perspectives.

To analyze the results, I have selected three students, whose contributions to the blog and accompanying fan fictions were remarkable in their approach, depth, and complexity. The work of Kate Unruh is appropriate to address first because she is the student who assumed the role of the petulant Guinevere on the blog. Her revision demonstrates the way one student was able to migrate a character's perspective from the blog to the academic paper.

[Kate's presentation]

Kate's revision is an example of one approach to the revision: adding a new perspective to established events, in this case Guinevere's supposed betrayal of Arthur through her union with Mordred. In keeping with her blog posting about Lancelot, I would characterize this piece of fan fiction as a poetic commentary on her source text.

An example of another approach is provided by Christine Sands, who inserts her character, Gwendoloena, a clairvoyant Guinevere from the Latin romance The Rise of Gawain, into the legend of Tristan and Isolde. This intervention occurs during a pivotal scene and actually fills a gap in the only surviving fragment of the French poet Béroul's Romance of Tristan (272).

[Christine's presentation]

In contrast to Kate's commentary on a text in which her character appears, Christine imagines how an Arthurian tale may change through the introduction of a new character. And by filling a gap in the story, Christine's revision serves as an elaboration of a provocative scene that satisfies a readerly desire to recover what had been lost in the transmission of the tale through the decay and/or destruction of medieval manuscripts.

Lastly, I turn to the work of Adam Overbay, whose ambitious revision could barely be contained within eleven pages (the average length was approximately five pages). He wrote as Bedivere, the often overlooked one-handed cupbearer of the Round Table, whose fifteen minutes of fame occurs at the scene of Arthur's death when he tosses Excalibur into the water, returning the mythical sword to the Lady of the Lake.

[Adam's presentation]

While Adam's revision could be characterized as both a commentary and an elaboration, his synthesis of characters, plots, and languages operates as what I would call a compilation. In other words, he distills his character's various textual identities into this revision to establish uncommon affinities between a number of Arthurian texts, which in turn uncovers interpretive possibilities that would unlikely be realized through traditional literary analysis.

I would like to conclude by addressing this last issue, the value of this kind of fan fiction, particularly within the context of academic writing. Surely I do not want to promote an uncritical fandom of literary texts, which suggests that works of literature should be objects of worship and praise. My goal, in fact, is almost the opposite. I want students to be skeptical readers, often even suspicious ones, of all texts, whether they are canonical or not. More often than not, I rely on the standard thesis-argument essay to achieve this goal. Unfortunately, one of the main difficulties I've encountered in teaching traditional literary analysis or academic argument is convincing students that what they say really matters. To return to my initial inquiry into point of view, I believe that one of the primary obstacles is the reluctance of our students to employ the first person in their writing.⁷  Students are understandably uncomfortable about asserting themselves in the academic setting, particularly because many view their essays as naïve interruptions of scholarly conversations that have been going on for decades, sometimes centuries. The regrettable result of such anxiety about the use of "I" in academic writing is the perpetuation of bland third person pronouncements that rely heavily on the existing scholarship and demonstrate little personal investment or perspective.

I find it delightfully ironic, then, that when students write in the voices of others, they readily submit literary texts to increased scrutiny, engage in academic debate, and immerse themselves in the critical conversations that any teacher would hope they would join. Moira Fitzgibbons, a teacher who has her students participate in similar role-playing in her Chaucer course, suggests further that "[a] relativistic attitude toward scholarly arguments (for example, 'everyone is entitled to his own opinion') is harder to maintain, I would argue, once a student has committed to shaping a fictional voice in a particular way."⁸  As I believe Kate, Christine, and Adam have demonstrated, their fan fictions likewise confront the critical problems that include (among others) the construction of gender roles, authorship and authority, and the relationship between truth and honesty. Additionally, the blog within the classroom context offers what digital culture theorist James Gee might call an Arthurian "affinity space," which allows for a variety of levels of interactions of students via posting and commenting through the anonymity of avatars.⁹  In this scenario, students establish their affinities by seamlessly shifting back and forth from the communities of the classroom and the blogosphere, offering their perspectives on course material in both face-to-face and anonymous online dialogue. Ultimately, I believe that the digital impersonation and presence that this assignment demands encourages students to think beyond the explication of the text and enter a chivalric cyberspace, in which knights don't just fight – they write and rewrite the very texts they inhabit.



1. According to James J. Wilhelm, the likely date of the poem is 1450. See his introduction to the tale in The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, new expanded ed. (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 467. Chaucer's Tales were written, and never completed, at the end of his life, between 1387-1400, but it's likely that he completed The Wife of Bath's Tale between 1392--5. See Larry Benson's editorial introduction to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), xxix. For more on the sources of the Wedding, see Thomas Hahn's edition of the text in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), ?.




2. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle in Wilhelm, The Romance of Arthur, 472. Future references to the Wedding and other Arthurian texts are from this edition.



3. The Roundtable, http://roundtableknights.blogspot.com (accessed November 29, 2010).



4. "The True Ending of 'Lancelot' or 'Knight of the Cart,'" The Roundtable, September 29, 2010.



5. Comment on "The True Ending of 'Lancelot' or 'Knight of the Cart,'" The Roundtable, September 30, 2010.



6. FanFiction.Net, http://www.fanfiction.net (accessed November 29, 2010).



7. For more on this "I" problem, see Sheridan Blau, The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), ?.



8. Moira Fitzgibbons, "'Cross-voiced' Assignments and the Critical 'I,'" in Teaching Chaucer, ed. Gail Ashton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 65-80, at 74.



9. James Paul Gee, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2004), 77-90.