About the Author: John Matthews
John Matthews is an historian, folklorist and author. He has been a full time writer since 1980 and has produced over ninety books on the Arthurian Legends and Grail Studies, as well as short stories and a volume of poetry. He has devoted much of the past thirty years to the study of Arthurian Traditions and myth in general. His best known and most widely read works are ‘Pirates’ (Carlton/Atheneum), No 1 children’s book on the New York Times Review best-seller list for 22 weeks in 2006, ‘The Grail, Quest for Eternal Life’ (Thames & Hudson, 1981) ‘The Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom’ (Element, 1994) and ‘The Winter Solstice’ (Quest Books, 1999) which won the Benjamin Franklin Award for that year. His book ‘Celtic Warrior Chiefs’ was a New York Public Library recommended title for young people.
Find the best price forThe Unknown Arthur: Forgotten Tales of the Round Table
John Matthews, Mark Robertson
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Hardcover, by Blandford
ISBN10: 0713724765 | ISBN13: 9780713724769
Page count: 160
The tales and legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table remain one of the most enduring aspects of the Middle Ages. The stories, as we know them today, emerged from an eleventh-century melting-pot of folk tradition and myth, refined and changed over the following five hundred-years in poems, dramas and often-repeated tales.
The main source for the most commonly told stories remains the early, classic twelfth-century account of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the subsequent embroidery of Thomas Malory and, even later, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, with it s Victorian knights and their silken-clad ladies.
Yes these depictions are only a part of the whole phenomena of the legends. Indeed, with Arthur himself a probable composite of at least three different figures from history and legend, there are dozens of other source-texts which begin to give us a different picture and new stories. Yet these important aspects of the Arthurian Legend are scarcely ever even referred to in contemporary versions of the stories.
Now, for the first time in a modern readable form, an Arthurian expert produces the fruits of research into these texts, many obscure and some never before translated into English, to provide a whole new collection of tales. No less exciting or intriguing than their more familiar counterparts, the twelve selected here are each retold in a modern style, preceded by a commentary and introduced to their source and significance.
Not only will they be a pleasant surprise to even the most knowledgeable Arthurian enthusiast, but they are also an inspiration to re-examine the whole cycle of the legends and to look again at the original sources. With a series of specially created colour plates by artist Mark Robertson, this is both ans an entertaining and informative insight into medieval life, with its dreams and interlinked spirituality of the characters and stories.
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