There are hundreds of retellings of the legend of King Arthur, starting from medieval times up to the present day. Here’s a selection of things you might look at, if you are interested in reading more Arthurian material.
Medieval Arthurian Works
Geoffrey of Monmouth A History of the Kings of Britain is the first work written in England that mentions Arthur; the original is in Latin, but there are lots of translations, including a Penguin edition.
Chretien de Troyes wrote a series ofpoems about Arthur and his knights in French.
You can find some of them in Medieval romances edited by Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis, in the MRC Library.
U of Calgary Library has lots of Chretien’s works both in the original French, and in translation.
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Arthur. There are several copies of this in the MRC library.
Modern Retellings
T.H. White, The Once and Future King. This is a fairly close retelling of Malory, with a good deal of humour. The Disney movie The Sword in the Stone is based on the first volume of this series.
Mary Stewart wrote a whole series of novels from the point of view of Merlin. The first book is The Crystal Cave.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. This is a retelling from the point of view of Arthur’s half sister, Morgan Le Fay. Bradley is often praised for having brought a feminist reading to the story.
Rosalind Miles has a trilogy which starts with Guenevere: Queen of the Summer Country.
Arthurian influenced works
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence addresses the legend of Arthur, but doesn’t retell it. The second book of this series is currently a film called The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.
Robertson Davies’ excellent novel The Lyre of Orpheus uses the Arthurian legend on several levels.
Films
One of the best interpretations on film is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One of the Monty Python actors, Terry Jones, has some reputation as a scholar of medieval literature.
Excalibur is a film which basically follows Malory.
There is a film version of The Mists of Avalon, but it isn’t spectacularly faithful to the novel or the legend.
First Knight is a fairly strange interpretation of Lancelot and Guenivere.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade draws heavily on Arthurian Grail legends, without retelling the story.
