Figure of Arthur

The Figure of Arthur is the unfinished prose companion to Charles Williams's two cycles of Arthurian poems, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). Williams, a poet, novelist, theologian and editor at Oxford University Press, had been drawn to the Matter of Britain for decades and wanted to set out, in plain argument, what he took the legend to mean and how its materials had been shaped over the centuries. He left the work incomplete at his death in May 1945, and it was published in 1948 together with C. S. Lewis's commentary on the poems, Arthurian Torso, which supplies an account of the poetry and a tribute to the man who wrote it.

Williams reads the Arthurian stories as a tradition that matured by accretion rather than by design. He moves from the early Welsh and Latin fragments through Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, the French prose romances and Malory, watching how a chronicle of a British war-leader slowly gathers the Round Table, the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the Grail. His central claim is that the legend is not finally about the rise and fall of a kingdom but about a pattern: a realm that is meant to be a image of the Kingdom of God, a court that is broken by love gone wrong, and a holy object that stands for the possibility of redemption. The mystery of the Grail, in his reading, belongs with the old Christian theme that glory is found in and through the flesh and the common order of things, rather than in flight from them. This is the conviction behind what he elsewhere called the way of affirmation of images, and it shapes how he judges each author he treats.

The book matters because it shows how one of the most original Christian imaginations of the twentieth century understood the relation between story, doctrine and love, and because it remains among the more serious attempts to trace the Arthurian tradition as a single developing whole. It also opens the poems, which many readers find difficult without guidance. Lewis's companion essay, bound with it in the original volume, adds a witness to Williams's influence on the Inklings.

Who should read this: Readers of Williams's poetry or his novels who want his own account of the myth behind them, and students of Arthurian literature who are willing to follow a theologian's argument rather than a historian's. It is not an introduction to the legend for newcomers, nor a finished scholarly survey, and readers who dislike dense, allusive prose and a strongly Christian interpretive stance will find it hard going.