The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends [antikvár]

FOREWORDEveryone who has approached the Arthurian legends with a view to finding out more about them is struck at once by their sheer breadth and complexity. Many turn away at this point, or content themselves with reading Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In so doing they miss a great deal. Wonderful though Malory's retelling of the legends is, it is only one among many. To have failed to discover the fourteenth-century poem of Sir Qaivain and the Qreen Knight, or the mysterious pageantry of the mighty Vulgate Version from which Malory himself drew extensively, is to have missed a wondrous experience.Even if the intrepid reader does find his way to Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and discovers how it differs from Perlesvaus, he will almost certainly reel back at the welter of names - people, places and things - which are part of the magic of the Arthurian world but which change, overlap and sometimes contradict each other outright.In twenty odd years of writing about, and teaching, the Arthurian legends the question 1 am still most frequently asked is this: What book should I read first to give me an overview of the legends? That book has now arrived. Ronan Coghlan's Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends is both timely and useful. It gives brief entries on all the major themes and characters of the legends, as well as on many minor figures whose identities will have remained, at best, shadowy and, at worst, completely obscured to most readers unfamiliar with Medieval French, Middle High German, Old Spanish or, indeed, any one of the half dozen antique tongues in which the Matter of Britain, the corpus of Arthurian legends, was composed.With this book, which is both scholarly and readable, you can discover the identity, and the story, of such exotic people as Bishop Baldwin of Britain, Bran the Blessed, Claris and Laris, Garlón the Invisible Knight, Dame Ragnell, Meliant de Lis, Wrnach the Giant and Ysaie the Sad, as well as the castles, forests, weapons, horses, dogs and all the other