Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory (1405-1471) @1470 Published 1485 by Caxton on a printing press Redaction—older works are digested, combined, or revised. Malory’s work might be considered a redaction.

Parzival and The Grail Quest

• Innocent
• Malory's Grail
• Jung’s Puer Aeternus “Latin for "eternal child," used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother.” (The Jung Page < http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php>)
• Fisher King: king wounded in the thigh; burns his hand and thigh when he reaches for a cooking fish; the kingdom languishes; grail will revitalize
• Stone or rock of original grail becomes Chalice or spear from Christian tradition
  Parzival sees grail; fails to retrieve it; ends with him returning to quest
• Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (German)
  • http://mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/we_parzival.html

• Chretien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances (1170-90)
  • "The Knight in the Cart"—Lancelot rescues Guinevere, first appearance of the romance
  • "Eric and Enide"--a man undergoes a series of quests with his wife to prove his worth
  • Andres de Capellanus
    • Capellanus wrote his book at the direction of Countess Marie de Troyes
    • ties to France
• Tristan
  • Parallels Lancelot and Guinevere: Tristan falls in love with his uncle's wife; the affair destroys the lovers and the friendship
  • Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (German)

• Quest
• Animus The inner masculine side of a woman. Like the anima in a man, the animus is both a personal complex and an archetypal image. (The Jung Page < http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php>)
• Sun god—power grows with the rising sun and falters as the sun lowers
• The Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain is ideal
• Marie de France's "Sir Lanfal" Gawain stands by Lanfal despite Arthur's anger

• References in Old English works to Romano-British war chief
• Corruption
  • Marie de France—court rules, prejudices, patriarchal biases
  • Pearl Poet—innocent, foolish, over confident, obtuse
  • Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King—emasculated

• Half-sister of Arthur
• Anima The inner feminine side of a man. The anima is both a personal complex and an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche. It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child, and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. Initially identified with the personal mother, the anima is later experienced not only in other women but as a pervasive influence in a man's life. (The Jung Page < http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php>)
• Gives birth to Arthur’s illegitimate son, Mordred

Mordred

• Artgur's son
• Jung on Shadow
• Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one's personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person.
• As child: The shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but-convention forbids!