About this portal
A source-cited reading room for the Matter of Britain, built so that a newcomer can learn the famous stories and follow a thread without ever losing track of whose Arthur they are reading.
What is here
- Primary text
- 1,201 reading units across 11 works — about 1,165,000 words
- Stories
- 49 episodes, retold and cross-referenced
- Figures
- 43 dossiers
- Voices
- 12 authors and traditions
- Throughlines
- 7 motifs tracked across the whole canon
- Quotations
- 25, every one located in its source by an automated gate
- Glossary
- 635 Middle English entries, from the edition’s own glossary
Where it came from
The portal is built on a research base assembled for another project: a quote-validated crosswalk of the Matter of Britain across its incompatible versions, with a controlled vocabulary, a set of house constraints, and a ledger of validated quotations. The intellectual structure of this site — the seven throughlines, the discipline of naming the version, the insistence on counting the cost — is inherited from that base.
What has been added here is the reading text, the retellings, the dossiers, the Grail thread, the design system, and the machinery that proves every quotation still says what it claims to.
How it is built
A static site, generated by Astro, with no server and no runtime data fetching. Public-domain source texts are fetched by a checksummed script, transformed into a reading spine by a deterministic parser that logs every editorial decision it makes, and wrapped in schema-validated JSON. A gate runs on every build: schemas, quotation location, rights tier, referential integrity, editorial coverage, text quality, and every internal link.
If a quotation cannot be found in its source, the build fails. If an episode has no primary passage or no statement of what it costs, the build fails. That is the whole method:verification is the product.
The pictures
There aren’t any. Every mark on this site — the shields, the ornaments, the drop caps, the sword in the favicon — is drawn in code or set in type. No third-party artwork is used anywhere, and no modern adaptation of the legend is named or leaned on.
That is partly a rights decision and mostly an editorial one. The visual associations that come with modern Arthuriana are extremely strong, and they would quietly become the reader’s default Arthur — which is the flattening this whole portal exists to resist.
Licence
- Code — MIT.
- Original apparatus (retellings, dossiers, throughline essays, metadata) — CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Primary texts — public domain; every edition and translator is listed at sources.
- One exception. The modern translation of the Vulgate Cycle is in copyright. It was used for research and quotation-checking only, is not distributed with this project, and appears here solely as two short quotations with the translator named.
Source code: github.com/JD-Jones-ASES/Arthur-Portal