One inheritance, many hands
Twelve writers, from a monk complaining about the state of Britain in the 540s to a Victorian Poet Laureate in 1885. Each received the story from the one before and changed it. These are the dossiers: what each voice invented, what it took, what it handed on, and the strongest case both for and against it.
They are listed in the order they wrote, because that order is the argument — you can watch the motifs move.
ChronicleThe pseudo-historical spine: Gildas, Nennius, Geoffrey, Wace, Layamon.
The Chroniclers
c. 540 – c. 1200
Gildas, Nennius, Wace and Layamon — the line that built Arthur as history, and quietly gave the game away.
Nennius · Wace · Layamon · Gildas
the founderGeoffrey of Monmouth
c. 1100–1155
The cleric who turned a shadowy Welsh war-leader into a king of Britain, and handed the legend its entire political skeleton.
Geoffrey
WelshThe Celtic root — the war-band Arthur of the Mabinogion.
French romanceChrétien, the Vulgate, the Queste, Perlesvaus — where romance and the Grail are invented.
Chrétien de Troyes
c. 1135–1190
The poet who invented Arthurian romance, the Lancelot–Guinevere love, and — in a poem he never finished — the Grail.
Chrétien
the systematiserThe Vulgate Cycle
c. 1215–1235
The vast prose cycle that welded romance to theology and built the ending into the beginning — Malory's main source.
The Vulgate
the judging Grail and the violent oneThe Grail Romances
c. 1200–1230
The Queste, where the Grail sorts the saved from the damned — and Perlesvaus, where it is carried into battle.
The Queste · Perlesvaus
GermanWolfram and Gottfried — the counter-voices on the Grail and on love.
Wolfram von Eschenbach
c. 1170–1220
The one poet who makes the Grail reachable by ordinary human pity — and the wounded king curable by a question anyone could ask.
Parzival
the fatalistGottfried von Strassburg
d. c. 1210
The other adultery — and the one that cannot be repented, because the potion means it was never chosen.
Gottfried
EnglishMalory, the two Mortes, the Gawain romances — the tragic English spine.
The Gawain Romances
late 14th–15th c.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Loathly Lady who knows what women most desire — the chivalric code tested to destruction on a single knight.
Gawain · The Gawain romances
the English route to the fallThe English Mortes
c. 1350–1400
Two Middle English poems on the ending — one on Fortune's wheel, one on the love — and Malory used both.
The Mortes
the keystoneSir Thomas Malory
c. 1415–1471
A knight writing in prison who compiled every stream into one tragic English book — and counted the cost of every motif he inherited.
Malory
ReceptionWhat later ages did with the inheritance.
Why chronology is the argument
It is tempting to sort these writers by importance, or by nationality, or by how much of them survives. Sorting them by date does something better: it makes the inheritance visible. Wace invents the Round Table in 1155 and Malory is still using it in 1469. Chrétien introduces an undefined vessel around 1180 and dies before saying what it is; within fifty years there are four incompatible answers, written in three languages, by people who had read each other.
The crosswalk shows the same material the other way round — by motif rather than by hand.