Transmission

One inheritance, many hands

This is the diagram the whole portal is arguing for. The lines are the routes along which the material actually travelled, and the point of the exercise is what happens to an object as it passes down one of them.

Pick a motif and watch it change. The sword starts as a Welsh war-leader’s weapon, is latinised and forged in Avalon, is demoted below the Grail, and ends up split in two — a stone that elects a king, and a lake that lends him a blade and takes it back. Nobody corrupted anything. Each of them made it mean something they needed it to mean.

11501250135014501550165017501850Geoffrey1136The Chroniclers1155Chrétien1180The Mabinogion1200Wolfram1205Gottfried1210The Grail Romances1220The Vulgate1225The Mortes1375The Gawain Romances1390Malory1469Tennyson1859
inheritance direction unresolved no influence, despite the overlap

Choose a motif above to trace the route it actually travelled, and see what each hand changed about it.

Two lines worth noticing

The dotted ones

One edge is drawn as unresolved: the Welsh tales and Chrétien tell two of the same stories, and a century of scholarship has not settled who borrowed from whom. Treating the Welsh material as straightforwardly the original is a reflex the evidence does not support, and so is the reverse.

One edge is drawn as an absence. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest poem in the tradition and it left no mark on Malory whatsoever — it survives in a single manuscript and was effectively unread for four centuries. Influence is not a function of quality, and a diagram that only drew the successful transmissions would imply that it is.

The voices in order → ·The same material as dates →