King Arthur Dialectical Journal

Throughout this story, Sir Gawain has shown his great personality, and his commitment to being a true knight. He proved that he was humble, self-disciplined, truthful, and had integrity. Gawain woke up one morning to find that the host's wife had crept in the room, and sat on his bed. She jokes that she had snuck in and captured him. Gawain plays along, until the wife tries to talk him into engaging sexually. Gawain continuously denies her requests politely. The Wife says that she would have married him instead if she could have. Sir Gawain was humble and expresses that her husband is a better man. she finally gives up, but requests a kiss. She continues this for the next two days, yet Gawain contains himself, and keeps his mind and body pure,

Gawain is willing to put his welfare on the line to save his king and friend. He says that he would be a coward and without honor if he lets King Arthur die knowing that all he must do to save him is to marry a woman, although she is quite disgusting.

Queen Guinevere’s character was more about being royal and doing as she wanted. She was married to King Arthur. She was above all of the wrongs that she has done and shows no signs of sadness, even when she is sad (page 632). She has an affair with Sir Launcelot without King Arthur knowing about it. She causes conflicts among the knights and the King. Both men are so in love with Queen Guinevere. Sir Launcelot throughout the story does battle for Queen Guinevere, while showing King Arthur his loyalty.

One of Queen Guinevere?s main objectives of cleansing her soul was allowing her to forgive herself for the courtly love expressed between her and Sir Lancelot. Courtly love was a secret part of the chivalric code.

Arthur stole his wife away from him. That is what started his rage and the thought of murdering the man. He did in a way where it would not look suspicious and that he died in combat. The sad part about this is even though he killed Richmond, his own wife cried for her lost lover. She was not the same-she was different.

He never returned home so she thought that he was dead. She says that she was young and not necessarily ready to marry Roger when she did. She loved him but she wasn't in love with him. She did care about Roger because he asked her not to tell anyone that he was her husband and she didn't tell anyone. She respected what he wanted done and if she didn't care about him at all then she would have told everyone that he was her husband. She was in love with Arthur but could never confess that to anyone else besides him because she didn't want anything to go wrong for Arthur. Arthur was supposed to set a good example about how to deal with life and not to commit sins because he was the minister of the church in their city. Little did everyone know that he was the adulterous. No one ever suspected him of it because no know would've thought that a minister would do

Because King Arthur offers Gawain's hand in marriage in exchange for the correct answer, Gawain is forced to marry the "loathly" lady. After Arthur explains the promise that he has made to the woman, Gawain answers

Not only does Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere cause him a great deal of suffering, it wreaks havoc on the lives of many other men as well. For instance, their affair brings tragedy to Sir Gawain and his family. Lancelot kills Gawain’s innocent brothers, Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareth, while rescuing the queen from being executed for adultery. Sir Gawain consequently instigates a blood feud against Lancelot that will eventually lead to his own death. King Arthur and his

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s, The Coming of Arthur is a long poem that explains a fragment of King Arthurs journey to becoming the king of Cameliard. In this writing the author takes scenes that may require a long description and sums them up in under ten lines, while scenes that need less detailed descriptions are explained in over twenty lines. An example of this would be the stanzas where Arthur and Guinevere get married. These stanzas could easily be summed into ten or less lines but Tennyson decides to take care with his words in this scene and explain all he can. The reason the wedding scene is so heavily descripted is because it is a representation of how far Cameiliard has come and a celebration of its strong beginning. This idea can be explored through events that caused the wedding, the significance of the wedding scene, its hidden symbols in the text and its foreshadowing to a great reign.

Drea brought her laughter under control. “It appears as if Gawain contracted head louse, and Arthur demanded Gawain shave his head immediately so the pest wouldn’t spread through the army. When my husband refused, Arthur, Perceval, and Lionel held him down and shaved his head. Poor husband. I loved those thick locks of his.”

The fact that Gwynevere is the King Arthur wife means that she is committing treason by having her relationship with Lancelot. Yet again the novel Arthur is being betrayed.

The idea of the morally pure Tryamour in opposition to Guinevere who is seen here to be a woman of loose morals seems to be in stark contrast to the comparison of Orfeo, the human king, and the Fairy King who appeared to be more of a twisted mirrors of one another. In fact in a Middle English romance it seems strange to see a vision of the court so corrupted that the author feels no need to explain the blinding of Guinevere beyond the fact that the Queen herself said let her be blinded should Launfal be telling the truth; a moment Saunders refers to in The Forest of Medieval Romance as “a sudden reminder of the violence of the faery world” (146). Taşdelen however leans towards the negative when it comes to Tryamour saying that her very being named a fairy is enough to reveal her “Threatening nature” (423) however she does for give Launfal and allows him to return with her to the fairy realm when he had betrayed her trust in the one thing she had asked of him,

Perhaps Arthur’s biggest error in in judgement had been when he chose to ignore his suspicions of the affair, for “Sir Lancelot had done so much for him and for the Queen so many times that…[he] loved him passingly well” (Malory 441). This showed the great amount of loyalty that was shared between the king and his best knight. Had Arthur acknowledged the affair before Agravain and Mordred informed him, he could have put a stop to it, or found a better solution, and not jumped into the war that would pave the path to Arthur’s untimely demise. This war is foreshadowed when Gawain warns Agravain, “for and there arise

Throughout this prose romance, Merlin is there to make sure that Arthur will survive. How Merlin

Queen Guinevere crying out to Lancelot of Arthur’s death was just one of the many other examples of how Arthur is seen