Arthuriana Never Gets Old, And There's Always Something New To Be Written And Always Something Which

It's a rare day that I'll go to bat for Uther, but...

--"The Death-Song of Uther Pendragon"

...there is compelling evidence that he knows what a rock is.

Really, it would probably be better for everyone if he became a geologist. Better yet, since he says he's a skilled poet and harper, he should have been a bard.

Arthurian characters ranked by how good a geologist I think they'd be:

Uther. There is no evidence he knows what a rock is. 0/10

Gawain. Could probably swing a rock hammer pretty hard, but has a history of not disclosing outside funding. 2/10

Bedivere. Likely has some experience in studying geography when making battle plans. 3/10

Arthur. He touched a rock once. He also has a decent amount of patience and strategy skill from being a king. 4.5/10

Lancelot. Good at getting lost in the woods, but I think he would forget to label his samples. 4.5/10

Tristan. He jumped off a cliff and survived once, which is a very geologist thing to do. 5/10

Merlin. Apparently very good at putting swords in stones, which means he knows what rocks are. Points off for getting trapped in a cave. 6/10

Morgan le Fay. Has experience in employing the scientific method through her attempts to murder Arthur, and is generally a very learned woman. 9/10

Palomides. Knows that the Earth is round, and is good at finding things in the wilderness. He cried by a well once, thereby demonstrating his knowledge of groundwater systems. 10/10

I'm a big fan of Madoc ap Uther, although I haven't written much about him yet. Here are some of my thoughts on him, not all of which are characterization-related but hopefully will be helpful:

He's described as "protector of happiness" (in "Madawc Drut", Marged Haycock's translation), which I find really interesting, as well as "a citadel of prowess/through feat and jest". Protector of happiness could be referring to his humor entertaining people, to his martial prowess keeping them safe, or both. (The same goes for the title itself: "drut" could mean bravery or foolhardiness but could be related to "drúth", Old Irish for jester).

Either way, it sounds like a sort of a duty, like this is something he feels obligated to do, which is obvious if he's a warrior but says a lot about his personality if he feels obligated to make jokes and keep others happy. Maybe there are some citadel walls around his inner nature and emotions; that might be a stretch in terms of literary interpretation, but potentially interesting in terms of characterization.

He seems to be very well-liked and seen as a merry fellow, but he definitely has a serious side: "before {he} was slain / he pledged himself by his hand", which is rather cryptic and suggests a sense of duty as well as a dire circumstance.

He was the son of Uther but didn't become king, so he could be Arthur's older brother who was killed before Uther died or a younger brother who didn't succeed Uther because Arthur was the eldest son (which would suggest that Arthur was raised by his biological parents). He could also be a younger brother who was the heir but was killed before Uther died (if Arthur was raised by Ector/Cynyr), but he is Eliwlod's father, so he was old enough to have children at the time of his death, which makes the last option seem less likely.

Skene's translation of "Marwnad Madawg"/"Madawc Drut" is much longer and says that he was killed by "Erof", but Haycock claims that that's the result of multiple poetic fragments which were on the same page being mashed together and that that bit is actually part of a lost poem about King Erof, AKA Herod, being dragged down to Hell. I think her translation is generally considered more reliable (and seriously doubt that Madoc was killed by King Herod, though that would be interesting).

He might be referred to as "{t}ransgressing" and "a famous leader" in a poem along with other heroes like Bran, Arthur, and Alexander the Great, but Madawg/Madog/Madoc is not a rare name. There are at least two different Madawgs mentioned in the Black Book of Carmarthen (ap Maredudd and ap Gwyn) who definitely aren't him and one who might be him but might not. As it is, the only pretty-certain references to him are "Madawc Drut" and a brief mention in Arthur's dialogue with the eagle. This is just about all the information we have to go off of, so my fondness for him comes entirely from "Madawc Drut", which is, unsurprisingly, from The Book of Taliesin.

Do we have any Madoc ap Uther/Madawg ap Uther fans out there? I'm trying to combine him with the more "continental" legends bc I think it'd be interesting but I'm wondering if anyone's written him before or has some characterization thoughts?

Dagbert Endless’ mother should look like this.

Mermaid’s Face by David Delamare (American artist, 1951-2016)

The hero tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Cloisters in New York City, NY

WIP Amnesty - This Well-nightingaled Place

This is a fic for Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, so it isn't wholly about Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, it's more about Stoppard's heavily fictionalised, definitely surreal take on them.

Fog. Twilight. A boat, with two men sitting back to back, gazing statue-still in opposite directions.

The world awakens, the fog is lit by a greenish glow. Sounds of sloshing water, birdsong, faraway churchbells, maybe baa-ing sheep, whatever is necessary to give the impression of a nondescript but idyllic English dawn.

One of the men startles, then the other. They both stand up, the boat rocks, they both hurry to sit down.

A moment of silence as they consider their situation.

One of them moves carefully, and without fully straightening up, turns around, and sits back down, on the other bench. Then the other – they are now on opposite ends of the boat, staring at one another. WILDE is dressed in somewhat ostentatious velvets, HOUSMAN in a deliberately boring suit. They are of a similar, but indeterminate age.

WILDE Mr Housman?

HOUSMAN Yes, I believe so. Mr Wilde?

WILDE Delighted to make your acquaintance again. We’ve met before, but we may not quite have been ourselves, that is to say, not these selves, and not in this place.

HOUSMAN This place?

WILDE Just a moment.

He peers around. Shields his eyes with his hand, looks again.

The light is morning light, but it comes from no particular direction.

Sniffs the air.

Sage and fresh-cut grass.

Licks his finger and holds it up to feel the wind.

The breeze is fresh, and westerly.

Dips his hand in the water to feel the current, then as an afterthought, brings his hand to his mouth and takes a sip, then splashes the remainder on his neck.

The waters of Isis, but clearer than they ought to be.

HOUSMAN Where are we then?

WILDE I would say we are where all writers end up sometime after they’re dead.

HOUSMAN (sceptical) Elysium?

WILDE I’m afraid not. We are in the Public Domain.

HOUSMAN

Why do you reckon?

WILDE I’ve been here before, many times. Mostly miserable biographies, and even more miserable fictionalized biographies, but not exclusively. It is fortunate that my creation, Dorian Grey, stands in for me when the writer merely wants to make a point about beauty or decadence or carnal sin, and I am left in peace. I am only here when they want me in person. A clever young man made an exquisitely drawn comic book about my final days before moving on to woefully mischaracterize Hemingway. I’ve been here in a story about Bosie wearing a green carnation, fighting for my last lost book against a host of batlike tyrants who have stolen the very city of London. There was a radio play of sorts that gave me a government job, impressive magical powers, and a handsome young man in plate armour to grovel at my feet. EMPIRE STAR And of course there was the business with young Mr Stoppard, where unless I am mistaken we last met.

HOUSMAN We did.  It has been a long time.

WILDE It has been no time at all. HOUSMAN Maybe not for you – my sleep is deeper. I am not here unless they sing one of my poems, and even then, I only walk these hills as if in a dream. Most days I am only here to the extent the Shropshire Lad is myself, that is to say, hardly at all.

WILDE So we are in Shropshire?

HOUSMAN The Shropshire I wrote is not the Shropshire you may have been to.

WILDE I have been to your Shorpshire more times than I have been to the Shropshire outside your pages. I have no objection to this Shropshirish, Oxfordish, Arcadia-ish place. It is a little dull, maybe, a little too pastoral, but there are worse places to be.

HOUSMAN What- ah, Reading.

WILDE And Paris, and Naples, and Berneval-le-Grand, and every jewel-bright city one visits as an exile and not as a guest.

Silence.

WILDE Don’t be quite so glum, you are souring the English countryside for me, although I suppose that is the highest and truest aim of all your poetry. To hang murderers from every tree, bury suicides at every crossroads and fill the churchyards with dead heroes, which ultimately seem to be the only sort of hero you really care about. To hell with it, show me what’s in that basket!

Housman looks around, and finds a wicker basket underneath his seat. Brings it out, looks into it, slides the whole thing over to Wilde. He rummages through it.

WILDE Cheese sandwiches. Sponge cake. Strawberries. What are these supposed to be?

He holds up a red metal cylinder.

HOUSMAN (glad to have something to explain) This is an anachronism. A deliberate one at that. I’ve seen prototypes at the Patent Office, but they didn’t start manufacturing stay-tab drinking cans like this until the sixties. Nineteen-sixties, that is.

Wilde still looks nonplussed. Housman takes it from his hand.

HOUSEMAN Here, you push the tab, and you drink from there.

Hands it back. Wilde takes a careful sip from the can, considers it, then takes a longer pull.

WILDE Gin and lemonade, with some spice to it. Pimms, maybe. I suppose absinthe would be too much to ask for.

He picks up a piece of sponge cake, eats it. Housman has not yet touched the food.

HOUSMAN There remains the question of why we’re here.

WILDE Someone clearly thinks we have something of relevance to say to one another. Or at least that my fictionalized, much-distorted form has something to say to your fictionalized, much-distorted form.

HOUSMAN So you have noticed.

WILDE What.

HOUSMAN That you’re not quite yourself.

WILDE I feel like myself, but I cannot do myself justice. I am slower, my words less exact. We are diminished, flattened in the hands of an inferior author.

HOUSMAN A corrupted text?

WILDE Worse. An interpolation.

HOUSMAN We might escape the worst of the corruption by limiting ourselves to things we have said before – things we had the time and means to edit beforehand, whenever possible.

WILDE Agreed. Now, why do you suppose you are here with me?

HOUSMAN I cannot think of anything. Not that I mind this boat on this river in this early morning light…

WILDE But you would much prefer to share it with someone else, or, failing that, much rather spend it alone.

HOUSMAN Quite. I am a textual critic first and a poet only by chance. You are an aesthete first and a poet only by circumstance. We have very little common ground.

WILDE You are too polite to mention that I whole-heartedly believe in a Christ that you find at best slightly ridiculous. I am rude enough to remind you that you declare your devotion to a queen and country that I can no longer bring myself to even jest about.

HOUSMAN So it is going to be…

WILDE There’s nothing else.

HOUSMAN It’s not what I wanted to be remembered for. I do not deny it, but I do not want my life’s work overshadowed by one quirk of my temperament. You too deserve better than to have your name tied permanently to scandal.

WILDE I don’t. I gave my own name to scandal, so now people have something to call it, the poor unnameable thing.

*

And that is how far I got with this story - if you want to get a sense of how it would have continued, I suggest you read all of Housman's poems (there aren't very many, it's three slim volumes), read the Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis, they say anything I could have wanted to say much better than I can say it.

Happy Passover to all my fellow Jews. May your holiday be peaceful and meaningful. I hope you got rid of your chametz at a non-stressful time.

Let my people know.

Memes of Judaism

That is very relatable because I did the exact same thing. Here's a partial list of my own awful ideas:

It started with Marianne Le Fay (I didn't like the name Morgan, so I renamed her) being so called because she was friends with fairies in the French Alps, then shifted to her being a changeling child who was raised by fey beings after Uther and the rest of his hunting party was killed while hunting a wild boar in Broceliande. No adequate explanation was given for why a three-year-old princess was taken along to hunt a wild boar.

Camelot was actually named Caramel-Not. Bors told people in the foreign countries he was in while he had amnesia that he was from a camel-lot and it stuck. (Also, Bors converted to Hinduism, regained his memory, and decided never to go back. All this was mentioned offhand--he hadn't lived in Camelot for years and never showed up in the story).

Prior to the start, Mordred somehow drove every human apart from him and Arthur, who he kept mostly unconscious, out of Camelot through wild goose chase quests, falsely tarnished names, and more creative but always nonlethal methods.

Mordred isekai'd Guinevere to a world made of clouds. The first part of the plot was just her trying to get back.

Mordred stuck Agravaine, Gareth, and Gaheris on a boat and set it adrift so that listening to Agravaine singing "The Ballad of the Pickled Cabbage" would eat away at the others' sanity.

Gawain and "Gallahad" were best friends. Gallahad was kind of a rustic himbo, in contrast to Percival, who was older and had found the Grail before he showed up (I actually like the last bit's angst potential).

Lancelot was really evil and in league with Anna (who was evil). Guinevere, Gawain, and Gallahad all hated him.

Mordred was a sorcerer and had a strix named Deluge who wanted to be named Norman as his familiar. (I know it makes no sense but I still have a soft spot for corny socially awkward evil wizard Mordred).

Arthur and Guinevere were going to get their marriage annulled, then eventually remarry, because the marriage was arranged and also because when they first married, Guinevere was under a curse.

The whole thing began with a seventh-grade assignment to write an alliterative paragraph, so a weird number of words in the prologue started with the letter G. Thus, we have Gawain grappling a ghastly green ghoul over a golden grail (not THE Grail, apparently, but that isn't clear until much later) at the very start.

Pendragons could turn into literal dragons. Mordred, as Uther's grandson, could turn into one despite lacking the Pendragon name, since it was genetic, but Guinevere could also turn into one because she was a Pendragon by marriage. (The lore was a bit spotty). The climax of the book was going to be an epic dragon battle between Mordred and Guinevere.

There's a bit more of that sort of thing, but I'll leave it there for now.

so a few years ago, before I realised that there was such a thing as an Arthuriana fandom on Tumblr that I could mine for resources, I decided, in my infinite wisdom, to start writing a novel.

now where this goes off the rails is the fact that I a) did no research and b) had some pretty unusual ideas about the characters I was going to be using. having since found out some actual, concrete information on these characters, I thought it would be fun to go through my old ideas and see how fucking wild they are in comparison to what I now know the characters are actually like.

Kea's list of awful ideas:

morgan le fay was going to be a werewolf

king arthur was going to be colourblind and have a peanut allergy as his only identifying traits

lancelot was going to murder his abusive merchant father by staging a cart crash in the middle of the woods, then stabbing him in the confusion. for plot reasons

Nimue/lady of the lake and Lancelot were going to be adoptive siblings who were raised by the wild hunt (still kinda fuck with the siblings idea tbh)

Kay was going to be Arthur's dog.

Guinevere x Lancelot? nah, Guinevere x Lancelot's sister (also still kinda fuck with this, give that woman some lesbianism she deserves it)

the main villain was going to be some random ass faerie assassin called the Shrike, so called because it skewered knights on trees (I used to listen to far too much hozier, if you couldn't guess)

Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin were going to be in a polyam relationship and Guinevere, Nimue and Morgan were going to be in a polyam relationship, which, if you consider the two pairs of siblings in that collection, means that the family tree of these characters is literally a circle.

the Fae were going to have big fuckass bird wings for no particular reason other than I thought it would be cool

I have so many more of these, if this breaches containment I'll make another

Metaruu’s Headcanon Ask Game

Send in a character or characters and an icon and I’ll give you…

🏳️‍🌈 A sexuality headcanon

🏳️‍⚧️ A gender headcanon

😇 A headcanon about their religion/lack thereof

🧸 A headcanon about their childhood

👻 A headcanon about what scares them

🎶 A headcanon about music

👽 A headcanon about a weird quirk of there

💤 A headcanon about their sleep

🦾 A disability headcanon

💝 A headcanon about their love language

🫂 A friendship headcanon

💔 An angsty headcanon

🪢 A headcanon about their family

📓 A headcanon about their hobbies

👗 A headcanon about their clothes

🔪 A headcanon relating to fighting/violence

🌟 A headcanon about their desires/wishes

🥇 A headcanon about what they’re best at

🍫 A headcanon about food

🎭 A headcanon about what they lie about

❤️‍🔥 A romantic headcanon

💄 An appearance headcanon

🖕 A headcanon relating to anger

😺 An animal related headcanon

😬 A headcanon about the worst thing they’ve done

😭 A headcanon about the worst thing that happened to them.

😶 A random headcanon!

At the rate it's going, Hurricane Milton looks like it will be incredibly destructive. As of the latest forecast I could find on the weather channel, it was "centered 560 miles southwest of Tampa...a strong Category 4 packing 155 mph winds as of 5 a.m. EDT...tracking east-northeast at 12 mph". According to the NHC, it could potentially be "one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida".

I know it's easy to get jaded with hurricanes and that sometimes, they aren't really bad enough to be worth evacuating for, but from what I can tell, this one absolutely is. If you're in an evacuation zone, leave if you can or find a shelter if you absolutely can't. Please stay safe, everyone.

good morning tumblr! be careful. i have saved a whole load of these to my phone at this point, so...

peak storm surge-

more storm surge - darkest purple is >10 feet, and is worst - though we might need more colours

recent track, showing landfall at 2 am on Thursday rather than 8 pm on Wednesday

75 is apparently completely clogged, as you'd expect at this point. people are leaving en masse and with good reason. there is free transport to shelters through uber in pinellas, hillsborough, and pasco - use it. the promo code is MILTONRELIEF. jim cantore arrived in tampa yesterday. jim cantore.

Those are fabulous. I’ll add an old and terrible meta-theory and expand on it to apply it to Grimwald:

The whole series was a dream Billy Raven had or took place in his imagination as a way of coping with his terrible circumstances. Lord Grimwald symbolized Harold Bloor. He was never a real person, or, if he was, he only visited Bloor’s once.

I am a truther for a lot of things, but my biggest truth is that Dagbert is agender. Why? If Lord Grimwald had no first son, then Lysander could kill him all day every day no problem. He/They Dagbert who doesn't identify as a man or son or boy but actually just doesn't care