The Return to Camelot

I love this description of the power that the Arthurian legends exerted in nineteenth-century Britain and its cultural imagination.

With the re-printing of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, poets, writers, and artists were inspired by these tales of chivalry and sacrifice at a time when the British Empire was at its height and ideals of service, governance, and personal endeavour were central to norms of masculinity.

Girouard perfectly captures the mood of the times and shows us why the vision of Camelot, doomed in its own Arthurian context, was even more flawed, and yet magnetic, in the context of empire.