a fellow shipper, redux

2019-02-22T01:38:38Z

I am naturally intrigued by the parallels that T. H. White drew regarding his approach to chronology in The Once and Future King as they are relevant to my interests:

If I had to fix a precise date, at a guess, for the period of which Malory was dreaming, I would say that he probably thought of Arthur as a contemporary of Henry II. His chivalry is the Norman chivalry of that king, with the Saxon left out. With all the enthusiasm of the present-day antiquarian who pictures the great Duke of Marlborough, and forgets the blood he waded through, Malory seems to have looked back three centuries to Henry II, forgetting the conquered serf. His Arthur stands, to my mind, in a sort of poeticized aura of the twelfth century: that extraordinary century of individualism, in which the second Henry, like Arthur, had a wife who was not above reproach (?), a bosom friend (Becket) with whom, as Arthur with Lancelot, he had an intense emotional bond, an empire beyond the Channel, and sons like Mordred to destroy him. But I have not, for this reason, confined my own version of Arthur to the 12th century.

Sure, why not.

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a fellow shipper

2016-09-28T03:21:43Z

T. H. White apparently read the same book that Jean Anouilh did—Augustin Thierry's Norman Conquest of England—and wrote this note in its endpapers:

[With Thomas Becket the King] seems to have had one of the most important relationships of his life. Sodomy was a Norman vice, and Becket beautiful as well as strong, but there need have been no physical relationship. Indeed, it is most unlikely. But he did have a most intense emotional relationship with Becket, and I have no doubt that he submitted sincerely to the rods… Consider this fat, grey-eyed, bloodshot, strangely attractive sportsman kneeling to be whipped before the tomb of that beautiful person whom he had personally known to be a saint long before he was canonised, who he had persecuted all his life ("hell knows no fury like a woman scorned") and whom he had driven to revolt because he loved him and could not for that reason permit him to live his own life. Henry is a very real person.

(quoted in T. H. White's The Once and Future King by Elisabeth Brewer)

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a fellow shipper, redux

a fellow shipper