Arthurian resources on the web

Siân Echard, University of British Columbia

 General Medieval Studies Resources

 Programs

Language and Texts

Early Britain

Religion

 Malory

 Arthurian Studies

 Arthurian Miscellany (i.e., not quite so studious...)

General Medieval Studies Resources

There are two large link sites for all things medieval: the Labyrinth and NetSerf. Both are very old, but continue to point to useful material. Both have special Arthurian sections.

You should also have a look at the On-Line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, a good source for information, and the related Internet Medieval Sourcebook, a source of primary material. Again, these are web sites that have been around for a long time, but their content remains relevant.

Medieval Studies Programs

There are many Medieval Studies programs: I've listed here only a few, whose home pages are useful for web research (some are useful only if you're looking for a place to do graduate work; a complete list can be retrieved through NetSerf: Degree Programs).

• The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto
• The Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University (some useful links here, but some of the content is Princeton-only)
• The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York
• Cornucopia, the Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University
• The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State

• The Middle English Compendium includes a Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose; if you are not accessing this link from a UBC site, you should click here to read about off-campus access
• Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485) at Luminarium
• TEAMS Middle English Texts gives online access to a wide range of texts, including the version of the Alliterative Morte Arthure that we will be reading in class
• The Online Medieval and Classical Library is no longer being updated, but it contains many medieval texts
• In Parentheses, out of York University in Toronto, has an extensive collection of medieval texts in many languages, all in PDF format: note that some of these may be of very old editions
• The Chaucer Metapage Audio Files is a set of links to sound files of professors reading Chaucer aloud: learning how Middle English sounds is helpful in learning what it means
• Teach Yourself to Read Chaucer, from the Harvard Chaucer Page, is another useful resource for learning to read Middle English

Early Britain

Useful sites devoted to the period in which we would find the historical Arthur include

• Vortigern Studies, a site based in the Netherlands which concentrates on Vortigern and his world
• Early British Kingdoms, created by David Nash Ford, the history editor at Britannia magazine
• The British Museum has images of many of its artefacts mounted online, and some are organized into tours. From the Explore page, click on Online Tours, and you'll find such things as Iron Age Britain and The Vikings. You can also search the collections.

• our Library has a subscription to The Bible in English, which will allow you to search Bibles from many historical periods for particular phrases [if you are trying to connect from off campus, read about connecting from home]
• the 1917 version of The Catholic Encyclopedia is available online
• Catholic Online Saints and Angels allows you to look up various saints

Arthurian Studies

• Thomas Green’s personal website, Arthuriana, has much interesting material and many useful links
• Arthuriana is also the name of the journal of the International Arthurian Society; its pages include an archive of articles from the journal, as well as links to other Arthurian sites
• The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester is a huge archive of Arthurian bibliographies, essays, and images
• Britannia magazine has a very nicely-organized Arthurian section
• The Quest: An Arthurian Resource hasn’t been updated since 1998, but there’s still a lot of useful material on this student club site; see, for example, the section called An Archaeological Quest for the real King Arthur, which has a great deal of information (with pictures) about archaeological research (only up to 1998, of course) into Arthur’s origins; note that the site currently (August 2012) reports that it is about to be updated

Arthurian Miscellany

A lot of Arthurian material on the web is non-academic in origin. Some material is put out by tourist boards in areas with Arthurian associations; some is the product of commercial sites seeking to sell Arthuriana; some material is found on fan sites, which range in quality from remarkably thorough and well-informed to, well, less so... The sites below are a small sampling of what is available.

For reference and background, try

• The Celtic Twilight’s Legends of Camelot, including the Arthurian Infopedia
• the Arthurian section of the Legends page: note that this is now an archive; updating seems to have ceased in 2007
• Britannia: Battle Re-enactment and Living History does pretty much what it sounds like: they are experts at staging battles from Arthur’s historical period (c. 400 - 500).

There are many Arthurian movies and cartoons, but copyright restrictions have gradually led to the removal of most fan-generated material (scripts, images, and so on). But you can

• search the Internet Movie Database for Camelot, Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and other Arthurian moves; for a list, see Kevin Harty’s list of Arthurian Film on the Camelot Project website
• see episodes of the Japanese anime Entaku No Kishi Monogatari: Moero Arthur, based on Malory, dubbed into Italian on the Daily Motion site and on YouTube (at least for now)
• visit the official sites for two recent TV adaptations, Merlin and Camelot

For local colour, try

• the Castles of Wales website
• the CastleXplorer website
• Castlesworld
• the Glastonbury: Isle of Avalon website
• the website of the Winchester Great Hall and Round Table
• and ArtMagick , a vast collection of those 19th-century images which so many of us associate with knights, damsels, and the like-- see also its sister-site for John William Waterhouse, whose subjects included medieval and Arthurian themes

And then there's

• the Excalibur Las Vegas Resort Hotel and Casino
• the Camelot Court Motel in Prince George (not clear, unlike for the Excalibur, why the name)
• Camelot Theme Park, whose rides include “Pendragon’s Plunge”
• Dark Age of Camelot, an online game which now (rather improbably) includes the Minotaur
• the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight paper doll set