Lights, Camelot, Action

How Old Should King Arthur and His Knights Be in Arthurian Film?

Kevin J. Harty, LaSalle University

From 1904 to 1998, the legend of King Arthur has been the subject of more than seventy films. Just last week, NBC and Hallmark Presentations gave us a four-hour Merlin, and next week Warner Brothers Animation will bring us a full-length animated feature, The Quest for Camelot, loosely based on a novel by Vera Chapman. A quick review of the responses on ARTHURNET to the Merlin mini-series shows that subscribers are nothing if not passionate about the cinematic matter of Arthur. I have not done an actual tally of the pros and cons, but the range of responses to the mini-series on ARTHURNET runs from wild enthusiasm -- generally from subscribers who approach the legend of Arthur less reverentially as the stuff of popular culture -- to the depths of cultural despair -- mainly from subscribers who take a more scholarly orthodox approach to the legend. I expect a similar range of responses will greet The Quest for Camelot -- both on and off ARTHURNET.

Films about Arthur have concentrated on several predictable themes: the quest for the Grail, the idea that Arthur is once and future king, and the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle. Like the Merlin mini-series, the biggest budget Arthurian film of this decade, Jerry Zucker's 1995 First Knight, drew a range of responses. Many objected to the film's conclusion in which Lancelot "gets the girl." Others, myself included, commented on the fact that the traditional love triangle was skewed by the choice of Sean Connery, Julia Ormond, and Richard Gere to play the leading roles -- specifically Connery was too old (old enough to be Guinevere's father) and Ormond and Gere in comparison were too young.

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But the objection that Arthur is too old and the triangle therefore unbalanced by the younger Guinevere and Lancelot seems to me based on the idea that Arthur and the members of his court should be a certain age.

Last Fall, I posed a question to subscribers to ARTHURNET: just what age or ages are the principal characters in the Arthurian legend? Traditionally, we tend to think of Merlin as very old, in part because of our association of age with wisdom. The NBC Merlin was at least refreshing in its depiction of a younger Merlin, since the wizened wizard image in film quickly and easily becomes reduced to a doddering fool. We know that the Arthurian legend spreads itself across vast literary and historical canvases in the Middle Ages. Great chunks of time pass within the pages of Malory or of the Vulgate cycle, but specific references to age are rare.

Norris Lacy in response to my ARTHURNET question volunteered some ages based on the Mort Artu. Here Guinevere is 50 years old at the work's beginning, and Arthur is 92 and Gauvain 76 at the work's end. At least one literary work then would support an age discrepancy roughly equal to that between Ormond and Connery. Geoffrey of Monmouth has Arthur ascend the throne at age 15, and Chrétien's Perceval is at first a young boy, though the poet is silent about how old Perceval grows to be in his process of maturation. In Arthurian literature, even without specific references to age, we do know that children are born and grow up (Mordred, for instance) and in some cases produce children of their own -- Morgause is a grandmother in Malory. Another tradition has Lancelot conceived on the night of the wedding of Arthur and Guinevere -- and literature tends generally to imply that Lancelot and Guinevere are younger than Arthur but not by how much. Of course, whatever their ages, the principal characters in Arthurian literature continue to make love and war decade after decade with an intensity that might give even the makers of Viagra pause.

One medieval literary work might support the idea that Arthur and his court are young, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the poem, we are clearly in a court not yet affected by the charge of adultery, indeed we are pre-Lancelot, if you will. Much is made in the opening stanzas of the poem that Camelot is fresh and young and full of promise, though perhaps more by reputation than by deed. The adjectives used tend toward the superlative, and the Green Knight's taunt to the silent members of court who avoid his challenge labels them beardless boys, in a reference to the disparity between their reputation and their deeds. While Gawain is untried -- the least worthy in his own self-effacing confession -- e and the members of the court all seem to be about the same age.

Two of the three films based on the poem get the matter of the age of the principals all wrong. In the first, Stephen Weeks's 1973 Gawain and the Green Knight, Nigel Green's Arthur is an old man; Murray Head's Gawain is much younger.

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Weeks remade this film in 1983 as Sword of the Valiant -- in which, incidentally, Sean Connery plays an iridescent Green Knight -- with an almost ancient Trevor Howard as Arthur to Miles O'Keefe's forty or so years younger Gawain.

The British ITV 1991 version of the poem directed by John Michael Phillips, however, decided that the court of Camelot should be peopled by an array of younger members, further to emphasize the greenness of the Round Table in yet another sense of the word.

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But the possible youthfulness of characters in the Arthurian legend as it is presented in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, as I indicated earlier, the exception. Other literary works at least allow for a tradition of middle or even old age among the principals, and films have generally taken their cues from these literary works.

The 1953 MGM CinemaScope Knights of the Round Table directed by Richard Thorpe and based, at least according to studio publicity, on Malory sees the principal characters -- Morgan, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere and even Modred -- as about the same age. Only Perceval and his sister Elaine are clearly younger, as the following scene from the film makes clear. In the previous scene Mel Ferrer's Arthur has been dancing with Ava Gardner's Guinevere, Anne Crawford's Morgan with Stanley Baker's Modred, and Robert Taylor's Lancelot with Maureen Swanson's Elaine. (Felix Aylmer's Merlin is clearly much older.)

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The 1963 Sword of Lancelot directed by Cornel Wilde who also played Lancelot has Arthur (Brian Aherne) refer to Guinevere as a mere girl as compared to himself and Lancelot, but Jean Wallace, the film's queen, is clearly the same age as Lancelot who is younger than Arthur.

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Little has, by the way, been made of the connections between Sword of Lancelot and First Knight, but I do think that a short article is in order showing how Zucker's film seems indebted to Wilde's for a number of plot devices.

What then are we to make of the ages of the principals in First Knight? Despite several literary suggestions about the ages of the principals, there is clearly no one literary tradition that First Night runs counter to. Interestingly, there is, it turns out, no cinematic tradition that is being violated either. From Edison's 1904 Parsifal through more than seventy other film versions of the legend of Arthur, there is no one tradition about how old the principal characters can or should be. In the 1904 Parsifal, Arthur is a mature king. The Arthurs of the many film versions of Twain's Connecticut Yankee are equally as mature if not bordering in some cases on senility. If each previous age has seen fit to reinvent the matter of Arthur in terms that reflect its own ideas and ideals -- the Arthur of Geoffrey is not the Arthur of Chrétien who is clearly not the Arthur of Malory -- so too we must allow cinematic license to filmmakers who may well see Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the other members of the Round Table as 6 or 16 or 60 or even older.