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the numerous Grail texts, discussed in the next chapter, which proliferated in the
1920s and 30s.
Scholarship, too, had been affected by the war. The summary of the German
literary canon given by Herbert Warren, Oxford Professor of Poetry during the Great
War, in a lecture on ‘Poetry and War’ typifies the militarisation of ‘Eng. Lit.’ at this
time:
The Germans had got it into their heads to-day that they were, before all
others, a nation of poets. How did they compare with the English? Put in naval
language, they had one super-Dreadnought, the Goethe, a powerful ship, but
hardly equal in guns or speed to the Shakespeare. They had two or three
Dreadnoughts, the Lessing, the Schiller, and the swift and dangerous craft,
largely fitted on French lines, the Heine, and a flotilla of minor vessels, but
nothing like the number of variety of the English armament.84
The Great War resulted in the diminishing of the influence of German scholarship on
English literary studies. It was now possible - desirable, even - to dismiss classic
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philology as ‘Teutonic nonsense’; while figures such as Heinrich Zimmer, Wendelin
Foerster and Wolfgang Golther, who had exerted a huge influence on pre-war
Arthurian scholarship, were of much less importance after the war.86 The little
attention paid to Foerster - who edited the first complete edition of Chretien’s works
(1884-99),87 thus giving Chretien studies a firm textual basis on which to build - was
particularly noticeable.*
The diminution of the German scholars allowed a greater space for the
theories of British, American and French critics - the most well known in the interwar
period being Jessie L. Weston and E.K. Chambers, from Britain; Roger Sherman
Loomis, A.C.L. Brown and J.D. Bruce, from America; and Eugene Vinaver and, later,
* The American academic William A. Nitze was one of the few post-war scholars who deplored the
critical fate o f ‘the late, quickly forgotten’ Foerster (‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Arthur’, Speculum,
2.2: 318). French scholars were particularly embarrassed about the irrefutable fact that German
medieval scholarship was far in advance of their own - especially with regard to French romance
(Busby and Taylor, ‘French Arthurian Scholarship’, A History o f Arthurian Scholarship, 101).
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Jean Marx, from France. The war and the earlier political tensions in Europe had also
given rise to a greater sense of political nationalism in literary studies, manifest in
George Saintsbury’s earlier-quoted 1912 description of Malory’s pre-eminence over
foreign Arthurian writers. Jessie Weston, perhaps the most influential Arthurian
scholar in the post-war era (despite the fact that her academic career was largely over
by the time she published From Ritual to Romance in 1920), published two
propagandist pamphlets designed to promote the war effort in 1915. One, Germany’s
Literary Debt to France (1915) claimed that Germany’s claim to a great literary
culture was essentially fraudulent and that German culture owed its existence entirely
to adopted foreign models.88 In another, Germany’s Crime against France (1915),
OQ
Weston attacked the German atrocities in Belgium. As discussed in chapter five, her
Arthurian scholarship was also motivated by a strong nationalist agenda, as were the
studies of many others who pursued the theories of the origins of Arthurian romance
in Celtic literature, including the English Alfred Nutt and the Welsh John Rhys and
Ernest Rhys.
But the effect o f the war was not only felt in the nationalist expressions of
established academics: it was most manifest in those who came to read English at
universities after the war. Their reading and interpretation of literature became
irrevocably bound up with their wartime experiences. Robert Graves’s words on
studying at Oxford in 1919, after four years spent as an officer in the Royal Welch
Fusiliers, were relevant to many writers who had fought:
I thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken
thanes in the Gothland billet, Judith going for a promenade to Holofemes’
staff-tent; and the Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and cosh fighting - all this
came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere
of the eighteenth-century.90
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Graves’s words are no less true of those who read the Arthurian story. Graves himself
wrote nothing on the Arthurian legend until the 1960s, but the influence of his
wartime experience still showed when he wrote an introduction to an abridgement of
the Morte Darthur by Keith Baines. Thinking of Arthur in decidedly military terms he
wrote that ‘no strategic or tactical system can be deduced from them, except a
customary concealment o f reserves under the shades of trees’.91 He claimed that ‘[t]he
original Arthur’ was ‘a heroic British cavalry general named Arturius’, and devoted
much space to discussing the importance of Arthur’s cavalry. Particularly interesting
is his belief that without his having been a cavalryman the Norman aristocracy would
never have patronised the legend.92 ‘Chivalry’, he declared, ‘is now on the wane’, but
he did not regret it.
The idea of the historical Arthur as a cavalry leader was a popular notion from
the 1930s until the 1980s (see chapter six for discussion). This belief was initiated by
R.G. Collingwood, who served in Admiralty Intelligence during the war. In Roman
Britain (1936), Collingwood presented Arthur as a Romano-Briton heavy-cavalry
commander who defended ‘a country sinking into Barbarism’. He envisaged Arthur as
holding the late Roman military office of Comes Britanniarum, employing his mobile
troops to defeat the Saxon infantry in a number of battles (as listed by Nennius) that
were spread throughout Britain.94 But Collingwood’s Arthur was not only far more
militaristic than previous ‘historical’ Arthurs, he was also a newly political
figurehead: he was ‘the last of the Romans’; his victory ensured by his being
‘intelligent enough [...] and vigorous enough’ to protect the final vestige^ of a dying
Empire.95 As Stephen Knight has written, Collingwood presented an Arthur that
‘validated at one blow the intelligence and will-power which are the central totems of
bourgeois individualism’, as well as making the Roman Arthur into an analogue of the