ISOULT: Yea, but the sweet,
Is it not worth the pain that we have dured?
TRISTRAM: And that which is to come.
ISOULT: What meanest thou?
What pain that is to come?Martha Kinross, Tristram and Isoult
It’s the spoiler in the very title of the most famous retelling1 of Arthur’s story - the crux of the story is in its ending.
That’s the basic elements of a tragedy. But like any good tragedy, so much of the story isn’t. Arthur’s Summer Kingdom breaks into the world with all the wonder and adventurous charm and heroism of a fairy tale until - slowly and quickly - the leaves start to fall and we have to face the uncomfortable questions. Why do good things die?
I think Camlann is one of the critical elements that have made the Arthurian stories resonate so well across so many different eras - the shadow it casts defies easier genre cliches, and lets each time wrestle with its thoughts.
An Axe Age, A Sword Age
O the glory of princes! How the time passed away,
slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!
There still stands in the path of the dear warriors
a wall wondrously high, with serpentine stains.
A storm of spears took away the warriors,
bloodthirsty weapons, wyrd the mighty,
and storms batter these stone walls,
frost falling binds up the earth,
the howl of winter, when blackness comes,
night’s shadow looms, sends down from the north
harsh hailstones in hatred of men.The Wanderer
537: Strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell, and there was great mortality in Britain and Ireland
The Annales Cambriae
The ending fits in the most to its original audience. Both Brythonic and English sources recall dark times and terrible slaughter2 and the chronicles attempt to explain the misery. The ending is dreary because that’s the answer to the original question the histories are answering.
And the question isn’t just about the past. Arthur dies because there is coming a time when all the world will burn like kindling and the skies be rolled back like a scroll. It’s Ragnarök or Armagedōn - the end of the world that may seem around every corner.
I think the grand finality of these stories is what keeps them compelling to us today.
O Fortuna!
Fortune rota volvitur;
The wheel of Fortune turns
descendo minoratus;
I go down, diminishing
alter in altum tollitur;
Another is carried upCarmina Burana
The lady asked him, “Arthur, where are you?”
“My lady,” he replied, “I am on a high wheel, but I do not know what kind of a wheel it is.”
“It is the wheel of Fortune,” she replied. Then she asked him, “Arthur, what can you see?”
“My lady, I think I can see the whole world.”
“That is true,” she said, “you can see it, and there is very little of which you have not been lord up till now. Of all the circle you can see you have been the most powerful king there ever was. But such is earthly pride that no one is seated so high that he can avoid having to fall from power in the world.”
La Mort le Roi Artu
The later Middle Ages may feel a bit less apocalyptic, or at least more distanced from those particular catastrophes. The world couldn’t have ended with Arthur and still left so much trouble behind, so a different formulation has to rise.
Why does Arthur die? Don’t you know that everyone dies? - Arthur might be the best example of greatness, but just like every other great and terrible thing, it must end. Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes except change - the Rota Fortunae.
The only solace in Fortune’s Wheel is to be at peace with its rotation and able to welcome the good it may bring - the greatest pain is hubris. The solace outside the wheel is Heaven and an escape from the cyclical rhythms of the world - and its greatest pain is sin.
The end of Arthur’s kingdom now may be shaped as the fall after an insatiable rise - conquering Norway and France and Rome and maybe even India! (but what good is even the whole world, if you can’t escape the wheel?) - or the corruption of the decadent peace, an easy place to debate the great moral questions of the day.
And it makes for compelling payoffs - even if we love the realm, the thoroughness of watching the seeds be sown makes the reaping feel cathartic.
A World Lit Only By Fire
The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his black wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the churches struggle, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages
Alas, said the king, that ever this unhappy war was begun; for ever Sir Launcelot forbeareth me in all places, and in likewise my kin, and that is seen well this day by my nephew Sir Gawaine. Then King Arthur fell sick for sorrow of Sir Gawaine, that he was so sore hurt, and because of the war betwixt him and Sir Launcelot.
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur
Sir Thomas Malory writes Morte D’Arthur at the tale end of a long civil war. He weaves in the story of the fall throughout the narrative, making it complex, layered and incredibly petty.
Sure, there’s the adultery and there’s a fair share of overambition helping doomsday along, but it all intermixes with feuds that just won’t stop bleeding and little disasters that snowball out of control. Malory’s Camlann is a political struggle spiraling out from the shining knights failing to be more than human.
Malory puts a bookend to the Middle Ages as it stares back at itself - not yet a parody or an elegy, but a close and cynical critique. Why couldn’t the Round Table save itself? Why were all the lofty ideals of chivalry dying in some royal struggle? It feels honest and relatable, while the long foreshadowing and slow breakdown of the table feels like that part of a horror movie where you can believe that if the characters could just hear you pleading at them, they could still get out alive, even though you know they can’t.
Among These Dark Satanic Mills
You must either made a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
The sequel of today unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep
They sleep—the men I loved. I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made,—
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur
The Arthurian revival of the Victorian age comes as the Romantics start to reconsider the vilified “Gothic” and “savage” Middle Ages3 which have otherwise faded in history.
The dream of progress has a lot of pain points in this era - the smoke of industry and cholera filled tenements may be bringing in ever-accelerating technological powers, and it may be hard to argue that it isn’t objectively better by all the metrics… but it’s not hard to see why it can feel like a nightmare that artists must wake up out of.
Morte D’Arthur’s not forgotten - in fact, the printing press ensured it won the battle for how the story would get remembered and its reprintings help spark the revival - but its cynical view on the fall of chivalrous ideals gets rarified. To the Romantic, this isn’t just the cycles of the Wheel of Fortune, or an inherent hollowness in the ideals - but a fall from grace. At some point the world lost its soul, and the current day is living on the wrong side of the divide.
It’s hard not to feel the appeal of this Camlann, even when the final take is some kind of reactionary monarchism or a black-and-white traditionalism. More than the others, this Camlann is tragic because it’s something that didn’t have to happen - a loss of a beauty the poet and their audience was meant to see, but now can only do so through tears.
The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizing his country, after which the men of Abel had sought to win their patrimony again for ever. Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricable. The present war might be attributed to Mordred, or to himself. But also it was due to a million Thrashers, to Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, everybody. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind
The last definitive “modern” take on the whole Arthurian canon4 comes from English pacifist T.H. White as he lives in a self imposed exile in neutral Ireland.
It is 1937-1940 as each of the parts get finished. In 1937, the Nazis annex Austria and seize the Sudetenland. In 1939, his homeland across the narrow Irish sea is at war with Germany. In 1940, France falls.
White’s Camlann is not the most subtle. Why should it be?
With the early Medieval Ragnarök back on the horizon, the legacy of the previous eras’ views - all tragic and all doomed - gives the writer a bit of a narrative release valve. What would be an overly saccharine message of peace gets the only ending note that can resolve it in a satisfying way - a deep horrified uncertainty.
Here, At The End Of All Things
“Wait! Wait - is this really all there is? Is this..?"
"What else ought there be?”The Green Knight (2021)
Right, we’re talking about this game - a game I’ve also named after the same spoiler ending. What does it mean for a roleplaying game for Arthur to die at the end?
This isn’t Shakespeare - it’s not even Critical Role. This isn’t meant to revolutionize storytelling or give us a new definitive take on the legends. But I think the value of Camlann (and every little Camlann before it; just because the world keeps going after each character’s death, there’s no less a person than Arthur) is in two parts.
First, the legends give plenty of examples of how for the most part it’s just not really there. The world is meaningful in life, and all the stories show how this can be juxtaposed with death without it having the only say in the tone and genre.
And secondly, when death does inevitably come into the storyline, there’s a host of different answers to it. A happily-ever-after can’t deal with death - it only works as a shock, a fake-out, or a subversion - but each storyline above shows different ways to set it up and to still extract a sense of meaning out of it. By knowing we have to face it - by making it unavoidable right in the face of everything - we know we have to prepare the story to be richer for it.
Footnotes
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It’s believed that Malory meant for the whole title to be the more generic The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table with this just being the last part, and the publisher made this iconic decision. ↩
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Even as modern evidence starts to trickle in that some of this is exaggerated at least in the numbers and scale suggested - the impression clearly was there. ↩
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That is, the world of Malory. ↩
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There are several popular unique visions, such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and I count it as a meaningful contender) or even the more grounded worlds like Mists of Avalon or The Warlord Trilogy - or pop takes like BBC Merlin…
These are perfectly valid and major in their own ways, but I don’t think anyone would say they’re a telling of the generic “canon” the same way that these older works might be.
Why that is deals with time and copyright laws/fanfic culture, and a whole lot of other things, but the point is that T.H. White might be the last big work that’s a unifying point of reference, at least at the present day. ↩