Eamhain of the unspoiling apples
The holy hill, the household of heroes.
Few are its forts, fair its hills
In their ever-green, gay garments
Baile Suthain Sith Eamhna
Despite all the talk about Arthur’s death, if you’re familiar with the story you may know there’s a bit of an asterisk and an irony to the blog’s title.
As the king lies mortally wounded on the battlefield, up to nine sorceresses arrive to take him to a hidden land called Avalon and they hope he can find healing there. If they already mentioned a tomb, the writer makes sure to mention there’s also a rumor he’s not in it.
So there’s a chance he’s alive, and later characters may hear or see something else in the general form of Rex quondam, Rexque futurus - “Arthur will return in Avenger’s Endgame”. He’s not dead at all! He’s merely in this space outside of time from whence he will return when he’s healed, or when the land needs him again. He’s a king under the mountain archetype - a Messianic figure - ready for his second coming. He lives!
Why seek ye the living among the dead?1
But… does he really live?
Avalon is by necessity a vaporous place in most stories - less tangible than Heaven, or the farm up state that your parents took the dog to. Even if it’s real2 is it real real3?
For a story that’s already in the historical annals, challenging what we’d see as a line between the verifiable truths and truths of the Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus sense, I think Avalon’s always meant to be engagingly out of reach - free to be all interpretations at once.4
And even if we take that all to be true and tangible - there is an Avalon, he was taken there, the tombs of Arthur are empty… that hardly means he is alive.
Arthur is mortally wounded when he is swept away into ambiguity. Perhaps Avalon has a power beyond the best doctors - a better shot at recovery - but we all know even the surest medical care can only go so far. At some point it is just rolling the dice.
The delays caused by his companion’s doubts sometimes are highlighted - as Malory has Queen Morgan remind us:
Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? alas, this wound on your head hath caught over-much cold
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur
and there’s little confidence to be shared - we must imagine how the die falls, and we’re told it has only a bare hope of landing on life.
And even then is he alive? At best he’s in some kind of nigh-eternal slumber or timeless exile - a suspended animation for an indefinite future time that we are to not know the day or the hour. No wonder Bedivere cries out:
Ah my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur
because to Bedivere, Arthur has died. Bedivere is alive and thus must live without being whisked off to the fairy realm - so he will never see Arthur again, or hear him, or interact with him in any way. A future revival means nothing to him - this is the behavior of a corpse.
Does this have any implications on the game?
A little. Not really for the rules directly, but a few implications to the scope of the plot:
First, some things matter because they are ambiguous and left up for interpretation (even perhaps daring the audience to interpret them). This includes but is not limited to Avalon. I don’t think characters should ever go there or find it any more tangible than a reader of Morte D’Arthur would.
And secondly, I think it’s fruitful to - like Malory - leave things somewhat abruptly unfinished. I think it’s important to have those final days rest on the questions of what matters after the death or life of the characters - why the whole story was worth it - but that any attempt to flash forward or resolve that may bring less than it takes. The story, I think, has to end in the tomb.
Footnotes
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The Gospel of Luke, Ch 24, verse 5 ↩
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By which I mean, not a lie or just a rumor. ↩
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As in, not some kind of metaphor, like that his legend lives on or he’s alive “from a certain point of view”. ↩
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And as an aside, I think Malory in particular doesn’t really like the interpretation that it’s real. He spends a long time lingering on the doubt, the death, the tomb - and leaves the signs of life as almost an afterthought. To me it feels like he thinks he is obligated to mention the famous canonical mystery, but finds one answer much more compelling narratively than the other. ↩