Tea at Trianon: C.S. Lewis and the Greatest Arthurian Epic

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 16, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Greatest Arthurian Epic

From The Library of Lewis and Tolkien:

Violent, lewd, celebrating deception and sexual immorality on the one hand; gracious, sensitive, revering mercy and humility and rejecting all that is crude, ugly, and obscene on the other — it would be natural to conclude that Ascham and Lewis were talking about two different books, two different portrayals of the Arthurian legend. Lewis must be demonstrating the way such stories could appear in a noble and Christian light, contrary to the book lambasted by Ascham.
The only problem is that Ascham and Lewis were not discussing two different books. They were both describing — or claiming to describe — the same book: Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Arthurian epic, Le Morte d’Arthur.
Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is a massive, sprawling narrative that chronicles the rise, decline, and eventual downfall of Camelot — the adventures, and later the breaking, of the fellowship of the Round Table. All of what we regard today as the classic, quintessential features of the Arthurian story are there (and then some): Arthur’s sword Excalibur; the wizard Merlin; the Lady — really Ladies — of the Lake; the quest of the Holy Grail, the healing of the Maimed King and restoration of the Waste Land; Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair; the rebellion of Arthur’s ill-begotten son, Mordred; Arthur’s final departure over the waves into the distant isle of Avalon. More than any other single work, Le Morte d’Arthur is the one that later storytellers have most drawn upon, whether Tennyson’s cycle of blank-verse poems Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, or John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. (Read more.)