The Influence of the Middle English Arthurian Tradition on Contemporary Popular Culture

The medieval period has long captured popular imagination; particularly true in popular media, including film and television - Two of television's biggest series in 2022 (HBO's House of the Dragon and Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) take place in pseudo-medieval worlds.

In acknowledging the popularity of the medieval, we can ask the question, why is the medieval world so attractive to creators and consumers of popular culture?

The aim is to discover how important the past is in the creation of our present by establishing a connection between the presentation of the medieval in modern visual media and the literature of the period. Due to its modern popularity the Middle English Arthurian tradition shall form the central corpus to be examined.

Both romances and chronicles will be analysed, establishing how the themes, icons, and symbolisms are appropriated and transformed by both medieval authors and modern filmmakers respectively.

To fully understand the intersection between the modern 'contemporary memory' of the middle ages disseminated via in popular culture, with the period as experienced by the medieval authors, this project tackles how medieval authors contributed to the mythologisation of their lifetimes. In doing so we begin revealing how this has affected modern assumptions.