ROUND TABLE. – Symbol of the perfect equality of the rights and duties of the knights who gathered at the legendary Breton court of King Arthur and, by extension, the name given to the cycle of romances and poems that flourished around their adventures.
No mention of the famous r. t. is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135), but only in the translation made of it a few decades later, in French octosyllabic verse, by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Robert Wace (Roman de Brut): the reference was then expanded around 1200 by Wace’s English translator, Layamon, with an imaginative description of the struggles for precedence at Arthur’s table and of the shrewd expedient devised by a carpenter from Cornwall, who offered to build a r. capable of seating more than 1,600 persons on an equal footing of dignity.
The subject matter of the Breton chivalric poems, although it found its natural setting in the countries of Celtic culture, was artistically elaborated in the centers of Franco-Norman civilization and gradually linked with the r. t. (even though it was originally entirely unrelated to it, as in the case of the legend of Tristan and Isolde), until, in Troyes (v.), it became an organic psychological and ethical development of the courtly and chivalric ideal, finally sublimated, in Perceval le Gallois ou le Conte du Graal, into a successful religious symbolism. The subject matter of this unfinished poem was extensively taken up by the German Wolfram von Eschembach (ca. 1170–1225) and by other French writers, both anonymous and known: Vaucher de Denain, Manessier, Robert de Boron, and Gerbert de Montreuil. Through the legend of the Holy Grail, containing the blood of Jesus collected by Joseph of Arimathea, it lent itself to heretical polemic against papal authority, drawing on legendary material of highly composite origin.