Round Table

ROUND TABLE. - Symbol of the perfect equality of 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 Round Table is found in the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1135), but only in the translation of it made a few decades later, in French octosyllables, by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Robert Wace (Roman de Brut): the mention was then expanded around 1200 by Wace's English translator, Layamon, with an imaginative description of the quarrels over precedence at the Arthurian table and of the shrewd expedient of a carpenter from Cornwall, who offered to build a table capable of seating more than 1600 places equal in dignity.

The matter of the Breton chivalric poems, although it finds its natural setting in the countries of Celtic culture, was elaborated artistically in the centers of Franco-Norman civilization and gradually linked with the Round Table (even though it was originally entirely extraneous to it, as is the case with the legend of Tristan and Iseult), until in the work of Chrétien de Troyes (v.) it came to constitute an organic psychological and ethical development of the courtly and chivalric ideal, finally sublimated with Perceval le Gallois ou le Conte du Graal within a fortunate religious symbolism. The matter of this last, unfinished poem was largely taken up by the German Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-1225) and by other French writers, both anonymous and known: Vaucher de Denain, Manessier, Robert de Boron, Gerbert de Montreuil. With the legend of the Holy Grail, containing the blood of Jesus collected by Joseph of Arimathea, it lent itself to heretical polemic against pontifical authority, on the basis of legendary material of very composite origin.

Enzo Bottasso