An excellent set of web links for the Arthurian legend is available at http://www.legends.dm.net/kingarthur/index.html.

A great deal of material on King Arthur is available from a variety of online sources. Some very reputable material can be found at the Norton Anthology of English Literature online (NAEL): http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/middleages/topic_2/welcome.htm  

The Arthurian Handbook edited by Norris Lacy and others is an excellent starting place for historical, background, and factual information on Arthur.

Historical Arthur

"Arthur and his knights, although believed by most medieval people to be historical, are almost entirely products of legend and literature, made up by many authors writing in different genres, beginning not long after the fifth and early sixth centuries, the time when he supposedly lived, and culminating with Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur in the latter part of the fifteenth century, " according to the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Middle Ages apparently agreed with Sir Winston Churchill that the story of King Arthur "was all true, or it was meant to be, and more and better besides." Like stories of Davy Crockett or George Washington, what the real man did were almost not as important as what people came to believe Arthur had done—and that is the source of his great power as a legend in British literature.

The NAEL points out that "the man who inspired the Arthurian legend would have been a Briton, a leader of the Celtic people who had been part of the Roman Empire and had converted to Christianity after it became the official religion of Rome. As the Romans pulled out of Britain, the native Britons were making a temporarily successful stand against the Anglo-Saxon invaders who had already occupied the southeastern corner of Britain. Archaeology, epigraphy, and oral tradition suggest that somewhere in the years around 500 C.E., a charismatic local leader arose who organized British defenses against the invading Saxon tribes. Whatever his actual name was—and there is a LOT of debate about that—he has come down to us as "Arthur."

NAEL continues, "Arthur was never a 'king'; more likely, he was a leader of the native British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons. In the Welsh elegiac poem Y Gododdin, composed ca. 600, a hero is said to have fed ravens with the corpses of his enemies, 'though he was no Arthur,' indicating that the poet knew of an even greater hero by that name. According to a Latin History of the Britons around the year 800, ascribed to Nennius, "Arthur fought against the Saxons in those days together with the kings of Britain, but he was himself the leader of battles." Nennius names twelve such battles, in one of which Arthur is said to have carried an image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders (or on his shield—the two words are closely related). The Latin Annals of Wales (a chronicle copied ca. 950) has an entry for the year 516 C.E. concerning 'the Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were victorious.' So we can see that both writers of histories and the keepers of chronicles started to incorporate the mythic events of the Arthurian legend as if they were historical fact."

 Furthermore, "Not until the twelfth century, though, did Arthur achieve a quasi-historical existence as the greatest of British kings. The new Norman kings of France, eager to legitimate their claims to the throne of England, were particularly interested in early histories of England that featured their ancestors—and a particularly ambitious and creative monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, seized on the legends of Arthur and embedded them into other legendary tales to create The History of the Kings of Britain (1137) which featured Arthur as the greatest king of legendary England—and conveniently, as an ancestor of the Angevin rulers of England. His panegyric (work in praise of a ruler)  was wildly popular and was quickly adapted into the vernaculars by Wace and Layamon, among others. At the same time, Arthur was flourishing in Welsh folktales as a fairy-tale king, attended by courtiers named Kei (Kay), Bedwyn (Bedivere), and Gwalchmai (Gawain). French writers, however, decided that such a great king must have a court—and created the "romance" side of the Arthurian story, featuring (of course French) knights like Yvain, Gawain, and their greatest creation, Lancelot. Drawing on a scholarly and slightly satiric tradition codified by Andreas Capellanus, these romances involved fin amor—refined or noble love—what later scholars call, inaccurately, 'courtly love'." [End of NAEL]

Romance Arthur

Arthur and his court, as exemplars of the new philosophy of chivalry and fin amor, quickly eclipsed the court of Charlemagne as the most popular storytelling material of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The idea of fin amor, what 19th century scholars renamed "courtly love," seems to have had its home in the circles around Eleanor of Aquitaine and her descendants, and is codified in Andreas Capellanus' De Amore, which sets out the rules for male/female engagement in this milieu and then provides a savage critique of it. The major figure in the embellishment of Arthurian romance is Chrètien de Troyes. Writing primarily in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, in the last three decades of the twelfth century, Chretien established the importance of Arthur’s knights and probably drew both the Grail legends and Tristan legends into the cycle as well. The new genre of romance focused not only on the exploits of this new knightly class fighting in wars and jousts or battling against monsters and supernatural enemies but also on the trials and fortunes of love and on the importance of personal, as opposed to feudal, bonds. His stories are aimed at mixed aristocratic audiences of men and women. Chrètien’s contemporary, Marie de France, assumes that her audience of noble readers understands the entire royal French culture of the Arthurian court. Her lais critique the whole idea of fin amor, and, especially in Lanval, ask readers to think about the values and views of women and men that such romances endorse.

The NAEL notes that "In the thirteenth century, a group of French writers produced what modern scholars refer to as the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle, in prose. This consists of a huge network of interlocking tales, featuring hundreds of characters. The Vulgate Cycle presents a darker side to Arthur and to the Round Table as a center of courtesy and culture." They attempt to cover the full history of Arthur, from the pre-history of the Holy Grail and the politics attending Arthur’s birth, through all his and his knights’ adventures, the quest for the Holy Grail, and Arthur’s eventual though ambiguous passing.

"In romance, both Arthur's role and his character undergo changes inconsistent with his reputation as a great warrior. His court continues to be the center from which the adventures of his knights radiate, but Arthur himself becomes something of a figurehead, someone whom French scholars refer to as a roi fainéant — a do-nothing king — who appears weak and is ruled and sometimes bailed out by one of his knights, especially by his nephew Sir Gawain" (NAEL). There are practical reasons for this: when a king fights a battle there is usually evidence of it. It’s easier to have the king stay home and have the knights go out and fight—fewer messy historical questions, and more possibilities for spin-offs and sequels (think the Star Wars novels). A chronology of the Vulgate evolution is found at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/344chron.htm.

"The very idea of Arthurian chivalry as a secular ideal undergoes a critique, especially in the Vulgate Cycle. While for the aristocracy Arthur's reign continued to provide an ancient model of courtesy, justice, and prowess, as it does in Deschamps's ballade on the Nine Worthies, moralists and satirists pointed out, with varying degrees of subtlety, how far Arthur and his knights fall short of the highest spiritual ideals. Sir Lancelot's adultery with Arthur's queen became an especially troubling factor" (NAEL).

E = English, F = French, L = Latin, W Welsh

The Longman Anthology website says that "Marie de France's identity remains obscure, but it is clear that she was a woman of French origin writing in England in the later decades of the twelfth century, widely educated, and in touch with the royal court. She dedicates her book of Lais to a "noble King" who was probably Henry II, and she may have been his kinswoman, possibly an illegitimate half-sister. Marie's works draw into that courtly culture the languages and traditions of the English and Celtic past. She rewrote a Latin narrative about the origin of "Saint Patrick's Purgatory" and the adventure of an Irish knight there; and she retold the fables of Aesop using an English translation that she attributed to King Alfred. The Lais, she says, came to her through oral transmission, and she connects them with the Bretons." (Page seems to have disappeared but I retrieved it thru the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20060216193435/http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/damrosch_awl/chapter2/
medialib/defrance.html.) The Longman Anthology website continues,

"Writing a generation after Geoffrey of Monmouth and not long before Gerald of Wales, Marie brings a quite different and rather critical set of preoccupations to her Arthurian story. She opens her tale with a realistic and admirable occasion of male power and strong kingship: Arthur's battle for territory and his reward of faithful vassals. A bleaker side of that courtly world, and perhaps of Marie's own, is also implicit, however. With a terseness and indirection typical of her lais, Marie shows women as property in the king's gift, knights forgotten when their wealth runs out, and the perversion of judicial process. It’s worth comparing the world of Lanval with what we saw in Old English poetry of the relation of lord and retainers, and the connections between men and women."

"The realm of eroticism and women's power in Lanval, though, is not automatically any more virtuous or stable than the ostentatious wealth and corruptible law of the world of Arthurian men. If Lanval's mysterious lady is beautiful and generous, she also takes his knightliness from him. Lanval is last seen riding behind the lady, and not on a warhorse but on a palfrey. Guinevere swiftly reduces Arthur to a weak and temporizing king. And in her initial explosion after Lanval rejects her, Guinevere accuses him of homosexuality. For all its absurdity, the moment articulates unnerving implications of the profound bonds among men in the Arthurian world, implications that could interrupt genealogical transmission of wealth and power. Marie's Guinevere again voices fears the tradition has left unsaid. "

"Marie de France may be trying less to propound a critique of the received stories of Arthur than to recall her readers' attention to elements that tradition has left aside, as she suggests in her prologue. Some of this is no more troubling than a delightful fantasy of wealth and pleasure, outside time and without consequences. Other elements imply, with startling economy, forces that (in the hands of later romancers) tear the Arthurian world to pieces." (End of Longman)

This is only one of Marie’s dozen lais; the others in her collection (including one on the Tristan legend) view love from other points of view, rendering a very kaleidoscopic picture of the relationships of men and women, of individuals and society, and of power and authority in her time.

Sources: http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/middleages/topic_2/welcome.htm

http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/damrosch_awl/chapter2/medialib/defrance.html  (retrieved from www.archive.org)

If you want to read two of Marie's Fables, which seem to anticipate Chaucer's fabliaux, you can find them on the Harvard Chaucer pages at http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/litsubs/fabliaux/mari-fab.html

Questions for discussion on Lanval drawn from http://merlin.capcollege.bc.ca/fahlmanreid/lanval_questions.htm