The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy

This analysis aims to show how the greatest romance stories of medieval Europe contain the seeds of later versions of tragedy, and the stress this put upon the literary form and ideological function of the romance. The analysis focuses on the effects of troubled family genealogy, in particular on the figure of Mordred, Arthur’s incestuous son, whose birth represented a sin with tragic repercussions, but a sin committed in innocence and thus one that reflects the operations of ‘fate’ conceived in ways that necessarily complicated medieval Christian understandings of the universe and its operations.