Recently, I posted on ‘The Matter Of Britain” — the Medieval term for Arthurian cycle — and its influence on Fantasy fiction in two posts, one looking at adult Fantasy, the other at works for Junior and YA readers.

In the first post, I reflected on “the swathe of Arthurian-based works for adult readers that dominated 1970s and 1980s Fantasy literature—with the theme continuing to maintain traction through into the 1990s.”

The Junior/YA fiction had a slightly wider sweep, with The Sword in the Stone published in 1938, but there was still a solid swathe of publications from the early 1960s through to the 1990s.

I believe it was a golden era for Arthurian stories, with so many published in such relatively close proximity — but when I look back a little further, to the nineteenth century, I realised that “The Matter of Britain” also enjoyed another heydey then.

Mark Twain, for example, published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889, while Tennyson was writing his famous and popular Idylls of the King between 1859 and 1885. William Morris also wrote a poem titled Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, in 1858.

So although the Arthurian stories are always with us, from time to time they appear to go through periods of greater-than-usual public popularity. So I would love to see a study that looked at whether there are any detectable trends in common between the two eras …

The one thing that seems certain, however, is that we will keep telling and retelling the Arthurian legends — and that they will enjoy periods of intense popularity again.