Why King Arthur Lives On Forever…and Vampires, Too.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why King Arthur tales never seems to quite go away and die?  They’re a lot like vampire stories in that respect.  They go dormant for a while, then there’ll be a big surge and everyone gets King Arthur happy for a while, before the cycle dies down again.  Remember in the late eighties and nineties when everyone seemed to be doing something about King Arthur?  There was The Mists of Avalon, and Camelot did its world tour, right up until Clive Owen did King Arthur in 2004, which kinda killed the whole King Arthur cycle stone dead that time around.

We’re right in the middle of a vampire cycle right now.  This one is a doozy, but there have been other vampire crazes – there was a short-lived one about twenty years ago, when Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot was first published, around the same time as a short-lived remake of Dark Shadows, with Ben Cross playing the vampire Barnabas Collins.  Then vampires subsided and died away until Anne Rice hit big with her books and away we went again.

So what is the fascination with King Arthur, then?  We’ve done vampires to, well, death.  We’ve turned them inside out and wondered why we love ‘em so much.  But Arthur is just as enduring, if not more so.

I have one theory.

King Arthur did magnificent things.  He held back a tide — for a while, anyway.  He was an heroic figure, and his life was filled with romantic deeds.  Even if you strip away the fantasy figures, the mystical mumbo jumbo and boil Arthur right down to basic historical bare bones, the guy was a gutsy warrior, a leader of men, and he did the near impossible:  He held frightened, resourceless, divided people together against overwhelming odds.  Damn, he was good.

Add even some of the tall tales into the mix, and he becomes legendary.  We know for a fact that The Battle of Mount Badon is true. Wow!

Given that tiny glimpse of historical truth, you have to wonder how much of the rest of it might be true.

And that’s where I form my theory.  That’s where I think the fascination lies for all of us.  We look at the stories and mythology of King Arthur and even the most cynical of us wonder, deep in the back of our minds, “what if this really happened?  What if it was true?”

What if?

I think this same fascination holds with vampires and werewolves and a lot of the urban fantasy mythology we can’t seem to get enough of, these days.  We read about these creatures that roam our city suburbs and neighbourhood malls, rubbing shoulders with us, sometimes pretending to be human, sometimes not even bothering trying to pass as one of us, but in the story we’re reading, they used to have to pass as human, once.  And we wonder…what if it is true?  What if in the real world they still are passing?

What if?

And you get that little atavistic shiver that makes you keep on reading, fascinated.

I know I’m going to pick up and read every King Arthur story that comes along.  And I don’t think this is the last King Arthur story I’ll ever write, either.  There’s far too much pulling me back to that universe for me to quit, yet.

What about you?