The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path
The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology
The Round Table
the fellowship and the empty seat
Invented by Wace in 1155 as a piece of social engineering — a table at which no baron outranks another — and elaborated by the prose cycles into the third table of sacred history (after the Last Supper's and Joseph's Grail table), with one seat, the Siege Perilous, kept empty for the knight to come. The fellowship is the matter's great social sacrament: equality ordered around a center that none of its members occupies.
Its tragedy is structural. The Queste empties it in an afternoon — the fellowship's finest oath is its own dissolution — and the Mort breaks what the quest spared. Malory, writing in a civil war, mourns it as the thing his own England could not keep: "the moste kyndeliest felyship of knyghtes that ever was."
Where it surfaces
- 10 Wace and the Round Table — Wace: the table invented.
- 12 The Uses of a Dead King — The Winchester table: the symbol made furniture, and propaganda.
- 19 Robert de Boron: The Christening of the Grail — Robert de Boron: the third table and the empty seat.
- 21 The Queste del Saint Graal — The Pentecost oath that empties the hall.
- 29 Malory III: The Day of Destiny — The fellowship's end on Salisbury Plain.