Rinse and Repeat I

I am a doctoral student and work on Merlin romances (for more information click here).

This blog post is an attempt to vocalise some similarities I observed specifically between romances about King Arthur and/or his knights and Role-Playing Games (RPGs). Arthurian romances tend to be quite long for medieval texts; they take place in the distant past of King Arthur (5th century – so they are set in a faraway past even for the medieval readers of romance in the Middle English period); and play out in a complex and distinct story-world. For modern readers of Arthurian romance, they often appear repetitive, if not digressive; the story-arc as we know it from modern narratives/stories is not as clearly visible in those texts. Merlin romances are a prime example for this.

In these texts, what could most easily be declared the main storyline consists of Merlin integrating himself into the royal court of Arthur’s predecessors (and then of Arthur himself) and helping Arthur unify the British Isles under his reign. However, most of the plot is taken up by things that have little to no relation to this: for example, a good four pages (of Lacy’s modern English translated edition) are spent on a story in which Arthur defeats a giant on Mont-Saint-Michel; another three pages talk about his fight against a demonic cat (and its backstory); Merlin’s visit to Julius Cesar (yes, really) in Rome takes up eleven pages. Another example is the series of many, many battles of Arthur’s knights in this text, for many of which neither Merlin nor Arthur are even present.

Arthurian romance is episodic in nature: it can be split up into many smaller sections, the order of which is not always relevant (and, in the case of the Merlin romances, prone to change), and not all of which have a clear impact on the main story. While this story format does not have much to do with the expectations modern readers might bring from reading modern novels, episodic storytelling is still very much in practice in other genres and media. Video games, and RPGs specifically, are an example of this.

RPGs are narratively-focused games in which the player usually controls a character, does tasks (quests), and plays through a central storyline. Beyond this main quest, RPGs tend to have more content to offer, be it an open world to discover, side quests, world events, achievements, collectibles, or whatever. Usually there is a journal or quest log as well as a map in which the player can see a list of their current tasks in the game, and they’re often organised, for example, by differentiating between main quests and side quests.

That means that here, too, we can see digressive content: of course, you COULD save the princess, but she won’t go anywhere – why not chase all those chickens first? Why beat the Top 4 if you can also catch ‘em all? Why fight a dragon now if you can join the Thieves Guild and get filthy rich first?

This concludes the first part of this blog post. In the next one, I will have a closer look at these digressions, why they exist, and what they mean for readers and players.

For further information on the image, click here.