Dibs

These days, as the lines grow ever fuzzier between truth and fiction, conspiracy and history, it no longer seems to matter whether certain figures actually ever lived. We’ve made movies about them, put them into novels, and it was all such a long time ago that who cares whether they actually rode horses, burped and breathed their last. But the authenticity of King Arthur used to really matter to historians and English majors, and what a relief it was for them when their questions appeared to be answered once and for all by Norma Lorre Goodrich, a California lit professor and “prolific author who discovered King Arthur was an actual person, [and who] has died of natural causes” at age 89, according to UPI on Saturday. “The former literature professor at the University of Southern California and Claremont Colleges discovered King Arthur was born to a royal family and once lived in Scotland. She also determined Guinevere was a Scottish queen and Lancelot was a Scottish king. For her work she and her husband were knighted in 1990…. When she was 5, an aunt gave her a copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s book, The Idylls of the King, and set her on a literary path.” Goodrich authored many books, including Merlin, The Medieval Myths, Guinivere, Priestesses, Charles Duke of Orleans, The Ways of Love and King Arthur. However, critics — such as Don Fry at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, writing in the Library Journal — protested that Goodrich should not necessarily be trusted, as she in turn trusted untrustworthy sources. “Though Goodrich asserts that hers ‘is the first book to have explored very minutely and in the original languages both the historical and literary material concerning King Arthur,’ numerous Arthurian scholars have written similarly researched books with similar conclusions,” Fry wrote in 1986. “Goodrich assumes ancient authors were accurate, and she has made the following findings: the real Arthur operated ‘between what is now Scotland and what is now England,’ rather than in the South; he died near Douglas; and Avalon was St. Patrick’s Isle, near Man. Her romantic sensibilities skate over the treacherous evidence and find geographic certainties everywhere.” Snap! And after reading her book The Holy Grail, blogger Daniel Jolley at Rambles.net muses: “Goodrich employs a writing style even more idiosyncratic and unwieldy than my own. … I must praise anyone who is able to get an editor to accept passive sentences. Nonetheless, there are sentences that, no matter how many times I read them, do not seem to be sentences at all, just expressions that often make no sense. On a broader level, many passages in the book … do not seem to relate to the topic at hand, namely the Holy Grail. … Good luck.” Double snap!