The summer of 1791 was an unusually wet one. The young schoolboy, and future Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, therefore had a lot of time on his hands. It was probably the weather that induced him to stay inside longer than usual and write a romance entitled “Harold; or, The Castle of Morford” (Bodleian MS Misc. Eng. e.21. Summary Catalogue 31777).
The ‘long eighteenth century’ (c.1688-c.1837) is not a period that people usually associate with medievalism…but the subject of this post is the play “King Arthur, or the British Worthy” (1691) by John Dryden and Henry Purcell.
This post examines the debt that George R.R. Martin owes to one of the nineteenth century’s foremost novelists, Sir Walter Scott.