Arthurian Places

Arthurian tourist sites create what Stijn Reijnders, adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux mémoire , calls lieux d’imagination : places that may or may not have their origins in history, but are compelling precisely because they join the real with a desired imaginary. We offer a tour of Tintagel Castle and Glastonbury Abbey in the UK, surveying the development of these sites from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) through the nineteenth-century Medieval Revival to today’s New Age religions and media tourism. We argue that Arthurian places are continually co-produced in processes far from finished; moreover, diverse groups have their own investments in such places – and are sometimes in conflict with each other. Thus we conclude with a discussion of two Arthurian sites outside the UK that exemplify how Arthuricity flourishes in unlikely places: the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, and Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler’s homage to the knights of the Round Table.