33 works across 28 centuries, back to Iliad and Odyssey.
Following one thread, 8 works from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to The History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae). Back to all 33 works
1997
J. K. Rowling
Late 20th century. Britain. Written in English.
An orphan raised by cruel relatives learns at eleven that he is a wizard and enters Hogwarts, a boarding school for magic, where he and two friends uncover a plot to steal an alchemical stone that grants immortality. It joins the British boarding-school story to the English children's fantasy tradition and sets the plot up as a clue-planted mystery.
1950
C. S. Lewis
Mid-20th century. England. Written in English.
Four children evacuated from London pass through a wardrobe into Narnia, where the lion Aslan dies and rises again to break the White Witch's winter.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Rowling has said she loved the Narnia books as a child. Like the wardrobe, the barrier at King's Cross is a hidden doorway from wartime or suburban drabness into a magical world where a child has a destined part in the struggle against an evil power.
1858
George MacDonald
Victorian. Scotland/England. Written in English.
A 'faerie romance for men and women' in which a young man, Anodos, wanders through Fairy Land meeting tree spirits, knights and his own shadow.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Lewis wrote that buying Phantastes at a railway bookstall in 1916 'baptised' his imagination, and he later called MacDonald his master. Lewis's Narnia, like MacDonald's Fairy Land, is a holy otherworld that a reader enters from an ordinary room.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
MacDonald carried the Christian fairy-land vision of his adult romance into his children's books. The wise woman in the tower and the testing of faith in unseen guidance continue themes he first worked out in Phantastes.
1590 (Books I-III)
Edmund Spenser
Elizabethan. England. Written in English.
Allegorical romance epic in which knights representing the virtues undertake quests in Faerieland, written in the nine-line Spenserian stanza.
Structural model, probable.
Anodos's journey through Fairy Land as a series of allegorical encounters with knights, false beauties and temptations follows Spenser's method. The deceiving Alder-maiden has been compared to Spenser's Duessa, and MacDonald was a close reader of the poem.
1485
Thomas Malory
Late Medieval England. England. Written in English.
Prose compilation of Arthurian legend from Arthur's birth to the fall of the Round Table, printed by Caxton.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Spenser makes Prince Arthur the linking hero of his poem and draws on the Arthurian world Malory's printed book had made familiar in England. Knights wandering a forest of adventures recall Malory's quests.
c. 1215-1235
Anonymous
High Middle Ages. France. Written in Old French.
Huge prose cycle of Arthurian romance covering Lancelot, the Grail quest and the death of Arthur.
Direct source, well documented.
Malory's colophons and his repeated phrase 'as the French book saith' acknowledge his sources. Large parts of the Morte, including the Lancelot sections, the Grail quest and the death of Arthur, are condensed translations of the Vulgate prose romances.
c. 1190
Chrétien de Troyes
High Middle Ages. France. Written in Old French.
Unfinished verse romance about a naive young knight who visits the Fisher King's castle and fails to ask about the Grail.
Direct source, well documented.
The Vulgate's Grail quest grows out of the story Chrétien left unfinished in Perceval, recast in prose and given a Christian meaning with Galahad as the Grail knight.
c. 1136
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Anglo-Norman. England. Written in Latin.
Legendary chronicle of British kings that gave Arthur and Merlin their first full literary treatment.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Geoffrey's chronicle, chiefly through Wace's French adaptation, gave Chrétien's generation the court of Arthur as a fixed setting. Chrétien set his invented knightly adventures against that background.
The line stops here: draws on Welsh legend, Nennius and invention; branch stopped here.
