Scarlet Katz Roberts

Let me try and explain how the Morte D’Arthur is like Grand Theft Auto

1

Open world games. The Los Santos sunset is an all too precise copy of those orange evenings in LA. Vespucci beach and the way the waves feel when Michael goes swimming or after an impromptu jetski ride. Each kingdom is as beguiling as it is regulated. You are permitted to wonder for hours (or fictional hours) so maybe a few minutes, until you happen upon it. Your vision/ a prophecy/ The Sankgreal.

2

Impassable barriers. Gravity in Los Santos is mostly real…or realish (let’s ignore careering from the top of Mount Chilliad as evening gives way to black night and bright morning in the space of one ride). But have you ever tried to swim to the edge of the world? Once I accidentally ejected from a plane I had stolen from the airport and taken for a pleasant afternoon ride. I fell straight into the sea, and got eaten by a shark — WHAT?

Sometimes you can’t push the world as far as you need to. All this is a long way of saying that Lancelot is not virtuous enough to reach the grail. Poor Lancelot: he gets thrown out onto the flaming flagstones, comatose.

3

Right place, right time. Go to Los Santos customs at the wrong time and you might be accosted by an escaping robber, who would’ve simply made off with the goods if you hadn’t been there— or would he? What happens to the block after you drive away? Does everybody stand in place until you come back? Another way of saying predestination is important. Poor old Lancelot is the moral key to the Arthurian cycle. The most precious piece, the holy hand that heals cursed wounds:

Then King Arthur and all the kings and knights kneeled down and gave thankings and lovings unto God and to His Blessed Mother. And ever Sir Launcelot wept as he had been a child that had been beaten.

And yet he cannot help himself. His duty to protect the queen, his loyalty to his treasured King tears him asunder. A real body couldn’t contain all that. Maybe that’s why the knights in the Morte D’Arthur sleep so much (Franklin and Michael are in and out of hospital) they need to go into standby and let the world pass over them, just for a bit, until they get their strength back.

He was in grete perell/And so he leyde hym doun and slept… so when he was aslepe there cam a vision unto hym.

Scarlet Katz Roberts is 23 years old and has just begun the poetry MA at the University of East Anglia. In her time as an undergraduate at Oxford, she was published in the Isis magazine and was the recipient of the 2021 Graham Midgely memorial prize for Poetry.

Twitter: @skr448