Acting on the assumption that the general public is unfamiliar with the Song Of Roland and wanting to emphasize how well known it would have been, I commented on another sub that “late medieval French fanboys would have argued about whether Durendal was better than Excalibur.” Is anything about that accurate? Is there evidence of any kind of “fandom” that developed around the characters in the various chansons de geste? Would Lancelot partisans argue with fans of Roland about who would win in a fight, the way they argued about whether Superman could beat the Hulk when I was a kid? Is there any indication that stories and characters from different mythologies were combined to meet a demand like this?
The Arthurian legends were turned into "novels" - stories written in vernacular - in the 12th and 13th centuries, with English and French writers creating a large number of derivative works where our main heroes acquired their main features and lived the adventures that they are still famous for: we could probably call this "fan fiction" or the Arthurian Literary Universe. And then there were sequels (four writers continued Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal) and translations. While we do not know whether the aristocratic and literate public argued about the characters - though one can imagine that they may have discussed in depth the various works available - there is something that those nobles absolutely did: cosplaying as Arthurian characters.
From the mid-13th to the 15th century, Arthurian stories and characters became central to a type of festivals known as "Round Tables" that combined jousting, feasting, dancing, and theatre. Called "one of the most fashionable diversions of Christendom" by historian Roger Sherman Loomis (Loomis, 1961), they were more social events than tournaments. They were indeed better regulated than the latter, though accidents happened and some Round Tables had to be cut short after people were seriously injured or killed, resulting in actual quarrels (Dean, 1987).
The first Round Table mentioned in the chronicles was held in Cyprus in 1223 when the lord of Beirut celebrated the knighting of his eldest son by having adventures of the Round Tables enacted for the public. The fad then spread like wildfire throughout Europe: princes and high ranking nobles in England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or the Low Countries organized hundreds of such events in the two following centuries. Nobles were not alone to enjoy this: as soon as 1281, some merchant bourgeoisies also organized their own Arthurian festivals.
Round Tables, which were sometimes given specific names, featured reenactments of the Arthurian stories as well as derivative stories inspired by them. The kings, lords and ladies acted themselves as Arthurian heroes in narratives that seem to have been more or less scripted, and they took up Arthurian names and armories during the event. The Pas de la Belle Pèlerine held between Calais and St. Omer in 1449 by the Lord of Haubourdin, Jean de Luxembourg, featured the following story where the Lord played the role of Lancelot:
A fair lady [who] had set out with her company on a pilgrimage to Rome, had been attacked by robbers, and delivered by a knight, who promised to escort her to the Holy City as soon as he had fulfilled his vow to guard a pass at the Croix de la Pèlerine.
King Edward I was particularly fond of Round Tables, and held many of them during his reign. For his marriage to Margaret of France in 1299, he played the part of King Arthur himself during an "elaborate Arthurian masquerade with many of the traditional characters impersonated" (Dean, 1987). Edward's Round Tables were an opportunity for political propaganda, and mocked the Scots or the Welsh, against whom the Knights of the Round Table were told to take arms (Loomis, 1961). Such events were not just entertainment: they were a display of power and wealth, they disseminated the ideals of chivalry (in a more controlled environment than the battlefield!), and they could have political goals.
The Round Tables could be quite elaborate and may sometimes have looked like the shows in our modern theme parks. The Saumur jousts organized by King René of Anjou in 1446 featured a wooden castle and animals from his menagerie. According to Loomis, one of the most elaborate Round Tables was held in 1493 at the castle of Sandricourt, near Pontoise. It was described as follows by the Herald of Orléans:
There were on successive days combats on foot at the Barriere Périlleuse, a general tourney at the Carrefour Ténébreux, individual jousts at the Champ de l'Epine. The climax of the last day was the Adventure of the Forest Desvoyable. The participating knights rode out of the castles accompanied by their ladies, and were presented with lances and swords at the Pin Vert, where knights of the Round Table had formerly resorted in search of adventure. Proceeding separately along the forest paths, they would couch their spears when they met and batter each other. Servants were on hand to provide wine and refreshments for the weary. At eve the knights repaired to the castles to banquet and to relate their adventures on oath. Followed dances and farces lasting till two in the morning. Orléans estimated that nearly 2,000 persons including armourers, saddlers, and leeches were entertained at the castle for eight days, and declared that never since the time of Arthur and his order, which comprised Lancelot Gawain, Tristan and Palamedes, had there been a Pas d'Armes which approximated more closely the deeds of the knights of the Round Table.
Of course, these Round Tables were not "fandom" events in the modern sense. However, people in the literate upper classes (nobles and bourgeois) cast themselves as the main characters of the Arthurian legends, rewrote and adapted the stories if necessary, and had fun (cos)playing scripted narratives about these characters. This suggests a form of personal appropriation of the literary medium that is perhaps not so different from that enjoyed by modern fans. That said, a Round Table arranged today would feature a group of presidents, prime ministers and other high-ranking politicians arranging live TV events to reenact together entire scenes of tentpole movie franchises, so we would have Barack Obama as Black Panther and Jacinda Arden as Black Widow.
An interesting side effect of the Arthurian Round Table shows is perhaps to have helped disseminate Arthurian names in areas where those names were not native. This is the hypothesis of Michel Pastoureau, who noted the appearance of names like Gauvain, Tristan and Lancelot, at a time when the Round Table festivals were getting popular, and attended by the non-noble populations. For instance, there was a French peasant called Lancelot Havard born in Normandy in the mid-1200s. For Pastoureau, this shows a major evolution in the naming systems in Western Europe, with societies moving from a system where names were only transmitted to a system where they could be chosen - in this case from a recent repertoire of names held by fictional characters. For all we know, the parents of Lancelot Havard attended a Round Table with a local lord playing Lancelot, and loved the name and its fictional attributes so much that they gave it to their son (hello to all the Daenerys!).
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