Garland Reference Library of the Humanities

A comprehensive reference source for Arthurian studies, "The Arthurian Name Dictionary" is a comprehensive encyclopedia of characters, places, objects, and themes found in the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The volume makes available, for the first time, a complete catalogue of these names, drawn from all significant Arthurian sources between Gildas's "De Excidio Britanniae "(the first "Arthurian" source, written c. 540) and Tennyson's nineteenth-century "Idylls of the Kin" (which began the modern era of Arthurian literature)
Covers all of Arthurian-informative, detailed, and extensive, The enormous number of characters and places in the vast body of literature called Arthuriana confounds even the most learned Arthurian scholars. "The Arthurian Name Dictionary "contains names extracted from over 250 original Arthurian texts. Its pages include information on characters such as Lancelot and Gawain; places such as Camelot and Camlann; objects such as Excalibur and the Holy Grail; and themes such as the Sword-in-the-Stone and the Beheading Game. Each entry provides a complete, accurate description of the name, including, when possible, the origins or historical basis of the name, and any counterparts with different names in other sources. Major characters and themes are discussed extensively, and their evolution through the series of texts is carefully traced
Offers more coverage than previous encyclopedias and dictionaries on Arthurian, "The Arthurian Name Dictionary" outdoes previous encyclopedias and dictionaries concerned with Arthurian subjects by including a far greater number of sources, by including a far greater number of names from those sources, and by discussing each name in far greater detail.