MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Dungeons & Dragons has a long history of appropriating and adapting medievalist fantasy into its campaign and novel settings. Of particular interest to Arthurian scholars are the links between the Dragonlance setting of D&D and the subject matter of medieval Arthurian texts. This link is made explicit—at least to those who can trace the adapted and appropriated material—in the novels of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the co-creators of the Dragonlance world. Weis and Hickman focus their attentions on an Arthurian character, Sturm Brightblade, and the order of knights to which he belongs, and establish his character arc from his humble beginnings to his fated death in battle in their core Dragonlance novels, and they portray him as a questing knight whose internal and external struggles link him to Malory, the anonymous Sir Perceval of Galles, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon. Sturm, however, is not a radically new type of character. In fact, he is an amalgam of Arthurian knights—Gawain, Perceval, Lancelot, and even Arthur himself—and his quest to live up to the chivalric code he embodies, “my honor is my life,” is rooted in the Arthurian ideal, the chivalric code of the Knights of the Round Table. Sturm’s story is further elaborated in Michael Williams’s novel The Oath and The Measure, which is itself an appropriation of Sir Gawain and the green Knight, with Sturm as a hybridized Gawain-Arthur figure. I argue that Williams’s novel and the novels of Weis and Hickman appropriate Arthurian content to provide a contextualized entry-point to their fantasy setting, and that Sturm, and his bastard son Steel, are revised and recontextualized Arthurian figures that rely on medieval Arthurian literature and the readers’ familiarity with such to be fully effective as characters.