The Lost Letter: Seeking the Keys to William\u27s Arthuriad

Mythcon 47 Guest of Honor address. The Arthuriad is dense with allusion and the reader often has a sense of missing much that goes on below the surface; as it happens, the reader is not wrong to be confused. Rateliff finds the keys that unlock this poetic sequence à clef in a relatively unknown letter Williams wrote in answer to a list of questions on the Arthuriad from C.S. Lewis, in the “gynecomorphical map” drawn to Williams’s personal specifications which served as endpapers to the poetry, and in Williams’s private life as revealed in letters and memoirs, in particular to personae he ascribed to certain women in his life. Includes illustrations