Now is as good a time as any to come out of the closet as an Arthurian and plug my next great Internet venture: Quondam et Futurus: An Arthurian Wiki.*
Here’s my thinking. There’s a wiki on the Muppets that lists every appearance of the Amazing Mumford. There’s a wiki on Naruto that includes every plot arc, even the critically panned Sasuke Retrieval.**** And yet, King Arthur, the once and future king, hasn’t got squat. Not diddly. Not even diddly-squat. If I want to find out why Arthur’s battlecry is “Clarence!” I have to dig around the archives of the Arthurnet mailing list, but if I want to find out where Chewbacca died, it’s a wiki-link away. This imbalance must be redressed. And since they won’t let me nuke the Star Wars Expanded Universe from orbit, the best I can do is get a real Arthurian wiki rolling.
I secured the space at Wikia some time ago, but dissertating, moving, et al. have kept me from doing much of anything to it yet. My goal for the site is to create an encyclopedia of Arthurian knowledge accessible enough for the lay, non-academic audience (fanboyspeople included) and detailed enough to be useful for academics, too, a place where you can read about Malory’s changes to the story of Pelleas and Ettard, as well as about that episode of the Transformers where they pull a Conneticut Yankee.
So, if you know anything about the Arthurian legends, please drop by the King Arthur Wiki. Trade me a few footnotes worth of your cognitive surplus. And if you want to become an official administrator, contact me offblog.
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*After the medieval monkey Cafe Press merch shop, soon to feature multiple designs of monkey magnets and much, much more, thanks to the heroic purchasing prowess of medievalists like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.** This is my way of saying that I made enough on the first magnet to justify opening a for real store that can handle more than one magnet, one tee-shirt, or one pair of boxer shorts featuring the souls of lechers damned to eternal torment.
**I was on hiatus for the entire “The Medieval Muddle Kurfluffle 2008,” but let me say, for the record, that any scholar who buys stuff from me is my kind of scholar. I don’t think Mr. Muddle ever bought anything, the skinflint. But maybe he did–anonymity and all.***
***Speaking of things that I was on hiatus for, I apparently got some web awards from a couple of blogs. I think by now that meme is dead, but thanks for the praise.
****Calm down, Narutonians. I have no clue what a Sasuke Retrieval is, nor if it was ever critically panned, nor indeed whether there are even critics of Naruto’s ouevre. To any confused Naruto-googlers who find their way here, I apologize. I will not, however, be doing any Google Penancing about whether they had Sexy Jutsu in the Middle Ages.