This is the King Arthur Companion (1983), by Phyllis Ann Karr, a book with some unusual history. It was born out of Karr’s research for Greg Stafford’s board game King Arthur’s Knights (1978) – it says a lot about Stafford’s attention to detail that he hired a researcher for a board game. The first edition of the book (this one) was a joint effort between Chaosium and traditional publisher Reston (I’ve heard that hardcovers were beyond Chaosium’s means at the time). By 1986, however, Reston was out of the picture and Chaosium issued a soft cover second printing, which is pretty much identical except for the cover. (Green Knight reprinted it as the Arthurian Companion in 1997 and again in 2001; the latter corrects a number of typos and omissions and is considered by Karr to be the definitive version)

According to Karr, this was “the first Arthurian study to be done in this type of dictionary-entry arrangement.” The content is broken into sections for people, places and things, as well as appendices for a timeline and lists of character groupings (the one for villains, a tricky topic in Arthurian legend, is particularly amusing).

It winds up being the scaffolding upon which Stafford would build his own synthesis of the various strands of Arthurian legend. That’s what Karr basically does here: take all the Arthurian stories and reconcile them all into a cohesive whole. And she does it with no shortage of sass, reveling in the contradictions. She’s got opinions on these characters and it is delightful to see her let loose – the section on Merlin is a standout example of her cutting criticism that both informs and entertains.

It is, in short, a must-have for anyone with an interest in Arthurian lore and certainly shouldn’t be far away from the grip of anyone running a Pendragon game (my copy is shelved right beside my Pendragon books). And there is apparently a new, corrected edition coming out in the near future, if tracking down an older copy isn’t your speed.