Teaching King Arthur In the 21st Century Classroom

Maybe you’re a kindred spirit who has been reading King Arthur tales for as long as you can remember. Or maybe you are only familiar with King Arthur due to all of the modern movie adaptations. Or maybe you’re someone who has never attempted anything King Arthur and wonder if it is still relevant today.

Chances are, your students are somewhere in-between options 2 and 3. I’m here to say that King Arthur is still alive and well in my classroom . Here are some tips with making him relatable in the modern day classroom.

If you would love a resource to teach all of this King Arthur goodness you are about to read about, check out this King Arthur bundle!

Interactive Websites and Apps

Incorporate interactive websites or educational apps that explore King Arthur’s legends in innovative ways. For example, the British Library’s “Discovering Literature: Medieval” section offers a wealth of resources, including manuscripts, essays, and interactive timelines related to Arthurian literature.

This blog post that they offer entitled King Arthur: fable, fact and fiction offers some wonderful background knowledge for students getting started with King Arthur and considering how this legend became a world-wide treasure.

King Arthur is one of our most popular heroes: noble yet flawed, a great leader (but perhaps not such a great judge of character), a brave soldier who died fighting for a noble yet hopeless cause.

There are tantalizing fragments of evidence that the legendary figure may be based on a real king who fought to defend Britain against Anglo-Saxon invaders around the 5th-6th centuries. But was he a Celt, a Roman, a Briton or an Anglo-Saxon, and did he really take on the Anglo-Saxons?

Medieval manuscripts blog

Movies and Shows

King Arthur movies and shows seem to pop up almost every single year. Netflix adapted Arthur Miller’s novel Cursed into a compelling new spin on Arthurian legends. There is also the old favorite of Star Wars: A New Hope that mirrors King Arthur’s story perfectly.

However, my favorite modern pop culture connection activity right now is having students watch the movie Aquaman and looking at how King Arthur parallels with Arthur Curry.

Aquaman, like King Arthur, embodies the archetype of the reluctant hero discovering his royal lineage and embracing his destiny as a leader. (You know- The Hero’s Journey)

Both characters wield powerful artifacts symbolizing their rightful claim to authority—Excalibur for Arthur and the Trident of Atlantis for Aquaman. Their quests involve uniting fractured kingdoms and overcoming internal and external challenges to establish peace and order.

Themes of honor, sacrifice, and the greater good permeate their narratives, highlighting their enduring appeal and relevance in contemporary storytelling. Through Aquaman’s storyline, audiences continue to connect with the timeless themes and motifs of the Arthurian legend.

Another fan favorite is the movie from the 1990’s First Knight!

Book XX (the outing of Lancelot and Guinevere’s love and the crumbling of the Round Table) since we usually read Sir Lancelot du Lake beforehand and discuss his actions in both. Is he truly a hero? Do his poor actions in Book XX outweigh all of his great deeds previously? What do they think of Arthur being more upset that he’s loosing his best bro than his wife?

It leads to some really stellar conversations. Pairing it with First Knight afterwards is always a fun as well!

Podcasts

My students love to listen to podcast episodes as much as I do. Sometimes it helps to break up the monotony of reading nonstop. Plus, it is a fantastic tool to use for any of your struggling readers.

I absolutely love the podcast entitled Myths and Legends. The podcaster has done several episodes on King Arthur tales now. Here are a couple of my favorites to use in my classroom.

Ep. 67B: Gawain and the Green Knight

The host of Myths and Legends Podcast does it again with another epic tale! He takes the courageous story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and gives a wonderfully detailed summary of the story in one episode. Again, I made a listening sheet for while students listen to the episode.

The twist here is that the host begins the episode as Gawain begins his journey. I still wanted my students to appreciate the beginning of the story when the Green Knight and Sir Gawain are introduced.

So, in addition to the listening sheets, I took some time to write an adapted version of the beginning of the story. It uses a little more of the language used today but not so much that it’s completely modernized.

Students get to do a close reading and annotation of the opening scene of the story and then switch over to the listening sheets for the podcast. In total, it takes about 3 days to cover one of my favorite Arthurian tales!

I personally love to read about Arthur’s Origins and pulling of the sword in the stone and then contrasting with the episode entitled The Mayday Massacre.

In this story, Merlin tells the adult King Arthur that a male child born on May 1st would grow to kill him (Mordred). Arthur decides to follow Merlin’s advice and round up all the male children of a certain age that were born on May 1st. Their parents are told that they are being honored and the children are going to live at the castle to be squires. Then, they are loaded on to a boat and pushed out to sea and left to die.

Of course, one child ends up living…

Arthur reasons that he’s doing the greater good for his people without physically killing any children. This leads to some great discussions on choices that leaders make and where do we draw the line on actions for the greater good.

Modernize The Text

I love to share Le Morte de Arthur with my students. My first year of teaching, several teachers shied me away from using this version because the text is so archaic. While I don’t have as much trouble understanding the text I completely understand why my students would.

The first time I tried using it it did take a little while of me reading it aloud to them and discussing it, but they did eventually get it….and loved it. However, I soon decided that modernizing the text would also be beneficial in empowering them to read and comprehend more on their own. So I spent several weeks and modernized chapters 1- through 17 of Book XX. This took a lot of work and patience but it was a major success!

Modern Stories- “Chivalry” by Neil Gaiman

This is one of the stories in Neil Gaiman’s anthology Smoke and Mirrors. My personal favorite is also playing this audiobook while we read since Gaiman reads it!

However, there is also a FANTASTIC version read by LaVar Burton that you can find HERE!

This beautiful story intertwines the magic of Arthurian legends with the modern world when Mrs. Whitaker (an old widower) purchases the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop and Galahad comes knocking on her door looking for it. Mrs. Whitaker refuses to give away the Grail as she likes how it looks on the mantle.

Galahad is determined and goes on many dangerous quests to find even more magnificent magical totems as well as helping her around the home to trade her for the Grail.

“Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.”

Neil Gaiman

It is a lovely story of looking at what is most important in our lives and what the true magic is. This product helps to introduce students to what Magical Realism is and then guides them through the thematic analysis of the story.

This is a fantastic opportunity to provide creative writing prompts that encourage students to reimagine King Arthur’s stories in modern contexts or craft their own original narratives inspired by Arthurian themes. This can foster creativity and critical thinking while allowing students to express their interpretations of the material.

As I said at the start of the post, I adore King Arthur legend and I love sharing this with my students. We discuss ideals like codes of chivalry, what it truly means to be heroic, and at what point do your poor actions outweigh your good ones.

I hope this has given you some fantastic ideas of how to incorporate King Arthur into your modern classroom. If you would love to have a King Arthur unit with all of these resources and more, check this out!

And, of course, long live the King!

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