Of all the jewels lying dusty in the barrow of Western literature, few are quite so inexplicably neglected as Arthurian romance. I don’t mean that King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and Merlin have been forgotten; I assume that children still watch Walt Disney’s 1963 The Sword and the Stone, that teen nerds still cackle at Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still required by at least a smattering of English departments. But where, outside of a Medieval Studies program, is anyone reading Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, le Conte du Graal, the anonymous Queste del Saint Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, or even Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur? And what accounts for this indifference, when popular culture has gotten such reliable mileage from Arthur-influenced productions like The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Game of Thrones?

Granted, these are by no means breezy reads; I will ruffle some dyspeptic medievalist’s feathers, no doubt, by pronouncing Parzival utterly unreadable. But most of these works are rewarding, both for the luxurious strangeness of the world they depict and for the insight they give into the spiritual intensity of their composers. A more recent take on the Arthurian legend, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried