Locating Camelot in Canada

Place, Memory, and John Reade’s The Prophecy of Merlin and Other Poems

Abstract

One of the most persistent European settler-colonizer mythologies is that North America will be the new Camelot, and that it hides the Holy Grail. Such stories gained popularity in the late nineteenth century, prompted in part by the transatlantic enthusiasm for Arthuriana following the publication of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Some, including John Reade’s 1870 collection The Prophecy of Merlin, and Other Poems, responded to the visit of Prince Arthur to the new Dominion of Canada as a convenient way of placing the legendary King Arthur in Canada. A parallel form of placing Camelot in Canada arose cartographically, as urban planners and property developers named streets and buildings after Arthur’s court. This essay examines the ways in which these literary and cartographic practices interact through lived experience, and how they simultaneously reinforce and destabilize the Canadian settler state.