King Arthur

by Christopher Hibbert

  The eighteenth century saw little interest in Arthur. Merlin had become a figure of mockery; astrologers used images of his head on the signs outside their fortune-telling establishments. The popular tale of Tom Thumb made the tiny man a knight at King Arthur’s court, in love with the king’s daughter Princess Hunca Munca. It was not until the end of the century that a rekindled interest in the Middle Ages brought Romantic poets and painters once again to the Arthurian cycle. Early in the nineteenth century, Walter Scott and Robert Southey wrote of Arthur and proposed or edited updated versions of Malory. By the middle of the century, medievalism was reflected in the Gothic art and architecture of Victorian England. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and writers and various lesser poets turned their attention to the Arthurian theme. And in 1859, Alfred Tennyson published the first series of the Idylls of the King, which translated Malory’s characters into a gospel for Victorian times.

  Tennyson contemplated this project for years and had visited places associated with Arthur in the West Country, seeking material and impressions. He read and reread Le Morte d’Arthur and studied the French and Norman chronicles and the legends of Wales. He published his first Arthurian poem, “The Lady of Shalott” in 1832, when he was twenty-three; he was planning an epic work on what he called “the greatest of all poetic subjects.” But he was uncertain of what shape his piece should take. By the 1850s, he had found the ideal narrative: a series of verses that described the interval between Arthur’s birth and his disappearance into the mists of Avalon.

  Publication of the first four idylls in 1859 was greeted with unparalleled enthusiasm; 10,000 copies sold within the first week, and Tennyson was offered 5,000 guineas for another volume of the same length. Over the next twenty-five years he wrote further idylls about Arthur, his knights, and the ladies of his court. The public was enthralled; at one point, Tennyson’s publishers had to contend with orders for 40,000 copies of an edition prior to publication.

  Tennyson’s Arthur, a “blameless King” of utmost moral rectitude, is far removed from Malory’s passionate knight. In the Idylls, there is none of the amorous environment that pervades Malory’s Camelot. Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur was called forth in Stephen’s time to give a heroic British origin to the Norman kingdom, Tennyson’s Arthur reflects the sentiments and morality admired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The poet depicts Britain of Arthur’s day not as an ideal period, but as an analogy from which Victorian readers could draw parallels for their own time. He stressed idealism, chivalry, unselfish patriotism, and religious faith, and attempted to show that even the finest ideals are subject to defeat. In the end, his message was one of hope, as Bedivere, despairing, calls the “true old times . . . dead,/When every morning brought a noble chance,/And every chance brought out a noble knight.”

  And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:

  “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

  And God fulfils himself in many ways,

  Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

  Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?

  I have lived my life, and that which I have done

  May He within Himself make pure! but thou,

  If thou shouldst never see my face again,

  Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

  Than this world dreams of . . .”

  The idealism of Tennyson’s Arthur has been seen as a reflection of Prince Albert, to whom, after his premature death in 1861, Tennyson dedicated the Idylls: “These to His Memory - since he held them dear/Perchance as finding there unconsciously/Some image of himself.” The dedication certainly makes the epic a public compliment to his royal patrons, but his purpose went deeper than that. The characters are symbolic: Arthur represents the soul, struggling to fulfill itself in the world (represented by marriage with Guinevere), while the Round Table stands for the soul’s attempt to ennoble and control human emotions - an ideal that is corrupted and eroded by the sin of Lancelot and Guinevere. But as Tennyson put it: “Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet.”

  The influence of Arthurian legend upon the art and literature of the period continued; photography, then a new technology, was employed to make a series of illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls, while some of the finest artists of the day contributed their visions of Arthur’s world. Musicians, too, were drawn to the story of Arthur, notably German composer Richard Wagner, who produced the first of his Arthurian music-dramas, Lohengrin, in 1850 and followed it with the famous Tristan und Isolde in 1865 and in 1882 with Parsifal, based upon legends of Percival and the quest for the Holy Grail. The regular performance of Wagner’s works and their overwhelming popularity formed yet another current in the spread of Arthurian influences.

  In 1958, the concept of knighthood was celebrated anew with T. H. White’s books about Arthur, which he gathered together under the title The Once and Future King, which brought the legend to life for a new generation through Camelot, the musical and the film based upon them.

  White presents the story in a vivid light, filling it with humor and magic, with lessons in hawking and boar-hunting, archery and jousting, history and animal lore. But he treats his material with the same respect as Malory, and at the end of the last book, White brings Malory into the story as an innocent-faced page. Arthur, tired and soon to die, tells the boy what the purpose of his life has been and urges him not to fight in the final battle with Mordred on the following day, but to take his horse to Warwickshire to carry on the idea of the Round Table and spread its message to future generations: “Put it like this. There was a king once, called King Arthur. That is me. When he came to the throne of England, he found that all the kings and barons were fighting against each other like madmen. . . . They did a lot of bad things, because they lived by force. Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account. Follow this, young boy. He thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be. So he gathered together all the true and kindly people that he knew, and he dressed them in armour, and he made them knights, and taught them his idea, and set them down, at a Round Table. And King Arthur loved his Table with all his heart. He was prouder of it than he was of his own dear wife, and for many years his new knights went about killing ogres, and rescuing damsels and saving poor prisoners, and trying to set the world to rights. That was the King’s idea.”

  And that, to White, was what mattered most. He was not concerned with the real Arthur; he turned history upside-down to recreate a medieval knight at odds with the ways of a violent world. He despised historians and archaeologists who were trying to track a legend to its historical roots and, in his view, destroy its beauty. For him, Arthur was “not a distressed Briton hopping about in a suit” of armor in the fifth century,” but a true knight with “an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he was a good learner who enjoyed being alive. . . . He had never been unjustly treated, for one thing, so he was kind to other people.”

  Arthur is clearly the ruler of his own legend, but he doesn’t stand alone. His character is forged in the fires of conflict, passion, and friendship. His court exhibits all the intricacies of courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal, magic and might. The Arthur we know would not have been the same without the sorcery of Merlin, the love of Guinevere, or the treachery of Mordred. This is where we leave the legend.

  All the essential elements of a classic hero story are present in the Arthur legend, which has perhaps been the secret to its endurance. Throughout history, myth and folklore around the world have shared the same basic structure: the hero’s quest becomes a symbol of humanity’s search for harmony and a personal journey toward enlightenment.
But if Arthur was, indeed, more than a symbol, the key players of his story must also have some foundation in fact. From cave painters to Hollywood screenwriters, storytellers have always exaggerated the stories of their heroes. Historical threads become so interwoven with fantasy it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction or to distinguish real people from imaginary characters.

  Before Arthur, there was Merlin, who, according to legend, orchestrated the birth of the Once and Future King. The prevailing image of Merlin is of a gray-bearded wizard, dressed in robes and hooded cloaks. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Merlin entered Arthurian legend as a prophetic youth; in Geoffrey’s Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin) – his earliest surviving work - the text is purported to be the wizard’s actual words. This is telling, in that many of the prophecies in this book are said to have originated with sixth-century prophet and madman Myrddin Wyllt.

  Born around 540, Myrddin Wyllt, also known as Lailoken, was an adviser to Gwenddoleu, a Celtic king who ruled an area of England now known as Arthuret. Gwenddoleu was a descendant of Coel Hen, the progenitor of several royal lines and possibly the historical basis for the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole.” In 573, Gwenddoleu and Myrddin were waged in the Battle of Arfderydd, which pitted several allied armies against each other. When the king was killed, his adviser went mad and fled into the Caledonian Forest, where he lived among the animals and discovered his gift of prophecy.

  A fifteenth-century Latin manuscript tells of encounters between Saint Kentigern – also known as St. Mungo, the patron saint and founder of the Scotland city of Glasgow – and a “naked, hairy madman who is called Lailoken, although said by some to be called Merlynum or Merlin, who declares that he has been condemned for his sins to wander in the company of beasts.” Myrddin appears again later in the story to ask Saint Kentigern to administer to him the holy Sacrament, claiming to have seen a vision of his own death. First, he stated, “I shall be stoned and die by clubs;” then, “my body will be pierced by a sharp stake, and thus will my spirit fall;” and finally, “I shall be sunk in water and so end my life on earth.” Kentigern was reluctant to trust Myrddin, “for he never said the same things twice but made indirect and conflicting predictions.” Still, the saint was persuaded to carry out his wishes. Later that day, according to the legend, the prophet was captured by a king’s shepherd, who beat him with clubs and cast him into the river Tweed.

  The Prophecies of Merlin, which introduced a new, distinctly English style of political philosophy called Galifridian, was widely read and almost universally believed in the early to mid-1130s. References to recent historical events – such as the sinking of the White Ship, which drowned the only surviving legitimate son of England’s King Henry I in 1120 – were believed to have been uttered by a prophet nearly six centuries before they occurred.

  Geoffrey used passages from the Prophecies for use in the History of the Kings of Britain. In one, Merlin is consulted by Vortigern, a British warlord who is trying to build a tower, only to have it collapse each time it is completed. Merlin discovers the reason behind its unsteady foundation: Beneath it was a lake, in which two dragons, one white and one red, were battling. The wizard saw the dragons as representative of the war between the Saxons and the Britons, and foresaw its conclusion: “Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be seized by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be leveled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood. The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners. For a boar of Cornwall shall give his assistance, and trample their necks under his feet. The islands of the ocean shall be subject to his power, and he shall possess the forests of Gaul. The house of Romulus shall dread his courage, and his end shall be doubtful. He shall be celebrated in the mouths of the people and his exploits shall be food to those that relate them.”

  The Boar of Cornwall is a reference to Arthur. But the legend of the two dragons was first told about Aurelius Ambrosius, a character in Nennius’ Historia Brittonum based on a fifth-century Romano-British war leader named Ambrosius Aurelianus, who won an important battle against the Saxons. This suggests that the Merlin of legend was actually an amalgam of Myrddin Wyllt and Ambrosius Aurelianus, though there are distinctions between the two. Most significantly, while Ambrosius is the son of a Roman consul, Merlin was sired by a demon who laid with a king’s daughter. In Geoffrey’s History, Merlin is also credited with creating Stonehenge as a burial place for Ambrosius Aurelianus. But the wizard’s bargain with Uther Pendragon at Tintagel, which produced Arthur, is his crowning achievement. Though Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has Merlin return to raise and tutor Arthur, Geoffrey makes no mention of him after Arthur’s birth.

  Like Merlin, there is evidence Arthur’s legendary Queen Guinevere combined traits and tales told of more than one person. She first appears in an eleventh-century Welsh tale, Culhwch and Olwen, but is only mentioned as Arthur’s queen. In or about 1136, a Welsh cleric named Caradoc of Llancarfan, writing about the life of sixth-century British monk St. Gildas, introduces Guinevere as a damsel in distress. In Life of Gildas, the queen is abducted and held prisoner at Glastonbury by a villain named Melwas, “king of the Summer Country.” Arthur searches for his lost love for a year, then assembles his knights to storm Melwas’s impenetrable castle to retrieve her. In later versions of the story, Melwas is called Maleagant, and Guinevere’s savior is Lancelot. The abduction and rescue of Guinevere is a common theme in the tales of King Arthur.

  A collection of Welsh manuscripts, Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Triads of the Island of Britain, or the Welsh Triads), suggests that Arthur had three wives, all named Guinevere. His first wife, according to these texts, was the daughter of Cywryd of Gwent, a Welsh kingdom lying between the Wye and Usk rivers. This Guinevere was sent by her father to a Roman camp on the east bank of the Nith River to be trained as a warrior and to command an army, where she supposedly met Arthur. A sturdy woman with long, golden hair and blue eyes, she was pined after by many men but promised in marriage to one of her father’s rivals, King Urien of Gorre. When Guinevere broke off her betrothal to marry Arthur, a war ensued between the kings that spanned four battles – all won by Arthur. In one version of the story, Urien is the father of Maleagant, and orchestrates the abduction of Guinevere. In another, Urien marries Arthur’s half-sister, the dark sorceress Morgan le Fay, sister of Morgause. Abducted a second time by Urien, Guinevere is thrown into a pit of vipers and fatally bitten on the finger. Her body is then retrieved and buried at Avalon.

  Arthur married a second Guinevere, this one the daughter of Gwythyr ap Greidawl, a knight in Arthur’s court. This Guinevere had a sister, Gwenhwyfach, who tricked Arthur into believing she was her sister for two and a half years before the deception was uncovered. Enmity between the sisters may have also led to the Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur was mortally wounded. The Welsh Triads refers to a slap that Gwenhwyfach dealt Guinevere as one of the “Three Harmful Blows of the Island of Britain.”

  The Triads list Arthur’s third wife Guinevere as the daughter of a giant named Gogfran Gawr. On the frontier of Shropshire, west of Wales, there was a land of giants called Bronn Wrgan. In one story, Gogfran had imprisoned some brothers of Guinevere there, and Arthur was sent to rescue them. Arthur cut off the head of the largest giant, tossed it into the middle of the River Teme, and used it as a stepping stone to get to Knucklas Castle, where he married Guinevere.

  The Guinevere of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is likely a combination of all three women. In this and other non-Welsh medieval romances, she is the daughter of King Leodegrance, who served under Arthur’s biological father, Uther Pendragon. When Uther died, his Round Table was entrusted to Leodegrance; later it was returned to Arthur
as a wedding present. Leodegrance was one of the few kings who accepted Arthur as overlord, making his kingdom a target of a rebel ruler named Rience. Notorious for trimming his robe with the beards of eleven kings he had conquered, Rience is determined to make Arthur’s beard the twelfth. Arthur comes to Leodegrance’s aid, thwarting an invasion by Rience, and meeting Guinevere for the first time.

  Both early and later Arthurian legend endow Arthur with sons, at least four of whom were assumed to have been born to Guinevere. The most notable exception is Mordred, the son of Arthur and his half-sister Morgause, who, according to prophecy, kills his father the king. Another affair with a woman named Eleirch produced a son, Cydfan. His four sons with Guinevere - Anir, Gwydre, Llacheu, and Duran – all met untimely deaths, killed in battle or through treachery. A sixteenth-century British romance writer, Richard Johnson, ascribed another illegitimate son to Arthur – Tom, who bore him grandsons, referred to only as the Black Knight and the Faerie Knight.

  Guinevere’s increasing importance in the Arthurian legend parallels women’s emergence, over the centuries, from an inferior role. In the early tales, Guinevere was little more than Arthur’s chattel, notable only for her beauty. By the twelfth century, however, she had become the heroine of a courtly love affair with Lancelot, the noblest of Arthur’s knights, whose reverence for her naturally increased her status.

  As each generation of storytellers and artists has retold the Arthurian legend, emphases have shifted, and fresh heroes have been given prominence. But Lancelot has been the most famous of Arthur’s knights since the twelfth century, when Countess Marie de Champagne commissioned a romance glorifying courtly love, with Lancelot as its hero. The French poem - Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart), written by Chrétien de Troyes – portrayed him as the most formidable of Arthur’s knights. When Guinevere is abducted by Meleagant, Lancelot joins Gawain, in a quest to rescue her. In his haste, Lancelot rides two horses until they collapse and die, then encounters a cart-driving dwarf, who promises to help the knight continue his pursuit only if Lancelot rides in his cart. Humiliated, Lancelot climbs in, and after several trials along the way, arrives at the castle of Gorre. Guinevere is at first cold to Lancelot, but later, after he breaks into her tower, they spend a passionate night together. Lancelot, whose hand was cut while climbing the tower, leaves blood on Guinevere’s sheets as he sneaks out just before sunrise. Meleagant discovers the stain and accuses Guinevere of a tryst with another wounded knight, which leads to a duel with Lancelot in defense of her honor.