Finding Arthur (4 page)

It is generally accepted that when Nennius said Arthur fought “together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle,” he meant Arthur was a leader of kings but that Arthur was not himself a king. A one-off manuscript discovered in the Vatican in the early nineteenth century makes this even clearer, in a version of the above passage that begins:

Then it was that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror.
⁸

The two other references to Arthur in Nennius come under the heading “wonders.” The first is a paw print on a stone, said to have been put there by Arthur’s dog while hunting boar. Nennius says men may remove the stone and carry it away for the length of a day and a night but that the next day it will always be back in its former place. Wonder two is the grave of Arthur’s son Amr, and Nennius describes its miraculous qualities thus: “Men come to measure the tomb, and it is sometime six feet long, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen. At whatever measure you measure it on one occasion, you never find it again of the same measure…”
⁹
Needless to say, these wonders are not particularly helpful to someone looking for the historical Arthur.

The
Annales Cambriae
, the Annals of Wales, were compiled in the tenth century and claim to be an annual record of events starting in 447. There are only twelve entries for the first hundred years, however, and they mainly record the births and the deaths of saints. The entry for the year 516 reads, “The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors.” The entry for the year 537 is as follows: “The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut [Mordred] fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.”
¹⁰
If these entries are accurate twenty-one years separated Arthur’s last two battles.

The
Annales Cambriae
also contain one of the earliest references to the man called Merlin to survive. The entry for the year 573 reads, “The Battle of Arderydd between the sons of Eliffer and Gwenddolau son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell; Merlin went mad.” The Battle of Arderydd was not fought in Wales however, but at the fort Caer Gwenddolau, which would now be in the hamlet of Carwinley on the Scotland–England border.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, started in the ninth century and considered to be England’s most important historical record of pre-Norman history, covers many events during the age of Arthur but has nothing to say about him. We are left then with only four sources of evidence of a historical Arthur: Aneirin’s
Y Gododdin
; Gildas’s
De Excidio
; Nennius’s
Historia
; and the
Annales Cambriae
. After Nennius, Arthur becomes increasingly elusive as, in effect, he passes from history into legend.

In the early seventh century the written word in the south of Britain was controlled by the Christian Church, which consequently was able to promote its own stories—predominantly tales from the lives of saints—to the exclusion of almost all others. This meant that the stories of Arthur had to flourish as part of the oral tradition or not at all. Fortunately for Western literature and indeed for history, the written word was restricted to a few compliant clerics, but the oral tradition was like the Internet—accessible to the masses and almost impossible to control.

Christian clerics, almost by definition deskbound men, created heroes in their own self-image (and in their own self-interest). They liked their heroes to be saints, not warlike men like Arthur. They also omitted almost all references to sex, pagan religions, and the druids, so Merlin was absent too. This gave the stories of Arthur a certain advantage. While the
Lives
of saints were bolstered by magical miracles, they were still deadly dull compared to the thrilling tales of Arthur and his men, which made the latter increasingly popular in the oral tradition. Anyone who doubts this should compare the action-packed, epic, heroic poem
Y Gododdin
with any of the vast number of sloth-slow hagiographies that have survived. Given a choice, the people of the late first millennium CE favored stories of Arthur over the Christian propaganda that the Church shoveled at them
ad nauseam
, although, of course, they were not always given a choice. This struggle between the popularity of Arthur and the propaganda of the Church resulted in stories in which Arthur was the villain.

In Lifric of Llancarfan’s late eleventh century
Life of Saint Cadoc
, Arthur and his friends Cai and Bedevere are playing dice when they see
a young man and a young woman (who will become Cadoc’s parents) being chased by armed men. Instead of going to their assistance immediately, as the Arthur of later legends would have done, Lifric’s Arthur becomes “violently inflamed with desire” for the young woman and has to be talked out of raping her.

Later, when Cadoc is Abbot of Llancarfan he gives sanctuary to men who had killed three of Arthur’s soldiers and refuses to hand them over. All Arthur is able to win as compensation is a herd of cattle, but even then he is beaten by Lifric’s saintly hero, the clever Cadoc, because the cattle soon turn into bundles of ferns. People who were prepared to believe that cattle could turn into ferns would surely also have believed that Arthur was active in Wales if Lifric told them this was so.

The Life of St. Padarn
tells of a tyrannical Arthur who ruthlessly demands Padarn’s tunic. When Padarn refuses to hand it over, Arthur becomes enraged and curses and swears. This wicked Arthur then stomps away, only to creep back later and steal the tunic. Before he can make his getaway, however, Padarn causes the ground to open up and swallow him. Arthur has to apologize before Padarn will set him free. This is a rather sad little story. Arthur is portrayed as a tyrant, but what great crime is he said to have committed? Stealing a tunic. This shows the mindset of the clerics who wrote these accounts. They thought of Arthur as the enemy of their church,
the fount from which for them all
blessings flowed
—why else would Arthur be portrayed as the villain?—and so they maligned him as a tyrant who … stole a tunic. Monks, who lived together in close proximity, may have thought the theft of a tunic a dreadful thing, but it is hardly a momentous offence outside cloisters. The world in which these monks lived may have been limited in the extreme, but when it came to punishments their imaginations knew no bounds—at the end of the story we have nothing less than the earth opening up and swallowing the wicked Arthur.

According to the
Life of Gildas
by Caradoc of Llancarfan, Arthur murdered Gildas’s brother, the warrior Hueil. Of course, as saints could not be bested in Christian books; in the end Arthur surrendered to Gildas and “in grief and tears, accepted penance … and led an amended course, as far as he could, until the close of his life.” (This was the same
Gildas who omitted the name of the historical Arthur from his history of Britain.)

These early attempts to portray Arthur as a villain were unsuccessful. No one really believed that Arthur was a villain, they pretended to believe it but they didn’t,
not really
. A heroic Arthur continued to thrive in the oral tradition, although these stories increasingly lost touch with their historical roots as romance and magic were added to make them even more popular (just as today we add romance and special effects to films). Since Arthur wasn’t going away, something needed to be done to bring him into the fold. Arthur needed to become a Christian, an Englishman, and, for good measure, a king.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth century Welsh cleric who worked for much of his life in the schools of Oxford, made Arthur even more popular with his wonderful book
The
History of the Kings of Britain
, written in 1136. While much of Geoffrey’s
History
is obvious nonsense, “history keeps popping through the fiction,” Lewis Thorpe writes. “What nobody who has examined the evidence carefully can dare to say is that Geoffrey … simply made-up his material.”
¹¹

It is clear that while writing his history Geoffrey had popular opinion in mind. “I had not got thus far in my history,” he writes, “when the subject of public discourse happening to be concerning Merlin, I was obliged to publish his prophecies.”
¹²
Knowing and liking Merlin from the oral tradition Geoffrey’s audience insisted that he write more about Merlin, despite the fact that his work was ostensibly a history of kings. In any event, in the middle of his
History
, Geoffrey rather awkwardly inserted a tedious catalog of what are said to be prophecies by Merlin.

Geoffrey was not a man to miss an opportunity, however, and so, in the late 1140s he followed up on the success of his
History
with his
Life of Merlin
. The Merlins portrayed in these two works are very different characters. The Merlin of the
History
is a more magical figure than the Merlin of the
Life
, who is more firmly rooted in history. This suggests that Geoffrey did not simply invent his Merlin; if he had, it is unlikely he would have so radically changed the nature of his invention between books. It also suggests that Geoffrey gained access to a more
historical source material sometime between writing the
History
and the
Life
.

Geoffrey had three main sources: “a certain very ancient book written in the British language” (that is, in a Celtic language) given to him by his patron, Walter Archdeacon of Oxford; Walter himself was “a man most learned in all branches of history”
¹³
; and the oral tradition.

Geoffrey’s
History
contains most of what is commonly known today as the story of “King Arthur.” He writes of Arthur’s conception, which he says took place when Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, raped Arthur’s mother, Ygerna (Igraine); of Arthur’s sister Anna, mother of Gawain and Mordred; of Arthur’s defeat of the “Saxons” at Mount Badon, which he places in Bath, in the south of England; of Ganhumara’s—that is, Guinevere’s—adultery with Modred [
sic
]; and of the Battle of Camblan [
sic
], where Geoffrey says Arthur killed Modred.

According to Geoffrey, Merlin magically changed the shape of Uther, Arthur’s future father, to the shape of Gorlois, the husband of Arthur’s future mother, and by this deception facilitated Arthur’s conception. This is, of course, obvious nonsense. Geoffrey’s Arthur becomes king without a sword or a stone and goes on to unite the kings of Britain. Then Guinevere, who is said to have been of noble Roman birth, makes an appearance, marries Arthur and commits adultery, not with Lancelot, as is popularly supposed, but with the treacherous Mordred. Geoffrey also makes one of the earliest references to Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, which he calls Caliburn, and to the Isle of Avalon, where he says Arthur was taken after being mortally wounded by Mordred at the climactic Battle of Camblan [
sic
].

Geoffrey’s Arthur is impossibly active all over mainland Britain: in Cornwall in the far southwest of England; at Loch Lomond in the southern highlands of Scotland; and in the Orkneys, in the far north of Scotland. He also has Arthur conquer Norway, France, the island of Gotland in the Baltic, and Iceland in the northern Atlantic. To top off all this, Geoffrey claims, more than somewhat anachronistically, that Arthur also defeated a Roman army! Why not? After all, Geoffrey was writing fiction, albeit fiction with a historical foundation, and penned some quite unashamed nonsense.

Wace, a Norman Frenchman writing in France in the twelfth century, followed Geoffrey in many respects in his
Roman de Brut
but changed the name of Arthur’s sword from Caliburn to Excalibur. He also introduced the Knights of the Round Table. A generation later another Frenchman, Chrétien de Troyes, introduced Camelot, which he said was Camulodunum (today’s Colchester) in the far south of Britain. Chrétien also introduced Lancelot and had Lancelot, not Mordred, commit adultery with Guinevere. Lancelot appears as a bit-part player in Chrétien’s story
Erec and Enide
, but his breakthrough tale is Chrétien’s
The Knight of the Cart
.

Lancelot was then taken up and made into a major hero by the Cistercian monks who compiled
The Vulgate Cycle
of stories, before becoming the Lancelot we know today from Malory’s fifteenth-century
Le Morte d’Arthur
. The importance of an increasingly fictional Lancelot was continually played up at the expense of both Arthur and real Celtic heroes like Gawain and Kay. The courtly love phenomenon of Chrétien’s day dictated that knights paid court to married women such as Chrétien’s patron, Marie of Champagne, but it is remarkable that Chrétien downplayed Arthur in favor of Lancelot to the extent that he did: courtly love did not allow for outright adultery. To paraphrase Gore Vidal, it was not enough for the romancers of the Christian courts of Europe that Lancelot succeed, it was also important that Celtic warriors of the Old Way failed.

From the twelfth century onward the heroic Arthur of history is steadily reduced. He ends up a man who cannot even retain the affection of his own wife and who, compared to the dashing Lancelot, is a somewhat stolid figure. In time, as the emphasis in the stories shifted from Arthur to Lancelot, Celtic champions like Kay and Gawain came to be portrayed as somewhat dull characters, in comparison with “perfect,” “pure” Christian knights such as Galahad and Perceval (a milquetoast twosome it is impossible to picture in a real fight). In effect, stories of Arthur ended up starring Christian knights who were amalgams of fictional saintly heroes and real warrior heroes.