King Arthur Legends.
Those Arthur legends had been floating about in ballad or song, but they never had much mention in anything pretending to be history[14] until Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day. There is nothing of them in the Saxon Chronicle: nothing of them in Beda: King Alfred never mentions King Arthur.
But was there ever a King Arthur? Probably: but at what precise date is uncertain: probable, too, that he had his court—as many legends run—one time at Caerleon, “upon Usk,” and again at Camelot.[15] Caerleon is still to be found by the curious traveller, in pleasant Monmouthshire, just upon the borders of Wales, with Tintern Abbey and the grand ruin of Chepstow not far off; and a great amphitheatre among the hills (very likely of Roman origin) with green turf upon it, and green hillsides hemming it in—is still called King Arthur’s Round Table.
Camelot is not so easy to trace: the name will not be found in the guide-books: but in Somersetshire, in a little parish, called “Queen’s Camel,” are the remains of vast entrenchments, said to have belonged to the tourney ground of Camelot. A little branch of the Yeo River (you will remember this name, if you have ever read Charles Kingsley’s “Westward, Ho”—a book you should read)—a little branch, I say, of the Yeo runs through the parish, and for irrigating purposes is held back by dykes, and then shot, shining, over the green meadows: hence, Tennyson may say truly, as he does in his Idyls of the King—
“They vanished panic-stricken, like a shoal
Of darting fish, that on a summer’s morn
Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot,
Come slipping o’er their shadow, on the sand.”
There are some features of this ancient fable of King Arthur, which are of much older literary date than the times we are now speaking of. Thus “the dusky barge,” that appears on a sudden—coming to carry off the dying King,—
“——whose decks are dense with stately forms,
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these
Three queens with crowns of gold, and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars——”
has a very old germ;—Something not unlike this watery bier, to carry a dead hero into the Silences, belongs to the opening of that ancient poem of Beowulf—which all students of early English know and prize—but which did not grow on English soil, and therefore does not belong to our present quest.[16] The brand Excalibur, too, which is thrown into the sea by King Arthur’s friend, and which is caught by an arm clothed in white samite, rising from the mere, and three times brandished, has its prototype in the “old mighty sword” which is put into the hands of Beowulf before he can slay the great sea-dragon of the Scandinavian fable.
Now, these Arthurian stories, put into book by Geoffrey—a Latin book, for all the monks wrote in Latin, though they may have sung songs in English, as good father Aldhelm did—were presently caught up by a romance-writer, named Wace, who was living at Caen, in Normandy, and whose knightly cousins (some say father and titled baron) had come over with William the Conqueror,—the name being long known in Nottinghamshire. This Wace put these Arthur stories into Norman verse—adding somewhat and giving a French air, which made his book sought after and read in royal courts; and fragments of it were chanted by minstrels in castle halls.
Then, this Arthur mine of legends was explored again by another priest and Welshman, who came to have some place at Oxford, where the beginnings of the great university were then a-brew. This writer, Walter Map[17] by name—or Mapes, as he is sometimes called—lived just about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the crusades were in full blast, and when dreams about the Holy Sepulchre hovered round half the house roofs of England. People saw in visions the poor famished pilgrims, fainting with long marches toward the far-away Jerusalem, and shot down by cruel Saracen arrows, within sight of the Holy of Holies. So Walter Map, the priest (they say he was one while chaplain to Henry II.), writing under light of that fierce enthusiasm, puts a religious element into the Arthur stories; and it is from him—in all probability—comes that Legend of the Holy Graal—the cup which caught the sacred blood, and which saintly knights were to seek after, the pure Sir Galahad being the winning seeker.
Nor did the Arthur legends stop here: but another priestly man, Layamon[18]—he, too, living on the borders of Wales, in the foraging ground of Arthur’s knights, not far from the present town of Kidderminster (which we know carpet-wise)—set himself to turning the Legends, with many additions, into short, clanging, alliterative Saxon verses, with occasional rhyme—the first English (or Teutonic) wording of the story; Map’s version being in Latin and French. He copies very much from Wace (Le Brut d’Angleterre), but his book is longer by a half. It has its importance, too—this Layamon version—in the history of the language. Of the why and the how, and of its linguistic relations to the Anglo-Saxon, or the modern tongue, I shall leave discussion in the hands of those more instructed in the history of Early English. We know this Layamon in our present writing, only as a simple-minded, good, plodding, West-of-England priest, who asked God’s blessing on his work, and who put that quaint alliterative jingle in it, which in years after was spent in larger measure over the poem of Piers Plowman, and which, still later, comes to even daintier usage when the great master—Spenser
“——fills with flowers fair Flora’s painted lap.”
Even now we are not through with this story of the Arthurian legends: it does not end with the priest Layamon. After printing was invented, and an easier way of making books was in vogue than the old one of tediously copying them upon parchment—I say in this new day of printing a certain Sir Thomas Mallory, who lived at the same time with Caxton, the first English printer, did, at the instance, I think, of that printer—put all these legends we speak of into rather stiff, homely English prose—copying, Caxton tells us, from a French original: but no such full French original has been found; and the presumption is that Mallory borrowed (as so many book-makers did and do) up and down, from a world of manuscripts. And he wrought so well that his work had great vogue, and has come to frequent issue in modern times, under the hands of such editors as Southey, Wright, Strachey and Lanier. In the years following Mallory, succeeding writers poached frequently upon the old Arthur preserve—bit by bit[19]—till at last, in our day, Tennyson told his “Idyl of the King”—
“——and all the people cried,
Arthur is come again: he cannot die.
And those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated—Come again, and thrice as fair.”