They, however, who would rob us of a historical and a chivalric King Arthur must, perforce, leave us an Arthur whose attributes as a presumed pagan deity do not prevent the unsophisticated from recognising in him an ideal prince of fairy-land. It is as such a prince that he appears against the setting of “old,” but not altogether “unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago,” in which he is presented in the early literature of Wales. It is as such a prince that one, at least, of the great English poets accepts him. To Spenser, Arthur, “taken from mother’s pap” and

“straight deliver’d to a Faery knight

To be upbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might,”[65]

was just the potent deliverer required to bring the Red Cross Knight and the rest of that questing company out of their various difficulties, and to establish, through a series of timely interventions, his right to the hand of the Fairy Queen.

In both Kulhwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabwy, as also in the Triads, we find frequent mention of Cornwall as a district with which Arthur is intimately connected. It is to Cornwall that he retires to rest after the hunting of the boar; and it is to Cornwall that Kai, at the close of The Dream of Rhonabwy, bids all repair who “would follow Arthur.” His home, and his court, there is at a place called Kelli, or Gelli, Wic. In later Arthurian literature little, if anything, is heard of Kelli Wic; Caerleon-upon-Usk displaces it altogether as the scene of Arthur’s central court. But, with Geoffrey of Monmouth, two other Cornish localities are brought into dramatic connection with Arthur’s fortunes—viz., Tintagol, or Tintagel; and Dimilioc, or Damelioc. These places are unheard of in the Welsh Arthurian tales, but, according to Geoffrey, it was at Dimilioc that Uther besieged, and his men slew, Gorlois; and it was this siege that enabled Uther, in the semblance of Gorlois, to gain access to Igerne in her retreat at the castle of Tintagel, and so to become the father of “the most renowned Arthur.” It is a pity that no Cornish records have survived to throw some further light upon these momentous events. It is, however, very unlikely that Geoffrey would have incorporated them in his narrative, had there not been, in Cornwall as in Wales, traditions long current which associated the name of Arthur with some of the ancient strongholds of the country. No less significant, as indicative of the existence of a separate Cornish legend of Arthur, is that Geoffrey, with others, tells us that the last and fatal battle with Medrod took place on the river Camel in Cornwall. It is not, perhaps, easy to reconcile these traditions with the theory that Arthur’s life and achievements were confined to North Britain. But that theory is no less difficult to reconcile with the abundance, and the ubiquity, of Arthurian place-names in all the districts, except Ireland, that make up “the Celtic fringe.” “Only the Devil is more often mentioned in local association than Arthur.”[66] The precise significance of such association is perhaps, in both cases, equally indeterminable.

Investigators of Arthurian origins talk a good deal about Brittany. Unfortunately, there is no early Breton, any more than Cornish, literature to draw upon for any further information about a pre-historic, or a pre-romantic, Arthur. The lais of Marie of France are supposed to embody matter borrowed from Breton minstrels who sang before the flourishing of romance; but only one of her poems, ‘Lanval’—and that but remotely—has any connection with early Arthurian lore. It may be that “the Bretons” whom Wace mentions as “telling many a fable of the Table Round”[67] were Armorican Britons. We know for certain, at any rate, that a legend of Arthur, which included a belief in his “return,” had taken firm root in Brittany by the twelfth century.[68] There is, therefore, no difficulty about assuming that it was from the Bretons, rather than from the Welsh, that the Normans derived their first knowledge of Arthur, and so came to construct out of the stories connected with him the romantic cycle known as the matière de Bretagne. The controversy waged about the relative shares of Great and of Little Britain in supplying matter for the French romantic writers[69] is of no real consequence—everybody is agreed that that matter is to be ultimately traced to a Celtic, and a British, source. What is of more importance is the fact that before any “matter of Britain” is heard of as a great romantic theme, a writer appeared who, by means of an orderly narrative embodied in an apparently sober chronicle, aroused an interest in Arthur’s life and deeds such as no mere romance could ever have succeeded in doing. He was Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it is in his History that we get our first full-length portrait of Arthur as a great, and actual, “king of Britain.”

CHAPTER III
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE CHRONICLERS

Chaucer, in his Hous of Fame, gives a station of conspicuous honour to a group of writers whose claim to distinction is that they are all “besy for to bere up Troye.” Homer, inevitably, heads the list, standing

“Ful wonder hye on a pilere

Of yren.”