King Arthur in history and legend

by William Lewis Jones

Geoffrey, in the epilogue to his History, hands over the task of writing of “the kings who succeeded in Wales” from the time at which his narrative closes to “Caradoc of Llancarvan, my contemporary.” Caradoc was an undoubted Welshman, but no Latin continuation by him of Geoffrey’s chronicle dealing with the Welsh kings is known to exist, and it is very doubtful whether a Welsh compilation bearing his name, and bringing Geoffrey’s narrative down to the year 1156, is a genuine work of his. It is, however, highly probable that he was the author of the Latin Life of Gildas, preserved in a twelfth century MS now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This work is of peculiar interest as containing certain Arthurian traditions which were apparently unknown to Geoffrey. Gildas is represented, in this fictitious biography, as being a contemporary of Arthur, king of all Britain, whom he loved and obeyed. He had, however, twenty-three refractory brothers who refused allegiance to Arthur, and the eldest of them, Hueil,[86] or Huel, King of Scotland, fought a battle with him in “the isle of Minau” and was killed. Gildas, who was in Ireland at the time, was much distressed to hear of this, but, as became a saint, he prayed for Arthur, and, returning to Britain, granted the king the pardon which he besought. Further on in the Life we get a version, probably the earliest in literature,[87] of the story of the abduction of Guinevere by Melwas (the Mellyagraunce of Malory), “the wicked king of the Summer Country,” or Somerset. After long seeking for a convenient opportunity, Melwas carries her violently away to Glastonia, or Glastonbury, a place chosen by him as being apparently impregnable because of the marshes around it. Arthur, discovering her retreat, besieges Glastonbury with a large army drawn from Cornwall and Devon. Before, however, he and Melwas engage in battle, the monks of the abbey, accompanied by Gildas, intervene; peace is made, and the queen is restored to her lawful husband.

Of the many chroniclers who, either in prose or in verse, repeat and embellish Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, by far the most interesting, and the most important in their influence upon the literary development of Arthurian story, are Wace and Layamon. Both are poets, and their metrical Bruts mark, as it were, the transitional stage between the Arthur of history and traditional legend and the Arthur of pure romance. Wace, according to Layamon, dedicated his poem, which was completed in 1155, to “the noble Eleanor, who was the high King Henry’s queen.”[88] This statement—and there is no reason to doubt its truth—affords another indication of the interest of the Angevin court in the literary exploitation of “the matter of Britain.” Geoffrey had already besought royal approval for his presentment of British legends, and had done his best to clothe his account of Arthur’s deeds in the highly-coloured rhetorical trappings that would commend it to courtly Norman readers. Wace went further. He took Geoffrey’s matter and dressed it up in a poetical form in French, thus giving it a much more widespread currency than a Latin prose chronicle could ever have done. Arthur becomes, in his Brut, the flower of chivalry, and his entire narrative is decorated in a way that would appeal to the imagination of all knightly Anglo-Normans. Nor is he without thought of the courtly ladies who took so lively an interest in tales of chivalry. Like Chrétien de Troyes and other romancers, he is at some pains to elaborate his descriptions of scenes of love. He takes delight in dwelling upon the accoutrements of warriors, and upon their individual exploits in the field. But it is not alone in such embellishments—the deliberate attempts of a courtly writer to please a courtly circle of readers—that Wace differs from Geoffrey. He adds to his narrative many details which indicate that he also had at his command an independent fund of Arthurian traditions. Wace’s literary celebrity is due, perhaps, most of all to the fact that he is the first Arthurian writer to mention the Round Table. “The Bretons,” he says, “tell many a fable of the Table Round,” but he does not explain whence such fables came, or where he heard them told.[89] He does, however, inform us that the Table was made round because each of Arthur’s knights thought himself better than his fellows, and Arthur devised this method of settling all disputes about precedence among them. The praise of the knights of the Round Table, he adds in another place, was loud throughout the world. Again, Wace adds considerably to Geoffrey’s description of the passing of Arthur. The king is not only taken to Avalon “to be cured of his wounds,”—the Bretons confidently expect his recovery, and look for his return. “He is still there; the Bretons await him; they say that he will come back and live again.”

Wace’s metrical chronicle formed the basis of the still more elaborate, and the more poetical, metrical Brut of the Englishman, Layamon,—the most remarkable English contribution to Arthurian literature until we come to Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight. Here we have a brave attempt to do what Caxton long afterwards desired,—to make Arthur the best “remembered among Englishmen before all other Christian kings.” Wace’s poem was a contribution to the polite literature of the Normans; Layamon’s, though his matter is so largely borrowed from Wace, is a patriotic English epic. It was his aspiration, as we learn from the opening lines of his Brut, “to tell the noble deeds of England,” and in his record of those deeds Arthur, who had been all but denationalised by the romancers, is restored to his fatherland and duly figures as the great “Christian king of England.” But Layamon was a poet no less than a patriotic chronicler, and could not help listening to the blowings of “the horns of Elfland.” Arthur’s prowess and royal attributes were such as could not be explained except for the intervention of superhuman powers. Elves surrounded him when he came into the world; it was from them that he derived the gifts which made him the best of knights and the mightiest of kings.[90] Again, at his passing, Arthur says that he is about to go to the splendid elf, Argante (Morgain, or Morgan, la fée); “she will heal me of all my wounds, and shall make me all hale; and afterwards I shall come to my kingdom and dwell among the Britons with mickle joy.”[91] Arthur’s byrnie was made for him by Wygar, “the elvish smith”; his spear by Griffin, of the city of the wizard Merlin (Kaermerddin); his sword, Caliburn, was wrought with magic craft in Avalon; the Round Table was constructed by a strange carpenter from oversea. Layamon’s account of the Round Table is much fuller than that of Wace, and is evidently based upon popular legends of wizardry. It was in Cornwall, when there was a quarrel among his knights, that Arthur met the stranger from beyond the sea who offered to “make him a board, wondrous fair, at which sixteen hundred men and more might sit.”[92] Though it was so large, and took four weeks to make, the table could, by some magic means, be carried by Arthur as he rode, and placed by him wherever he chose. Layamon had evidently heard more about the Round Table, “of which the Britons boast,” than he cares to disclose in his poem; but “the Britons,” he tells us at the end of his description of the Table, say “many leasings” of King Arthur and attribute to him things “that never happened in the kingdom of this world.”

No more spirited, or more romantic, passage is to be found in Layamon’s poem than that in which he describes Arthur’s last battle. It was fought at Camelford, “a name that will last for ever.” The stream, hard by, “was flooded with blood unmeasured.” The combatants were pressed so close that they could not distinguish friend from foe; “each slew downright were he swain, were he knight.” Modred, and all his knights, were slain, as were also “all the brave ones, Arthur’s warriors, high and low, and all the Britons of Arthur’s board.” None remained alive at the end of the battle,—and they were two hundred thousand men who fought there,—save Arthur and two of his knights. Arthur, grievously wounded, bequeaths his kingdom to Constantine, Cador’s son, and says that he himself will go unto Avalon to be healed by Argante,[93] “the fairest of all maidens.” And “even with the words there came from the sea a short boat, borne on the waves, and two women therein, wondrously arrayed; and they took Arthur anon, and bare him quickly, and softly laid him down, and fared forth away. Then was brought to pass that which Merlin whilom said, that there should be sorrow untold at Arthur’s forthfaring. The Britons believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalon, with the fairest of all elves, and ever yet the Britons look for Arthur’s coming. Was never the man born, nor ever of woman chosen, that knoweth the sooth, to say more of Arthur. But whilom there was a seer hight Merlin; he said with words—and his sayings were sooth—that an Arthur should yet come to help the Britons.”

CHAPTER IV
ROMANCE

Before the close of the twelfth century the Arthur of popular legend, and of the chronicles, had been transformed into a purely romantic hero. The British king, soon after the appearance of Geoffrey’s History, becomes the centre of the most profitably worked of the cycles of mediæval romance. Much of his individuality is, inevitably, lost in the process; and that loss implies, no less inevitably, a gradual obscuration of the primitive British environment which originally surrounded him. The paramount chief of early Britain, whose prowess and conquests form the prime epic theme of Geoffrey and of Layamon, appears as the king of no known realm, numbering among his retainers heroic figures drawn from the uttermost limits of the mythical world. Exalted, as a world conqueror, to a level with Alexander and Charlemagne, he becomes, like them, largely lost to sight among the crowd of fabulous characters called up around him by the professional romancers. The Arthur of the romances is no more than a primus inter pares. He does, indeed, stand above his knights by virtue of his royal dignity,—he is still “King Arthur,” and the head of a great Court. But our interest in his own personality diminishes with the increasing accumulation of exploits attributed to his knightly retinue. The glory of the king is dimmed by the general brilliance of his Court. It is as though the Round Table, originally founded to put an end to all claims of precedence among his knights, had had the result of bringing Arthur himself into the unvalued “file.” Knightly heroes, of whom little, or nothing, had been heard before, enter the Arthurian circle, and perform feats which interest us far more than anything done by the king. In early Welsh tradition, and in Geoffrey’s chronicle, Kay and Bedivere and, later, Gawain, alone figure as warriors whose deeds are at all worth mentioning by the side of Arthur’s. In the romances, Kay and Bedivere play quite subordinate parts, while Gawain becomes much more prominent, only, however, to find his high station challenged, and frequently usurped, by newcomers such as Tristram and Perceval and Lancelot.

The cause of all this change is obvious. The age of Chivalry had come, and the Arthurian stories provided “the raw material” exactly suited to its romantic literary requirements. The original Celtic legends concerning Arthur and his few primitive “knights” lent themselves, at once, to adaptation and embellishment by writers whose main concern was with knight-errantry and courtly love; while the conception of an Arthurian “court,” with its fellowship of questing knights, invited the importation into it of any and every legendary hero whose story could in any plausible way be connected with Arthur. They had another advantage which contributed to their supreme popularity in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. They had about them an element of mystery, of magic, of indefiniteness, coming as they did from the Celtic wonderland in the West. The Arthurian kingdom had no geography,—it was a “no man’s land,” which defied all cartography, and the bounds of which could be extended by each romantic writer at his will. It is true that British tradition, and the bards and chroniclers who had sought to give it literary form, associated Arthur’s name with well-known localities in Great Britain; but, even there, the “champion of Britain” had no settled capital or court. London, the chief city of the Norman kings, claimed him as her own; but so did Winchester, Lincoln, York, Chester and Carlisle. Then there was Caerleon-upon-Usk, the delectable “metropolitan city” where Geoffrey of Monmouth had definitely located his court in Wales. Moreover places in Britain with mysterious legendary associations came to be connected with Arthur’s name. Glastonbury, whither Joseph of Arimathea was fabled to have brought the Holy Grail, was reputed to be his burial-place, and the district around it was identified with the mythical Avalon. The grim old western castle of Tintagel was fixed upon as his birthplace, and the tale of the battle on the Camel led to the building, in poetic imagination,[94] of a new Arthurian court at “tower’d Camelot.” The name of Camelot at once suggests such purely romantic regions as “the wild woods of Broceliande” and “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.”[95] Astolat, Cameliard, Sarras, Carbonek, Joyous Gard, and other places, belong to the same romantic class, and lie quite beyond geographical identification. Stories, in which the characters thus roamed indifferently among places well known to Norman England and in regions which belonged entirely to “the land of phantasy and illusion,” lay open to the incursion of fabulous matter drawn from many varied sources. In a word, the unrivalled possibilities of “the matter of Britain” for all kinds of romantic exploitation established for it an easy supremacy over the other romantic themes, and the literary uses to which it was put by writers of romance throughout Western Europe all but robbed it, ultimately, of its distinctive features as a native British growth.

The various stages in the romantic use and adaptation of the Arthurian legends, mainly by French writers, are not difficult to trace. First of all, we get the metrical chronicles,—attempts to put Geoffrey’s quasi-historical record into a poetical form which much better suited its heroic theme than the sober garb of Latin prose. Wace’s Brut, completed in the year of Geoffrey’s death, is our earliest extant example of this poetical treatment of Arthurian story, and his work, as we have seen, was written with a much more deliberate purpose of pleasing courtly readers than Geoffrey’s. The tastes and requirements of such readers, regarded solely from the standpoint of their interest in knight-errantry and romantic love, determine the character of the second and the third phase which Arthurian literature assumes. The metrical, and the prose, French romances began to be written about the same time, and from the same motive. It is generally held, however, that the poetical romancers were in the field before the prose writers: at any rate, the most famous of the metrical romances—those of Chrétien de Troyes—are earlier than any prose romances which have come down to us. Chrétien, in whom his admirers find the greatest mediæval poet before Chaucer, wrote for the Norman aristocracy, and especially for ladies, what were practically the fashionable novels of the day. He dedicates his Chevalier de la Charrette to the countess Marie of Champagne, whose interest in everything appertaining to the French cult of l’amour courtois is well known; and all his poetical ‘novels’ are largely designed for the entertainment of women eager for literature of a more sentimental appeal than sagas of monster-slayers and warriors. The sudden appearance of the immortal love-stories of Tristan and Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guinevere, shows how triumphantly the French romancers responded to the demands made of them.

Chrétien de Troyes’ share in the literary flotation of both these stories entitles him to a place in the history of pure Arthurian romance even above that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey can claim, beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a purely poetic “matter of Britain.” Among them Chrétien, and—if we are to take him as the unquestioned author of the great prose Lancelot romance—Walter Map, stand pre-eminent. As to Chrétien’s signal share in the work there is, at any rate, no controversy, and his name is associated with the poetical treatment of the stories of each of the three celebrated heroes just mentioned. He is believed[96] to have been the author of a lost Tristan poem—probably his first work, composed about 1160,—which is surmised to have been the foundation of the long prose Tristan romance, whence Malory drew much of his material. It is in his Chevalier de la Charrette that we first hear of Lancelot as a lover of Guinevere. His unfinished Conte del Graal is one of the first literary presentations of the story of Perceval.

Two other poems of Chrétien are, with the Conte del Graal, of exceptional interest as bearing a close relationship to three Welsh prose romances included in The Red Book of Hergest, and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. The Welsh analogue of the Conte del Graal is the so-called ‘mabinogi’ of Peredur, son of Evrawc; while the Welsh tales called Geraint, son of Erbin, and The Lady of the Fountain resemble, in their main features, Chrétien’s two poems entitled Erec and Le chevalier au lion. The Welsh romances, as we have them, are undoubtedly of later date than Chrétien’s poems, and bear such clear traces of Norman-French influence as to have led many critics to deny altogether their Celtic origin. But they are neither translations, nor adaptations of Chrétien’s works.[97] The only explanation that meets all the facts is that the French poems and the Welsh tales follow an older and a simpler Celtic form of the stories embodied in them, which was accessible both to Chrétien and the Welsh writers.