In this episode Ellen and I with the help of my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America trace the development of the Arthurian legend during the Middle Ages, as Arthur was transformed from the chieftain of Welsh stories into the exemplar of medieval French and English chivalry.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
In this episode Ellen and I with the help of my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America trace the development of the Arthurian legend during the Middle Ages, as Arthur was transformed from the chieftain of Welsh stories into the exemplar of medieval French and English chivalry.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
The History and Legend of King Arthur in the Middle Ages
Richard: Welcome to our podcast, ‘Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages. Today’s episode explores the development of the Arthurian legend from the Middle Ages to its modern incarnation in literature and films. I’m your host, Professor Richard Abels. My co-hosts are my better half and my inspiration for all things medieval, Ellen, and my good friend and long-time colleague, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of The Catholic University of America. Some of you may know Jenny from her Great Courses videos and her Smithsonian Associate lectures.
Jenny, we are delighted to have you back.
Jenny: And I’m delighted to be back. It was a lot of fun discussing with you and Ellen the evidence for a historical King Arthur. But I think that today’s subject, the development of the Arthurian legend, is even more interesting.
Richard: I totally agree. As a historian of early Britain and a teacher, I enjoy wrestling with the question of Arthur’s historical existence, even if it is unsolvable given our current state of knowledge. But I also see the historicity of Arthur as a distraction from historically more critical questions. What happened in Britain after it withdrew from the Roman Empire in the early fifth century? What was the nature and impact of the migration of Continental Saxons, Jutes, Angles, and Franks to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries? This period of history, which historians call sub-Roman Britain, is a true Dark Age. Because of the lack of written sources, historians are forced to rely on the archaeological record. Archaeology is invaluable in providing information about living conditions, economy, and culture, but it depends upon written records to place this information into historical context.
Jenny: The question of whether Arthur was a real person is, as Richard said, a fascinating puzzle for historians of late Roman and early medieval Britain. But why it has attracted popular and to some extent scholarly interest is Arthur’s fame as a figure of legend. For many people the name King Arthur conjures up a romantic image of the Middle Ages as an Age of Chivalry and Faith.
Richard: That was my introduction to King Arthur as a kid reading Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and his Knights and Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur. Both are children’s versions of Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte D;Arthur. It helped that Pyle was one of the best book illustrator’s of his generation, and Lanier’s volume featured several illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. How about you, Ell?
Ellen: For me King Arthur is and will always be T.H. White’s intensely human and ultimately heartbreaking figure. But I may be one of the few Americans whose first exposure to Arthur was as a Romano- British war leader in the twilight of Roman Britain in the novels of Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset.
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Richard: In the 1950s and 1960s a number of authors wrote novels in which Arthur was a Romano-British warlord. Even the then-well known romantic mystery writer Mary Stewart tried her hand at an Arthurian novel. These novel drew upon the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum, History of the Britons, traditionally attributed to a British cleric named Nennius.
Jenny: And for simplicity’s sake, we will continue to call him Nennius
Richard. The best of these novels, at least in my opinion, are by Alfred Duggan, Rosemary Sutcliff, and Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell’s highly entertaining Warlord Chronicles, in which Arthur is a sixth-century warlord fighting against Saxons and rival British princes, is being made into a ten part miniseries.
Ellen: Rosemary Sutcliff so appreciated the attraction of Malory’s King Arthur that she retold his stories about the Knights of the Round Table in a wonderful trilogy. Of course, that is also true for T.H. White, although he transformed Malory’s Arthur and Lancelot into two of the most timeless and ultimately heartbreaking characters in all of fiction.
Richard: As we talked about in the previous episode, the historical Arthur, if there was a historical Arthur, would have been a Romano-British warlord.
Jenny: The problem with this scenario is that Gildas, our only contemporary source for the period, doesn’t mention Arthur. His hero is Ambrosius Aurelianus. The very first datable source that even mentions Arthur the early ninth-century History of the Britain.
Richard. Other than that there is a passing allusion to a great warrior named Arthur in the northern Welsh poem Y Gododdin, which may be as early as ca. 600 A.D.
Ellen: Or as late as the early eleventh century. And, as Jenny pointed out in our last episode, that reference could be an interpolation, as the poem only survives in a later 13th century manuscript, well after Arthur had become a famous legendary figure
Richard: Nicholas Higham, a historian and archaeologist from the University of Manchester, points out that even if the Gododdin reference is authentically early, it may refer to a different Arthur who we know did exist. This Arthur was a prince of Dál Riata who fell in battle against the Picts in southern Scotland in the late sixth century. The death of Artur mac Aedan meshes well with the poem in terms of both place and time.
Higham is an Arthur-atheist. Based on his study of the sources, he concluded that Arthur is a fictional hero created by the author of the early ninth-century History of the Britons as the champion of British resistance to the Saxons. That fictional character was reshaped by each author who wrote about him subsequently to reflect concerns of the age. King Arthur, Higham concludes, is no more real than Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who.
Jenny: Or Finn McCool who resembles the Welsh Arthur in many ways. But there’s a famous saying in history and archeology that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The period in which Arthur is supposed to have lived is a Dark Age.
Richard: Which is why I am more agnostic than atheist.
Jenny: As am I.
Richard: There may be something to the no smoke without fire argument, but if there is, the historical Arthur is a cypher. If he existed, we know nothing about him.
Jenny: The question comes down to whether Arthur was Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. Johnny Appleseed was a real person named John Chapman. Paul Bunyan was not. Which one is Arthur? I don’t think we can answer that question with any certainty.
Richard: Arthur is some ways reminds me of Robin Hood, the only medieval figure whose fame rivals Arthur’s in the English-speaking world. The historical Robin Hood appears to have been a tenant of St. Peter’s Church, York, named “Robert Hood, also known as Hobbehood. For reasons unknown to us he was outlawed in 1225. The Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer record that the sheriff of Yorkshire owed 32 shillings and six pence to the Crown for the outlaw’s confiscated chattels, a modest sum that placed this Hobbehood well below the rank of knight or gentry.
Somehow this individual became a magnet for good stories about outlaws. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that he became the familiar Robin Hood who led a band of Merry Men in Sherwood Forest, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, romanced Maid Marion, and defended the weak against the tyranny of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Bad Prince John while good King Richard the Lionheart was on Crusade. We don’t need to know anything about the historical Robin Hood to appreciate the legend.
Ellen: We should do an episode on Robin Hood.
Richard: Only if you agree to watch a few movies with me.
Ellen: Okay, we can pass on Robin Hood. If Higham is so dismissive of those who believe there was a real person underlying the Arthur legend, why did he think it worth his time and effort to write this book?
Richard: I can give you a cynical answer. A book entitled King Arthur: The Making of the Legend is going to sell, and given the modest salaries of British academics, that’s a consideration.
Ellen: Which is why so many British historians write for BBC History magazine and History Today.
Richard: Less cynically, Higham has devoted his life to the study of early medieval Britain. I think he wrote this book out of frustration. He wanted to put to rest, once and for all, what he sees as specious arguments for a historical Arthur so that historians can get back to the important stuff, figuring out what actually happened in the sub-Roman period.
Jenny: Higham is fighting against a popular impulse. People like King Arthur. They WANT him to be real.
Richard: They want to believe that there is an underlying reality to the stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—even if these stories have nothing to do with sub-Roman Britain.
And that brings us to today’s episode: the development of the legend of King Arthur, the King Arthur familiar to most of our listeners.
One of the sources of tension in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is the cultural divide between the chivalric Norman-French knights, represented by Lancelot, and the heroic though barbaric Celts, represented by Gawain and his brothers. Whatever one makes of this in the novel—and we will probably talk about that—it does reflect a basic division in the development of the legend of King Arthur. There is a Welsh-Breton Arthur and an Anglo-French Arthur that to some extent Sir Thomas Malory integrated in his late fifteenth-century masterwork, Le Morte d’Arthur. Since the Welsh Arthur is the earlier of the two, let’s begin with him.
Jenny, at the end of the previous episode you said that there are a number of Welsh stories about Arthur dating to the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Why don’t you tell us a little about them.
Jenny: The earliest full story we have concerns the hero Culhwch, who has to complete a number of impossible feats before he can marry the heroine, Olwen, the daughter of the fierce giant Ysbaddaden. Culhwch offends his stepmother by refusing to marry her daughter, and the witchy stepmother curses him that he will not be able to marry anyone except for the giant’s beautiful daughter. Despite never having seen Olwen, Culhwch immediately falls madly in love with her and vows that she will be his bride.
Richard: A case of love BEFORE first sight!
Jenny: Apparently. Culhwch’s father warns him that to do so he will need the aid of his famous cousin King Arthur. Arthur agrees to give him whatever aid he requires, except for use of his sword and his wife
Ellen: His sword and wife? Okay, now I am officially weirded out.
Jenny: Knowing that the giant Ysbaddaden will not give his daughter in marriage without presenting the would-be suitor with impossible tasks, Arthur sends Culhwch off with a large retinue that includes his six greatest warriors, three of whom are regulars in the medieval Arthurian legend, Cai, the handsome Bedwyr, and the valiant Gwalchmai
Ellen: Who later become Kay, Bedivere, and Gawaine?
Jenny: Yes, and a host of other attendants with less familiar names, including the great warrior from Celtic mythology, Gwynn ap Nudd. Arthur’s court in this tale is less like the knights of the Round Table, than the superheroes of D.C. Comics Justice League or Marvel’s Avengers. Cei, for example, we are told held his breath for nine days under water and when he wished could grow to the size of a tree. Culhwch needs their special talents to fulfill a series of impossible and potentially fatal tasks that Ysbaddaden requires suitors of his daughter to perform. The giant’s reluctance is because his daughter’s marry means his own death.
Richard: And why is this tale so important in the development of the Arthurian legend?
Jenny: The story itself isn’t but it includes two lists that are critical, one of the personages associated with King Arthur’s court and the other of the deeds of King Arthur and his great knights. It is a who’s who of Welsh Arthurian legend. The story is also our earliest full tale in which King Arthur and his court play a major role. Some of the references in the lists are really sketch, as if they are a kind of aide-memoire for an audience that knows all these tales already. So the story is an indication that stories about Arthur are well and truly developed by around 1100, and for proponents of the historical Arthur, this is part of the “no smoke without fire” argument.
Richard: I encountered this story as a child in The Mabinogion, a compilation of Welsh medieval hero stories, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. My grandfather Simon had a copy, which I read whenever we visited my grandparents. I only later learned that it was a copy from the Brooklyn library that had been due back in 1904. I don’t think I told you that, Ellen. Knowing you, you would have insisted that we pay the fine.
Ellen: Or at least return it. I’m flattered but that you think I am that honest, but I am also practical. I shudder to think what I would have done with that book if it had been returned to Barnard College Library when I was a student worker. Do we still have it?
Richard: I think I gave it to Becca.
Jenny, you also mentioned in the last episode that Arthur appears in a number of early medieval Welsh saint’s lives. What role does he play in them? And how would you characterize the King Arthur of these Welsh stories?
Jenny: We have already seen that the Arthur of Culhwch and Olwen is a pretty legendary figure. He shows up in just the same way in the lives of saints that were written in the eleventh century in Wales. In these stories, Arthur acts as a kind of foil for the saints. He does something to annoy the saints, who then perform appropriate miracles, and then Arthur wises up and submits to the authority of the saint. But he is clearly not an unambiguously virtuous figure. Just one example from the Life of St. Cadoc, who supposedly was born in 497 AD (though the details of this are quite hazy). Cadoc gave sanctuary to a man who was accused of killing three of Arthur’s men, and Arthur was furious. He demanded compensation in cattle, and then, just to be difficult, when they were produced, he demanded that they be of a certain rare color (as if to say, I’m not going to accept compensation). By the power of the saint, the cattle were changed to the requisite color, and the transaction was accomplished. But the saint got the better of the king, because after Arthur had departed with the cattle, they were changed into bundles of ferns. Now, the fact that this kind of thing happens with Arthur repeatedly in the lives of different saints makes one suspicious. He is clearly a literary convention here.
Richard: Jenny, you date the Culhwch and Owen story to the tenth or eleventh century. I know that the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Mabinogion are 14th-century so why date it that early?
Jenny: It’s a matter of language. The Culhwch and Owen story is in Middle Welsh, which dates it to the eleventh or twelfth centuries. Literary scholars are divided on when precisely.
Ellen: And why is that important?
Jenny: The key issue is whether it was composed before or after 1138, when a cleric born in the Welsh border country, Geoffrey of Monmouth, published a work of pseudohistory titled De Gestis Britonnum, “Of the Deeds of the Britons,” or as it is better known, the Historia Regum Britanniae, “The History of the Kings of Britain.” This purports to trace the history of Britain from its founding by Brutus, a great grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, to the death of King Cadwalladr of Gywnedd in Wales in the late seventh century. A third of the work is devoted to Arthur. It proved to be so popular that literary scholars use its publication for whether a work can be used legitimately as evidence for a historical Arthur or the memory of a historical Arthur. The assumption is that anything composed after 1139, when we know The History of the Kings of Britain was in circulation, is ‘contaminated’ by it.
Richard: The first half of the twelfth-century was a Golden Age of Anglo-Norman historical writing. Modern historians, though always conscious of the differences between modern historical writing and the agendas of medieval historians, admire the work of Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury. These historians really tried to get it right. And because of that, they couldn’t compete in the marketplace with the fabulous stories told by Geoffrey.
Ellen: How do we know that? There wasn’t a New York Times Best seller list in the twelfth century.
Richard: Manuscript survival and the ‘borrowings’ of subsequent writers. There are 225 extent twelfth and thirteenth-century manuscripts of The History of the Kings of Britain. In contrast, William of Malmesbury’s “Deeds of the Kings of England” survives in about 20 manuscripts. Orderic Vitalis’ The Ecclesiastical History survives in the author’s own autograph copy at his abbey of St Evroul and in one other twelfth-century manuscript copy at the abbey of Caen. Modern historians love these works. They are our primary sources. Apparently, contemporaries much preferred stories about King Arthur and Britain’s legendary past.
Ellen: You sound a little annoyed by that.
Richard: I guess I am. The shelves of Barnes and Noble are filled with books by popular historians who regularly outsell the academic historians whose work they use.
Ellen: If academic historians learned to write a little better, than they might sell more books. I still am fond of the Plantagenet histories by Thomas Costain!
Richard: You’re right. Academic historians tend to write for other academics. The gold ring is getting tenure. Narrative history is not their forte. Popular historians write to entertain and to sell books. The really good ones, like Marc Morris and Dan Jones, both entertain and inform. The best book about the development of the Arthurian legend is by Richard Barber, the publisher of Boydell Press. Barber, at least in the U.S., would be considered a popular historian, although he knows more about medieval knighthood and chivalry than just about any academic historian of his generation.
Ellen: Which is what we are trying to do in this podcast, no?
Richard: Yeah, and in my preparation for it I reread Richard Baber’s King Arthur: Hero and Legend.
Jenny, what do you think Geoffrey of Monmouth’s goal was in writing the History of the Kings of Britain? Was he writing an entertainment? O know that he claims that he was merely translating an ancient book in the British language, but do you think that he was, or was he consciously making things up?
Jenny: I’m not sure that his goal was to entertain. Even the ‘serious’ medieval historians you mentioned wrote to teach moral lessons. Geoffrey, I think, created a history of Britain that was meant to be a ‘mirror of princes.’ He wrote at a time of looming political instability. His Arthur was the type of king that Geoffrey believed England needed. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that Geoffrey, unlike for instance William of Malmesbury, was more than willing to fill in historical gaps by making things up, and everything prior to Caesar’s invasion of Britain was a gap.
Richard: Henry of Huntingdon, tells us, that he had looked in vain for information about Britain before the coming of the Romans when he wrote his chronicle. Then on a visit to the abbey of Bec in Normandy in 1138 he was, in his words, astonished to discover in the library a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.
Jenny. Geoffrey was conscious that he was filling a gap in his contemporaries’ more prosaic writings. In his preface he pointed out with disingenuous wonder that
“I was surprised that, among the references to [the kings of Britain] in the fine works of Gildas and Bede, I had found nothing concerning the kings who lived here before Christ’s Incarnation, and nothing about Arthur and the many others who succeeded after it, even though their deeds were worthy of eternal praise and are proclaimed by many people as if they had been entertainingly and memorably written down.”
Fortunately, his good friend Walter, the learned archdeacon of Oxford, came to his rescue. Walter presented him with “a certain very ancient book written in the British language,” which he asked Geoffrey to translate into Latin. If that book actually existed, it has long since disappeared.
Ellen: How seriously do historians take that?
Richard: Most dismiss it as a standard trope of medieval epic and historical writing. In the Middle Ages innovation and originality were NOT admired. To be taken seriously, one needed to cite authorities.
Jenny: Which was true also in theological debates. It is interesting, though, that Geoffrey cited here a double authority: the ancient book written in the British language and Walter, archdeacon of Oxford to vouch for it.
Ellen: So where did Geoffrey get the material for his story about King Arthur?
Jenny: Most historians believe that what Geoffrey largely made up what he didn’t take from Nennius. He does write that he supplemented what he learned from the “ancient book” given to him by archdeacon Walter with stories about Arthur and other British heroes that he had heard as a boy, presumably in the southern Welsh marches around Monmouth. He then dedicated this work to two powerful marcher lords, Robert, earl of Gloucester, and Waleran de Beaumont, count of Meulan and earl of Worcester. Interestingly, Waleran and Robert would soon by on opposing sides in the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda.
Richard: It’s with Geoffrey that we see the true beginning of the medieval King Arthur. The Arthur of the Mabingogion and early Welsh tales is a pre-courtly chieftain. Although magic plays a part in the later Arthurian stories, the Welsh Arthur’s court seems to be rife with it. His warriors are more like superheroes than knights.
Jenny, how did Geoffrey shape the story of King Arthur? What do we owe to him?
Jenny: It is with Geoffrey of Monmouth that we see the first significant stage in the development of the medieval legend of King Arthur. After the Norman Conquest, the new arrivals from the continent became fascinated with the stories about King Arthur and adopted them as their own. Since the Normans initially formed the elite of English society, their taste became the taste of all aspiring people, and by the thirteenth century, the story of a British hero who had resisted the Anglo-Saxons had been embraced by all English people, regardless of ancestry. On one level, of course, this embrace of a Celtic-speaking hero was ironically somewhat fitting, since many English people had Celtic-speaking ancestors of whom they were by this point totally unaware. The main message of the story of King Arthur is that certain myths are destined to become universal. Who can resist the Once and Future King?
The Arthurian tradition takes a dramatic turn in the twelfth century, when the Norman conquerors of England make a kind of cultural alliance with the traditions of the Celtic-speaking world. Up to this point, the traditions concerning Arthur have been considered to pertain to what came to be called much later on “the Celtic Fringe,” but in the twelfth century, the Normans embraced this tradition.
The story really takes off with Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain is a sprawling work that covered the largely legendary early history of the island of Britain before the arrival of the Romans. Geoffrey claimed that his book was actually a translation of an ancient work in the British language. The work was controversial at the time; many accepted it as a true record of the past, while others pointed out inconsistencies in chronology and more or less dismissed the whole thing as fiction.
Richard: Although Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work was widely accepted as historically true, some medieval writers were unpersuaded. The late twelfth-century writer Gerald of Wales thought that Geoffrey’s work was bogus, but his contemporary William of Newburgh wins honors for this scathing review:
“… a writer in our times has started up and invented the most ridiculous fictions concerning them (the Britons) … having given, in a Latin version, the fabulous exploits of Arthur (drawn from the traditional fictions of the Britons, with additions of his own), and endeavoured to dignify them with the name of authentic history; … no one but a person ignorant of ancient history, when he meets with that book which he calls the History of the Britons, can for a moment doubt how impertinently and impudently he falsifies in every respect… Since, therefore, the ancient historians make not the slightest mention of these matters, it is plain that whatever this man published of Arthur and of Merlin are mendacious fictions, invented to gratify the curiosity of the undiscerning… Therefore, let Bede, of whose wisdom and integrity none can doubt, possess our unbounded confidence, and let this fabler, with his fictions, be instantly rejected by all.”
Jenny: Don’t hold back William.
As Richard said, modern scholars do not believe in the existence of this single British-language source. For one thing, Geoffrey relied heavily on Nennius for the section about King Arthur, and that text is in Latin. The degree to which Geoffrey used other written sources is still debated. What really separates Geoffrey’s historical writing from those of his contemporaries is his willingness to include obviously mythical material. He invented Brutus to provide Britain was a Trojan founder, and concocted a king named Lud to provide an origin story for the city of London. The History of the Kings of Britain provides the nugget of the stories for Shakespeare’s plays King Lear and Cymbeline, for example, and this is where we find the origins of the “Old King Cole” of the famous nursery rhyme. But it was really King Arthur who was the breakout hit.
Geoffrey kept the Ambrosian tradition of Gildas and Nennius, but here he calls him Aurelius Ambrosius and identifies him as the son of King Constantine. This is totally new and probably represents a garbled attempt to reflect the context of late Roman Britain, in which there was a real (usurping) emperor named Constantius, the father of the later Emperor Constantine. Ambrosius is now one of three brothers, the oldest of whom is killed at the behest of the treacherous Vortigern, who gets increasingly bad press as the stories of this era develop.
Ambrosius has a younger brother, Uther, who takes the throne after Ambrosius is treacherously poisoned. Uther then becomes the father of Arthur, making Ambrosius Arthur’s uncle. Here we see the development of the familiar legend.
He claims that he drew upon Welsh stories he heard growing up, and there is evidence of that in the History. Arthur’s sword is called Caliburnus, the later Excalibur, which derives from Caledfwlch in the Welsh stories. He introduces in the Arthur story—and transforms—the prophetic Welsh bard Myrddin, whom he renames Merlin.
Ellen: Wait a minute. How does Myrddin become Merlin? Shouldn’t it be Merdin?
Richard: Linguistically, yes. But, as one scholar pointed out, the name Merdin would have had unfortunate connotations for a French-speaking audience.
Ellen: Oh.
Jenny [ignoring us]: Apparently, the first part of the History that Geoffrey wrote was a section called The Prophecies of Merlin, which circulated as a separate work. Geoffrey’s Merlin is not only a prophet but a wizard. He is responsible for the birth of the hero Arthur by transforming Arthur’s father Uther into the likeness of his enemy Gorlois of Cornwall so that he can have sex with his wife Igernia.
Richard: Geoffrey’s Arthur doesn’t have a Round Table—we owe that to the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet Wace who reconceived Geoffrey’s History into a French poem—but the young king “invited unto him all soever of most proves from far-off kingdoms and began to multiply his household retinue.” Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote at a time that England was on the verge of civil war. A main theme of his work is the necessity of strong and legitimate central rule. Arthur is for Geoffrey an ideal ruler because he is strong, shrewd and just.
Jenny: Geoffrey also attached to Arthur the imperial ambitions of fourth-century and early fifth-century Roman generals in Britain like Magnus Maximus (remembered in Wales as Macsen Wledig) and Constantine III. After uniting Britain, Arthur conquers Gaul. When a Roman procurator sends him a letter demanding the return of the territory and the payment of back tribute owed by Britain to the Emperor in Rome, Arthur responds by raising an army of 183,200 knights and innumerable foot soldiers. Geoffrey’s account of Arthur’s expedition to the Continent mixes hero tales with history. Arthur’s expedition begins with his personal victory over the giant of Mont St Michel, who had been ravaging the territory of Arthur’s Breton ally Hoel and had kidnapped his daughter. Arthur’s campaign is victorious. The Roman Emperor Lucius falls in battle, but so do Kay and Bedivere. But as Arthur prepares to march on Rome, he receives news that his nephew Mordred, to whom he entrusted the kingdom in his absence….
Ellen: Nephew? I thought Mordred was Alfred’s bastard son by his half-sister Morgause.
Richard: Not at this point. It wasn’t until around 1230 that the anonymous author of the so-called Lancelot-Grail or Vulgate cycle of Arthurian stories transformed Mordred into the bastard product of an incestuous relationship. The story was constantly evolving.
Jenny: So at the moment of his greatest triumph, Arthur learns that his nephew Mordred has usurped the Crown and is about to marry Queen Guenhuuara, Guinevere in the later stories, having spread the story that Arthur was dead. Arthur returns to Britain, engages Mordred in battle in Cornwall. It is a bloodbath in which Mordred and all of his followers are killed. Arthur is severely wounded and taken to Avalon to be healed. Guenhuuara retires to a convent and the kingdom passes to Constantine.
Richard: After this Geoffrey’s history becomes more factual and moves on a lot quicker. Richard Baber makes the point that Geoffrey didn’t simply combine the Arthur of Nennius and Welsh legend, but created an entirely new character. In Barber’s words, “Geoffrey seems to be attempting to provide the Britons with an emperor-hero to whose golden age they could look back with pride.” In other words, Arthur was the British Charlemagne.
Jenny: Geoffrey’s work inspired tales of King Arthur in both Anglo-Norman French and Middle English. By the mid-1150s there were two poetic translations of the work in French, the first by Geoffrey Gaimar, which does not survive, and the second by Wace, which proved to be highly influential. Around 1200, an English poet translated and adapted Wace’s poem into Middle English. Via the mysterious process of fusion between Anglo-Saxon and Norman that occurred in the twelfth century, by the later Middle Ages, the English in general had adopted King Arthur. They no longer saw him as a Welsh hero who had resisted their ancestors. Rather, they viewed him as a great king from the legendary past. These stories tended to skip over the very specific historical context of the fall of Roman Britain and the age of Anglo-Saxon settlement. Instead, the tales are set in a kind of timeless age of chivalry, in which the court of King Arthur is a highly idealized version of a twelfth-century court.
Ironically, Geoffrey’s work was also translated into Welsh, and the Welsh version served as a kind of rallying cry for the Welsh in resisting the English. So, Geoffrey’s text ended up having completely opposite effects on the two sides of the Welsh-English conflict, just one of many strange twists in the story of King Arthur!
Ellen: Is this when Arthur became the quondam rexque futurus, the once and future king?
Jenny: Geoffrey of Monmouth is really vague about that. He leaves Arthur gravely wounded and carried off to the Isle of Avalon to be tended by Morgan le Fay and eight other women. Geoffrey in his “Life of Merlin” leaves open the possibility that he would someday return when the Britons most needed him. When Geoffrey wrote, the idea of Arthur as the Once and Future King was already being bruited about. William of Malmesbury, writing around 1125, mocked what he called “ancient idle talk” that Arthur would return, which he attribute to the failure to locate Arthur’s tomb. A decade later another Anglo-Norman cleric and historian, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote to a Breton friend about his discovery of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book. In that letter, he says of Arthur that “the Bretons, your ancestors, refuse to believe that he died and solemnly await his return.” This idea became what historians call the Breton Hope.
Richard: One of our listeners, Prof. Christopher Berard of Providence College, persuasively argues that the idea of Arthur as secular messianic redeemer wasn’t an ancient tradition of the Bretons or Welsh, but arose in relation to of the First Crusade.
Jenny: About the same time that Charlemagne became a once and future emperor for the French.
Richard: Yeah. By the 1150s One cannot exaggerate the importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth in establishing King Arthur as one of the foremost medieval heroes. But his Arthur is still not the King Arthur familiar to our listeners. You can search Geoffrey’s writings in vain for Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan, Camelot, the Sword in the Stone, the Lady of the Lake, the Round Table, and the Grail Quest. All these were added to the Arthurian legend between 1170 and 1250. Geoffrey’s Arthur was more courtly than the Arthur of the Welsh tales, but it was left to a series of French writers of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries to make him and his court into the epitome of chivalry. The process began with a poet from the Channel Island of Jersey, Wace. Wace, writing for the court of the new Angevin king of England Henry II, turned Geoffrey of Malmesbury’s History into a French epic poem, and—in the words of Chris Berard-- “transformed Geoffrey’s Arthur, a conqueror in the Norman mold, into a courteous, just, and mighty roi-chevalier,” a royal knight. As Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur was an idealized version of the rex pacificus King Henry I of England, Wace’s Arthur is modelled upon King Henry II.
Ellen: How did Wace get around the identification of Arthur with the Britons, and by extension, the Welsh?
Jenny: By declaring the Welsh of his day to be a degenerate race.
Richard: A view shared by the next writer to contribute to the development of the legend of King Arthur, Chretien de Troyes. It’s to Chretien de Troyes that we owe Lancelot and his adulterous affair with Queen Guinevere, the court at Camelot, and the Holy Grail. Like so many medieval authors, we know very little about Chretien. He flourished in the second half of the twelfth century, and apparently came from Troyes in the county of Champagne. He tells us that he wrote “Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart,” for Countess Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and “Perceval, Or the Story of the Grail,” for Philip of Alsace, count of Champagne. The courts of the counts of Champagne and Flanders were the center of the chivalric courtly culture that developed in the twelfth century. Ironically, this was because their counts were able to tap into the wealth generated by the medieval commercial and industrial revolutions. The textile industry of Flanders and the great medieval fairs of Champagne led to the emergence of a wealthy urban middle class, which, in turn made it increasingly necessary for the landed nobility to justify its status as a social elite. They did so through the culture of chivalry, and the counts of Champagne and Flanders had the wealth to serve as patrons of the chivalry.
Ellen: As we talked about in an earlier podcast.
Richard: Right. Chretien wrote several romances set in the court of King Arthur: “Eric and Enide,” “Cliges,” “Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion”—which is by far my favorite, “Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart,” and “Perceval, of the Story of the Grail.” All of these center on the romantic adventures of the knights of Arthur’s court. The court serves as a backdrop to the tales, and Arthur himself is in the background. Chretien’s Arthur is hardly a heroic figure. When the naïve youth Perceval enters Arthur’s court to demand to be knighted, he finds the king sitting at table, silently lost in thought as his wounded knights chatter away. The boy gets the king’s attention only when his horse knocks Arthur’s hat off. Arthur apologizes and explains: “Dear brother, welcome. I beg you not to take it too ill that I failed to answer your greeting. My anger prevented a reply: for the greatest enemy I have, who hates and distresses me most, has just laid claim to my land and is so impertinent as to state that he’ll have it whether I like it or not. He is called the Red Knight. The knight would never have angered me by words alone, but he snatched away my cup and lifted it so insolently that he spilled all the wine in it over the queen. After this dreadful deed the queen returned to her chambers, in deadly fury and grief.” This is hardly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s warrior king—or even Malory’s.
Although Chretien introduced Lancelot and Lancelot’s love affair with Queen Guinevere into the story, his model of chivalry is actually Sir Gawain. Chretien reshaped Kay, the superhero of the Welsh Arthurian tales, into the antithesis of the courtly Gawain. Following Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien made Kay into the seneschal or steward of Arthur’s court. He is characterized by his sarcasm and rudeness, for which he pays the price of being consistently humiliated by better knights.
Jenny: Seneschals often get treated like that in the romances.
Richard: I suspect the troubadours did this to win over the household knights in his audience. Seneschals were in charge of the lord’s household, including the training and disciplining of squires and knights. He was also the gateway to the lord, standing between the household knights and their lord’s favor.
Ellen: Sort of like assistant principals in high schools.
Richard: I can’t recommend Chretien’s Arthurian tales highly enough, and there are several good, affordable English translations. As I mentioned in our episode on medieval movies, the only fully authentic medieval film I have seen is Eric Rohmer’s 1978 Perceval le Gallois, a literal though highly stylized translation of the poem to the screen. The full movie is available for free online at Daily Motion.
Ellen: Chretien’s work seemed to open a floodgate to Arthurian romance writing in France, Germany, Spain, and England.
Richard: Chretien was quickly followed in France by other trouveres and in Germany by minnesingers who added to the Arthur legend. Chretien’s “grail” is a mysterious object that appears to have been a communion-dish rather than a chalice. Robert of Boron is the poet who transformed it into the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of Christ. Chretien’s story of Perceval became the basis for Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Parzival, the greatest of the German Arthurian romances.
Arthur and his knights became a veritable mania among the aristocracy of the High and Late Middle Ages. Arthurian stories were told not just in French but in Italian, Spanish, German, and, of course, English. Arthurian themed tournaments became a fad in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Ellen: Not surprising, given that the medieval European military aristocracy constituted an international class with a shared chivalric identity. French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English knights had more in common with each other than they had with their own peasants, townsmen, or the clergy.
Richard: In the mid-thirteenth century, the German knight and minnesinger Ulrich von Liechtenstein dressed as King Arthur and went on a jousting tour to collect knights for his Round Table. King Edward I of England was the king who most consciously modelled himself upon King Arthur. Edward held a famous Round Table tournament at Windsor, where he believed that Arthur had first constituted the Round Table, and a few year later explicitly modeled his chivalric Order of the Garter on the fellowship of the Round Table.
Ellen: King Edward I of England ordered a replica of the Round Table be constructed out of oak as part of a Round Table tournament he held around 1290 in honor of the betrothal of his daughter. It is now on display in Winchester.
Jenny: Stories about King Arthur became so popular that they were the subject of a rather transparent and infamous hoax. In 1191, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey in the west of England dug up two skeletons that they claimed had belonged to Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. There could be little doubt as to the identity of the couple. Placed on top of the coffin of the male was a lead cross inscribed with the words: “Hic iacet sepultus Rex Arturus in insula Avalonia” “Here lies King Arthur buried in the isle of Avalon.”
Richard: How fortuitous of the monks. Glastonbury, which was an extremely wealthy abbey, had fallen on hard times because of a disastrous fire in 1184 that had destroyed its ancient church.
Jenny: Very fortuitous. The curious flocked to Glastonbury to check this out. Such discoveries of burials were the stock in trade of stories about saints, since possession of the relics of saints helped promote a church in the fierce competition for medieval pilgrims, but it was unusual for the body or bodies discovered to belong to a secular ruler whom nobody claimed had been a saint.
The site of the excavation of these graves is commemorated to this day at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, though you will notice that the wording of the sign carefully does not take a position with regard to the authenticity of the remains.
Richard: Yes, but that has done nothing to cool the enthusiasm of tourists. The discovery of the bones of King Arthur was not only fortuitous for the monks of Glastonbury but to the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England. Wace had equated King Henry II with Arthur, but there was still the nagging problem that the Welsh were expecting their Arthur to return and restore British rule over the entire island. It’s interesting that Gerald of Wales, a court cleric who visited Glastonbury soon after the discovery and reported onit, claimed that King Henry II had initiated the project. The king, according to Gerald, had had learned from a Welsh bard that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, which had once been known as Avalon. The king urged the abbot to look into the matter. Whether or not Henry II was responsible, the hoax was convenient for the Plantagenets as it was for the abbey. If Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, he wasn’t coming back to lead the Welsh to recover Britain. That was the nail in the coffin to Arthur as the Once and Future King.
Ellen: Groan. You couldn’t resist.
Jenny: Not by coincidence, in 1187, four years before the monks found Arthur’s grave, the posthumous son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Brittany, was christened Arthur.
Richard: “Arthur” had returned to Brittany! The burial of Arthur at Glastonbury was also important to King Edward I of England. In 1278, months after having defeated Llewellyn ap Gruffyd, Prince of Wales and ruler of Gwynedd, and compelled his homage, Edward visited Glastonbury. There he ordered the tombs of Arthur and Guinevere to be opened. After inspecting their bones, he order the monks to translate the tombs to be placed before the high altar in the Church.
Jenny: Arthur once again was being treated like a saint.
Ellen: But why?
Richard: By ordering a formal translation of the remains, Edward was confirming that he as king of England were in possession of them. He was also reaffirming his personal identification with Arthur. In other words, just as Edward III was absorbing Wales into England, he was absorbing taking the Welsh’s great national hero and absorbing him into a different story, that is the rule of the kings of England over Britain.
Ellen: Okay, back to the development of the legend. When did Arthur become the figure that we are most familiar with?
Richard: I would say not until around 1470 when Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte D’Arthur, but all the elements of that story fully emerged in the thirteenth century in two massive French prose compilations: the Lancelot-Grail or Vulgate Cycle, completed around 1230, and the Post-Vulgate, or Grail Cycle, produced around 1240. The authors are anonymous, although one manuscript of the Vulgate Cycle claims Henry II’s courtier Walter Map, who died in 1210, as its author. What distinguishes both is that they are in prose and tell the story of Arthur from his prophesied birth to his death. The longest section in the Vulgate Cycle concerns Lancelot and his love affair with Guinevere. Lancelot is presented as the model chivalric knight, although his affair with Guinevere culminates in the destruction of the fellowship of the Round Table. Their adultery is exposed by Gawain’s treacherous brother Agravain. Lancelot manages to escape, but Guinevere is caught and sentenced to be burned. Lancelot, of course, rescues her, but in doing so kills not only Agravain but also his brother, Lancelot’s friend, Gareth. An enraged Gawain insists upon vengeance, and Arthur goes to war against Lancelot. This war is interrupted by news that the Romans have ravaged Burgundy, and Arthur turns his attention to defeating them, with Arthur personally killing the emperor. News then arrives about Mordred’s usurpation of the throne. Gawain, who had been seriously wounded by Lancelot, recognizes Lancelot’s virtue and love for Arthur and tells the king to call upon him for help. Lancelot responds, but is too late. Arthur and Mordred have killed each other in battle. Lancelot, however, pursues and kills Mordred’s two sons, and becomes a hermit.
Jenny: The Post-Vulgate Cycle is a condensed and revised version. Scholars believe that the author may have been a Cistercian monk. The Lancelot section is severely abbreviated and the quest for the Grail expanded. The focus is not on the profane knighthood Lancelot but the spiritual knightly perfection of his son Galahad. The anonymous author also pulled Tristan into the Arthurian orbit.
Ellen: These two cycles are the most prominent and influential works of Arthurian literature in the thirteenth century, but they are on the tip of an Arthurian literary iceberg. The hero of much of French Arthurian poetry was Gawain, represented as a brave, chivalric, and a flirtatious rake. A much different Gawain emerges in the most famous Arthurian work of the fourteenth century, the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this poem, Gawain is the model of chivalric duty and honor. In the midst of the celebration of the New Year, a giant dressed in green rides into King Arthur’s court. He carries a large axe in one hand and a holly bough in the other. He tells the court that he hasn’t come to fight but to play a game. He challenges any knight to strike him with the axe. In return, that knight will appear one year and one day later in the Green Chapel where he will receive one blow from the axe. When no knight is willing to take the wager,
Richard: More prudent than knights usually are in medieval romances and epics….
Ellen: Arthur steps forward. But he is intercepted by his young nephew Gawain who begs him for the honor instead. The Green Knight kneels and with one stroke Gawain strikes off his head. Non-plussed, the Green Knight calmly picks up his head, reminds Gawain, of their promised rendezvous, and rides off. The year passes and Gawain goes in search of the Green Chapel to pay his debt. The poem is really is worth reading.
Richard: Spoiler alert. I am about to tell you how Gawain’s adventure turns out. So if you plan to read the poem and want to be surprised, turn down the sound for the next couple of minutes. Medieval authors delighted in presenting their heroes with moral conundrums for the edification and amusement of the young knights for whom they wrote. The anonymous poet of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is no different. Gawain technically fulfills his pledge to the Green Knight, and survives to return to Arthur’s court with his tale. But he does so by breaking another promise. After a number of adventures, Gawain is led to a castle that lies near the Green Chapel. As in so many romances, the lord of the castle is delighted to offer hospitality to so distinguished a knight, assuring him that the Green Chapel is nearby. Gawain is received graciously by the lord’s beautiful wife and a crone, who is treated with honor by all. The lord goes hunting every day and leaves Gawain in the care of his wife. He proposes that he and the knight should exchange whatever they had acquired each day. For three days in a row, the beautiful mistress of the castle attempts unsuccessfully to seduce Gawain. He courteously rebuffs her advances and only consents to give her kisses. At the end of the first day, the lord gives Gawain a deer, and Gawain gives the lord a kiss. On the second, he gives the lord two kisses in exchange for a boar. On the third and final day before he is due at the Green Chapel, Gawain gives the lord three kisses and receives a fox. The lord neither asks, nor does Gawain tell, from whom he had received these kisses. But Gawain has withheld one of his acquisitions. The lady of the castle had given to Gawain as a keepsake a girdle of green and gold silk with the magical property of protecting its wearer from any physical harm. Knowing that otherwise he was going to his death, he accepted the gift, and promises to keep it secret from her husband. By failing to give the girdle to the lord of the castle, Gawain had foresworn himself. The next day, wearing the girdle, Gawain appears at the Green Chapel to submit to the owed blow. The Green Knight twice feints a strike when Gawain flinches. The third time he swings the axe and gently knicks Gawain’s neck. He then explains that this was a game devised by his own lord, Gawain’s aunt Morgan le Fay, who wished to humble Arthur’s proud knights and grieve Guinevere. He reveals that he is in fact the lord of the castle whose hospitality Gawain had enjoyed. The two feints were his penalty for accepting kisses from his wife. The nick was the penalty for his failure to disclose the girdle. But ultimately, the Green Knight assures Gawain, he had shown himself to be an honorable knight. Gawain chastened returns to Arthur’s court safe and sound, to the relief and happiness of all. But Gawain insists on telling them of his failure. He shows them the nick on his neck and the girdle which he tells them is the “badge of false faith that I was found in there” because of cowardice and coveting. King Arthur and the knights and ladies of the court respond from that day forth each knight of the Round would wear a girdle as a symbol of fellowship. Some scholars have seen this as an origin story for King Edward III’s chivalric Order of the Garter. The Order’s motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” “Shamed be he who finds evil here,” fits in well with the story.
Ellen: I know that T.H. White has been criticized for his anachronisms, but what strikes me is that he was very much attuned with the theme of the human frailty of even the finest knights. The theme of shame and moral compromise seems to run through so much chivalric literature.
Richard: We have so much more to cover that I think that this is a good time to break. We will pick up in our next episode with Sir Thomas Malory’s masterwork of Arthurian literature, Le Morte D’Arthur. Around the year 1470 Malory, an imprisoned knight, wrote a prose narrative that wove together all the threads of the medieval Arthurian legend. Combining the historical writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth and French and Middle English romances, Malory established the familiar King Arthur of children’s books, films, and novels.
I hope that you will join Ellen, Jenny, and myself for our next final episode of this series, as we trace the modern development of the Arthurian legend. We will be talking about at some of our favorite novels, in particular T.H. White’s The Once and Future King; several films, some of them good and others dreadful, and even how Arthur found his way into comic books and video games.
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Bye for now.