In Search of the Historical Arthur

The noted humanitarian to Africa, Albert Schweizer, wrote a book back in the twentieth century, "In Search of the Historical Jesus."  He and many others wanted to see what sorts of evidence there might be that would be considered the kind of record that historians use, in addition to the religious texts of the Bible, to tell us about the life of Jesus.  That is, he wanted sources that could be read and understood about Jesus's life whether or not one was a Christian, and also to see how the Gospels could be read historically.

The Roman governors of first-ccntury Palestine, the ones who put Jesus to death as a revolutionary, kept zero records of their decisions and activities, or at least none that have survived.  But there are scraps of mentions of Jesus in other (mostly Jewish) records and chronicles, and of course the Gospels themselves, written some two generations after the crucifixion for religious communities that considered Jesus their founder as well as the Messiah.  As Schweizer and other historians have concluded, there's no question of Jesus as a historical person, an itinerant Jewish preacher who attracted disciplines, who spoke of the brotherhood of all people, with special reference to the poor and marginalized, and who was put to death by the Romans.

Other aspects of Jesus's life, the miracles, the resurrection, being the Messiah, are aspects of faith, not subject to being supported or refuted by historical methods.  But a lot of Christians like having the historical underpinnings for their faith.  In a parallel way, a lot of people want to know about the historical underpinnings of the King Arthur stories.  (Big topical leap there, you say?)

Arthur is a far more nebulous historical figure than Jesus.  He didn't have four different accounts of his life written within 40-50 years of his death.  And the stories we think of as the "real" Arthur stories were compiled by Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century, out of bits and pieces spread out over the previous 900 years.

But there may still be a historical Arthur lurking somewhere in there, as I have previously noted.  In the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Roman armies pulled out of Britain and the Angles and Saxons arrived, some local leaders fought back, determined to keep their Christianized Roman culture.  The name Arcturus (Arthur) is a good Roman name, and in areas where the Saxons made little headway (Wales, Cornwall) the Celtic communities had occasional references over the following years to someone being "as brave as Arthur" or a vague mention of the "great warrior Arthur."  This Arthur would not have been a king but a military commander, and nothing we think of as "the Arthurian story" would have been attached to him (Camelot, the Round Table, the Grail, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc.).  There were also stories of the great leader Arthur leading a pig-rustling raid, but we'll let those pass.

A sixth-century account by the monk Gildas mentions the great and glorious battle of Mount Badon by the Britons against the Saxons, which certainly shows the presence of such war-leaders as the supposedly historical Arthur.  Unfortunately for Arthur fans, Gildas named the glorious leader as Ambrosius Aurelianus, somebody totally different.  But never fear!  Three centuries later, the chronicler Nennius retold the story of Mount Badon, and this time Arthur was the hero.  Whew, that was close.

 

But Arthur as we know him really begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth.  He was Welsh and a bishop, writing in the 1130s when the Normans had conquered England, and Geoffrey wanted to glorify his Celtic heritage, which was now threatened by Norman French culture on top of the Saxon influences that had dominated England (not Wales) since the sixth century.  His "History of the Kings of Britain" first made Arthur a king, first told the story of Uther Pendragon who impregnated the duchess of Cornwall while disguised as her husband (resulting in Arthur's birth), first mentioned the magic sword Caliburn (later Excalibur), and first noted a dying Arthur being taken to the isle of Avalon.  Geoffrey seems to have made everything up, including a great many other great British (Celtic) kings.  His book was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages, and the story of Arthur was off and running.

While Arthur became a very popular hero in Britain, his reputation also spread to the Continent.  Chrétien de Troyes, writing at the court of the counts of Champagne in the 1170s, gave us the story of the Grail and of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere.  The latter he seems to have adopted from the somewhat older story of Tristan and Isolde, a story set in Celtic Cornwall as Geoffrey of Monmouth had set Uther and Arthur in Cornwall.  The name Arthur was given to a grandson of King Henry II of England in the late twelfth century (young Arthur may or may not have been done away with by his uncle King John, but that's another story).

The monastery of Glastonbury decided in the 1190s that it was actually located in the isle of Avalon and "discovered" the tombs of Arthur and Guinevere, leading to much better tourist trade than had ever shown up for their saints.  The earl of Cornwall, younger son of King Henry III, built a castle at Tintagel, in Cornwall, in the mid thirteenth century, explicitly to tie himself to the spot where Geoffrey of Monmouth said Arthur was conceived.

Tintagel today is a spectacular ruined castle high above the sea, and people still come there in search of the historical Arthur.  While there they can enjoy Guinevere's English Tea and Merlin's Beer and buy toy swords.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on kings, legends, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

King Arthur

Everybody loves King Arthur stories.  The sword in the stone, the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle, the tragic betrayal by Mordred, who is Arthur's nephew and son, the Holy Grail even before Indiana Jones and Monty Python got hold of it.

Medieval audiences loved these stories just as much.  There was a thirteenth-century preacher who noticed his audience dozing off and woke them all up by saying, "Once upon a time there was a king named Arthur."  (Once they were alert, of course, he chided them for preferring a story to a good moral lesson.)

Curiously, loving King Arthur stories has made many modern readers want to find the "historical Arthur" and attach the stories to him.  There actually seems to have been a historical Arthur, but he doesn't match what people want to find out about him.  The real Arcturus was a Romanized Briton, not a king (Britain had no kings once it was conquered by the Romans) but probably a dux, a war leader.  Arcturus is a good Roman name.  He would have also been a good Christian.

He would have lived in the late fifth/early sixth centuries, at the time that imperial Rome was pulling its troops out of the west and focusing on war with Persia (see more here on the "fall" of the Roman Empire).  The Angles and Saxons, Germanic peoples, came across the North Sea once there were no more pesky Roman legions in Britain, conquered, and settled.  The historical Arcturus seems to have fought to keep them at bay for at least a few decades.

This was the beginning of the period called (misleadingly) the "Dark Ages" in Britain.  The Romanized, Christianized population fled to the margins, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, the areas that still think of themselves as Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon.  They remembered in story the mythical adventures of Arthur, who had once withstood those nasty English, but whose final brave defense ended in glorious failure.  There is some thought that the dragon, now a Welsh symbol and later attached to Arthur (Pendragon and all that), came from the dragons on Roman military banners.

The idea of the glorious leader Arthur stayed alive over the centuries, but without any of the accompaniments now taken for granted.  Guinevere and Lancelot were first added in the twelfth century.  So was the Holy Grail.  Other aspects, like the sword in the stone, Mordred, the lady of Shallot, and Morgan Le Fay were added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  What we think of as the "standard" Arthur story was put together by Thomas Malory at the end of the fifteenth century, trying to organize and combine all the different stories in circulation.

Like modern audiences, medieval audiences wanted to believe Arthur was real.  In the twelfth century, the rather obscure monastery of Glastonbury "discovered" that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at their monastery.  Pilgrims flocked from all over.  Glastonbury is on a hill (a "tor") in a rather marshy region, which, without too much difficulty, could be equated with the "island" of Avalon.  It all made sense.

All medieval authors retold stories of Arthur as stories about their own period, making the weaponry, the castles, and the manners at court match what their audiences knew--except of course much fancier and bigger.  Nonetheless, they usually set these stories "officially" in late Roman Britain, only a few generations after Joseph of Arimathea had (theoretically) brought Christianity to the island.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015