Celts to Vikings 11: King Arthur

Monday night, when my students’ first papers were due, I lectured on King Arthur. The Arthurian legends area a great case study of the very issue we have spent much of the class discussing, what we can learn about the past from literary sources like the Irish legends. In their full-blown, 12th-century form, the Arthurian legends give us an Arthur who is the king of all Britain and also conquers a large swathe of Continental Europe. He has an ancient fertility goddess for his wife, a magical sword from the realm of the pagan gods, a mighty castle for his home, and a war band made up of the greatest knights in Christendom. With the help of his wizard Merlin he administers the law justly and oversees a golden age of British peace and prosperity. Alas, he is ultimately betrayed by his cousin Mordred and treacherously slain, or else wounded and then carried off the Isles of the Blessed by more goddesses in a magical ship. It’s quite a career, even leaving aside his involvement with the quest for the Holy Grail, a separate legend somehow that gets attached to the heroes of Arthur’s court.

Was Arthur a real person? Everything about this question is hotly debated. Even Arthur’s name is the subject of contention, some holding that it is the obscure but real Roman name Artorius, others that it is a Celtic name meaning “bear king,” or something else entirely. If Arthur did live, it was some time around 500 AD, which happens to be the worst documented period of British history since before Caesar’s invasion. (“Of course,” say the cynics.) The early sources about Arthur make him a leader of Romanized Britons in their struggle against Saxon invaders. The Saxons first appeared in Britain around AD 428, and a letter of AD 446 survives in which embattled Britons, besieged by Saxon, Pictish, and Irish invaders, plead for help from the surviving Roman authorities in Gaul. By about AD 500, though, the situation in Britain has stabilized, with the Saxons holding only a small part of the island, and they do not really begin to sweep across the lands that would become England until after AD 550. The resistance put up by the Roman Britains requires some explanation. After all, larger, richer territories like Gaul, Spain, and Italy were entirely overrun by barbarian invaders. Somebody, therefore, was leading British resistance against the invaders, and the Welsh remembered two names from this time: Ambrosius Aurelianus, and Arthur. Our oldest account of the resistance was penned by the British priest Gildas around AD 540, and Gildas singles out Ambrosius Aurelianus as his hero. Gildas also tells us that the British won a great victory over the Saxons fifty years before his time at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon.

The first mention of Arthur in any surviving text is in a Welsh poem of around AD 600 saying simply that some warrior should be praised for valor “even though he was no Arthur.” Several similar mentions survive from Welsh poetry, enough to tell us that by AD 700 Arthur was famous among the Welsh as a great warrior and commander. The first historian to mention Arthur was Nennius, an obscure monk who transcribed, around AD 800, a list of 12 battles in which Arthur was the commander. This list includes Mount Badon but only one place, Carlyle, that can be identified with any confidence, and that is on England’s northern border, on the west coast, a very strange place for anyone to be fighting Saxons. If this location is authentic is presumably means that Arthur fought Picts as well. Nennius does not say that Arthur was a king; in fact, he says explicitly that Arthur was chosen for command even though he was not the most noble of the Britons. Around AD 900 an anonymous writer compiled a document we call the Welsh Annals that lists a few dozen events in British history over the previous 500 years, including two mentions of Arthur:

Year 72 (c. AD 516) The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shield for three days and three nights and the Britons were victors.

Year 93 (c. AD 537) The Strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell and there was death in Britain and in Ireland.

Across the period from AD 600 to 900, then, Arthur was known to the Welsh as a commander who led British armies against invaders, especially Saxons. The slow spread of the Saxons across Britain shows that there was such resistance, and presumably somebody was leading it. I think it is quite likely that one of the leaders was Arthur, and that the tradition of him as a war leader is authentic.

Of course, Arthur did not stay a mere war leader. Around the year 1000 he began appearing in saints’ lives and as the king of all Britain. In the Welsh story Culhwch and Olwen, which Welsh scholars think dates to around 1050, Arthur is much the figure we all know, a mighty king in a marvelous castle surrounded by a stable of heroes. He has, in short, become a figure from Celtic myth.

The bards were not interested in preserving accurate details about the heroes whose deeds they sang. Instead, they honored heroes of the past by assimilating them into their myths. The more they admired a man, the less truth they told about him and the more they loaded him with the attributes of a demigod. The highest honor they could pay to a hero was to destroy his individuality and completely remake him into an archetype, the way they did with Arthur.

What we learn from the myths, then, is not so much what really happened -- although some of that is, I believe, preserved in the myths -- but what people think ought to have happened. We see their categories of thought, their hopes, their fears, their ideals. Certain social facts are reflected accurately, such as the dominance of aristocrats, and the armament of warriors, but what fascinates me is the cultural and psychological dimension of the myths. They show us the wildest dreams of people who lived long ago.