Anyone who spends enough time around me comes to realize that I have a complete obsession with the King Arthur legendarium. There are many reasons I’m drawn to the legends of King Arthur and his knights. I think there certainly something in the story that makes it powerful and active even in our modern era. One of the more academic reasons I find King Arthur fascinating is the long history of the evolution of his story. With Arthur, we get to see the making of a myth as it develops from a rudimentary concept into the massive corpus of literature and media that it has become today.
The origins of the Arthur legends are shrouded in mystery and have been debated by scholars for generations. Suffice it to say that some people believe the figure of Arthur to be grounded in historical fact while others think his story is purely mythological. I fall solidly in the former camp, though even a believer as fervent as myself can’t deny that Arthur’s story has been impacted by mythology. King Arthur would have been a Brythonic warlord living sometime in the 5th century. Britain had been severed from Roman in the early days of the 5th century, and though it saw a return to a more traditionally Celtic mode of life, it was still heavily Romanized. At that time, Britain was plagued with endless waves of invaders, the most troublesome of which were the Saxons. After a series of disasters, many of the Britons fled their homeland and set up a new settlement in Armorica, now called Brittany after their settlement. King Arthur purportedly defeated the Saxons and won peace for the land until the tragedy of Camlann which brought an end to the peace of Arthur. After the loss of the Pendragon, the Britons suffered a centuries long defeat which ended with only their most remote kingdoms surviving the onslaught with their culture in tact. The Saxons became the English while the Old English word “Wælisc”, meaning “foreigner”, became the national name of the Welsh. Understandably, the Britons have held onto the legends of Arthur as memories of the golden years.
There is little early evidence for an Arthur legend because very little information whatsoever made it out of the turbulence of Late Antiquity Britain. The earliest work on the period is a polemic written in the 6th century by a Brythonic monk named Gildas, who gives a scathing analysis of his contemporaries and how they’ve ruined Britain. Gildas mentions the victory at Mount Badon, a feat attributed to Arthur by later authors, but does not mention Arthur. Still, even a generation later, it is evident that the 5th century was regarded as the brief golden age of the Britons. It isn’t until the 9th century at the earliest that Nennius, another monk, writes a history in which he sings the praises of Arthur as a great warrior and commander of battles. Arthur is praised for supernatural feats of strength and skill, but is never called king.
By the 11th century, Arthur’s story began to take on even more mythological qualities. In the story of Culhwch and Olwen we first see Arthur mentioned as a king accompanied by the retinue of knights with whom we are familiar. Culhwch is Arthur’s cousin and enlists the help of the famous king and his knights in his quest to wed the beautiful Olwen, daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr. Their quest takes them on many adventures, including the hunting of the King of Boars, the freeing of a Celtic deity from prison, and a quest for a magical cauldron. The tale of Culhwch and Olwen was clearly not the first story to feature Arthur as king and supernatural hero; undoubtedly there were many stories told of Arthur between the 9th and 11th centuries. Though difficult to date (estimates vary from the 6th century to the 14th), the poem, The Spoils of Annwn, contains what is probably the most impressively mythic achievement in all of Arthuriana: the voyage of Arthur to the underworld. Through this cryptic and beautiful poem by the bard Taliesin, Arthur takes his place alongside Hercules, Orpheus, and Aeneas in the pantheon of our greatest heroes.
Arthur’s name was forever immortalized by the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the pseudo-historical History of the Kings of Britain in 1136 which seized the imagination of Europe. The book was translated into Norman and Middle English, and formed the basis for Arthurian stories told across the continent. Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which was published in 1485, became the definitive edition of the story and is still considered a classic today. From Mallory onward, nearly every retelling of Arthur’s story would include Lancelot, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Grail Quest, though they are all later additions.
The legend of Arthur has had myriad forms as it has grown and changed through the centuries. It has pulled lesser stories into its orbit, drawn inspiration from cultures across Europe, and continues to evolve today. Pieces of Arthur’s legend even spread beyond the bounds of his story and populate innumerable others. One day, I hope to pen my own retelling of the great story of Arthur and I hope that I can do it justice. For those of you who are close readers, I’m sure you will find some Arthurian themes in The Wind from Faerie and its sequels. I simply can’t help it.
The Sensiahd word of the day is “rhis”, meaning “king”. Example sentence: Eth rhis ys boudican. The king is victorious.