December 2018 – King Arthur building the legend cont'd
The session:
Continued Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte DArthur”
1/. This was finished in 1469 or 1470 and was printed by Caxton in 1485 (the first of our sources to make it into print). The setting of the tale is fifteenth century, and Arthur is portrayed very much as a fifteenth century figure.
2/. Malory lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses and he was greatly concerned about the damage that civil unrest was doing to England, and the danger, as he saw it, that the entire country was about to collapse in ruin. He portrayed Arthur as the strong king who came to the rescue when the country stood in similar peril in the past; and as the sort of king that England needed in his own time.
3/. According to Malory, Arthur fought a long and bitter civil war before he could secure the crown and the kingdom, but then Malory tells us that this security did not last. According to the Cistercian monks, in their reworking of the Arthurian material (the Vulgate Cycle) Arthur’s glory faded because of sexual sin. According to Malory, Arthur’s court was destroyed because of infighting and treachery amongst his own knights – Malory’s message to his readers being that England is in the same danger now; and if civil unrest could destroy the mighty King Arthur, it will certainly do the same to us.
4/. Malory used most of the source materials that we have looked at so far, but then he added a lot of extra details and embellishments of his own. In fact, most of the elements that are associated with the Arthurian legends actually made it into print courtesy of Thomas Malory. So we have the sword that Arthur draws from the anvil, to prove that he is the rightful heir to the throne; the magical Otherworld sword Excalibur that is given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake; Arthur’s court at Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table; and Arthur’s act of incest with his half-sister Morgause that results in the birth of Mordred who is destined to destroy both Arthur and his kingdom.
November 2018 – King Arthur building the legend contd
The session:
1/. Completed looking at Chretien de Troyes French Romances (Romance is an old version of the French language). He produced five Arthurian Romances. He was influenced by the earlier writers and stories and was under aristocratic patronage rather than working in an ecclesiastical environment so could write a different type of book and add his own details.
He was the first to link Queen Guinevere and Lancelot. The storytelling in ‘Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart’ employs the rules of courtly love with the female being revered and the male disdained, gallantry, within a deeply Christian context. It starts with some deep flattery to Marie de Champagne his patron. The story covers the abduction of Guinevere and other members of the Camelot Court by Meleagant. Lancelot who is Guinevere’s champion sets off to rescue her. Along the way he is subject to many trials, temptations and tribulations. Not all goes well and he suffers conflict and soul searching which at times is at odds with his courtly love ideals. He hesitates to get into the cart as it is a very low status means of transport linked to the crusades and to losers but he should only have been thinking about Guinevere. There are suggestions of the other world.
2/. ‘Vulgate Cycle’ was written just under 100 years after Chretien works. It is a reworking of the French Romances by Cistercian monks sometime between 1230 and 1250. The church had wealth and political power and had their own agenda; they rejected the questionable values of courtly love. They used the Arthurian stories as a vehicle to promote an alternative more Christian/spiritual way of living. The stories were transposed from the 6th century to the Middle Ages. Guinevere is used to show the perfidious nature of women, they are sexual, fickle, betraying, and bad tempered; Lancelot is shown as wracked with grief and remorse. As a result of Guinevere’s behaviour and the failings of Lancelot Arthur’s glory fades.
3/. Le Morte DArthur, Sir Thomas Malory c1469/1470. This book was Caxton Press printed so had a much larger potential readership. There is a mystery as to the real identity of Malory he may have been a noble man who went off the rails and wrote the works in prison. He may have been a professional gentleman soldier who was a prisoner of war but there is no evidence he was ever knighted so he would not have been a Sir. Malory read Chretien and the Vulgate cycle and he also knew Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work and the others. He then added in his own bias and influences. Malory lived in the time of the War of the Roses and was afraid the country was going to collapse. Arthur was a strong and resolute king whose power and glory did not last due to unrest within his court.
October 2018 – King Arthur building the legend contd.
The session:
1/. Completed looking at Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain” including:
Arthur’s exploits in Gaul where he killed a giant on Mont St Michel, subdued most of Gaul.
Arthur set off towards Rome but returned home to fight his nephew Mordred who had seized his crown. Guinevere had broken the vows of her marriage.
He defeated Mordred and his 8,000 strong army in a bitter battle. Mordred then retreated to Cornwall.
Guinevere gave way to despair and took the vows of a nun.
Arthur’s final battle was at the River Camblan in Cornwall. Arthur was mortally wounded and carried to the mystical Isle of Avalon. This happened in 542. He was succeeded by his cousin Constantine, son of Cador, Duke of Cornwall.
2/. Other chroniclers of Arthur based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work.
Robert Wace – was an Anglo-Norman monk who translated Geoffrey’s History into Norman–French, in verse form c1150. He introduced the idea that Arthur was not dead but would return, added the first written reference to the Round Table and expanded the chivalry and romance side of the tale. He dedicated it to Eleanor of Acquitaine.
Layamon – a priest living in Worcester took Robert Wace’s work and translated it into Middle English, in the late 1100s. He added in a boat and two women who take Arthur to Avalon. He was influenced by his own time when it was brutal in Britain, he left out the chivalry side of the story and increased the violence involved and the number of casualties.
Chretien de Troyes – based in Troyes at the Court of Marie de Champagne (daughter of Eleanor of Acquitaine) and her husband Henri who were his patrons. He used Geoffrey of Monmouth and Robert Wace as source material along with other French, Breton and Welsh sources. He was not part of the clergy. He expanded the chivalry and romance side of the story. Romances appeared in 12th Century and were popular with the French nobility. These were translated in dozens of languages. He introduced ‘courtly love’ which involved exquisite beauty, morals, nobility, with women worshipped as a goddess by their lovers, platonic in its ideal form, the hero having to show his worth to an outwardly disdainful woman. The ideal did not always prevail in the stories or reality.
These translations made the story of Arthur accessible to more people as Geoffrey’s work was originally in Latin. Books were very expensive and were not available to all levels of society.
September 2018 – King Arthur building the legend
The session covered:
Continued looking at Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain”.
It was only in the Middle Ages that the story of Arthur started to take off.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the “History of the Kings of Britain” c 1136. He was a well read clergyman. He would have been familiar with early sources and welsh folklore and poetry. He wrote it as an interesting read with added colour. The west is Britons, the east was colonised by the Saxons amongst others.
The time at which it was written would have had an influence. For example the references to the combat style and jousting were relevant to 12th Century not the time Arthur is supposed to have lived.
Arthur was a Christian waging war on pagan Saxons, which reflects Geoffrey of Monmouth’s beliefs. There were massive Saxon casualties, in the many thousands. No evidence of such huge losses has been found.
One of the old sources he used was Nennius’s battle list for Arthur. This list was covered in our March session. He changed the order of battles, combined and added to it. Perhaps he had other sources for which we no longer have a record or made things up.
He reports military campaigns involving thousands of men, travelling great distances. In one case an army 183,000 going to Gaul. He conquered Iceland and Norway.
The result is a rollicking tale reminiscent of the Celtic warrior hero.
August 2018 – No Session Held
July 2018 – King Arthur building the legend
The session covered:
Making a start on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain”.
In writing his book, Geoffrey used most of the early Welsh sources that we have also covered, plus Welsh folklore and legends that were current in his own time, plus the Classical writers for his Roman history, plus his own imagination. He produced a very entertaining mixture of probable history at one end of the scale, through myths and legends, to pure fantasy at the other. He wanted to tell the story of the history of Britain from a British (i.e. Celtic or Welsh) point of view, so the Saxons get a very bad press throughout.
He starts with the first inhabitants of Britain (a race of giants) and then brings in Brutus, the grandson of Prince Aeneas of Troy, who kills off the giants and takes control of the land. Brutus is followed by a series of British kings who are all portrayed as great personalities, with Arthur as the greatest of them all.
Geoffrey is the first writer to link Merlin with the Arthurian material, and he also introduces Uther Pendragon and Igerna as Arthur’s parents, and Arthur’s conception at Tintagel. It is thought that Geoffrey may have found the story of Uther and Igerna in a Cornish legend that has now been lost, but the Tintagel connection would seem to have been his own invention.
According to Geoffrey, Arthur began his campaigns against the Saxons as the King of the Britons and sole commander of the British army. His first objective was to attack the Saxons in York, to seize loot from them, with which he could reward his own men. He was entitled to do this because he had a rightful claim to the kingship of the whole island of Britain and all that it contained.
June 2018 – King Arthur is there evidence he existed contd
The session covered:
A number of theories which support the argument that an historical Arthur did exist.
We looked at seven of them
1/. John Morris/Leslie Alcock
Arthur was a late C5th/early C6th Romano British war leader from the Celtic Gododdin people who fought the Picts and Scots in the north and later moved south west to fight the Saxons.
2/. Graham Phillips/Martin Keatman ref ‘King Arthur: The True Story’, 1992
Arthur was the grandson of the Gododdin Chieftan Cunedda. He migrated from the north sometime in the C5th and had his HQ at the old Roman town of Wroxeter. Arthur being a nickname meaning bear.
3/. Fran & Geoff Doel and Terry Lloyd ref ‘Worlds of Arthur’, 1999
Arthur was associated with the Kingdom of Dumnonia in the south west.
4/. Geoffrey Ashe
He was a Romano British war leader originally called Riothamus
This Arthur took an army from Britain into Gaul to fight the Visigoths on the behalf of Rome.
5/. Alistair Moffat ref: ‘Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms’, 1999
Arthur was a Gododdin war leader based in the north who fought the Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons and the British kingdom of Strathclyde, had a one off battle in the south at Badon and the battle of Camlann was located at the western end of Hadrian’s wall.
6/. C S Littleton & L Malcor ref : ‘From Scythia to Camelot’, 1994
Arthur’s name was Lucius Artorius Castus a Roman general who is recorded as commanding a troop of Sarmatian mercenaries. These were from the Russian Steppe Lands, north of the Black Sea. This theory has the dates as much earlier than the others at around 175 AD.
7/. Howard Reid ref: ‘Arthur the Dragon King’, 2001
Arthur was a king of the Alan peoples who originated from the Eurasian Steppes (Scythia). Mid C5th he moved his people to Armorica (Brittany) where he fought rebellious Celtic tribes on the behalf of Rome. The C5th ‘Life of Germanus’ records a meeting between Eothar and the Bishop Germanus.
We also looked at what it would mean if he was not real and was always a mythological figure. He may have started as a god/warrior hero and been given a human persona. This has happened before as we have seen in the Celtic Warrior hero tradition.
The story of Arthur as well as being popular in Britain also exists in Northern France, Germany and Continental Europe. He appears in Grail Myths. Where might the myth have come from? Possible European connections are shown in theories 4, 6 and 7. For example Arthur is in the myths and legends of the Alan people. In Scythian legends Nart Saga Tales there is a mythical figure called Batraz. His mother was a frog by day and beautiful woman by night, he grew at a phenomenal rate, he had a magic sword, killed a giant, had a chalice of truth. Wounded in his final battle he cast his sword into the sea and the legend is that he is not gone.
Further Reading
There is a lot of information available on the internet by using simple searches on the writers’ names or the topic. Some books are still in print others are available second hand.
References:-
John Morris ‘The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650’,
Leslie Alcock ‘Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology A.D. 367-634’
Graham Phillips/Martin Keatman ‘King Arthur: The True Story’, 1992
Fran & Geoff Doel and Terry Lloyd ref ‘Worlds of Arthur’, 1999
Geoffrey Ashe ‘The Discovery of King Arthur’
Alistair Moffat ‘Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms’, 1999
C S Littleton& L Malcor ‘From Scythia to Camelot’, 1994
Howard Reid ‘Arthur the Dragon King’, 2001
May 2018 – King Arthur is there evidence he existed contd
The session covered:
The continuation of our search for references to King Arthur in the early Welsh source material.
In the Welsh battle poem “Y Gododdin”( attributed to the poet Aneirin and composed sometime in the early 600s) it is said of one Gododdin warrior that ” He glutted black ravens on the walls of the fort/ Although he was not Arthur”.
In the “Elegy of Gereint” (author unknown) that describes the Battle of Llongborth, we have “At Llongborth I saw Arthur, an emperor commanding the battle”.
We have no way of knowing if these one line references to Arthur were there in the original C7th versions of the poems, or if they were added in later copies, when Arthur had become a well-known figure in folklore.
In the “Spoils of Annwyn”, the poet Taliesin (late C6th) gives us a tale of Arthur and his companions conducting a raid on Annwyn, the Realm of the Dead in the Otherworld, to steal the Cauldron of Plenty (cf Cuchulainn who does much the same thing). This is Arthur in the context of Celtic warrior hero mythology, rather than telling us anything about Arthur as a possible historical figure.
April – King Arthur is there evidence he existed contd
The session covered:
looking at the early Welsh “Saints’ Lives” that were written by monks at Llancarfan in Glamorgan, in the C12th (although the saints in question lived c500AD), so again a large time difference between when the events happened and when they were actually put in a written record. Arthur is mentioned in the Lives of St Cadoc, St Carranog, St Gildas and St Illtud, in largely unflattering terms, and in encounters in which the saint gets the better of the pagan and unruly warrior. This may have been subject to bias on the behalf of the recorders.
discussions that these various sources contain some references that could place Arthur in an actual historical context. However, there is also lots of obviously mythological material that reflects the fact that by the late C12th, Arthur was a very well-known figure in Welsh folklore. So again, possible historical references overlaid by folklore and mythology. We are really no closer to answering the question “Was Arthur ever an actual historical figure?”
March 2018 – King Arthur is there evidence he existed contd.
The session covered:
A summary of the previous session where we discussed the suggestion he was a British or Romano leader from the north. There was not a lot of evidence for his existence, no mention of him in the 540’s documents by Gildas nor by the Venerable Bede in 730ish. The earliest mention is 800-900 AD (around 400 years later than he is thought to have existed) in the British Miscellany – the Welsh Annals mention Arthur being the victor at the battle of Badon 518 AD and his final defeat at the Battle of Camlann in 539 AD.
Nennius wrote in Latin circa 800 AD. He compiled data and did not try to interpret it, just to collect it. As a result there is often more than one account of things and we do not need to worry about his bias. This gives us a lot of data. In Nennius’s the ‘History of the Britons’ he covers a lot of the information discussed in the previous session. He refers to Arthur as Dux Bellorum, a war leader not a king, that could have been why Gildas did not include him in his reporting as he was only a warrior. Nennius says it as a fact and lists 12 battles in which Arthur took part and won. He treats him as an historical figure but also as a folklore hero.
The written evidence is still not there and it is thought likely that Nennius found his information for the battles in an old Welsh poem of which there is no remaining evidence. If this is true there is a theory that Arthur was alive when it was created which would place it prior to his defeat at the Battle of Camlann which is not mentioned.
We looked at the 12 battles referring to information from ‘Arthur’s Britain’ Penguin, London 1971 by, Leslie Alcock who tried to reconstruct the campaign. The possible sites for the battles were greatly geographically spread which would have meant a lot of travel and did not make military sense and there were time order issues. There was no consensus on locations and for the first eleven battles the evidence is speculative. There seems to be very little if any residual evidence for Arthur’s battles. There is more evidence for the twelfth battle The Battle of Badon. The Battle of Badon is likely to be in the south given it took place between the Britons and Saxons but this still had five possible locations.
The final battle at Camlann is not mentioned by Nennius but this is covered in the Welsh Annals. There is considerable debate over the location of Camlann.
Next month we shall consider some slightly later documents written in Latin then onto the mythology of Arthur.
February 2018 – King Arthur is there evidence he existed?
The session covered:
The historical context and where he would fit in to what is known of the people, social and political structures and the geographical location of people and tribes of the time.
There are no surviving early written references to Arthur at a time when the Romans and others kept good records.
When looking at historical records it is important to consider what influences there may be on the writer and their interpretation of events.
There are myths and legends of King Arthur and his followers in Europe as well as Britain.
Traders, warriors, settlers, entertainers etc. moved freely around the west coast of Britain in the time period. There is an oral tradition of a great warrior hero in the centuries after 500AD which originated in the North of England and down the West Coast 5th C onwards. Stories of Arthur and resistance appear 960 onwards, 400 years after he may have lived.
There was a discussion on two written references to Arthur in the British Historical Miscellany Welsh Annals. The first was to the Battle of Badon in 518 AD and the second to the strife of Camlann in 539 AD which is a long time period after the battle Badon. Some sources put the battle of Camlann even later which would mean a very long time frame of 21+ plus years between the two battles. The Miscellany is probably dated c960-970 AD so is from over 400 years after the events recorded. The consensus is it at least records an early tradition of a warrior called Arthur at the Battle of Badon.
At the next session we shall look at Nennius and the History of the Britons.
January 2018 – The Death of Cuchulainn
The session covered:
Culchulainn’s links to the supernatural and the gods. Tales of him show his ability to move between one world and another, so showing god-like characteristics. Some tales show him to be descended from the sun god and there are references in the Phantom Chariot to him sailing west for many days.
The three tales in the session covered some common recurring themes and references as such as birds which feature in Celtic mythology. Bird migration was explained by them moving to the other world and they are seen as messengers and emissaries for the gods. Green is the colour of the gods. Water being the delineation between this world and the supernatural, so tales are based on lakes, trips to islands, the magical properties of fords.
The Wasting Sickness of Cuchulainn, this appears in a manuscript of the book of the Dun Cow from 1100’s which covered a story from oral form from long before it was written down. It takes place at Samhain a magical time of year. Whilst feasting 2 beautiful birds linked by a red/gold chain sing and all who hear it are lulled to sleep. Cuchulainn awakes and goes to hunt the birds. They turn into women who whip him until he is nearly dead and leave. He stayed in bed for a year and then awoke and told his story and goes back to where he was whipped. The story goes on to involve Fand, the most beautiful woman in the world and abandoned wife a of Manannan Mac Lir the sea god, who wants Cuchulainn and then does not and the story is finally resolved with a drink of forgetfulness so he and Emer (his wife) can go on again as if nothing had happened.
The Phantom Chariot, a story which involves the other world and enchantment and many of the common themes. It is an epic tale of a raid on a mysterious island where they encounter all manner of mystical beasts which Cuchulainn overcomes eventually coming home with gold.
The Death of Cuchulainn. Treachery had to be involved as no one could beat him. Queen Medb had never forgiven him for the cattle raid and she gathered an army against him. She brought in the triplet daughters of Calitin. Calitin was a wizard that Cuchulainn had killed along with his 27 sons before the triplets had been born. They had been raised as witches
There were signs and portents and the Druids tried to keep Culculainn away. His horse the Grey of Macha refused to be bridled and cried tears of blood.
Three old women cooking a hound on wooden spits invited Culculainn to eat with them. He was honour bound to do so despite the hound being his totem animal. This caused serious damage to his strength and fighting ability with half his body paralysed. He saw his enemies and asked three druids for the three spears he had with him. These were Medb’s men and they gave them to him by hurling them at him, fatally wounding him and killing Laegh Mac Riangabra his faithful charioteer. He died after tying himself to a stone pillar so he could die standing. With his death the glory of the Red Branch of Ulster passed.