The King Arthur of Pseudo-History (The Matter of Arthur, Part 1)

Today we start our discussion of what has been called "The Matter of Britain": the tales of King Arthur and his knights.  This episode focuses on the earliest writings about Arthur in English: Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain and Layamon's Brut.

Music: "Rejoice" by G.F. Handel perf.  Advent Chamber Orchestra
"Running Fanfare" by Kevin Macleod

Transcript

Welcome to episode 6 of the Classic English Literature Podcast!  Today, we’re going to begin what I’ll call a sporadic mini-series.  I’d like to begin discussing the legends of King Arthur and his knights.  But I have been a little intimidated by tackling this.  The body of material concerning Arthur is just so vast.  If you count modern retellings in film, these stories have been circulating for well over a millennium, constantly being revised and repurposed and refined to suit the needs of the times and the peoples.  These tales come from Wales and Brittany first, but then France, England, Germany, and now Hollywood.  How to do such a vast corpus justice?

Well, I can’t.  Whole libraries, university programs, and podcasts are devoted to Arthuriana.  The scheme I’ve settled on is to devote an occasional episode to these stories as appropriate to the historical epoch we’re covering generally.  So, today we’ll talk about the Arthur texts during the Anglo-Norman period.  Later in the year, we’ll look at the massively influential texts of the 14th and 15th centuries.  In the fullness of time, the Victorian retellings will get their go.

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The question of the historical Arthur is surely a vexed one.  Over the centuries, his existence has been taken as absolute fact and whimsical fancy.  He has been cast as the last Roman general of Britain and a Scots prince adopted by the Welsh.  We have an early mention of the Battle of Mount Badon (Mons Badonicus) – the engagement that supposedly stemmed the Saxon tide for a time – from the British preacher and historian Gildas in the 6th century in which the putatively-historical Arthur is presumed to have fought.  There are references in Nennius’s The History of the Britons of the early 9th century and brief mentions in The Annals of Wales from perhaps the mid-10th century. I think most now accept the notion that there was a British war duke whose guerrilla tactics successfully withstood the Anglo-Saxon incursion in the 5th century, and that by force of arms and personality he became a convenient site for the accrual of legend.  

The earliest of these legends that we can account for come from Wales, where, according to the generally accepted narrative, the Celtic Britons retired from the advancing Saxons.  The Mabinogion, the first collection of Arthurian romances, preserving tales of the Welsh bardic tradition, was compiled in the late 12th or early 13th centuries.  So, until this period, the historical status of Arthur and his warriors remained ambiguous: was it legendary history or historical legend?

The first major compiler of the Arthur tales in England was Geoffrey of Monmouth, a cleric who, as his name suggests, had a close personal and geographical connection with Wales.  His History of the Kings of Britain presents the earliest complete narrative of Arthur’s career, in about 1136, so just before lunchtime.  Written in Latin, it aspires to serious researched history (he often cites other authorities and witnesses and, in fact, claims that his book is a translation of an older text in the British tongue).  However, we know now that this is a truckful of shoemakers.  That is, a load of cobblers.  Scholars, such as Roger Sherman Loomis and Rudolph Willard, have gone so far as to call it “fraudulent history.”  I think that may be a bit harsh – I’m not entirely sure malicious deception was Geoff’s plan – but it does test the credulousness of the most credulous gull when he speaks of Irish giants and fornicating demons. Yes, surely, our definition of history as strict and dispassionate reportage is a modern one and the distinction between history and legend may have been more porous in the premodern world, but the History attracted scathing reviews from scholars even at the time.  In his preface to History of English Affairs, William of Newburgh, writing in the latter part of the 12th century, tears into Geoffrey of Monmouth with an excoriation that can only be described as “Twitteresque.”  Really.  Have a listen:

a writer in our times has started up and invented the most ridiculous fictions concerning them, and with unblushing effrontery, extols them far above the Macedonians and Romans. He is called Geoffrey, surnamed Arthur, from 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 endeavored 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. For he only who has not learnt the truth of history indiscreetly believes the absurdity of fable.

Ooh.  Slash and, as it were, burn. You may have noticed William’s gibe of “Geoffrey, surnamed Arthur.” It is indeed true that Monmouth signed his name Geoffrey Arthur.  Feels a bit like Bela Lugosi coming to believe he actually was Dracula.  Newburgh is harsh, but fair.  Score one for Billy the Burner.  However, hardly anyone reads the History of English Affairs and Geoffrey’s fabulous history still gets the odd eyeball.  And the even ones, come to that.  Game, set, and match for Monmouth the Somewhat Mendacious!  Like the old Liberty Valance quote: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Because Geoffrey’s embroidered history, in addition to its literary significance, serves a very practical socio-political purpose for the Norman regime.

As a cleric, Monmouth knew his Latin and would have been quite familiar with Roman and ancient Chritsian literature.  As a Welshman, he probably drank in the old folk tales and legends of Cambria like mother’s milk.  This allows him, when he sets out on his history, to create a counter-narrative to the Venerable’s Bede’s history of the founding of Saxon England.  Monmouth reaches back further, to the Trojan War, and Aeneas’ grandson Brutus, who colonizes and gives his name to Britain.  If, to the peoples of what is now Wales and Cornwall, the Normans were just the latest in a series of foreign invaders stretching back to Caesar’s legions, these most recent arrivals share a mytho-cultural origin story: Romans (and their French-speaking descendants) and native Brythonic peoples are related.  Thus, it is the Anglo-Saxon culture that is foreign.

But we should hardly see this as a nostalgic plea to restore the old Roman hegemony.  Far from it.  In fact, the Roman Empire serves as the great enemy in Monmouth’s version of Arthur’s life.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s do a quick and dirty on Monmouth’s version of Arthur.

I believe we mentioned, in an earlier episode, the British king Vortigern whose rash and hasty decisions brought on the Anglo-Saxon incursion (according to the Venerable.)  Monmouth casts Vortigern in a similarly weasley role, this time as one who usurps the British throne after the withdrawal of Rome in an alliance with the Saxon brothers Hengist and Horsa.  Eventually, the Saxons get aggressive, Vortigern tucks tail and scarpers, but all are eventually defeated by the British brothers Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon.  Ah, there’s a name from the legendarium that many recognize!

To commemorate the British who died driving off the Saxons, Aurelius decides to build a monument.  But being no mason or architect, he can’t settle on what kind.  “Ask Merlin!” everyone says.  “I know!” replies Aurelius with kingly self-awareness, “I shall ask Merlin.”  And so he does.

In Geoffrey’s telling, Merlin is not yet the proto-Gandalf we’ve come to know.  Here, he seems to me more a general-purpose wise man: bit of a shaman, bit of an engineer, bit of a jerk.  He says that Aurelius should go to Ireland and steal the great Giant’s Ring of Mount Killaraus – a monumental ring of massive standing stones.  Sound familiar?

So Uther Pendragon takes an army of 15,000 men, invades Ireland, nicks Stonehenge.  And that, children, is the God’s honest truth.

Merlin is loaded with other great news and ideas.  After whipping Vortigern a second time, a magical star appears above Aurelius and Uther.  Merlin says that Uther will become king, establish a dynasty, but that the decline of the Britons will follow.  Sheesh.

Here’s where we get the familiar story of Uther fathering Arthur on the Duke of Cornwall’s wife Ygerna.  Merlin gives Uther drugs that change his appearance to that of the Duke’s, so Ygerna doesn’t even know she’s being raped.  Lovely.  The drugs thing, though, as opposed to some magic spell, is an interesting difference.  Anyway, this is how Britain’s greatest king is conceived: vile lust in a drug-fueled rape.  Auspicious.  But it does serve to present Arthur as legitimately conceived.

Now, lest we think that Monmouth implicitly approves of these developments, it should be made clear that yet another Saxon attack occurs and we are given to understand that it is a punishment for Uther’s adultery.  As a theory of justice, you may do with that as you will.

Once Arthur comes of age, and following the death of his father, he becomes king through the normal ceremonial course.  There is a marked lack of magic here: Archbishop Dubricius “lamented the sad state of his country.  He called the other bishops to him and bestowed the crown of the kingdom upon Arthur.”  No swords in stones or ponds.  Just succession in a time of crisis.

What follows are decades of crisis: “In Arthur courage was closely linked with generosity, and he made up his mind to harry the Saxons so that with their wealth he might reward the retainers who served his household.”  Rather a selective conception of generosity, I must say, but it does bear a striking resemblance to that very Anglo-Saxon bond of comitatus.  

And that bond would have to hold, for Arthur and his men engage in wars with the Saxons and the Scots and the Picts.  During these prolonged struggles, Arthur restores Christianity to York, the northern Saxon capital, as well as restoring the native British nobility there.  As a historical analogy, this may seem rather ironic, given the Normans dispossession of the Saxon nobility.  But, of course, Geoffrey is seeking to delegitimize the Saxons in favor of a preceding Brythonic claim, so, as far as he is concerned, the Normans are restoring what Arthur restored.  Then he turns his attention to Iceland, and brings that country to heel. Arthur’s expansion intimidates other chieftains, like the kings of Gotland and the Orkneys, who voluntarily submit to Arthur’s overlordship.

Now we get twelve years of peace.  Monmouth writes:

Arthur then began to increase his personal entourage by inviting very distinguished men from far-distant kingdoms to join it. In this way he developed such a code of courtliness in his household that he inspired peoples living far away to imitate him. The result was that even the man of noblest birth, once he was roused to rivalry, thought nothing at all of himself unless he wore his arms and dressed in the same way as Arthur’s knights.

It seems to me that Arthur gets a bit of a big head now.  And rather restless.  He enjoys the fact that foreign kings tremble and despair when they look upon his mighty works.  So, he does what anyone would do: he invades Norway.  Then Gaul.  And Aquitania.  And Gascony.

Geoffrey of Monmouth details Arthur’s ruthless expansion as a historical precedent (and justification) for the similar expansionist designs of the Normans.  By the conquest of Norway and what is now France, Monmouth unites the British and Norman lines.  Interesting also that Arthur grants the province of Neustria (what would become Normandy) to his right-hand man Bedivere and Anjou (the origin of the coming line of Norman kings, the Angevins) to his seneschal Kay.  

Finally, after seventeen years of conquest and righteous rapine, the apparently slumbering giant of Rome awakens.  Twelve Roman envoys arrive at Arthur’s court, bearing the olive branches of peace, only to deliver a scathing rebuke from the Emperor Lucius Hiberius.  He says,

I am amazed at the insolent way in which you continue your tyrannical behaviour. I am even more amazed at the damage which you have done to Rome. When I think about it, I am outraged that you should have so far forgotten yourself as not to realise this and not to appreciate immediately what it means that by your criminal behaviour you should have insulted the Senate, to which the entire world owes submission, as you very well know. You have had the presumption to disobey this mighty Empire by holding back the tribute of Britain.

Sounds very much like a teacher scolding an ungrateful child.  One can hear the tsking and sense the wagging finger: “I’m not angry, but I am so, so disappointed.”  The catch here, however, is that the ungrateful child is an obscenely successful war chief who will not lightly take a dressing-down, especially from a soft southerner.  Arthur consults his advisors, shrugs off the Roman threat as minor, and disputes Roman claims by his own interpretation of the Emperor’s “fake news”::

For myself, I do not consider that we ought to fear his coming very much, given the trumped up case he uses to demand the tribute he wants to exact from Britain. He says that he ought to be given it because it used to be paid to Julius Caesar and those who succeeded him. When these men landed with their armed band and conquered our fatherland by force and violence at a time when it was weakened by civil dissensions, they had been encouraged to come here by the disunity of our ancestors. Seeing that they seized the country in this way, it was wrong of them to exact tribute from it. Nothing that is acquired by force and violence can ever be held legally by anyone. 

That last line displays a staggering lack of self-awareness.  Does he not control nearly all of northern Europe by right of conquest?  Did anyone in council raise the hairy eyeball to that howler?  Probably not. Rather, Arthur demands tribute from Rome, and wages a successful war to get it.

Yes, that’s right.  Geoffrey has Arthur conquer Rome itself – he is the master of all Europe and significant parts of Asia and Africa. But in these wars he loses Bedevere and Kay, his minions in France.  And, he will lose much more.

Because here’s where we get to the juicy scandalous bits.  While Arthur is out teaching Rome a lesson in history and good manners, Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, seizes the British throne and the British queen: Guinevere, who hails from a noble Roman family.  It’s wonderful how Monmouth gets all his political players to behave themselves properly in his analogous retelling.  But, in a moment of frustrating modesty and discretion, our storyteller goes silent, in the third-person: “About this particular matter . . . Geoffrey of Monmouth prefers to say nothing.”  Argh!  You can’t hint at the most sordid tittle-tattle and then go mum.  Spill the tea, as the kids say.  I think they still say that.

But he doesn’t. The tea remains safely in the pot.  Instead, as all moral people do, he skips uncomfortably over the sex to return to the placid familiarity (and moral wholesomeness) of savage violence.  Mordred assembles a force of Saxons, Scots, Irish, and Picts to defend against Arthur’s reclamation (in a very neat parallel: Mordred reassembles all of Arthur’s old enemies to the destruction of the kingdom).  The actual deaths of Arthur and Mordred are quite underwhelming.  A simple statement of fact: “Arthur himself, our renowned king, was mortally wounded and was carried off the Isle of Avalon. . . . this in the year 542 after our Lord’s Incarnation.”  Rather a letdown, isn’t it?  We’re used to swelly music and dramatic lighting, profound wisdom whispered as the breath expires, tears and sighs.  Not for Geoff.  Just the facts, ma’am. Except for all the made-up stuff.

I think Monmouth’s retelling – as perhaps the first major written narrative of Arthur – presents us with a much different hero than we’ve come to expect in the high chivalric versions of Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or in the films by Richard Thorpe and John Boorman.  At this early stage, Arthur doesn’t feel that different from a Beowulf – very much still the glory-seeking, easily affronted warrior.  The sheen of Christianity is, admittedly, much thicker, but the gentleness and courtesy to which  Monmouth refers is again and again undercut by Arthur’s wrath, vengeance, and pride.  His pep talks to his armies are harrowing calls to slaughter:

Although the Saxons, whose very name is an insult to heaven and detested by all men, have not kept faith with me. . . 'I myself will keep faith with my God. This very day I will do my utmost to take vengeance on them for the blood of my fellow countrymen. Arm yourselves, men, and attack these traitors with all your strength! With Christ's help we shall conquer them, without any possible doubt!

When he urges his men on against the Romans:

Are you letting these effeminate creatures slip away unhurt? Not one must escape alive! . . . Not one must escape alive! Not one must escape, I say!’ As he shouted these insults, and many others, too, Arthur dashed straight at the enemy. He flung them to the ground and cut them to pieces. . . . Their armour offered them no protection capable of preventing Caliburn, when wielded in the right hand of this mighty king, from forcing them to vomit forth their souls with their life blood.

There is a marked anxiety about masculinity in these speeches, and violence and vengeance are the best ways to define and protect it.  Perhaps that’s why rape and infidelity play such an important role at the beginning and ending of this tale: Uther’s violation of Ygerna (and her concomitant, as they would have seen it, unfaithfulness to her husband) is mirrored in Mordred’s usurpation of queen and crown.  Perhaps, in Monmouth’s view, masculine power and privilege – over land, over “lesser” men, over women – is the mysterious force holding a society together, and sexual deviation is the greatest threat.  Monmouth still seems to assume that nobility – strength of character as well as of body – is “inborn.”  He uses the word twice in reference to the superiority of “noble birth.”  One is still born noble in this worldview, though one must continually prove it, usually through strength of arms. This certainly seems continuous with Beowulf’s world.  But not the Seafarer’s – or, at least, not entirely.

In around the year 1200, a Worcestershire priest whom we know as Layamon (though there are significant differences in spelling and pronunciation) took Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain (by way of a French-speaking poet named Wace)  and set it to verse, becoming the first to present the Arthurian story in English poetry. Called Brut, it is immensely long, over 16,000 lines, but notable for its curious mingling of French and Anglo-Saxon poetic devices.  He often retains the Old English alliteration and caesura while complementing them with assonance and internal rhyme (something of an innovative move in the 13th century).  His version of Arthur’s birth (echoing the legendary birth of Alexander the Great) runs thus:

[The fairies) gave him the might to be the best of knights;

They gave him another thing, that he would be a mighty king;

They gave him a third, – his death would be long deferred.

In this passage, Layamon also uses a device called anaphora, the repetition of a phrase in successive clauses.  This gives the lines, I think, the feeling of crescendo, a rushing cascade of blessings.  It also reinforces the magical or miraculous quality of Arthur’s birth; there’s something of the chanted spell here. 

As Layamon details Arthur’s military history, we get very much the same hyper-masculine Norman warrior hero provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the section called “The Battle of Bath” (which corresponds, I think, to Mons Badonicus), Arthur sounds a lot like Beowulf:

Lo, here are before us the heathen hounds

Who killed our chieftains with their base crafts; 

And they on this land are loathest of all things

Now let us attack them and lay them starkly,

And avenge wondrously our kin and our kingdom

And wreak great shame with which they have shamed us,

That they over the waves have come to Dartmouth.

They are all forsworn and they shall be lorn;

They are all doomed with the aid of the Lord.

The concerns of shame, and vengeance, and disloyalty (forswearing) provoke a dehumanizing view of the Saxons, not only as animals (hounds) but as the damned (heathen).  Elsewhere, Arthur refers to the Saxons as “goats,” medieval shorthand for the damned, drawn from the Gospel distinction between sheep and goats, the saved and the condemned.  Interesting to me that Layamon makes liberal and effective use of Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions while casting them as the enemies of civilization.

As a side note, this battle between native British and invading Saxons reminds me of one of our first poems, “The Ruin,” in episode 2, in which a Saxon traveller looks at the ruins of Bath (perhaps) and marvels at the giants who must have made such a wonder.  Well, you’re the one who wrecked it, Bubba.

I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s conception, nobility was a matter of birth.  But here in Layamon, there are hints of the coming preoccupation with nobility as a matter of one’s behavior rather than of one’s bloodline.  Arthur establishes the famous Round Table to quell the petty prides of his followers, who get into a rather childish food-fight over who should get preferential seating at the dinner table.  He chides them:

Sit down, sit down at once, each man on pain of his life!

And whoever will not do that, condemned shall he be.

Take me that same man who this fight first began,

And put a withy on his neck and drag him to a moor,

And throw him in a low-lying fen, where he shall lie.

And take all his next of kin, whom ye can find,

And smite off their heads with your broad swords;

And the women that ye can find nearest him of kin,

Carve off their noses and ruin their beauty;

And thus will I wholly destroy that kin that he came from.

And if I evermore shall hear afterwards

That in my court, be he high, be he low,

For this same assault stir a quarrel later

No ransom shall be given for him, neither gold nor any treasure,

Tall horse nor armor that he shall not die

Or be drawn asunder with horses, as beseemeth traitors.

Blessed bovine biosolids!  Perhaps “chides” was the wrong word.  This is a condemnation in a Biblical tenor!  The fella who started the fight, who thought he deserved the seat of honor, is to be dragged out to the moors, dumped in a swamp, and left to die.  His male kin are to be beheaded and his female kin mutilated.  Arthur wipes out their line.  Then he claims that anyone who starts another quarrel to settle any hurt feelings here, will be denied ransom and left to a traitor’s death.  And none of this is contingent upon birth status: “be he high, be he low.”  Noble men do not start cafeteria fights over their seats. Hardly seems straight out of the “Turn the Other Cheek: A Guide to Christian Forgiveness for the Brythonic Ruler” mindfulness workshop. Of course, the more practical solution is to make a table with no seats of honor; a round one, in which everyone is seated equally.  And that, children, is how the famous Round Table came to be.  And everyone lived happily ever after in a world without distinctions of rank or status, judged not by the blueness of their blood, but by the content of their character.  I, for one, am certainly happy to be living in such an egalitarian wonderland.

Layamon includes, at the end of Arthur’s career, an eerie premonition, which fleshes out Monmouth’s rather bathetic death-scene.  Arthur has an allegorical  dream, in which he sees Mordred coming at him with a huge battle axe and Wenhaver (Guinevere) literally pulling apart the roof of his castle with her bare hands. Arthur stumbles to the ground, breaking his right arm, but, grasping Caliburn in his left hand he strikes off Mordred’s head and cuts Wenhaver to pieces.  Geoffrey tells of a dreamed battle between a dragon (signifying Arthur) and a bear (Mordred).  But Layamon’s dream is more harrowing and hallucinatory.  After his vision of war, he says:

But  myself,  I  did  stand     upon  a  wooded  land, 

And  there  I  did  wander    widely  over  the  moors. 

There  saw  I  griffins     and  grisly  fowl; 

Then  came  a  golden  lioness     moving  over  the  down, 

Of  all  beasts  the  most  gracious     that  our  Lord  hath  made; 

The  lioness  ran  towards  me,     and  by  the  middle  seized  me, 

And  forth  she  betook  her,     and  turned  towards  the  sea; 

And  I  saw  the  waves     driving  in  the  sea,  

And  the  lioness  into  the  flood     went  bearing  me. 

When  we  two  were  in  the  sea,     the  waves  took  me  from  her; 

There  came  a  fish  gliding,     and  ferried  me  to  land; 

Then  was  I  all  wet  and  weary,     and  sick  from  sorrow. 

Arthur’s final vision is a sylvan nightmare of isolation, ending in his rescue by a lioness who bears him to a fish that bears him to land.  A circular motion here, from wood to sea to land again – a return, a premonition that, as the legend has it, Arthur will return when his people need him.

The  Britons  believe  yet    that  he  is  alive, 

And  dwelleth  in  Avalon    with  the  fairest  of  fays; 

And  the  Britons  still  look  ever    for  Arthur  to  come. 

There  was  never  man  born,     of  any  maiden  chosen,  1080 

Who  knoweth  of  the  truth     more  to  say  of  Arthur. 

But  there  was  once  a  prophet,     Merlin  by  name; 

He  foretold  in  words, — his  sayings  were  true, — 

That  an  Arthur  must  still  come     to  help  the  Britons. 

Incidentally, an  older  manuscript  reads that he will come again to help the  "Anglen,"  i.e.  English.  Only a revised manuscript  reads "Bruttes,"  i.e.  Britons,  which,  of  course,  makes  sense. I’m sure the Norman overlords prefer the update, but it’s interesting that even at this early date, the English/British identity is showing a bit of slip. 

So let’s leave Arthur here for the nonce.  These first forays into Arthurian literature present themselves as history, but certainly fabulous ones, in which lives parallel lives across generations, dream visions foretell the future, and quite messianic expectations of a resurgence temper the sorrow of death, quite unlike the despair at the end of Beowulf.  But in other ways, Arthur still seems a quintessential dark age war chief.  He is just, for that culture, but mercilessly so.  Morality is the king’s fiat.  There is little evidence of emotional or psychological complexity in any of the characters here, though I’m fascinated with Wenhaver – what’s going on in her head?  Layamon doesn’t say, given the low opinion of women in this masculine world.  But in a history so consumed with loyalty and disloyalty, male characters sometimes risk treachery for personal glory.  Women can’t earn personal glory – so why does Wenhaver go with Mordred?  Just a misogynistic  portrayal of female sexual opportunism?  I think there’s more than that.  Would she have had any agency anyway, given that women were basically chattel, especially at the aristocratic level?  If not, then certainly we should pity her, not condemn her.  I’ll never know, but I like to wonder.

Next time, we’ll look at one of the most famous Arthurian romances of the Anglo-Norman period, Marie de France’s Lanval.  Now we get into some magic, some passionate love, some rather complex women.  Great story. 

In the meantime, please take a moment to review the podcast on your favorite app.  Also, I would appreciate any little financial support.  Thank you for listening, and tune in next time to The Classic English Literature Podcast!