LITMIR.BIZ

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is it about the Arthurian legends that so many people find appealing? Is it just that he has been used as a historical metaphor to explain something as nebulous as the origins of Britain? Or is it more than that? Does Arthur express something deep within ourselves, something we do not fully understand, but which we feel matters? Or are the myths surrounding the Once and Future King just very good stories? My own feeling is that while it may be possible to deconstruct the historiography (i.e. the history of the history) of the Arthur myths, that process will not necessarily explain their enduring appeal, and it certainly will not explain why they are so extraordinarily popular with so many people of different nationalities today. Let me give a single example of the phenomenon.

      Anyone who has been touched by the power of the Arthur myths never forgets the experience. It happened to me back in 1974, in Toronto, when I was an Assistant Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was a time when there was a great upsurge of Arthurian interest, brought about by Leslie Alcock’s claim that a Somerset hillfort at South Cadbury was probably the site of Camelot.⁶ Geoffrey Ashe’s popular analysis of the myths and stories surrounding the Grail legends had appeared in paperback,⁷ and of course there were other publications, some good, some less so.⁸ It was widely assumed that, as an English archaeologist, I would know about the Dark Ages. In fact I was a prehistorian working on the outskirts of prosaic Peterborough, not at glamorous Glastonbury—but like a fool I kept quiet about that. In any case, the museum’s PR people thought it would be a good idea if I gave a public lecture on the subject of ‘Arthur’s Britain’. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.

      My suspicions should have been roused when the BBC contacted me in late summer while I was digging in Peterborough; my lecture in Toronto was scheduled for some time around Christmas. The BBC had received a tip-off from someone in Canada, but as I was still reading the first chapters of Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, I couldn’t answer the questions they asked me. So they left me in peace.

      Back in Toronto, I soon realised that my Arthur talk was going to be very big indeed. The publicity was huge, and was developing swiftly. In the mid-1970s the over-commercialised AM radio stations of North America were being replaced by more laid-back FM stations, playing music by bands like the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd and so forth. King Arthur was meat and drink to this audience, and I had several extended chat sessions with DJs on air.

      On the day of the lecture I arrived at the museum, but the crowd around the main entrance was so big that I had to go down to the basement and enter through the goods entrance. I clutched my slides in what was rapidly becoming a very sweaty palm. Upstairs, the main lecture theatre was already packed, and there was still half an hour to go. I handed my slides to the audio-visual technician, who was visibly shaken by the huge crowd. He was Welsh, and the quiet words ‘Good luck, boyo’ came from an uncharacteristically dry mouth. Out on the stage a crew was rapidly rigging up a sound system that would relay my voice to a crowd standing in the huge rotunda just inside the museum’s main entrance. I later learned that additional loudspeakers were positioned outside the building—and remember, this was Canada in the winter.

      I think the lecture was successful, but I was so dazed that I can’t in all honesty remember how it went. Arthur had worked his magic, and had left me an older and a wiser young man. After that experience, I simply will not accept that the appeal of Arthur is just about British origin myths or the romance of chivalry. I do not believe that there is a rational explanation, but I am convinced that there is a power to these stories that cannot be explained away.

      We have seen how two of the British origin myths, the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, owe their current popularity to a series of reinventions in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same can be said of Arthur, but his story has a far longer history of creation, recreation and adaptation. By contrast, whether or not one believes there was ever an ethnic group called the ancient Celts, it cannot be denied that Britain was home to a diverse group of Iron Age cultures with their own highly original style of art. Similarly, even if, as I believe, they did not invade en masse, a few ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (or people like them) probably did come to Britain in the post-Roman period—either that, or perhaps as well as that, influential British people repeatedly travelled to northern Germany, where they were influenced by what they saw.

      But when it comes to Arthur, one fact cannot be sidestepped: there is no mention of a character of that name in any ancient account of Britain written between AD 400 and 820—and Arthur is supposed to have lived in the fifth century.⁹ There are sixth- and seventh-century accounts of battles and other events in the fifth century which have been linked to Arthur by modern authors, with more or less credibility, but none with certainty. There are also later accounts which hark back to earlier times and hypothetical lost authors; but nobody, either at the time or within a few generations of his death, wrote about him by name until some four centuries later—fifteen or twenty generations after the event. To put that in context, it is as if Simon Schama was the first historian ever to mention Oliver Cromwell by name.

      Today Arthur is essentially a literary phenomenon, and there is an enormous subsidiary literature devoted to the legends surrounding him.¹⁰ Here I will concentrate on the early writing that actually gave birth to the legends that still continue to be recreated and elaborated.¹¹

      We cannot embark on even a short review such as this without first questioning whether our hero did or did not exist.¹² Given the lack of direct evidence prior to the ninth century, it seems to me that the question cannot be answered. Derek Pearsall puts it well: ‘Proving that Arthur did not exist is just as impossible as proving that he did. On this matter, like others, it is good to think of the desire for certainty as the pursuit of an illusion.’¹³ What we can say, however, is that the fifth century was a time when strong individual leaders were needed and had come to the fore—as we will see when we discuss the Late Roman frontier fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall (Chapter 9). It seems to me that if Arthur did not exist, which seems more likely than not, he ought to have done. It is equally probable that there were several Arthurs. The trouble is, we have no evidence either way. If we cannot establish the truth of Arthur the man, what can we say about Arthur the myth? The stories and legends of the Arthurian cycle may tell us only a little about post-Roman Britain, but they can tell us something about the times in which they were written. More importantly, they can throw a great deal of light on the way in which British history has been expropriated by powerful people and political factions for hundreds of years. It is a process which continues to thrive.

      The earliest account of events that were later linked to Arthur was written in a sixth-century history by a man named Gildas. Gildas is a shadowy figure, but we do know that he was a British monk of the Celtic Church, that he was thoroughly fluent in Latin, and that he died around 570 or 571. He spent his life in south Wales and Brittany, where he is revered as a saint. The oldest existing manuscript of his work dates to the eleventh century. Its title, De excidio et conquestu Britanniae (Concerning the Ruin and Fall of Britain), gives away the reasons why Gildas wrote his history: he was in fact preaching something of a political diatribe.¹⁴ Gildas wrote in a particularly high-flown, flowery style of Latin that does not translate very comfortably. The distinguished archaeologist and historian Professor Leslie Alcock was driven to write: ‘If ever there was a prolix, tedious and exasperating work it is Gildas’ De excidio.’¹⁵ Even so, his message is abundantly clear: Anglo-Saxon expansion is divine retribution for the moral laxity of the Celtic/British nobility.

      The absence of any mention of Arthur in this important early source is surprising—the more so since Gildas is the first to mention the Battle of Mons Badonicus (Mount Badon), which was supposedly the most significant event of Arthur’s

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