The uses of King Arthur

Legends are different kind of historical fiction.

The comment that gave rise to the current series of posts, on historical fiction, was a criticism of a retelling of the story of King Arthur.  The commentator noted too many anachronisms, things that could not have been contemporary with the real Arthur, including a reference to Charlemagne.  We have not seen the show he referred to, so we can’t say anything about it directly.  But we have some knowledge of the legend.

The island of Britain (well, most of it) was part of the Roman Empire for over three centuries.  The Romano-British culture there established was as civilized, though perhaps not as old, as anywhere in the Empire.  But the grave threats Rome faced in the early fifth century caused it to recall its legions from Britain to mainland Europe, leaving that culture without regular troops for its defense.  About the middle of that century barbarian tribes (traditionally Angles, Saxons and Jutes) began to cross from what is now Germany to the island and settle there.  We do not know details of the process by which southeast Britain became England; these are the Dark Ages, where sources are few, late, and unreliable.  But it is clear that sometime about the year 500 the Anglo-Saxons were stopped for a generation.  This is the historical background for King Arthur.

The Venerable Bede, writing some two centuries later, fills in a few details.  He identifies one Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Roman of royal blood, as the leader of the Romano-British army that defeated the Angles.  He then passes on to other things; he is much more concerned with the state of the Church than with political power.

(The historical Charlemagne appears between these two paragraphs.)

It’s only with Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing about 1136, that we see the story of Arthur in anything like its familiar form.  He is now the grandson of Ambrosius Aurelianus and son of Uther Pendragon; there is the sorcerer Merlin and Guinevere (though not Lancelot), and much fighting in armor on horseback.  Geoffrey may have been writing actual historical fiction, since some scholars think he simply made up much of his History of the Kings of Britain.  (He claims to have translated it from an old book in Welsh).  But there is much anachronism, since Geoffrey really had no idea how much society and technology had changed in the seven centuries that separated him from his subject.

And he sets out the preposterous (to us) idea that Arthur conquered most of Western Europe.  Well, maybe not to Geoffrey.  More than once the legions in Britain had chosen a leader who went on to make himself Emperor of Rome; perhaps his story is a dim memory of one of those episodes.

From there, Arthur crossed the Channel to appear in French Romances, where his story became one of high chivalry, courtly and knightly behavior being stressed.  Lancelot and the Quest of the Holy Grail are added.  He returned to be retold by Malory in the version we’re most familiar with today, and is among the first books to be printed in English (in 1485).

Though perhaps more of us know the story from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (and the musical and movie Camelot based on it).  In White’s work anachronism abounds.  Knights wear fifteenth-century plate armor and display nineteenth-century English public-school attitudes, and are described as Normans oppressing their Saxon peasantry.  For this White had no excuse; he knew very well that none of this belonged in the sixth century.  So as historical fiction his work does not do well,

But that was not his aim.  He was giving form to a legend, using it to examine the actions of brilliant but flawed people, and to meditate on the use of force, on Might and Right and Justice in the sad aftermath of the Second World War.

One could write historical fiction about King Arthur, in which everything would be properly sixth-century.  We’ve seen good examples of this.  Legends are a different thing.  (But we’re still puzzled at how Charlemagne might come in.)