Exploring the World of King Arthur

-Vulgate Lancelot, c. 1220, trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Carleton W. Carroll

They pushed and shoved at one another and Mordred fell backwards from the force of Gawain’s spear and landed on his shoulders, badly wounded. Sir Gawain leapt onto the man and seized him by the head. His grief was ready for this moment but so, unfortunately, was destiny. He pulled out a short knife from a silver sheath intending to stab Mordred in the throat with it; but the cut never occurred. His hand slipped and slid on the shiny chainmail as Mordred slyly shot a hand under the man on top and heaved him off, then drew a knife of his own and stabbed Gawain through a gap in his helmet, through his head and up into his brain. Sir Gawain was gone, that good man of arms. [...] "He was a giant amongst men, that’s for sure," Sir Mordred [said]. "This was the good Sir Gawain, the most considerate, the most gracious man ever to live under God’s Earth, the strongest with weapons, the happiest in battle and the noblest and most courteous in the king’s hall. He was openly praised as having the bravery of a lion and if you had known him, sir king, in the land where he lived, his wisdom, his knighthood, his accomplishments, his leadership, his courtesy, his courage, his fighting skills, then you would lament his death for the rest of your life." This traitor allowed a tear to trickle down his cheeks. Then he turned around and said no more but went away weeping, cursing the day that destiny had dealt him such a blow.

-Alliterative Morte Arthure, c. 1400, trans. Richard Scott-Robinson

I love weaving together strands from different Arthurian versions, because you can find incredible parallels like this. In the Vulgate Cycle Lancelot, we see young Mordred (in his pre-villain days) breaking down in terror at the thought of losing his older brother, so grief-stricken that he "fell down upon a bed and wept and cried and wrung his hands and tore all his clothes."

For context, this is right after Arthur agrees to let Guinevere go into a quite obvious trap (which ultimately leads to Guinevere’s abduction by Meleagant) with only Kay for protection, simply because he’d promised to grant whatever Kay asked. We’re told that “there was no one who was not upset” at this decision, but no one dares openly stop it or contradict Arthur - who is, after all, the king.

And it’s then that we get this crucial exchange:

No one’s grief was strong enough to prompt him to follow after her until Sir Gawain addressed the king, his uncle, in private. “Lord, you have behaved like a child, and I am astonished,” he said. “But if you heed my counsel, then while they are still near, we shall follow them, you and I, along with any others who wish to come there. As for me, I could not hold back from racing after them. It would be wrong for us not to follow them, at least until we know what will happen to the queen, and how Kay will behave.”

“Let us set off, dear nephew,” the king replied. “You have spoken courteously now. Since you have taken this matter into your hands, have the horses bridled, saddled, and led out that we may mount without delay.”

There’s always a very delicate balance Gawain is walking in how he interacts with Arthur, and you see it even in how the relationship is described here: the king, his uncle. On one hand, Arthur is Gawain’s relative, which gives him a certain leeway to treat him, if not quite as an equal, certainly much closer to it than most people could dare. But on the other hand, Arthur is the king, Gawain’s king, and questioning his authority too strongly would be considered unacceptable.

And I think you see that balance in such a fascinating way here. We’re told that everyone was unhappy with Arthur’s decision, but only Gawain dares to say so. Not only that, he basically tears into Arthur in incredibly strong terms: “You have behaved like a child, and I am astonished.” Clearly, Gawain feels confident that he’s earned the right to speak his mind to Arthur - to give him a piece of his mind, really, in this scene - and he doesn’t seem remotely afraid that there might be consequences for doing so.

But. But. Notice that crucial little detail there: in private. Gawain very pointedly waits to say anything about this until he and Arthur are alone. In public, around the other knights, Gawain doesn’t say a single word to contradict Arthur’s decision. In private, he tells him he’s acted like a child.

I’m reminded of a post I wrote a while ago about Game of Thrones, pointing out that Jon and Daenerys both make a distinction between being criticized in public and in private. Daenerys tells Jorah and Ser Barristan: “You’re both here to advise me. I value your advice. But if you ever question me in front of strangers again, you’ll be advising someone else.” And similarly after being crowned King in the North, Jon tells Sansa: “You are my sister, but I am king now. When you question my decisions in front of the other lords and ladies, you undermine me.” (Emphasis mine.) In both cases, I think the point was pretty clearly not ‘You cannot criticize me’, but rather ‘You cannot publicly undermine my authority’.

Arthur doesn’t need to tell Gawain this. Gawain knows. And I think you get a powerful sense of the trust between them from this short moment: Gawain trusts that he can speak his mind freely to Arthur without consequences, but he waits to do so until it’s just the two of them. In return, Arthur doesn’t stand on his ego but listens humbly and accepts Gawain’s criticism. I think it’s particularly fascinating that he tells Gawain he’s spoken courteously. On the face of it, “You have behaved like a child, and I am astonished” doesn’t sound remotely courteous - it sounds downright rude, in fact. And yet Arthur clearly doesn’t think so. He not only admits that Gawain is right, he endorses the way he said it as correct and praiseworthy.

I think that’s a great demonstration of how Gawain’s courtesy isn’t just a synonym for “polite”: it’s about his ability to follow social codes for correct behavior. Here, the measure of his courtesy isn’t that he always minces words, but that he understands when it is and isn’t acceptable to speak bluntly.

And I think it’s telling, too, that even when he’s basically telling Arthur off, he still addresses him formally as “Lord”. That might seem like a meaningless formality when the rest of what he’s saying seems anything but respectful, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s a constant reminder that Gawain never forgets Arthur is his king, or the respect that’s due to him, even when he’s openly questioning his decisions. He might seem harsh, but yet it's always tempered by a fundamental deference and he's careful never to overstep those lines.

- Y Gododdin, commonly attributed to the Welsh poet Aneirin c. 7th century, translated by Siân Echard

Since I mentioned it in my reply to @sensicalabsurdities, I thought I might as well post this here: What may well be the very first Arthurian reference we have!

As with so many Arthurian texts, the exact date and authorship of Y Gododdin is uncertain because it only survives in later manuscripts. But if it was in fact written by the poet it’s ascribed to, Aneirin (our source for it is a 13th-century compilation of his poems called the Book of Aneirin), it would have been written as early as the beginning of the 7th century, making it the earliest reference to Arthur currently in existence.

And it’s notable, really, more for what it doesn’t say than for what it does: The poem is describing a battle completely unrelated to Arthur here, one that would have taken place significantly after Arthur’s death. And in describing the might of one of the warriors in that battle, Gwawrddur, the poet basically says “As amazing as this guy was, he still was no Arthur.”

(In response to this post.)

@sensicalabsurdities, I hope you don’t mind me replying like this! It’s just easier than reblogging the whole long post again.

The issue of whether there’s a historical basis for Arthur is a fascinating one, although not one I’ll be going into that much in depth on this blog since I’m both more knowledgeable and more interested in Arthur as a legend than what the actual historical facts may have been. 

There definitely was a significant oral tradition around Arthur, though - something I’ll be getting into more when we get to some of the Welsh stories and references to him. The earliest reference we have to Arthur is in a c. 7th-century poem called Y Gododdin, which just passingly uses him for a comparison, on the clear expectation that the audience would already know who he was and what the comparison implied.

A lot of Welsh mythology was originally oral in fact, which makes it really hard to trace what the stories originally started as and who influenced whom when the stories came to be written down. (This is particularly relevant when we talk about the Arthurian stories collected in what’s come to be known as the Mabinogion, such as the Three Welsh Romances and Culhwch and Olwen.)

When it comes to historical Arthur though... my best guess, based on what I’ve read, is that he probably was based on a real person, but that real person and his life story were near-unrecognizably different from the King Arthur legend as we know. As we’ll see when we get to the Arthur mention in Historia Brittonum, he may not even have been a king, or even nobly born. I think the basic fact of there being a Briton leader named Arthur (or something similar) who won some significant victories against the Saxons is probably true, and there may also be a historical basis for some of the earliest mentioned Arthurian characters, like Guinevere, Mordred, Gawain, Kay, and Bedivere.

-  Historia Brittonum, c. 828 a.d., translated by J.A. Giles 

Aaaand, it’s the Saxons!

Other than the story with the dragons (we’ll get there!), inviting the Saxons into Britain is probably the thing Vortigern’s most known for, and understandably so. It’s a move with huge historical significance (if it indeed happened this way), and there are a lot of complicated historical issues involving the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain that would have affected how Nennius, telling this story hundreds of years later, would choose to portray Vortigern’s choice. 

I’m not going to address that at length, though, because... well, I’m not remotely qualified, honestly. In general, because this period of history isn’t one I’m super-knowledgeable about, I’m going to mostly focus on the texts themselves, only bringing in some historical context when necessary. But because at this point we’re dealing with texts that purport to be historical chronicles (even if they’re often anything but historically reliable), and touch on a lot of actual historical issues, it’s unavoidable that I’ll have to deal with that more. So I shall do my best!

At this point, though... suffice it to say that when you’re a newly independent country in constant fear of invasion and/or occupation, inviting in the enemy with open arms is understandably not going to be a popular choice.

There’s another subtext to how the conflict between the Saxons and the Britons is portrayed though, here and throughout a lot of Arthurian literature, and you’re already seeing it in this passage: The Britons are Christians, and the Saxons are pagans.

There’s a clear dichotomy being set up here between the Britons’ (supposedly) pure and true belief in “the omnipotent Gd and our Lord Jesus Christ”, and the Saxons claim to be descended from a pagan deity - “one of their idols... whom, blinded by some demon, they worshipped according to the custom of the heathen”. It’s all underlined by the author of Historia Brittonum going off on a brief, irrelevant tangent about the nature of Jesus and how great his “compassion to human nature” was, while the Saxons’ beliefs are attributed to them being “blinded by some demon”.

This is ugly. It’s narrow-minded and bigoted and intolerant, and it takes this conflict beyond the realm of the purely political to use the Saxons’ beliefs to (literally) demonize them.

But all of that is a modern perspective, of course, and to the audience of Historia Brittonum, the Saxons’ pagan beliefs would have been just one more proof that they were bad news, that Vortigern was corrupt and misguided to “receive them as friends”. It also turns the ensuing conflict for control of Britain into a holy war, with the Britons representing all that is holy and good, and the Saxons a perverted “heathen” force.

Obviously, a lot of this is going to register very differently to me - and to most modern readers of accounts like this - than it would have to the intended  medieval Christian audience. It gets pretty uncomfortable at times, and I’ll try to deal with these issues sensitively as they come up, hopefully without dwelling on it too much or repeating myself unnecessarily.

- Historia Brittonum, c. 828 a.d., translated by J.A. Giles 

And here we get our introduction to Vortigern! As I mentioned a couple posts back, Vortigern is a character who doesn’t start out explicitly connected to Arthur (though they’re both discussed in Historia Brittonum) but becomes so later on, and a large part of his story as portrayed here will show up later on with Arthurian characters (most notably Merlin, Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon, and two of his uncles) in key roles. 

Notably though, while Vortigern becomes part of the Arthurian mythos, he’s never portrayed as having met Arthur himself - he’s the archvillain of the previous generation, defeated and killed before Arthur is even born. (This is in contrast to what Guy Ritchie decided to do with him in his recent King Arthur movie, but... well, I won’t get into that here. :-P)

I find it interesting that our first introduction to Vortigern as a character (in this book, that is - there were references to him before this) chooses to emphasize... what a mess the country was in during his reign, basically. Like I discussed before, this was an era when Britain was being faced with conquest or occupation by multiple foreign powers, and as we’ll see, Vortigern failed pretty spectacularly to deal with any of those threats, and made some of them (most notably the threat of Saxon dominance) far worse. 

- Historia Brittonum, c. 828 a.d., translated by J.A. Giles

This is technically right before the Arthurian sections of Historia Brittonum - you can find it on pages 12-13 of the pdf I linked - but I thought it was important to start here for the historical context it brings. 

Roman control of Britain officially ended in 410 a.d., as a result of the Roman Empire’s failure to protect the Britons from invasions by the Picts, Scots and Saxons. As a result, the Britons (with some help from the Gauls) expelled the Roman officials and, in the words of the 5th-century historian Zosimus, “rejected Roman law, reverted to their native customs, and armed themselves to ensure their own safety.” (See handy wiki article for more information!)

If Arthur was old enough to be winning military victories in 516 a.d. (see this post), this would have been at most a couple of generations before his time - this handy timeline of Arthurian history (which I consulted when making this post) estimates his birth around 465 a.d., or just 55 years after Britain gained independence from Rome. 

Arthurian stories are often wildly ahistorical, and Arthur himself may not have even existed (and certainly didn’t as the character we know today), but for all that I think the historical context does matter, and is crucial to understanding some of the stories we’ll be discussing in the future. Britain in Arthur’s time wasn’t the dominant imperial power it would someday become - it was a tiny country that had just gained independence from a dominant imperial power (though granted one that was quickly losing power by that time), a country that had just recently “reverted to their native customs” and was desperately struggling to maintain that independence, not only from Rome but also against the constant threat of conquest by invading powers like the Picts and Saxons.

I’m not going to ramble that much about the history here - I’m not nearly knowledgeable enough to dare, honestly - but what makes all of this relevant is that Arthur came along during a period of immense political instability, when Britain’s independence was still new and shaky and they faced numerous outside threats, and he managed to not only maintain Britain’s independence but make the country strong and prosperous, throughout what’s usually portrayed as quite a long and successful reign. 

I think that has a lot to do with why his reign is considered so exceptional, why he’s remembered as Britain’s greatest defender - he wasn’t just a fair and just ruler (though he’s usually portrayed as such), he’s someone who brought stability during a time when, in a sense, everything was hanging in the balance to determine Britain’s future. He fought off multiple foreign powers and ensured that Britain stayed independent, without which Britain as we know it today might not even exist.

I genuinely wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in seeing me nerd out over King Arthur and you guys have all been so lovely and encouraging, thank you so much!!

So next up we’ll be going through Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), which is exactly what it says on the tin and was written around 828 a.d. It’s historically been attributed to a Welsh monk named Nennius, although some people now doubt his authorship. 

Like the Annales Cambriae, Historia Brittonum tells us a bit about some of Arthur’s battles, in this case briefly describing twelve different battles that Arthur fought against the Saxons. Most of the Arthurian-relevant material, though, deals with a quite lousy king named Vortigern who invited the Saxons over and then completely failed to stop them from taking power. Particularly notable is a story where Vortigern’s tower keeps collapsing and he’s told that sacrificing a “boy with no father” is the answer, which I’ll be dealing with at length when we get up to it. 

At this point, none of this is explicitly connected with Arthur, but it becomes relevant because a couple centuries later Geoffrey of Monmouth made Vortigern a usurper who stole the throne from Arthur’s uncle and is therefore the archnemesis of Arthur’s other uncle and his dad (Uther Pendragon). Geoffrey likewise turns the “boy with no father” story into Merlin’s backstory, and so the whole Vortigern story largely ends up being a prequel of sorts to King Arthur proper.

We’re starting here because it’s not only one of the earliest Arthurian references but, frankly, a quite short and easy starting point.

The Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals) is a chronicle of Welsh (and more largely, British) history which currently survives in manuscripts dating back to the 12th century, but is thought to have been composed significantly earlier, possibly in the latter half of the 10th century. As such it’s one of the earliest sources we have about King Arthur, and contains only two quite brief references to him - both dates of battles. These references can be read here, and read:

516. The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were victors.

537. The Battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell, and there was devestation in Britain and in Ireland.

On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to tell us much about Arthur, but there’s already a lot you can glean from this.

The dates, 516 and 537 (and enjoy those, because exact dates for anything are rare in the world of King Arthur) give us an idea of the timeline of Arthur’s reign. In 516 we hear that he won a (presumably significant) victory, indicating that this might be the time when he was at the height of his power and prominence. 537 is the Battle of Camlann, which we hear caused devastation and even at this early point seems to indicate his downfall. 

We also see even at this early stage that Arthur is a Briton war leader and, through the story of him “carrying the cross of Jesus on his shoulders” at the Battle of Badon, specifically that he’s a Christian hero. Later stories, of course, expand greatly on Arthur’s role as both a defender of Britain and a Christian figure (the latter particularly coming to prominence in the Grail legend, though it’s really present in most Arthurian stories to some degree). 

The second entry here also introduces us to a second character, Medraut, better known to most Arthurian fans as Mordred. Again, later stories expand greatly on Mordred’s character and his role in the Battle of Camlann, but this brief entry gives us very little about him. As others have pointed out, while later versions establish that Arthur and Mordred died fighting each other at Camlann, the reference in Annales Cambriae in no way makes that clear. All we know is that Arthur and Medraut both died in the battle, but from this context you might just as easily assume that they were fighting on the same side - that Medraut was Arthur’s right-hand man, perhaps, and that his death like Arthur’s is being noted as a reason for the devastation that occurred when they lost the battle.

 I’m pretty new at this, so bear with with me. 

Until now, I’ve only ever had a personal, multifandom blog on tumblr, dedicated to the various nerdetry I’m fixated on at a given time.

But lately I’ve been working my way through various Arthurian texts, trying to trace the development of the story and expand my knowledge of the various versions kicking around out there, and I thought it might be nice to have a place to share my thoughts as I read.

I have no idea if anyone will be interested in reading those thoughts, honestly. I do know there’s a lovely Arthurian fandom on tumblr (several of whom I’ve been following for years on my main blog), so maybe some of you might be interested in coming along for the ride. And to those who are interested in King Arthur but haven’t read many of the stories inside, this might be an interesting place to see what catches your interest.

Or... maybe no one will be interested in my ramblings, which would be understandable! Regardless, I thought I’d give this a whirl, and we’ll see how things go.