A hundred miles from Glastonbury, the ruins of Tintagel Castle emerge from a rocky peninsula overlooking the Celtic Sea, the part of the Atlantic Ocean that laps at the south coast of Ireland. The place of Arthur’s conception, if not his birth, the castle yielded another fragment of Arthurian history. Tintagel’s association with Arthur began in the twelfth century with Geoffrey of Monmouth. When excavation of the site began in the 1930s, many historians were quick to quell public excitement over the possibility that it may lead to some historical evidence of Arthur’s existence. Archaeologist Ralegh Radford declared that “No concrete evidence whatsoever has yet been found to support the legendary connection of the Castle with King Arthur.” But others were not so dismissive. In 1998, the discovery of a sixth-century stone carving sparked the imaginations of Arthurian scholars.
The artifact, which has become known as the Artognou Stone, is believed to have originated as a dedication stone for some building or structure, and later broken into two pieces, one of which was reused as part of a drain. The dating of the stone was due to its proximity to fifth- and sixth-century pottery excavated nearby, and the formation of its inscriptions, which are from that period. The top right-hand corner of the stone features a diagonal cross, bordered by letters on both sides. One of the letters is worn away. The other is an “A.” Below is the inscription, “PATTERN[-] COLI AVI FICIT ARTOGNOU,” which is translated as “Artognou descendant of Pattern[us] Colus made (this).” Some have suggested that Artognou is a variant of Arthur, though others see it as only a passing resemblance. Artognou, in Old Breton, literally means “Bear Knowing.”
Whether fact or fantasy, the Artognou Stone has drawn large numbers of both scholars and believers in the legend to Tintagel Castle. In 2010, 190,000 people visited the site. Some have suggested that St. Nectan’s Kieve, a pool beneath a waterfall on the Trevillet River, is where Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table were anointed before embarking on their quest for the Holy Grail.
A footpath connects Tintagel Castle with the hill reputed to have once held Camelot and King Arthur’s court. Known as Arthur’s Way, it is walked by thousands who believe that their steps trace those once taken by those men of legend.
Even if the excavations at South Cadbury fail to uncover the reality of the Once and Future King, they have dispelled the illusion that Arthur was the magical king of medieval romance. We can imagine him now, not as a monarch clad in gleaming armor parading through the stone halls, particolored pavilions, and painted towers of medieval Camelot, but as a stern warrior facing brutal sixth-century warfare, living in a stronghold built for defense rather than pleasure.
He does not wear a silver breastplate, but a leather cuirass; not a plumed helmet, but a close-fitting iron headpiece lined with leather. His breeches and boots are brown leather and his red woolen cloak, the only splash of color in an otherwise drab appearance, is fastened at his right shoulder with a bronze brooch of Celtic design. At his left side, he carries an iron sword in a leather scabbard; in his right hand he grasps the wooden shaft of an iron spear.
With this picture of Arthur in mind, the fanciful legends first appearing in the pages of Malory seem to contain a kernel of truth. Undeniably, a truth buried deep within a legend is nothing new, and in this connection the story of German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann is much to the point.
As a boy in the 1830s, Schliemann was fond of fables and legends. In particular, he loved the epic stories of Homer’s heroes, Achilles and Hector, Paris and Helen, and the city of Troy, capital of King Priam, which, after a ten-year siege by the Greeks, was captured, burned, and leveled. All his life Schliemann remembered a book about the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus that his father gave him when he was ten years old. He decided when he was grown up, he would go to Troy and excavate the legendary city.
Schliemann left school at fourteen and worked for five-and-a-half years in a grocery store, then became an office boy in Amsterdam and spent his spare time studying foreign languages, becoming fluent in Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He learned Russian to represent his company in St. Petersburg, and did so well there that he soon was in business on his own as an import-export merchant. He retired in 1863 at the age of forty-five and devoted himself to the mythical studies that captured his imagination as a child.
In 1868, he sailed for Greece, determined to prove that the scholars and experts who had relegated the Trojan epic to the world of fiction were wrong. He was as convinced - as he had been as a boy - that the Greece of Homer’s Iliad existed, that Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and Aeneas, were heroes who had lived and fought and died. Again and again, Schliemann read the Iliad, searching for clues that would lead him to Troy, following Homer’s directions as best he could. His trail led him to Hissarlik, a small town in western Turkey. There, ignoring ridicule and discomfort, Schliemann set 100 men to work digging. They uncovered the ruins of Priam’s city and traces of a civilization previously unknown to archaeology.
Schliemann’s faith and ability proved a legend can have its base in historical reality. So may it be some day with Camelot and the Arthurian legend. In the 1970s, English writer Beram Saklatvala made several suggestions to account for some of the legend’s varied details. He guessed that the source of the French book from which Malory claimed he had taken the story of the sword in the stone might have been a lost Latin chronicle in which this sentence or something similar appeared: “Arthur gladium ex saxo eripuit” – “Arthur drew, or seized, a sword from the stone.” This remarkable feat, Malory tells us, was beyond the power of other men and proved Arthur was the rightful king. This story and others like it induced Caxton to tell his readers that they were “at liberty to believe” Le Morte d’Arthur was not all true. But Saklatvala suggests the Latin phrase might be a mistaken copy of the record of an authentic fact.
The words that arouse disbelief are ex saxo, “from a stone.” Medieval clerks often omitted the letter “n” and showed the omission by a stroke drawn in above the next letter, so that ex saxoē, or ex saxone, would mean that Arthur took the sword from the Saxon rather than from the stone. Whether we are to interpret it that Arthur struck the sword from the hand of a much-feared Saxon warrior in combat, or that the Saxon is intended to mean the Saxon race whose ambitions were thwarted at Mount Badon, it is not hard to believe that such a victory would ensure Arthur the leadership of the British armies, if not the throne of the British kingdom in the West Country.
Saklatvala argues that the story of the other sword in the legend, Excalibur, may have passed into the realm of myth by a similar process. In Malory’s version of the tale, the sword appears in the midst of a lake of “fair water and broad,” and after the battle of Camlann, when Arthur instructs Sir Bedivere to return it to the waters, “there came an arm above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.” Geoffrey of Monmouth also writes of Arthur’s “peerless sword, forged in the Isle of Avalon,” which he calls Caliburn.
Saklatvala suggests an early chronicle showed Arthur obtaining his sword ex cale burno beside the river Cale, in which case its name and its connection with water would be readily explained. The Romans ascribed some of the merits of their swords to the quality of the water into which the blacksmith plunged the heated blades in order to temper them. The river Cale is within an hour’s ride of South Cadbury Castle.
Some scholars have refuted Saklatvala’s thesis. Apart from the fact that the medieval Latin word burna, “stream,” is recorded for the first time only around 1135, when Geoffrey was completing his History, the Somersetshire river Cale in his day was written Cawel; the spelling “Cale” does not appear until Elizabethan days. There is also doubt about whether the ex in Excalibur stands for the Latin word meaning “out of” or if it is just a prefix used to accentuate the first syllable as in the Old French form of the word “escalibor” - like that in “especial,” compared with “special
.”
The generally accepted derivation of the name of Arthur’s sword, according to Arthurian scholar R. S. Loomis, is Celtic rather than Latin. Excalibur’s name in the Welsh romances is Caledvwlch, based on the Welsh words calet, “hard,” and bwlch, “notch.” Loomis believed this was just a Welsh approximation of the name of another famous sword, renowned in Irish legends: Caladbolg, meaning “Hard Sword” or “Hard Sheath,” which was made by the fairies for an Ulster hero named Fergus. In one of these Irish sagas, the hero Fergus Mac Leite uses Caladbolg to do battle with a lake monster. Victorious, but mortally wounded, he begs his followers to give his sword only to another hero named Fergus, and to treasure it “that none other take it from you; my share of the matter for all time shall be this: that men shall rehearse the story of the sword.” There are obvious parallels here with Mallory’s story of Arthur, although no scholar has done more than point out the similarities.
The fact that the quest for Excalibur’s source leads back to Celtic myth is not surprising. It was natural that the defeated British people should imbue their greatest hero with legendary attributes that originally belonged to other heroes, or even gods. As Loomis put it: “Throughout the world’s history, clouds of legend have gathered about the heads of military leaders who have caught the imagination of a people. This happened to Alexander and Charlemagne, to Napoleon and Washington. For the Britons it was enough that Arthur inflicted a series of defeats on their heathen foes and staved off for a time their expulsion from what was to be England. . . . To this racial hero the Welsh and to some extent the Cornish attached a floating mass of native traditions, together with matter derived from Ireland and the Britons of the North. This they passed on to the Bretons, who shared their passionate devotion to the memory of Arthur, and the Bretons in turn, speaking French, were able by the fire and the charm of their recitals to captivate the imagination of the non-Celtic peoples. Thus, the obscure battle leader of a defeated race became the champion of all Christendom, his knights paragons of valor and chivalry, and the ladies of his court nonpareils of beauty.”
The legends attribute other weapons to Arthur as well, some whose origins and utility are more practical than Excalibur. At the Battle of Mount Badon, Arthur is said to have wielded a spear called Rhongomyniad, which translates to “spear, striker, slayer.” Another legend has Arthur slaying a witch with a dagger called Carnwennan, meaning “little white hilt.” And the sword with which Mordred killed Arthur at the Battle of Camlann was called Clarent – a sword of peace meant for knighting ceremonies, stolen by Arthur’s illegitimate son.
But there is no need to find historical parallels to believe in the reality of Arthur. We may believe nothing else in Le Morte d’Arthur, but the existence of its central figure is scarcely in doubt. We even may believe, as one historian said of the Glastonbury stories, that none of the Arthurian legends bears any relation to recorded facts, but the existence of those legends is in itself a fact.
Even now, after 1,500 years, new evidence could dispel the mists of legend and reveal an undeniable truth. Until then, we can piece together a biography of Arthur.
He was born around 475 into a well-to-do West Country family and given a Roman name, Artorius, in token of the family’s traditional loyalty to the empire. As a young man in the Christian kingdom of Ambrosius, the last Roman outpost in Britain, he showed a talent for leadership. He assumed responsibility for the defense of the kingdom on Ambrosius’ death. He formed and trained an effective cavalry, which fought in the traditional Roman style. He persuaded most of the British kings to accept him as their leader, a Count of Britain on the Roman model, and to appoint him commander.
With his own cavalry and whatever support he could gather, he traveled throughout Britain, attacking invaders in campaigns that took him from Chester in the west to the forests of Caledonia north of Hadrian’s Wall, and into lands occupied by the East Saxons and the North Angles. He gave his cause a Christian and Catholic tenor by invoking the protection of the Virgin Mary, yet he offended the Catholic Church by forcibly taking supplies from monasteries.
In 516, his enemies converged upon his defenses in the southwest, but at Mount Badon, somewhere near the Wansdyke, he led his cavalry against them, inflicting such an overwhelming defeat that peace reigned for fifty years. That peace was broken by a civil war in which Arthur and Mordred, the illegitimate son who sought to replace him, both were killed. For some twenty years, however, Arthur had been the recognized master of those parts of Britain not occupied by the Angles and Saxons. He was proclaimed king by his troops, and he held with his knights a court that later generations were to know as Camelot.
Once again, facts and speculations merge into myth, and we are left searching for that incontestable proof that someday may solve the riddle of Malory’s “great conqueror and excellent King.” He has meant something different to each generation: To one, he is a tyrant king; to another, a mighty warrior; to yet another, a ruler of a magical subterranean kingdom; to Malory, he is a hero, noble and tragic, and it is this image that has left the most lasting impression.
Yet even while Malory wrote, the temper of the times had changed. The world he described still had its appeal, even to Henry VIII, who boasted of his descent from Arthur through the Welsh princes to whom the Tudor family were distantly related and enjoyed jousts, tournaments, and sport of all kinds. But Henry was exemplar of knightly behavior, and in the upsurge of interest in classical literature and art, and the clash between Protestant and Catholic faiths that characterized the sixteenth century, the idea of medieval chivalry began to seem an anachronism. It was not just that new weapons had rendered knights obsolete; the practical and realistic Elizabethans tended to see them in terms of Cervantes‘ Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.
Some Elizabethans could - among them Edmund Spenser, whose The Faerie Queene, published at the end of the sixteenth century, combined the influences of the Renaissance with the antique legends of Britain. Spenser died without completing his work, but in a 1589 letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, he described his intentions: “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline. Which for that I conceived should be the most plausible and pleasing . . . I chose the historie of king Arthure, as most fit for the excellencie of his person, beeing made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the danger of envie, and suspicion of present time.” Following the style of Homer, Vergil, and the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser has labored to portray in Arthur “before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.”
Despite Spenser’s intention of making Arthur the hero of his work, the prince is more an incidental figure in the six books of The Faerie Queene; he plays no significant part in the adventures of the various knights and ladies. Spenser uses material from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, adapting or altering it to suit his purposes. He treats Arthur as a legendary figure rather than an historical one, an attitude that foreshadows that of many writers of the following century.
“Charles James Stuart Claims Arthur’s Seat” was a popular slogan at the coronation of James I in 1603. As the Stuart king of Scotland ascended the throne of England, poets boasted that, with Britain united under one crown, the prophecies of Merlin were fulfilled. Ben Jonson and Thomas Campion wrote masques and pageants celebrating James’ accession; Jonson planned an Arthurian epic. As the new monarch entered London, a complicated double British pedigree, claiming James’ direct descent from Arthur on both sides of his family, was displayed on two seventy-foot pyramids at the entrance to the Strand.
But the Arthurian golden age was a short one. James and his son Charles I believed they were divinely appointed to rule; Parliament, increasing in strength, grew more rebellious. The Stuart kings were poor representatives of the royal state, and those favoring Parliament and the English constitution began to scorn their ancestor, King Arthur, and look instead to Arthur’s ancient enemies, the Anglo-S
axons, as the real fathers of the country, language, and laws. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History was ridiculed; he had, according to one observer, “stuft himselfe with infinit Fables and grosse absurdities,” scoffed one Parliamentary sympathizer.
The poet Milton, fascinated by Italian romances and influenced by Spenser, planned an epic poem on “the kings of my native land, and Arthur, who carried war even into fairyland.” Later, as a staunch Puritan and supporter of Parliament, he not only abandoned Arthur as a subject for an epic but also, in his History of Britain, made every attempt to discredit the British hero, calling him “more renown’d in Songs and Romances, than in True stories.” Nennius he dismisses as “a very trivial writer,” and after a discussion of the Battle of Mount Badon, Milton sums up: “But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign’d in Britan, hath bin doubted heertofore, and may again with good reason.”
But after the Civil War and the bleak rule of Oliver Cromwell came the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the first new book on Arthur in many decades. John Dryden, a loyalist, wanted to produce an Arthurian epic poem that would popularize Stuart rule but was too busy writing plays to compose it. In 1691, he used the subject for an opera for which Henry Purcell supplied the music. This concentrates primarily on Arthur’s battles with the Saxons and makes Arthur and a Saxon prince rivals for the love of Emmeline, the blind daughter of the Duke of Cornwall. Arthur wins his bride, whose sight is restored by magic drops provided by Merlin.
It is ironic that the three greatest poets of the seventeenth century, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden planned epic poems on the subject of Arthur, but did not write them. Two massive Arthurian epics were composed, however, by King William III’s physician, Sir Richard Blackmore, who found the writing of epics “an Innocent Amusement to entertain me in such leisure hours which were usually past away before in Conversation and unprofitable hearing and telling of News.” He would have done better to confine himself to the news; he and his epics are known today only because a far better poet, Alexander Pope, labeled him “the everlasting Blackmore” who “sings so loudly and who sings so long.”
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