King Arthur

• 1. Introduction

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  A warrior on the field of Y Gododdin has just slain three hundred enemies, and the poet praising him still cannot offer the highest compliment. "He was no Arthur," the verse concedes. The line is one of the most famous Welsh poetic references to a king who may never have drawn breath at all. King Arthur stands at the center of the Matter of Britain, the medieval literary tradition that made him a folk hero of post-Roman Britain. In Welsh sources he leads the Britons against the invading Anglo-Saxons in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Yet most historians who study that period do not believe he was a real person. How does a figure with no solid historical footing become the overlord of Wales, Cornwall and the North? Who decided he had a father named Uther Pendragon, a wife named Guinevere, a magician named Merlin, and a sword that would echo for nine hundred years? And why, century after century, did people insist he had never truly died?

• 2. The Missing King

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  Gildas wrote his polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae in the 6th century, within living memory of the Battle of Badon. He mentions the battle. He never mentions Arthur. That silence sits at the heart of the historical problem. Arthur appears in no surviving manuscript written between 400 and 820, and he is absent from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Bede, writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the early 8th century, also names Badon but credits the British victory to Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man whose parents had perished "in the storm" and who was "of the royal race." The first datable mention of Arthur comes in the Historia Brittonum, a 9th-century Latin compilation attributed in some late manuscripts to a Welsh cleric called Nennius. It lists twelve battles, culminating at Badon, where Arthur is said to have single-handedly killed 960 men. The 10th-century Annales Cambriae dates Badon to 516-518 and records the Battle of Camlann, where Arthur and Medraut both fell, to 537-539. These two texts long anchored the case for a real Arthur. Recent research has weakened that anchor. The Annales Cambriae grew from a chronicle begun in the late 8th century, and the Arthurian entries were likely added in the 10th century, with the Badon entry probably derived from the Historia Brittonum itself. The historian David Dumville put the skeptical case bluntly: "there is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories."

• 3. Bear, Star, Or Soldier

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  The Roman family name Artorius is the most widely accepted root for the Welsh name Arthur, though Artorius itself has an obscure and contested origin. The linguist Stephan Zimmer proposes a Celtic source, a Latinization of a hypothetical Artorījos drawn from an older patronym meaning "son of the bear/warrior-king." That root, arto-rīg, also gave the Old Irish name Artrí. A simpler-sounding theory derives the name from Welsh arth, "bear," plus a word for "man," but scholars reject it on phonological grounds. In Welsh poetry the name is always spelled Arthur and rhymes only with words ending in -ur, never -wr, which rules out "man" as the second element. A third idea, accepted by only a few professional scholars, looks to the sky. It traces Arthur to Arcturus, the brightest star in the constellation Boötes, near the Great Bear. The name means "guardian of the bear" in Ancient Greek, and Arcturus was seen as the leader of the other stars in Boötes. Even the early Latin texts hesitate over what kind of leader Arthur was. Neither the Historia nor the Annales calls him "rex." The Historia instead names him "dux bellorum," leader of wars, and "miles," soldier.

• 4. The Wonder-Tale Warrior

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  A gatekeeper bars a fortress door, and Arthur answers by reciting the names and deeds of his men, among them Cei and Bedwyr. The scene comes from "Pa gur yv y porthaur?", a poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen, and it shows an Arthur far stranger than the courtly king of later legend. A 2007 survey led by Caitlin Green identified three strands in this earliest material. In the first, Arthur is a peerless warrior who hunts monsters to protect Britain, facing giant cat-monsters, divine boars, dragons, dogheads, giants and witches. In the second, he is a figure of folklore and local wonder-tales, leading a band of superhuman heroes who live in the wild landscape. The third strand binds him to the Welsh Otherworld, Annwn, where he raids fortresses for treasure and frees prisoners. Poems attributed to Taliesin carry these threads further. "Preiddeu Annwn," "The Spoils of Annwn," recounts an expedition into that Otherworld, while "Marwnat vthyr pen" hints at a father-son bond between Arthur and Uther long before that relationship became standard. The saints' lives add a rougher edge. In the Life of Saint Cadoc, written around 1100 by Lifris of Llancarfan, Arthur demands a herd of cattle as wergeld for three slain soldiers; when he takes the animals, they turn into bundles of ferns.

• 5. The Book That Made A King

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  Around 1138, Geoffrey of Monmouth finished a book that would supply the skeleton of every Arthur story to follow. His Historia Regum Britanniae traced British kings from the Trojan exile Brutus to the 7th-century Cadwallader, and it gave Arthur his first full narrative life. Geoffrey made Arthur a descendant of Constantine the Great and conceived at Tintagel, where Uther, disguised by Merlin's magic as his enemy Gorlois, sleeps with Gorlois's wife Igerna. The fifteen-year-old Arthur succeeds his father, wins a series of battles ending at the Battle of Bath, then builds an empire across Ireland, Iceland, the Orkneys, Norway, Denmark and Gaul. Marching toward Rome, he learns that his nephew Modredus has married Guenhuuara and seized the throne. Arthur returns, kills Modredus on the river Camblam in Cornwall, and is carried mortally wounded to the isle of Avalon. Much of this was Geoffrey's own invention. He borrowed the twelve battles and the name Camlann from earlier sources, and lifted names like Cei, Bedwyr, Gwenhwyfar and Caledfwlch, the last becoming Excalibur, from Welsh tradition. But Brynley Roberts judged that "the Arthurian section is Geoffrey's literary creation and it owes nothing to prior narrative." A late-12th-century critic, William of Newburgh, said Geoffrey simply "made up" his tale through an "inordinate love of lying." The verdict did nothing to slow the book. Over 200 Latin manuscripts survive, along with 60 copies of the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd.

• 6. The Sidelined Sovereign

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  Chrétien de Troyes wrote five Arthurian romances between roughly 1170 and 1190, and in doing so he pushed Arthur to the margins of his own legend. In Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, he introduced Lancelot and the adulterous love affair with Guinevere, turning Arthur into a recurring cuckold. In Perceval, the Story of the Grail, he introduced the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, with Arthur again reduced to a small role. The French romances reshaped his character entirely. The fierce warrior who once laughed while slaughtering witches and giants became the roi fainéant, the do-nothing king. In the Mort Artu he turns pale and silent on learning of Lancelot's affair. In Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, he cannot stay awake after a feast and retires for a nap. Norris J. Lacy observed that despite these frailties, "his prestige is never, or almost never, compromised by his personal weaknesses." The 13th-century Vulgate Cycle, five Middle French prose works, formed the first coherent version of the whole legend. It made Mordred the child of incest between Arthur and his sister Morgause, and it established Camelot as his primary court. The whole tradition reached its summit in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485, the comprehensive English retelling that most later Arthurian works descend from.

• 7. The Long Silence And Return

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  By 1634, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur went to print for the last time in nearly 200 years. The end of the Middle Ages had drained the legend of its hold. The 16th-century humanist Polydore Vergil rejected the claim that Arthur ruled a post-Roman empire, to the horror of Welsh and English antiquarians, and the historical framework behind the whole Matter of Britain came under steady attack. For a time Arthur survived mainly as a political costume. Richard Blackmore's epics Prince Arthur and King Arthur, from 1695 and 1697, cast him as an allegory for William III against James II. The most popular Arthurian tale of the era was the comic story of Tom Thumb, set in Arthurian Britain but played for laughs. The revival came in 1816, when Malory was reprinted for the first time since 1634, carried forward by medievalism, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival. Alfred Tennyson became its central figure. His Idylls of the King, first published in 1859, sold 10,000 copies in its first week and reworked Arthur's life for the Victorian age, making him a symbol of ideal manhood undone by human weakness. Across the Atlantic the revival fed Mark Twain's satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889. The belief that Arthur never died had haunted the legend from the start. William of Malmesbury wrote in 1125 that "Arthur's grave is nowhere seen, whence antiquity of fables still claims that he will return." In 1191 a tomb was identified in an orchestrated discovery at Glastonbury Abbey, a find that quietly closed off the prophecy by producing his remains. After it, Arthur slipped into folk legend, found sleeping in remote caves and at times roaming the night as a spectre in the Wild Hunt.