Encyclopaedia
ARTHUR
A vast body of (mainly) European literature from the 9th century to the present is associated with the name of this hero. According to the earliest records, he was an historical character of the 6th century, although it is not certain where in Britain he was active – the Old North or the south-west. In the Historia Brittonum (9th century), he is the leader of the kings of the Britons opposing the attacks of the Anglo-Saxons and 12 of his victories are listed. Gildas (c. 540) refers to the last of these, the battle of Badon Hill, as a great victory that halted the progress of the enemy, though without naming Arthur. His victory at Badon Hill is referred to in the Annales Cambriae under 516, and the battle of Camlan, ‘where Arthur and Medrawd fell’ is noted under 537.Nevertheless, it is difficult to speak with any greater certainty about the ‘historical’ Arthur other than that he may have been a military leader who succeeded, before his death at the battle of Camlan, in delaying the advance of the conquerors. This probably lay at the root of his appeal as an important figure in later poems and tales. The list of his victories may derive from a Welsh praise poem, and the Historia Brittonum contains two traditional topographic anecdotes about ‘the warrior Arthur’. The more important of these relates the story of Carn Cafall in Builth, a stone bearing the footprint of Cafall, Arthur’s hound, made during the hunting of porcum troit, namely Twrch Trwyth [or Trwyd], one of the central episodes of the tale ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’ (c. 1100) in The Mabinogion. This tale, together with a number of early Welsh poems, some saints’ lives and The Triads of the Island of Britain, are evidence for a body of tales about the leader of a band of wondrous warriors who free the land of dragons, giants and oppressions, and who plunder the Otherworld (Annwfn) of its treasures as they free a prisoner. ‘Preiddiau Annwfn’, a poem from The Book of Taliesin, is thought to have been composed sometime between 850 and 1150; it contains an account of an expedition by Arthur and his men against Annwfn. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138), was responsible for expanding Arthur’s ‘historical’ features and locating his court at Caerleon, rather than at the Celliwig of Welsh tradition, but it was in the French romances of the 12th century and later that the courtly Arthur and his knights developed as standards of chivalric behaviour - as portrayed in Welsh in the romances of ‘Peredur’, ‘Owain’ and ‘Geraint ac Enid’ (see Mabinogion, The). This is the picture that seized the imagination of writers and their audiences, especially after the publication of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in 1485. But even in the early texts Arthur is not consistently heroic and he receives a fair measure of criticism in saints’ lives. It appears that his character was a mixture of the heroic and comic, and ‘Breuddwyd Rhonabwy’ (see Mabinogion, The) is an early example in Welsh of Arthurian satire.
One element in the story, however, persisted strongly in popular tradition in Wales, Brittany and Cornwall. This was the messianic belief that Arthur had not died and would return one day to restore his nation’s freedom. The belief is suggested in a line in the 10th-century ‘Englynion y beddau’: ‘Anoeth bit bedd i Arthur’ (A wonder, or difficulty, of the world is [would be] a grave for Arthur). Throughout the Middle Ages and afterwards, there is clear testimony to the belief that Arthur had been carried to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds, or that he is asleep with his soldiers in a cave, awaiting the call to return. Arthur, the saviour who will return, ‘the once and future king’, is the most abiding figure in folklore, more so than the literary chivalric king. The purported discovery of his grave at Glastonbury in 1180 was an attempt to discredit the belief in his return. Thereafter, efforts were made to present him not as the enemy of the English but as a glorious ancestor of the English royal family.