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Anatomy of a Hero

- An Overview of the Development of the Arthurian Legend

Susi Vaasjoki
Proseminar
Spring 2001

Index Introduction Origins of Arthur Early reference A sketch of a historical Arthur Celtic tales Myth, fancy and men of war Cultural and literary influences Geoffrey of Monmouth The ideology of Geoffrey's Arthur The Historia as literature Arthur transplanted The French romances Chrétien de Troyes Behind the romance The Vulgate Cycle The Holy Grail The legend immortalised Morte Darthur Malory's world Conclusion Sources and links

Introduction

The study of what has been dramatically called "the Matter of Arthur" has captivated students and scholars for centuries. Ranked along with such historical giants as Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, Arthur's name is firmly established as a byword for greatness. In this company, Arthur has only one failing. Unlike Charlemagne or Alexander, Arthur is known to us only through an extensive, widely variable literary tradition. If there was once a man at the bottom of the myth, he hopelessly obscured by time, and layer upon layer of stories.

This essay will attempt to provide an overview of the development of the Arthurian tradition in the middle ages, and to make sense of the process that transformed the figure Nennius calls Arthur the Soldier into the knight king described by Malory. Developments in the tale will be explored with attention to both literary and sociohistorical aspects; while some changes can be assigned to innovation and many other elements traced to traditional tales which have, as Loomis puts it, "been drawn into the orbit of Arthur", certain shifts of emphasis can be attributed to the contemporary cultural climate.

For purposes of coherence, this essay will limit itself to a handful of authors and texts, and keep the main focus on the character of Arthur. While these parameters leave out many interesting works - such as the German romances Parzival and Tristram, the English Gawain and the Green Knight, and any discussion of non-European influences on Arthurian authors - the limited length of the paper demands that the scope of texts examined and the viewpoints applied be limited accordingly.

Origins of Arthur

Any analysis of development must at some stage ask the question, "Where did it all begin?". Very rarely can a satisfactory answer be provided, and sadly, this is doubly true in the case of Arthur, whose tale comes down to the modern reader through centuries of idealisation, literary fancy and the occasional outright fraud. Still, there are some fragments that, while far from providing a final answer, can at least provide a glimpse of what might have been at the root of the legend.

Early reference

One of the earliest mentions of Arthur's name is to be found in the Annales Cambriae - a historical document compiled c. 950, though it is generally accepted that the events were recorded much earlier and then merely copied to a later manuscript. In this chronicle, which lists events of great importance from the beginning of the 6th century onward, Arthur is mentioned in two separate entries:

LXXII. Annus. Bellum Badonis, in quo Arthur portavit crucem Domini nostri Jesu Christi tribus diebus et tribus noctibus in humeros suos et Britones victores fuerunt.
(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. )

XCIII. Annus. Gueith Camlann, in qua Arthur et Medraut corruere; et mortalitas in Brittania et in Hibernia fuit.
(The Battle of Camlann in which Arthur and Modred fell, and there was a plague in Britain and in Ireland. )

While scholars disagree on the precise dates of these battles, most are inclined to place them in the early 6th century, approximately 518 and 539 (Jenkins 28). This seems to go well enough with what we know from the 6th century historian Gildas, who claims in his De Excidio Britanniae that he was born in the year of the battle of Badon, which brought the Saxon invasion to an effective halt. However, Gildas makes no mention of Arthur. Many explanations have been offered for this, ranging from personal grievances (Caradoc's "Life of St Gildas" suggests that the historian's failure to mention Arthur is due to Arthur's slaying of Gildas' brother. The theory is doubtful, as Gildas is notorious for not naming names, and it is unlikely that he had a personal grievance with all the people he declined to identify) to ideological bias. Among the more plausible suggestions is Knight's theory that Gildas systematically omitted the names of all figures who were not both Roman and Christian. Even at the time of its forming, the tale of Arthur was subject to ideological manipulation (Knight 8).

A more generous account of Arthur is provided by Nennius' Historia Brittonum, written c. 830 by an undiscriminating process the author describes as "heaping together all I have found in Roman annals and in the chronicles of the holy fathers" (Gransden 6). After describing the beginning of the Saxon invasion in Britain, Nennius states that "Arthur fought against them in those days, with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was the leader of the battles." (Jenkins 30). He goes on to name the sites of twelve battles fought by Arthur, among them Mount Badon. In Nennius we also find a section devoted to Mirabilia, the marvels of Britain, including a description of the unmeasurable grave of Arthur's son, and the footprint left in stone by Arthur's hound Cabal while hunting the boar Troit. Along with his history, Nennius provides a few morsels of the myth already coalescing around the figure of Arthur (Loomis 19).

A sketch of a historical Arthur

With a little educated guesswork, a picture begins to emerge. The handful of historical sources we have from the period agree that a man called Arthur lead Briton forces in battle against Saxon invaders with remarkable success in the early 6th century. Rather than king, Nennius gives this Arthur's title as dux bellorum, leader of battles, and on several other occasions refers to him as Arthur miles, Arthur the Soldier. Jenkins argues that though the wholesale slaughter of Saxons described by Nennius borders on hyperbole, the numbers are plausible when applied to the leader of a cavalry unit. The assumption is backed by the fact that the sites identified from Nennius' list of battles are spread over an area which could only have been covered by a highly mobile force (30-31).

Rather than the accustomed picture of a knight king, this series of educated guesses leaves us with a sketchy image of a remarkably skilled 6th century cavalry general. While this may seem anticlimactic, it is not unreasonable to assume that sustaining Britain in the face of invading Saxon forces was what gave the name of Arthur its first bid at immortality. Still, it must be noted that this evidence is far from conclusive. Nennius is notorious for mixing fancy with his facts, and Gildas equally so for neglecting names. Still, both mention the battle of Badon, also found in the Annals in connection to Arthur. As all other people named in the Annals can be verified as historical, Jenkins suggests that it is likely that Arthur and Modred too are more than fictions - but as critics of a historical Arthur will point out, likely is a long way from certain. Barring some unforeseeable discovery, we will never know for sure.

Whether or not one accepts these accounts as authentic, the fact still remains that the first literary accounts of Arthur are as a soldier opposing the Saxon menace. In this light it is mildly amusing that by the 12th century, this had all but disappeared from the Arthurian tradition, giving way to the courtly airs of French romances. Part of the blame can be laid on the Celtic tales, as in Knight's words "neither history nor nationalism was part of the secular British world" (7).

Celtic tales

The earliest mentions of Arthur in an purely literary context come down to us in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a Welsh manuscript collection which dates from the 12th century, but which contains works attributed to periods as early as the 6th century. Among the earliest is Y Gododdin, a heroic poem in which the protagonist’s skill as a warrior is described with the words “he glutted the black ravens on the wall of the fort, though he was no Arthur”. Short as it is, this brief reference to Arthur as the nonpareil of warriors gives a fair taste of how the early Celtic tales depicted him.

Myth, fancy and men of war

As Knight says, in the Celtic tradition of storytelling nationalism and history were far outweighed by the mythical and the fanciful. So, while clerical histories were content to describe Arthur as an extraordinarily successful commander, secular tales soon stepped beyond the bounds of realism and began the process of steeping the tale in the rich body of Celtic lore (7-8).

The most substantial piece of Arthuriana found in the Black Book is the poem Pa Gwr (“What man?”), supposedly dated around the 10th century. The poem consists of a dialogue between Arthur and a gate-warden, who will not let Arthur’s warband pass before all its members have been identified. The poet names the companions of Arthur and describe their individual peculiarities and feats of bravery. As per tradition, the praise heaped on each man borders on the ridiculous. Cai, the prototype for the romances’ inefficient and ill-tempered Sir Kay, is described as a warrior far greater than Chrétien or Malory give him credit for:

Heavy was his vengence, / painful was his fury. / When he would drink from a horn / he would drink enough for four. / When he came into battle, / he would slay enough for a hundred. / Unless it were God who accomplished it, / Cai's death were unattainable. (Lines 68-75; Sims-Williams 1991, p.43)

However, besides the expected warriors (two of which – Cai and Bedwyr – survive the transition into the romances) the poet also recounts a number of figures such as Manawydan son of Llyr, commonly identified as the sea god of pagan Ireland. The message is obvious. Between the time the Annals and Pa Gwr were set to paper, Arthur had evolved from a simple soldier into a leader prestigious enough to command the loyalty of Celtic gods. (Loomis 19-20)

Another poem, Preiddeu Annwn (the Spoils of Annwn), puts an even sharper focus on Arthur as the stuff of legends. Contained in the book of Taliesin, it describes a raid lead by Arthur to the Otherworld to steal the magical cauldron of Annwn.

If Pa Gwr can be seen as a textbook case of heroic hyperbole in action, Preiddeu Annwn is an image of the eerie mythical quality equally characteristic to tales of the Otherworld, in Celtic tradition a strange mingling of elysian qualities with dark strangeness.

Cultural and literary influences

Though first translated by Lady Guest in 1849 as part of the Mabinogion, Culhwch and Olwen was supposedly written down c. 1100, though Knight speculates on it being much older. It is one of the few complete Arthurian stories in the Celtic tradition. Loomis takes a special interest in the way that the framework of the tale – prince Culhwch wooing Olwen, the giant Yspaddaden’s fair daughter, with the aid of his cousin Arthur – seems to incorporate a number of traditional stories. Arthur’s hunt of the boar Twrch Trwyth appears to recall a similar hunt in Nennius’ Mirabilia, and the daring raid to obtain the cauldron of the Irish king seems much like a more prosaic version of the raid in Preiddeu Annwn. Several parallels are drawn which seem to foreshadow the romance – the hero is related to Arthur, love is his prime motivation, and his ultimate reward after completing the quests that form the bulk of the narrative is a beautiful wife. Loomis even comments on several similarities between this story and Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, but admits that it is very unlikely that Chrétien had access to the Welsh manuscript (24-27).

Knight takes another approach entirely. Instead of literary traditions, he contrasts the tale with the period it is attributed to, in an attempt to make sense out of features that a modern reader interprets as mere quaint idiosyncrasies. According to Knight, Celtic society was ruled by a warrior caste, that bolstered its power over the farming caste by surrounding themselves with warbands; Arthur is naturally identified with the dominant class, and by the magnificence of his followers (described very similarly to the band in Pa Gwr), is transformed from a mere general into the “chief of princes on this isle”. The boar-hunt and the raid on the Irish king, while simple fantasy to a modern reader, must have been quite sensible to a contemporary audience, as both hunting and raiding neighbours were established ways of proving courage and acquiring wealth. Ties of kinship and unity inside the warband are emphasised, as both are essential in maintaining the dominance of the warrior caste. Finally, Knight claims that the cultural importance of obtaining Olwen as a bride stems from the threat of infertility posed by Culhwch’s stepmother’s curse. A warchief without sons to strengthen his warband was tragically diminished in stature (13-20).

These analyses, though radically different, are by no means mutually exclusive. They even agree on some points, most importantly on the portrayal of Arthur. In Culhwch and Olwen, and in the Celtic tradition in general, Arthur is inseparable from myth; he is the ultimate warrior, almost superhuman in skill and godlike in stature. His followers are attributed fantastic and supernatural abilities, and often act independently of their leader, but still there are tasks that only Arthur can accomplish. In Culhwch and Olwen, it is Arthur who finally defeats the Black Witch after the best of his warriors have been humiliated at her hands.

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Of all the accounts of Arthur, the one contained in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae is the most disputed. Probably written in 1136, the work provides Britain with a legendary founder – one Brutus of Troy – and goes on to describe a succession of British kings that even contemporary authorities deemed an outright fraud. Though Geoffrey claims such sources as Gildas, Nennius and Bede, the bulk of his material is supposedly from a “certain very old book written in the British language”. This source is now commonly thought a figment of Geoffrey’s admittedly fertile imagination (Gransden 201-203).

Regardless of the Historia’s dubious facts, Knight has good cause to dub it the world’s first international best-seller; it survives in over 200 manuscripts, 50 of them from the 12th century. This amazing popularity is attributed mainly to its patriotic appeal – it provides the Britons with a glorious past – and to its entertainment value. While Geoffrey’s integrity as a historian can be questioned, his ingenuity in catering to the tastes of his time is unassailable. Gransden puts it bluntly: “Geoffrey was a romance writer masquerading as a historian. No historian today would object to him if he had avowedly written a historical novel" (Gransden 202, 204-206).

The ideology of Geoffrey’s Arthur

The Arthur of the Historia is very different from his Celtic counterpart. Rather than a quasimythical warlord, Geoffrey’s Arthur is a thoroughly sensible military king. His early career is marked by a succession of conquests, not only over the Picts but also over substantial areas in mainland Europe. As he holds court at Caerleon-on-Usk to celebrate his success, a demand for tribute arrives from Rome; Arthur refuses the demand, embarks on a furious campaign and ultimately slays the emperor in single combat. His victory, however, is short-lived. Modred has used the king’s absence to seize both Arthur’s throne and Guinevere, already established as Arthur’s queen in the Celtic tradition. Arthur returns and slays Modred, but is himself mortally wounded and carried to Avalon to be healed.

The tale of Arthur occupies a full fifth of the Historia. This was the first recorded attempt at a complete biography of Arthur, and in literary terms, it proved a huge success. According to scholars, this was no accident. Though the mythology Geoffrey creates seems to suggest Briton patriotism, Gransden states a number of points on which his Arthur is obviously tailored to suit a contemporary Norman template. These include the fact that Arthur is endowed with all the qualities desirable in a Norman king, and that the list of his conquests in Scotland and Europe is suspiciously similar to the territorial aspirations of William the Conqueror (Gransden 206-207).

Knight offers a similar opinion, and goes on to suggest that in fact, the entire Arthurian section of the Historia can be seen as a euphemistic apology for Norman rule in Britain. Geoffrey goes to some trouble to establish the Normans – not the Welsh or the Anglo-Saxons – as the true heirs of Arthur, the supreme overlord (44). Furthermore, the eventual fall of Arthur is brought about by the treachery of his Regent, leading to civil war. This, Knight argues, is a threat any Norman aristocrat could identify with. Norman power rested heavily on their trained, well-equipped warriors, and in such a society, the idea of an internal rift turning this destructive potential in on itself must have been truly terrifying (52, 59-60).

In the light of this evidence, claims of the Historia being a deliberately ideological work do seem justified. Finally, Gransden points out that the author’s multiple dedications of his work to the powers-that-were suggest certain social ambitions (204, 208-209). Although this apparent bias further undermines Geoffrey as a credible historian, it sheds some light on the reasons he may have had to construct his Arthur in an image designed to curry favour with the Anglo-Norman nobility.

The Historia as literature

Though its historical value is debatable, the Historia remains of considerable interest to scholars and students of Arthuriana. While doing away with the hyperbole and mythical connections seen in Pa Gwr or Preiddeu Annwn, it has drawn on other sources to create a mythology of its own. A great deal of the work is innovative, if not wholly original, and preserved in later versions of the story.

In the Historia, Arthur is conceived under glamour; his father Uther Pendragon uses an enchantment placed on him by Merlin to fool Ygrane of Cornwall in to thinking he is her husband Gorlois. The hero’s end is equally mysticised, as the dying king is carried of to Avalon, leaving his people to await his return as prophesied by Merlin – an echo of the tradition that Arthur’s grave is forever unknown. While Geoffrey was careful to present his king as a Norman monarch whose power rested on solid conquests and military might rather than the nonsensical quests of a Celtic hero, he has not erased all traces of the old tradition. Midway through the campaign against Rome the author injects an apparently unrelated giant-slaying adventure, which strongly resembles a Celtic monster fight (Knight 58-59).

Loomis speculates at length on the sources Geoffrey drew his Arthurian material from. The prophecies of a young Merlin to Vortigern he traces to the tale of the prophetic boy in Nennius; the begetting of Arthur on Ygrane at Tintagel to a Cornish legend; the tale of Modred’s treachery to a tradition that had sprung up around the battle of Camlann, so elusively mentioned in the Annales Cambriae. The model for Arthur’s court at Caerleon-on-Usk Loomis finds in reality, in the coronation festivities of king Stephen (36-37).

The Caerleon passage is of special interest in the sense that here we find not only the first mention of a tournament in England, but also a reference to the ladies of the court insisting that men prove their worth in battle before granting their favour. Both, Geoffrey states, were made better by this, as it kept the ladies chaste and the knights courageous. Though the Historia is not a romance per se, it seems to briefly take on the characteristics on one in that this episode portrays a variant of courtly love as an ennobling and refining force (Loomis 38, Knight 62).

Arthur transplanted

Though Geoffrey's ideological manoeuvring must have done a great deal for the fame of the Arthurian tradition, its spread cannot be attributed to him alone. The Historia came about in a time when, it has been suggested, the Anglo-Norman nobility had lost touch with its Frankish roots and was ready to adopt a non-Germanic hero such as Arthur to fill the void; it was also extensively translated and adapted. One of these adaptations (by Wace, who in 1155 set it in French couplets, added even more contemporary detail in fashion and conduct, and toned down Geoffrey's sometimes graphic violence to a level acceptable to a French audience) contains the first literary mention of the Round Table, which according to the author was already famous in the oral tradition of the time.

Wace, in turn, was translated and greatly expanded on by the alliterative poet Layamon, producing the first Arthurian work in vernacular English. In terms of originality, Layamon's Brut contributed a prophetic dream (probably traditional) foretelling Modred's treachery and adultery with Guinevere, and declared that fairies presided over Arthur at birth. It also contained a particularly gruesome variation of the Round Table -story told by Wace: whereas Wace's Arthur merely broke up a squabble over seating arrangements, Layamon's version has the king decreeing that the man who started the fight shall be drowned a mere, and that his male relatives will have their heads and his female relatives their noses cut off. The table itself, which in Wace was specially ordered to prevent quarrels among the knights, is donated by a carpenter some time later. Layamon's narrative presents Arthur as a great man and model Christian, but it also has a vicious streak, especially apparent in its descriptions of the slaughter of Saxon invaders (Loomis 42-43).

That native Britons should exalt in Arthur's devastation of Saxon forces is quite understandable - but to find a Saxon author, as is the case with Layamon, lingering on the gory details of Saxon corpses is somewhat puzzling. Knight supposes that in the peace following the halt of the Saxon invasion, the Germanic tribes lost most of their aggressive edge and were gradually integrated with the native population. By the 10th century their descendants had come to regard themselves as fundamentally "English", and so had no ethnic qualms to distract them when faced with tales of a heroic warrior slaughtering their ancestors.

Loomis suggests another theory for the fame of Arthur abroad, one which may well have paved the way for the Historia and its offshoots. In the time of the Saxon invasion, emigrants fled to the continent and settled in Brittany. However, they retained contact with their insular cousins; Loomis attributes the spread of Arthurian legend to the mainland mostly to this contact. As the emigrants and their descendants became bilingual, they could well have passed the tales told by their insular kin on to French minstrels, eager for a new source of stories to feed the bored aristocracy. The fantasy and romance already present in Celtic Arthuriana, revised and housebroken to French tastes, could well have been welcomed as an alternative to the more traditional tales of Charlemagne's wars. Certainly minstrels had introduced Arthur into the oral tradition of the continent long before the emergence of major written romances (32-33).

The French romances

So far, we have looked at the origins, the early stages and the first major ideological shift in the Arthurian legend; in it, we see very little that is familiar. That is about to change. The tale of Arthur as known today owes much of its central imagery to the French romancers - in particular to Chrétien de Troyes.

The romances differ from the earlier tradition in that they were often products of commission rather than spontaneous creativity. Their acknowledged function was to please and to entertain, and their main patrons were among the French baronial class. Though written in the same period and a similar cultural climate as the Historia, the different purpose and audience of the romances caused them to develop in a direction very different from Geoffrey's work, or the Celtic tales they often used as models.

Chrétien de Troyes

Though by no means the only French romancer to take up the matter of Arthur, Chrétien de Troyes was undoubtedly the most successful. From what we know, he began his work around 1170, and wrote 5 moderately long Arthurian novels in octosyllabic couplets. The last - the first known tale using the Grail motif - was left unfinished due to his death, though four different continuations have been written by other authors (Loomis 67). It is Chrétien we have to thank for the modern association of Arthur with tournaments, courtly love and knightly graces; where previous Arthurs were warriors first and foremost, Chrétien declares his (or at least his employer's) alternate set of priorities by saying that Arthur ruled, according to Knight's paraphrase "in the olden times before love and courtesy were debased to their modern state" (Knight 69).

Like many romancers, Chrétien drew heavily on the Celtic tradition for material - though it is possible that the material came to him through conteur stock rather than directly. Yvain, or Le Chevalier au Lion (The Knight With the Lion), contains a number of elements traceable to Celtic sources; in the broadest sense, the plot itself can be seen as a version of a Celtic kingship fable, where the hero achieves wealth and power through a woman connected to water and possessed of supernatural abilities or associations (Knight 83). In Yvain's case, the woman is Laudine, whose realm is guarded by a magical spring. Yvain wins her by defeating the knight - her husband - who guards the spring. Yvain himself can be traced to Owain, son of Urien - a verified historical figure from the age of Arthur who fought the invading Angles and earned legendary status in his own right; it was only later that he became absorbed into the Arthurian tradition as one of Arthur's knights (Loomis 59).

Perhaps better known is Chrétien's Lancelot, also known as Le Chevalier de la Charrette (The Knight on the Cart). Supposedly commissioned and co-written by Mary of Champagne, it is the first text we have recounting the affair of Lancelot and Guinevere. Lancelot is a late-comer in the Arthurian tradition, but by the author's treatment of his subject, it appears that by the time this piece was written, the relationship between him and Guinevere was firmly established in minstrel stock; Lancelot is named very late in the tale, and for a long while all references to his involvement with the queen are made in a way that would quite probably be incomprehensible to an audience not already familiar with the idea (Jenkins 81).

As a romance by Chrétien, Lancelot peculiar reading. While other works, like Yvain, Cligés and Erec feature realistic emotions on part of the characters, the reactions of Lancelot and Guinevere take the demands of courtly love to ridiculous extremes. Guinevere capriciously commands her lover to lose at a tournament two days running, before allowing him to win a fabulous victory on the third; Lancelot swoons with the best of Victorian ladies upon discovering a few lost strands of Guinevere's hair. It has been argued, quite plausibly, that the reason for this is a deliberate choice to burlesque the tale as a skit on the concept of courtly love; whatever the truth of the matter, contemporaries received it with enough seriousness that later tales incorporate the same ridiculous standards of devotion with a perfectly straight face (Loomis 51, 54).

Behind the romance

According to Knight, the romantic tradition flourished in an age characterised by the expansion of the aristocracy due to a long period of peace and prosperity. This lead on one hand to increased tensions within the noble ranks, and on the other to the adoption of primogeniture (i.e. succession of the eldest) as a means of inheritance, to avoid dividing the property between multiple heirs. The result, somewhat simplified, was an excess of adventurous young noblemen either waiting for their fathers and brothers to die, or seeking a wealthy, marriageable heiress to provide them with lands and titles in their own right. To these young aspirants, blatantly wish-fulfilling tales such as Yvain promised at least the possibility of a better tomorrow (74-77).

Romantic influence, however, went far beyond a coating of 12th century chivalric ideals and fantasies of wealth. One of the major changes induced by the romancers is the demilitarisation of Arthur. From the towering figure of the Celtic tales and the Historia, the romances reduced him to a mere background character, on the periphery of the action but rarely directly involved, and never in the centre of things. The active parties were now Arthur's knights; the king himself was reduced to a revered but essentially ineffectual stage prop. Kay, here named as Arthur's seneschal, suffers a similar fate. Where Cai in Culhwch and Olwen was a man of fiery temper and great deeds, the romance Kay is merely ill-tempered, abusive and completely incompetent as a knight.

Knight has a good deal to say about this. The romances were favoured and funded by the higher aristocracy, who respected kingship, but also feared the power of an active and forceful king. Emphasising chivalry and Arthur's status as "first among equals" defused this threat without damaging the prestige of kingship; besides a symbol of unity among the knights, Knight sees the Round Table as a symbol of reduced kingship. The transformation of Kay is likewise politically motivated; the seneschal was the instrument of the king's power, and so making him inept and uncourteous enabled heroes to defeat him in both fields of chivalry - physical prowess and courteous behaviour (77-79). Finally, he states that this twin ideal, the very heart of chivalry, served mainly to conceal the essentially oppressive nature of knighthood (in Yvain exemplified by the fact that Yvain achieves power by slaying a knight and appropriating his wife and lands) and to provide a fiction of social superiority over the increasingly wealthy but still unchivalric merchant class. As for the reality of chivalry, Knight is content to cite a fellow scholar saying it is very unlikely that chivalric code was ever enforced outside the pages of a novel.

If Knight's analysis is to be believed, the romancers of the 12th century were cunning fellows indeed. While he makes a good case, and while his theory of love and courtliness as a means of sanitising the aggressive actions of the characters makes very much sense from a modern viewpoint, as far as deliberate planning goes, one is tempted to reflect on exactly how far contemporaries actually rationalised their literature.

The Vulgate Cycle

By the early 13th century, Arthur had become a mainstay of romancers everywhere. Whether this is the reason for the compilation of the Vulgate cycle, we can only guess; still, as a compilation of all previous Arthurian material, it merits a mention.

Sources are rather careful in their statements concerning the origins of the Vulgate cycle. Loomis dates it between 1210 and 1230; the authors are unknown, but supposed to be monks, possibly Cistercian, from the Champagne or Burgundy area. It incorporates material from nearly every previous French romance - especially the work of Chrétien de Troyes - and includes several elements of undefined origins. Most often these are attributed to oral tradition, but innovation on part of the authors has not been ruled out. The writing is uneven, presumably due to the multiple authors and the wide variety of sources; the whole, however, is surprisingly coherent (92-93).

Among the more notable changes established in the Vulgate is Lancelot's upbringing. Here, he is presented as a French prince, abducted at birth by a water-fairy who raises him - hence the name Lancelot du Lac, "of the Lake". In this version, the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere is consummated only after Arthur has first dishonoured his marriage vows; still, Guinevere decries her plight with a voice more anguished than anything Chrétien's Guinevere would have been capable of (93-95). In the Vulgate we also find the first mention of Lancelot as the father of Galahad, the virgin knight. This is one of the points which has been attributed alternately to innovative writing, or a tradition of Lancelot fathering an illegitimate child that predates Chrétien's Lancelot (97). A particularly notorious bit of the tale also makes its first appearance in the Vulgate Arthur; the idea that Modred, the main cause of Arthur's downfall, was Arthur's incestuous son.

The Holy Grail

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Vulgate cycle is its lengthy account of the mysterious Grail. A full two of the five books are devoted to an account of the history and the quest for this legendary object.

The Grail motif first appeared in Perceval, or Le Conte del Graal, by Chrétien de Troyes; whether it originated with him is debatable, as the author himself claims to have taken the plot directly from a book given to him by Philip of Flanders. Many scholars, including Loomis, find this likely; while Chrétien is characteristically a very solid author, in this work he often seems as mystified as his audience is by the twists of the narrative (60, 62). Be this as it may, any possible source text is now lost to us, and survives only in Chrétien's perplexed account of the Maimed or Fisher King at the Grail Castle, and the procession that marches through the hall carrying a bleeding lance and the platter-like dish that the author identifies as the graal. The meaning of this sequence was never clarified by the author, as the work was completed by others.

Confused as it was, this account of the Grail fascinated authors and audiences enough to be immediately adopted as a central feature of the legend. By the compiling of the Vulgate cycle, it had not only been revised into a more coherent form by romancers such as the German Wolfram von Essenbach and his Parzival; it had also acquired a history of origin.

The Vulgate Cycle's History of the Holy Grail makes the auspicious claim of being written by Christ himself. Essentially, it relates the prehistory of the Grail, describing it as a vessel used in the last supper and transported by Joseph of Arimathea to Britain, where it was watched over by his descendants. This has nothing to do with Chrétien's original, but Loomis claims to find several Celtic echoes in this legend, and in its continuation, the Quest for the Holy Grail (119-120).

As for the origins of the Grail motif, no satisfactory account exists. Loomis has written at length on the subject, suggesting that the foremost Arthurian symbol of Christianity in fact derives from an amalgam of Celtic myths. Among these he numbers the tale of Bran, son of Llyr, who was wounded in a manner similar to the Fisher King and possessed a magical drinking horn - two French romances give the custodian of the Grail the name Bron, and the name of his castle, Corbenic, could conceivably be a scribal corruption of cor benoit, blessed horn. Loomis also notes that in several tales, the Grail is credited with serving each man with the food he desires most. In Celtic tales this property is shared by the platter of Rhydderch (62-63).

The legend immortalised

After a variety of alternate treatments in the hands of romancers and poets on either side of the Canal, the tale of Arthur finally found its way to Sir Thomas Malory. If Chrétien can be credited with establishing some of the most central themes of the legend, Malory deserves to be named as the man who established the pattern that the bulk of later works follow. The Vulgate cycle merely collected Arthuriana; in Malory, it is canonised. Part of the credit may be due to its timing. Completed c. 1470, just as printing was coming into general practice, Malory's Morte Darthur reached a wide audience faster that any Arthurian text before.

The time Malory's Arthur hails from differs radically from the golden age of romances. By the 15th century the mounted knight had lost his significance as a force on the battlefield and the hierarchical feudal society that first spawned the romance had degenerated into bastard feudalism, driven by financial and contractual arrangements, rather than estate. The imagery of Arthur no longer corresponded to contemporary fashion and ideals; it was increasingly becoming the vaguely nostalgic imagery of a simpler past. Of the history that might have started the legend, little if anything remained in the amalgam of Celtic fancy and French chivalry.

As an Arthurian author, Malory cuts an unlikely figure. From what we presume to know he was a knight himself, but was at various stages of his life jailed for assorted offences; indeed, his epic was composed in a prison cell. Still, in deference the turbulent Lancastrian-Yorkist politics of his time, it has been suggested that a number of the charges were motivated by political enmities rather than actual misdeeds (Knight 106).

Morte Darthur

For all that Malory created his epic in prison, he seems to have had access to an extraordinary amount of sources. Loomis identifies nine different source texts, among them several parts of the Vulgate Cycle, a biography of Merlin that derives from it, and from English poetry both the alliterative and stanzic Morte Arthur (169-70). The possibility exists that he also had access to a lost Welsh romance, Gareth; Loomis supports this view. Malory's work drew heavily on existing sources, and Knight acknowledges that in this light, it is unlikely that Sir Gareth's Tale would suddenly depart from this pattern. Still, he notes that it is possible. Even if the chapter is original to Malory, it still bears a great structural similarity to Chrétien's Yvain (120, 122).

Original or not, Malory is responsible for organising existing materials into the shape most modern readers associate with the Arthurian legend. All the major hallmarks of the tradition, previously scattered over a host of texts are here collected into a single epic: Arthur's ascension by drawing the sword from the stone; his receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake; the Grail-quest, where Lancelot, because of his sins, is refused the Grail but his son Galahad attains it, and Perceval is accepted as its keeper; the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere; and the scene where the dying king bids sir Bedivere to cast Excalibur into the mere, and is carried to Avalon. These individual elements were shaped by Malory into what could be called canonical form.

Whether or not Malory's work was originally conceived as a whole, or as individual tales, is a matter of scholastic debate. If one subscribes to the former view, its early parts are best described as groundwork establishing the glorious setting that following chapters will disrupt and finally destroy. In this part of the work, the young Lancelot is presented as the model of knightly prowess and courtesy; he admires Guinevere, but holds himself to a strict code of celibacy. Gawain, Arthur's nephew, is established as very valiant but somewhat over-ferocious in his pursuit of glory; Arthur himself is to some extent revived from the marginal role assigned to him in early romances, but does not regain the singularly active and unsurpassable status he held in Celtic legend.

Throughout the tale, it is Lancelot who proves the most interesting of the characters. Where previous romances described Lancelot either as a shameless adulterer or a knight of unmatched ability, but nonetheless subject to a tragic passion, Malory combines the two with a good deal of psychological success. His Lancelot starts out an idealist, but as he is no Galahad, he succumbs to temptation. He feels shame for his adultery, but defends himself with the arrogance of a man justifiably dubbed the best knight in the world; still, when called to lay hands on a man whose wounds can only be healed by a knight described by the very same words, Lancelot humbly pleads God to heal the man, if that is His wish, for he himself could never hold such power. Malory's Lancelot is neither the flawless champion nor the immoral villain seen in previous romances. He is arrogant and susceptible to temptation, but even as a sinner he is still by courtesy and courage the greatest knight in the world.

Malory's world

Malory's Arthuriad has been published in two versions: Morte Darthur, a title coined by the printer Caxton, and The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, printed in 1934. Of these, the latter is supposed to present a earlier version, which Malory at some stage edited to produce the version printed by Caxton. The division of the work into eight independent tales has been the source of much debate; several scholars, Knight included, have argued that the tales can be seen as a coherent whole (Knight 105). Loomis disagrees here, and points out that character personalities and the style and tone of the narrative vary widely from tale to tale. He suggests that as Malory was writing in prison and had no guarantee of being able to finish his work, it is plausible that each tale was designed to stand alone, even though the author may have had a larger frame in mind while working on each part (Loomis 171-173).

Where romance knights quested for personal glory and gains, in the first half of the tale, Malory's knights act more like a police force upholding a Christian peace. The impression is of an orderly, unified nation controlled by the aristocracy - not too far from the true situation in the 15th century, as keeping the peace was a constant challenge for the monarch, and often he was forced to rely on wealthy lords to police their own regions. Still, while the knights' exploits are marked by a tendency to uphold order, at times they may contribute to or even initiate unrest (Knight 112-113). The most blatant example of this is the ruin of Arthur, which comes about largely because of the rift created between Arthur and Lancelot when Guinevere's adultery is revealed, and is made worse by Gawain's anger over the death of his brother at Lancelot's hands.

This shift of emphasis, Knight says, is typical to Malory and his period. Arthur still falls in battle against Mordred, but the effects of external treachery are made immeasurably worse by internal strife. This is clearly analogous of the rivalries among contemporary aristocrats during the War of the Roses - a theme also referred to by the detail that instead of Saxons, Arthur's battles are fought against petty, squabbling kings. In many aspects, Malory's knights show the influence of the privatisation of society; they act independently of Arthur and of each other, they are motivated by personal agendas and emotions, and private shame is a chastising feature as powerful as the more traditional public sense of honour. Nevertheless, in Malory this powerful individualism is also endowed with the power to greatly harm the unity of the state (Knight 128, 142-143).

Conclusion

Shortly after Malory's time began the decline of the Arthurian legend. Romances became unfashionable, and were often condemned as adulterous bawdry, outright manslaughter and generally a bad influence on the young. Geoffrey's Historia, however, maintained its prestige as an authoritative source into the 16th century - partly, it has been suggested, because the Tudors supported their claim to the throne by tracing their lineage to Arthur, and Geoffrey's writings were the main means of corroborating this.

After centuries of neglect, the legend owes its resurrection from obscurity mostly to Tennyson and his Idylls of the King. This work, heavily indebted to Malory, re-established the tale of Arthur as a literary theme, and encouraged others to go where few had been since the beginning of the Renaissance. Today's Arthurian tradition is rapidly rediscovering its roots. Several authors of fiction, among them Bernard Cornwell, have attempted to recreate the myth of Arthur in the image of the 6th century; others, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, have turned the tables on the blatantly male-dominated medieval romances, and shifted the emphasis to female characters. In works such as these, the tradition of a literary Arthur lives on, shaped by the time it stems from.

Sources and links

Most of the original texts have been taken from the internet. Regrettably, many of them lacked proper documentation of the source. In my listing, I have included a URL, and what other information was available.

Annales Cambriae. Online. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cambrian.htm

Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Trans: W.W. Comfort; Everyman's Library, London, 1914. Online. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Lancelot/, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Yvain/

Culhwch and Olwen. Trans: Lady Charlotte Guest. Online. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/kilhwch.htm

Gransden, Antonia. Historical writing in England c. 550 - c. 1307. Ithaca N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1974.

Jenkins, Elizabeth. The Mystery of Arthur. Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1975.

Knight, Stephen. Arthurian Literature and Society. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Loomis, Roger Sherman. The Development of Arthurian Romance. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1963.

Malory, Sir Thomas. King Arthur and His Knights. Ed. R.T.Davies. London: Faber & Faber, 1976.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Online. http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~adderley/arthur/malory/malory04.htm

Preiddeu Annwn. Ed & trans: Sarah Higley. Online. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/annwn.htm

General material

Maailmanhistorian pikkujättiläinen. Porvoo-Helsinki-Juva: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1988

The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm

Illustration: H. J. Ford (1860-1941), "Excalibur Returns to the Mere"