All
the tales translated by Lady Guest are taken from The Red Book
of Hergest, with the exception of The History of Taliesin.
the tales translated by Lady Guest are taken from The Red Book
of Hergest, with the exception of The History of Taliesin.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v01
The poem is, therefore, one of many-sided interest.
Its permanent value lies in its oft-sounded note of freedom, in its
metrical innovations, its discarding of the artificial for the natural,
its grasp of new methods, its new ideals and in the daring sugges-
tion it makes in connection with love. And, finally, it must be con-
fessed, the poet had travelled well. Though full of appreciation
for a foreign literature, he has not changed "his Country Manners
for those of Forraigne Parts”; he has “onely pricked in some of
the Flowers of that he had Learned abroad into the Customes of
his owne Country. " And in this way more than one of our poets
have since that day written.
## p. 243 (#263) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND
"A GRAVE there is for March” (or “Mark”)—80 runs a stanza
in one of the oldest extant Welsh poems__"a grave for Gwythur,
a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword ; a mystery is the grave
of Arthur. ” “Some men say yet," wrote Sir Thomas Malory,
many centuries later, " that king Arthur is not dead, but had by
the will of our Lord Jesu into another place. ” The mystery of
Arthur's grave still remains unsolved, for
Where is he who knows?
From the great deep to the great deep he goes.
Towards the end of the twelfth century, in the very heyday of the
British king's renown as a romantic hero, the monks of St Dunstan's
at Glastonbury-at the original instance, it is said, of Henry II-
professed to have discovered the mortal remains of Arthur in the
cemetery of their abbey church? Some sixty years before, William
of Malmesbury had given an account of the discovery in Wales
of the grave of Arthur's nephew, Gawain, but the grave of Arthur
himself was not, he said, anywhere to be found ; hence, ancient
songs: prophesy his return. It was thought that the illusory
expectations thus cherished by the British Celts could be dispelled
by the Glastonbury exhumation. But so sorry an attempt as this
to poison the wells of romance met with the failure it deserved.
Arthur lived on, inviolate in fabled Avalon. Graven on no known
sepulchre, his name,
a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.
The memory of no other British hero is so extensively preserved
as his in the place-names of these islands; "only the devil is more
often mentioned in local association than Arthur. "
" A poem, in triplet form, entitled The Stanzas of the Graves, preserved in The
Black Book of Carmarthen, a MS of the twelfth century.
2 Giraldus Cambrensis gives the longest account of the affair (De Principis In.
structione, vm, 126–9).
3 Antiquitas naeniarum. Gesta Regum Anglorum, Bk. III.
• Dickinson, King Arthur in Cornwall (Longmans, 1900), preface, p. vi.
1642
## p. 244 (#264) ############################################
244
The Arthurian Legend
The nomenclature of Arthurian fable, which has a voluminous
critical literature of its own, does not concern us here. No student
of Arthurian origins, however, can fail to be impressed by the
strange disproportion between the abundance of Arthurian place-
names in the British islands and the amount of early British
literature, whether in English or in the insular Celtic tongues,
dealing with the Arthurian legend. The early English Arthurian
literature, in particular, is singularly meagre and undistinguished.
The romantic exploitation of “the matter of Britain” was the
achievement, mainly, of French writers 80 much so that some
modern critics would have us attach little importance to genuine
British influence on the development of the legend of Arthur.
For, when all is told, Arthurian romance owed its immense
popularity in the thirteenth century to its ideal and representative
character, and to its superiority over the other stock romantic
matters as a point de repère for every kind of literary excursion
and adventure. Thus, the “matter of Britain” very quickly
became international property-a vast composite body of romantic
tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality
drew upon and used for their own purposes. The British king
himself faded more and more into the back-ground, and became,
in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless “land of faëry,"
which
None that breatheth living aire doth know.
His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they,
in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalisation, and
appear as natives of no known clime or country, moving about
in an iridescent atmosphere of fantasy and illusion. The Arthurian
fairy-land thus became a neutral territory-an enchanted land
where the seemingly incompatible ideals of knight-errantry and
the church were reconciled, and where even east and west brought
their spoils together as to some common sanctuary. “Pilgrimage
and the holy wars” writes Gibbon, “introduced into Europe the
specious miracles of Arabian magic. Fairies and giants, flying
dragons and enchanted palaces, were blended with the more
simple fictions of the west; and the fate of Britain depended
on the art, or the predictions, of Merlin. Every nation embraced
and adorned the popular romance of Arthur and the knights of
the Round Table; their names were celebrated in Greece and
Italy; and the voluminous tales of Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram
were devoutly studied by the princes and nobles, who disregarded
the genuine heroes and heroines of antiquity. ”
## p. 245 (#265) ############################################
Early Welsh Tradition 245
Britain, however, claimed the titular hero of the legend; and
it was on British soil that the full flower of Arthurian romance
in due course made its appearance. Sir Thomas Malory's
marvellous compilation superseded, for all time, each and every
"French book” which went to its making. And, as Caxton takes
occasion to emphasise in his preface to Malory's book, Arthur,
as the "first and chief of the three best Christian kings” of the
world, deserved “most to be remembered amongst us Englishmen. ”
It so happens, however, that, in our own, no less than in
Caxton's, time, “divers men hold opinion that there was no such
Arthur, and that all such books as been made of him be but
feigned and fables. " There is, indeed, much in the history of the
legend to justify the attitude of these sceptics. The first great
outburst of the popularity of the story was due to a writer who, in
the words of one of his earliest critics? , “cloaked fables about Arthur
under the honest name of history”—Geoffrey of Monmouth. The
historical Arthur-assuming that Geoffrey meant all that he wrote
about him to be taken as authentic fact-thus made his first
considerable appearance in literature under very dubious auspices.
The “British book” which Geoffrey professes to have used has
never been discovered, and is not unreasonably supposed by
many to have been a myth. Thus, they who would substantiate
Caxton's assertion that “there was a king of this land called
Arthur” have to produce earlier, and more authentic, evidence
than anything furnished by Geoffrey.
Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows absolutely
nothing of Arthur. Wales, alone, has preserved any record of his
name and fame from a date earlier than the twelfth century. But
even Welsh writers of an indisputably early date tell us very little
about him, and tell that little in a tantalisingly casual and
perfunctory way. Yet it is in a few obscure Welsh poems, in
one very remarkable but difficult Welsh prose tale and in two
meagre Latin chronicles compiled in Wales, that we discover the
oldest literary records of both the historical and the legendary
Arthur. A few stubborn critics still maintain, against the opinion
of the best Welsh scholars, that the Welsh works in question are
not, in substance, earlier than the twelfth century—that, in other
words, they contain no fragments of Arthurian lore which can be
proved to be older than the date of the MSS in which they are
preserved. None, however, will now dispute the approximate
dates assigned by the best authorities to Nennius and the Annales
1 William of Newburgh.
## p. 246 (#266) ############################################
246 The Arthurian Legend
Cambriae ; and it is in the two Latin documents bearing these
names that we have the earliest extant records of a seemingly
historical Arthur.
The Historia Brittonum, commonly ascribed to Nennius, is
a curious compilation, which was put into its present form not
later than the first half of the ninth century? About the year
800 a Welshman named Nennius–or, to use the native form,
Nynniaw—who calls himself a disciple of Elfođ, bishop of Bangor
in North Wales”, copied and freely edited a collection of brief
notes, gathered from various sources, on early British history and
geography. Nennius claims, in his preface, after the manner of
his kind, to be an original compiler. “I have,” he says, "gathered
together all I could find not only in the Roman annals, but also in
the chronicles of holy fathers,. . . and in the annals of the Irish and
English, and in our native traditions. ” Elsewhere he avows
himself a mere copyist, and tells us that he wrote “the 'Cities'
and the ‘Marvels' of Britain, as other scribes had done before
him. " Arthur appears in both the quasi-historical and the purely
legendary parts of Nennius's compilation. In what purports to be
the strictly historical part of his narrative Nennius relates how,
some time after the death of Hengist, Arthur fought against the
English along with the kings of the Britons and “was himself
their war-leader”-ipse dux erat bellorum-in twelve battles
In the eighth of these encounters, at the castle of Guinnion,
“Arthur bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders“,
and the pagans were put to flight with great slaughter. ” The
ninth battle was fought at the City of Legions"; the twelfth, and
the last, on Mount Badon, where “nine hundred and sixty men
fell before Arthur's single onsetde uno impetu Arthur. ” The
prominence given, even in these brief notices, to Arthur's individual
prowess shows that legend was already busy with his name. The
“Marvels of Britain " gives us nothing but legend ; here Arthur
* Zimmer contends (Nennius Vindicatus) that the History was completed in 796.
Thurneysen would fix the year 826 as the date of its completion (Zeitschrift für
Deutsche Philologie, Halle, 1897). Cf. the present volume, ante, Chapter v, pp. 70 ff.
? As a disciple of Elfod (Elbodugus), Nennius must have lived about 800. His
History, it may be further noted, was known under bis name to the Irish scholar,
Cormac (831—903).
| 3 Hist. Brit. ch. Lu.
* Of. Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1, 10:
“ Amazement runs before the towering casque
Of Arthur, bearing through the stormy field
The Virgin sculptured on his Christian shield. ”
o Caerleon, or Caerlleon, upon Usk-a city to which Geoffrey of Monmouth,
probably from interested motives, gives great prominence.
## p. 247 (#267) ############################################
Nennius and Gildas
247
is translated altogether into the realm of myth. In the Welsh
district of Buelt', we are told, there is a mound of stones, on the
top of which rests a stone bearing the print of a dog's foot. “It
was when he was hunting the boar Troit that Cabal, the dog of
Arthur the warrior, left this mark upon the stone; and Arthur
afterwards gathered together the heap of stones under that which
bore his dog's footprint, and called it Carn Cabal. ” Here we
discover an early association of Arthurian fable with the topo-
graphy of Britain. Another “Marvel" tells of a certain stream
called “the source of the Amir," which was so named after “Amir,
the son of Arthur the warrior," who was buried near it. The
allusion to the hunting of the boar links Nennius's narrative with
what is probably the most primitive of all the Welsh Arthurian
tales, the story of Kulhwch and Olwen? In that fantastic fairy-
tale the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth, which is Nennius's porcus
Troit, forms one of the chief incidents, and the hound Cabal there
appears under his Welsh name of Cavall.
The Welsh monk and historian, Gildas, mentions the battle of
Mount Badon in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. That
battle, according to Gildas, was signalised by “the last, almost,
though not the least, slaughter of our cruel foes, and that was
(I am sure) forty-four years and one month after the landing of
the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity. ” But Gildas
makes no allusion at all to Arthur's feats in the battle. Neither
does he once mention his name in connection with the general
struggle which he describes as being carried on, with varying
fortune, against the English. The only leader of the British in
that warfare, whom Gildas deems worthy of notice, is Ambrosius
Aurelianus, the last of the Romans, “a modest man, who alone of
all his race chanced to survive the shock of so great a storm”
as then broke over Britain. The silence of Gildas, who was,
presumably, a contemporary of the historical Arthur, would be
significant, were it not that he is equally reticent about the
achievements of every other native British chieftain. Gildas
belonged to the Roman party in the Britain of his time, and
1 Builth (modern Welsh, Buallt).
9 Included in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion.
3 Ambrosius, transformed by Geoffrey into Aurelius Ambrosius (cf. Tennyson,
Coming of Arthur, "For first Aurelius lived, and fought and died "), is known in Welsh
literature as Emrys Wledig. He appears in Nennius as Embreis Guletic. Guletic, or
Guledig, means "over-lord,” or “king,” and Arthur himself would seem to bear this
title in a Welsh poem in The Book of Taliesin (No. xv). See Skene, Four Ancient
Books of Wales, Vol. 1, p. 227.
## p. 248 (#268) ############################################
248
The Arthurian Legend
to exalt the prowess of any British prince would ill assort with
his pious lamentations over the absolute degeneracy of his race.
The battle of Mount Badon, together with another which was
destined to overshadow it completely in the later developments
of Arthurian story, is recorded, and dated, in Annales Cambriae
-the oldest extant MS of which was compiled, probably, in
the second half of the tenth century? There, under the year
516, we read: “Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders, and the Britons were
victors. " The reference to the carrying of the cross is, of course,
an obvious echo of the tradition recorded by Nennius about the
image of the Virgin Mary-either, or both, being doubtless the
device borne by Arthur on his shield? Of greater interest is
the second entry in the Annals. In the year 537 was fought "the
battle of Camlan, in which Arthur and Medraut fell. ” Medraut is
the Modred, or Mordred, of romance. The Annals tell nothing
more about him; but in this bare record lies the germ of the first
of the tragic motives of subsequent Arthurian story. Camlan is
"the dim, weird battle of the west,” where Arthur met "the traitor
of his house," and
at one blow,
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,
Slew him, and, all but slain himself, he fell.
From these meagre notices of the early Latin annalists of
Wales we pass to such Arthurian traditions as are found embodied
in the songs of the oldest Welsh bards. This, indeed, is a perilous
quest, for it is beset with difficult problems of historical and
textual criticism upon which scholarship is still far from saying
its last word. It may, however, be premised with some confidence
that there lived in Wales, in the sixth and seventh centuries,
several bards of note, of whom the best known by name are
Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin. The compositions attributed
to these, and other bards of this early period, are found in MSS
the dates of which range from the twelfth to the end of the
fourteenth centuries. The oldest of all the MSS is that known
1 The most likely date is 954 or 955. See Phillimore's edition in Y Cymmrodor,
Vol. ix, p. 144.
? It is worth noting, as bearing upon the Welsh origin of this tradition, that the
old Welsh word for “shield,” iscuit, would be spelt in exactly the same way as
the word for “shoulder. " Both Nennius, and the writer of the Annals, appear to
have misread it. Geoffrey of Monmouth attempts to put the matter right (Hist. 11,
ch. IV) in describing Arthur as having "on his shoulders a shield" bearing the Virgin's
image; but he, also, confuses Welsh tradition in giving to the shield the name of
Arthur's ship, Priwen or Pridwen.
## p. 249 (#269) ############################################
Early Welsh Poetry
249
as The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled during the latter
part of the twelfth century, the period to which also belongs the
oldest known MS of Welsh prose, that of the Venedotian code
of the laws of Wales. The Book of Aneirin, which contains
the famous Gododin, is the next oldest MS, and is probably to
be assigned to the thirteenth century. To the thirteenth century,
also, belongs The Book of Taliesin, while another famous MS, The
Red Book of Hergest, dates from the end of the fourteenth century.
These “four ancient books”i constitute, together, our chief
available repertory of the early poetry of the Kymry.
Amid much that is undeniably late and spurious, these collections
of Welsh poetry contain a good deal that is, in substance, of obviously
archaic origin. In many of these poems there is, in words applied
by Matthew Arnold to the prose Mabinogion, "a detritus, as the
geologists would say, of something far older"; and their secret
is not to be “truly reached until this detritus, instead of being
called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent,
is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story? " Nowhere,
however, is this detritus more difficult to disengage than in the
few poems in which Arthur's name appears. The most celebrated
of these early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên
and Taliesin never mention him; to them Urien, lord of Rheged,
is by far the most imposing figure among all the native warriors
who fought against the English. It is Urien with whom “all the
bards of the world find favour,” and to whom they ever sing after
his desire 8. ” Neither is Arthur known to Aneirin, who sang in his
Gododin the elegy of the Kymric chieftains who met their doom
at Cattraeth. “There are only five poems” writes Skene", "which
mention Arthur at all, and then it is the historical Arthur, the
Gwledig, to whom the defence of the wall is entrusted, and who
fights the twelve battles in the north and finally perishes at
Camlan. ” This is not a quite accurate summary of the facts; for
these poems, while pointing to the existence of a historical Arthur,
embody also a detritus of pure myth.
The most significant, perhaps, of all the references to Arthur
in early Welsh poetry is that already quoted from the Stanzas of
the Graves in The Black Book of Carmarthen. The mystery
1 The Four Ancient Books of Wales is the title under which the poems in these
MSS were published, with translations and copious dissertations, by W. F. Skene
(Edinburgh, 1868).
? On the Study of Celtic Literature.
* Book of Taliesin, XL (Skene, Vol. 11, p. 186).
* Four Ancient Books of Wales, Vol. 1, p. 226.
## p. 250 (#270) ############################################
250 The Arthurian Legend
surrounding his grave at once suggests the existence of a belief
in his return, and William of Malmesbury, as we have seen, knew,
early in the twelfth century, of "ancient songs" which kept this
belief alive. The currency of such a tradition, not only in Wales,
but in Cornwall and Britanny, at the very beginning of the twelfth
century is proved by an account given by certain monks of Laon
of a tumult caused at Bodmin in the year 1113 by the refusal
of one of their number to admit that Arthur still lived". Another
of the Stanzas of the Graves is significant, as containing an allu-
sion both to the battle of Camlan, and to "the latest-left of all”
Arthur's knights, Bedwyr, or Bedivere, who shares with Kai, or
Kay, the pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive
Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable:
The grave of the son of Osvran is at Camlan,
After many a slaughter;
The grave of Bedwyr is on the hill of Tryvan.
Bedwyr and Kai appear together in Kulhwch and Olwen; they
are there once met with, for example, on the top of Plynlimmon
"in the greatest wind that ever was in the world. ” “Bedwyr,"
the same story tells us, “never shrank from any enterprise upon
which Kai was bound. " The pair were united even in their death,
for, in Geoffrey's History, they perish together in the first great
battle with the Romans. Another of Arthur's knights figures as
the hero of an entire poem in The Black Book-Gereint, the son
of Erbin? In this poem Arthur is represented as the leader of a
number of warriors, of whom Gereint is the most valiant, fighting
at a place called Llongborth3:
At Llongborth saw I of Arthur's
Brave men hewing with steel,
(Men of the) emperor, director of toil.
At Llongborth there fell of Gereint's
Brave men from the borders of Devon,
And, ere they were slain, they slew.
Here we find Arthur in much the same rôle as that of the dux
bellorum of Nennius, or the comes Britanniae, who held "the
place of the imperator himself, when Britain ceased to be part
of the dominions of Romet. "
1 See Migne, Patrologia, 156, col. 983.
Gereint, the Son of Erbin is also the title of the Welsh prose romance which
corresponds, in its main features, to Chrétien de Troyes's Erec.
* Supposed by some to be Portsmouth. The Welsh name simply means “ship's
port. "
• Rhys, preface to Dent's edition of Malory, p. XXV.
## p. 251 (#271) ############################################
Early Welsh Poetry
251
Arthur, however, appears in a distinctly different character
in yet another poem included in The Black Book. In Kulhwch
and Clien, one of Arthur's chief porters answers to the fearsome
name of Glewlwyd Gavaelvawr, or Glewlwyd of the Mighty Grasp.
The Black Book poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between
him and Arthur. Glewlwyd would seem, in the poem, to have a
castle of his own, from the gates of which he questions Arthur
about himself and his followers. The description given of them
by Arthur is noteworthy as pointing to the existence of an early
tradition which made him the head of a sort of military court,
and foreshadows, in a rude way, the fellowship of the Round Table.
Several of the names found in it connect this curious poem with
Kulhwch and Olwen. The first, and the doughtiest, of Arthur's
champions is "the worthy Kei (Kai). ” “Vain were it to boast
against Kei in battle,” sings the bard ; "when from a horn he
drank, he drank as much as four men; when he came into battle,
he slew as would an hundred; unless it were God's doing, Kei's
death would be unachieved. "
Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the
only other old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made
to him. The poem in question is found in The Book of Taliesin,
and is called Preiđeu Annwon, or the Harrowings of Hell. This
is just one of those weird mythological poems which are very
difficult to interpret, and where, again to quote Matthew Arnold,
the author “is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully
possess the secret. ” Here Arthur sets out upon various expe-
ditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them had
as its object the rape of a mysterious cauldron belonging to the
king of Hades. “Three freights of Pridwen,” says the bard, “were
they who went out with Arthur; seven alone were they who
returned" from Caer Sidi, Caer Rigor and the other wholly
unidentified places whither they fared. It is in this poem that
the closest parallels of all are found with incidents described in
the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, and, as a whole, it “evidently
deals with expeditions conducted by Arthur by sea to the realms
of twilight and darkness? . " But, here, the British king is much
further removed than in Kulhwch from any known country, and
appears as a purely mythical hero with supernatural attributes.
The most remarkable fragment for the tale, as we have it, is
an obvious torso-of all the early Welsh literature about Arthur
Rhys, preface to Dent's Malory, p. xxxiv, where the poom's correspondences with
Kulhwch are pointed out.
her fared. un incidents veridently
## p. 252 (#272) ############################################
252
The Arthurian Legend
that has come down to us is the prose romance of Kulhwch and
Olwen. The oldest extant text of it is that of the early fourteenth
century MS known as The White Book of Rhyderch', where we
find many remarkable archaisms which have been modernised in
the version of The Red Book of Hergest; but the original form
of the story is assigned, by the most competent authorities, to the
tenth century. It is included in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation
of the Mabinogion; and, as that translation largely contributed
to the fashioning of the most popular presentment of Arthurian
romance in modern English poetry, a brief account of the entire
series of these Welsh tales may here be appropriately given.
All
the tales translated by Lady Guest are taken from The Red Book
of Hergest, with the exception of The History of Taliesin.
Taliesin, in the form we have it, is a compilation of obviously
late medieval origin, and is not found in any MS of an earlier
date than the end of the sixteenth century. The name Mabi-
nogion belongs, strictly speaking, to only four of the twelve stories
included in Lady Guest's book. Each of these four tales is called
in Welsh “ceinc y Mabinogi,” which means “a branch of the
Mabinogi”; and the correct title for the group should be “the
four branches of the Mabinogi. ” The term mabinogi signifies "a
tale of youth," or "a tale for the young. ” The “four branches” are
the tales known as Pwyll, prince of Dyved; Branwen, daughter
of Llŷr; Manawydan, son of Llŷr; and Math, son of Mathonwy.
They contain what is probably the most archaic body of Welsh
tradition in existence, are largely, if not entirely, mythological in
character and suggest many points of analogy with the mythic
tales of Ireland4. They deal, mainly, with the fortunes of three
great families, the children of Dôn, the children of Llŷr and the
family of Pwyll. In these stories, the Mabinogion proper, Arthur
does not appear at all.
Of the other tales, two—The Dream of Maxen Wledig and
Llud and Llevelys—are brief romantic excursions into the do-
main of ancient British history, later in date, probably, than
Geoffrey's Historia. Arthur does not figure in either. The
remaining five tales, however, are all Arthurian, but form two
1 In the Peniarth Library. Gwenogvryn Evans has an edition of this MS in
preparation.
* Rhys, Dent's Malory, p. xxxiv.
8 Thomas Love Peacock drew most of his matter for The Misfortunes of Elphin from
this tale.
* For a suggestive analysis of the probable origins and mythological significanca
of the “ four branches,” see Rhys, Celtic Folk-lore, vol. II.
A18 tale.
## p. 253 (#273) ############################################
The Mabinogion
253
distinct groups. In Kulhwch and Olwen and The Dream of
Rhonabwy we have two Arthurian stories of apparently pure
British origin, in which Arthur is presented in a milieu altogether
unaffected by the French romances. The second and better known
group, consisting of the three tales entitled The Lady of the
Fountain, Geraint, son of Erbin and Peredur, son of Evrawc,
are romances palpably based upon French originals. They corre-
spond, respectively, in their main features, to Chrétien de Troyes's
Le chevalier au lion, Erec and Le conte del Graal? .
The Mabinogion, as a whole, are the most artistic and de-
lightful expression of the early Celtic genius which we possess.
Nowhere else do we come into such close touch with the real
“Celtic magic," with the true enchanted land, where “the eternal
illusion clothes itself in the most seductive hues? " Composed
though they were, in all probability, by a professional literary
class, these stories are distinguished by a naive charm which
suggests anything but an artificial literary craftsmanship. The
supernatural is treated in them as the most natural thing in the
world, and the personages who possess magic gifts are made to
move about and speak and behave as perfectly normal human
creatures. The simple grace of their narrative, their delicacy and
tenderness of sentiment and, above all, their feeling for nature,
distinguish these tales altogether from the elaborate productions
of the French romantic schools; while in its lucid precision of form,
and in its admirable adaptation to the matter with which it deals,
no medieval prose surpasses that of the Welsh of the Mabinogion.
These traits are what make it impossible to regard even the later
Welsh Arthurian stories as mere imitations of Chrétien's poems.
Their characters and incidents may be, substantially, the same;
but the tone, the atmosphere, the entire artistic setting of the
Welsh tales are altogether different; and “neither Chrétien nor
Marie de France, nor any other French writer of the time, whether
in France or England, can for one moment compare with the
Welshmen as story-tellers pure and simple. "
i Le Conte del Graal is only in part the work of Chrétien.
» Repan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races. (Trans. Hutchison. )
* A. Nutt, in his edition of Lady C. Guest's Mabinogion, p. 352. Cf. Renan :
“ The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable serenity of the
Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense between a smile and a tear. We
have in them the simple recital of a child, unwitting of any distinction between the
noble and the common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that calm
and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto’s stanzas transport us. The chatter of the later
medieval French and German imitators can give no idea of this charming manner of
narration. The skilful Chrétien de Troyes himself remains in this respect far below
the Welsh story-tellers. " The Poetry of the Celtic Races.
## p. 254 (#274) ############################################
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The Arthurian Legend
Kulhwch and Olwen, however, is the only one of these tales
that need detain us here, embodying as it does, in common with
the Welsh poems already quoted, Arthurian traditions far transcend-
ing in age the appearance of the Arthur of chivalry. Here, as
Matthew Arnold has said in an oft-quoted passage, the story-teller
"is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition
merely-stones ‘not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
greater, cunninger, more majestical. ” The main theme of the
story is the wooing of Olwen, the daughter of Yspađaden Pen
Kawr, by Kulhwch, the son of Kilyd, and the long series of
labours imposed upon the suitor in order to gain her hand
Olwen appears to have been well worth the arduous quest, for
“ her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were
her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone
amidst the spray of the meadow fountain," and "four white trefoils
sprung up wherever she trod. ” Arthur appears, here, not as the
ideal British warrior, nor as the hope and future restorer of his
race, but as a fairy king, overcoming uncouth and monstrous
enemies by his own and his followers' magic. All the same, he
is the lord of what is to the story-teller, in many places, a very
determinate realm; for, one of the most remarkable features of
Kulhwch and Olwen, as compared with the later Arthurian tales,
is the precision of its topography. The route of the boar-hunt,
for example-or the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth—may be traced,
without much difficulty, on our maps? .
Even more remarkable, however, than the topographical detail
of the story is the congeries of fabulous and fantastic Dames
grouped in it around the central figure of Arthur. This feature,
suggesting, as it does, the Arthurian court of the age of chivalry,
might be taken as evidence of the late redaction of the tale as we
have it, were it not that the story-teller gives details about most
of these strange characters which are evidently drawn from the
remnants of some lost saga. Arthur himself is introduced to us
in his palace, or hall, called Ehangwen, and thither Kulhwch comes
to crave his help to obtain Olwen; "and this boon I likewise seek,”
says Kulhwch, “at the hands of thy warriors. " These warriors
Kulhwch then proceeds to name in seemingly interminable suc-
cession. First in the long and weird list come Kai and Bedwyr;
others well known to early Welsh tradition include Gwynn and
to obtain Olwenien, and thither by
says Kulhwch
1 See Rhys's account of the hunt in Celtic Folklore, Vol. a, p. 572.
## p. 255 (#275) ############################################
one foot"; "Gure example, one Sol. 18 humour, briefly
Kulhwch and Olwen
255
Edern, the sons of Nud, Geraint, the son of Erbin, Taliesin, the
chief of bards, Manawyđan, the son of Llŷr. But, among the
company, there also appear several grotesque figures of whom
nothing is known save what the story-teller himself, giving rein,
as it would seem, to a deliberately mischievous humour, briefly
records. Thus we have, for example, one Sol, who “could stand
all day upon one foot”; Gwevy), the son of Gwestad, who “on the
day he was sad, would let one of his lips drop below his waist,
while he turned up the other like a cap upon his head”; Clust, the
son of Clustveinad, who "though he were buried seven cubits
beneath the earth, would hear the ant fifty miles off rise from her
nest in the morning. " Even familiar Arthurian heroes, like Kai,
are dowered with superhuman powers. “Kai had this peculiarity,
that his breath lasted nine nights and days under water, and he
could exist nine nights and nine days without sleep. ” “Very
subtle was Kai; when it pleased him he could make himself as
tall as the highest tree in the forest. " We are remote indeed,
in such company as this, from the knights of the Round Table;
but we are not so remote from the fairy world depicted in the
“Four Branches of the Mabinogi. ” The conclusion to which
Kulhwch and Olwen, and the few poems which mention Arthur,
clearly point is that the British king was far better known to
early Welsh tradition as a mythic hero than as the champion
of the Britons in their wars with the English. There may have
been a historical Arthur who was a comes Britanniae, or a dux
bellorum, of the sixth century, and his name, “re-echoed by the
topography of the country once under his protection," may have
"gathered round it legends of heroes and divinities of a past of
indefinite extent? . " What we do, however, know is that the
Arthur who emerges out of the mists of Celtic tradition at the
beginning of the twelfth century is an entirely imaginary being,
a king of fairy-land, undertaking hazardous quests, slaying monsters,
visiting the realms of the dead, and having at his call a number of
knightly henchmen, notably Kay and Bedivere, who are all but his
equals in wizardry and martial prowess. This mythical Arthur-
the creation of a primitive imagination altogether unaffected by
the sophisticated conceptions of chivalry and of conscious dealers
in romantic literary wares-belongs to early Welsh literature
alone.
The transformation of the Welsh, or British, Arthur into a
romantic hero of European renown was the result of the contact
· Rbys, preface to Dent's Malory, p. xxxvi.
## p. 256 (#276) ############################################
256
The Arthurian Legend
of Norman culture and, as it would seem, Norman diplomacy,
with the Celtic races of the west. It was doubtless from Britanny,
rather than from Wales, that the Normans derived their first
knowledge of the Arthurian stories. Indeed, it is probable that
the nameless story-tellers of Britanny fastened upon, and expanded,
a number of popular traditions which prefigured the Arthur of
romance much more clearly than anything told or written in
Wales. The Armorican “Bretons" are probably those whom
Wace mentions as “telling many a fable of the Table Round? . "
In Britanny, also, a belief in Arthur's return must long have been
current, for Alanus de Insulis records that a denial of it in the
second half of the twelfth century would be likely to cost a man
his life in the country districts of Britanny. By the middle of
the eleventh century the relations between the duchy of Normandy
and the Bretons had become particularly close, and the duke of
Britanny was one of William the Conqueror's staunchest allies at
the time of the invasion of Britain.
It is not, however, to Britanny that the great Latin ex-
ploitation of the legend of Arthur, under Norman auspices,
belongs, but to a section of Great Britain where the Norman
conquerors had, very rapidly, succeeded in establishing intimate
relations with the Welsh. By the beginning of the twelfth
century the Normans had effected a firm settlement in South
Wales. Now, it happens that it was a writer associated, at
least by name, with the South Wales border, and claiming the
patronage of a princely Norman who held that part of the country
in fee, who, most of all, is entitled to be called the literary father
of Arthurian romance. Robert, earl of Gloucester, and a natural
son of Henry I-for there is no evidence in support of the tradition
that his mother was the beautiful Nest, the daughter of the Welsh
prince, Rhys ap Tewdwr-acquired, early in the twelfth century, the
lordship of Glamorgan by marriage with Mabel, daughter of Robert
Fitz-hamon, conqueror of Glamorgan. Robert, like his father, was
a liberal and a diplomatic patron of letters. It was to him that
William of Malmesbury, the greatest historian of his time, dedi.
cated his History. To him was due the foundation of the abbey
of Margam, whose chronicle is a valuable early authority for the
history of Wales. On his estates at Torigni was born Robert de
Monte, abbot of Mont St Michel, a chronicler of renown, and a
lover and student of Breton legends. Above all, it was under his
1 Roman de Brut, 1. 9994.
• Prophetia Anglicana, etc. (Frankfort, 1603), Bk. I, p. 17.
## p. 257 (#277) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
257
immediate patronage that Geoffrey of Monmouth compiled his
romantic History of the Kings of Britain.
Of Geoffrey's personal history we know little. His full name
appears to have been, significantly, Geoffrey Arthur. His relentless
critic, William of Newburgh, takes “Arthur” to have been a by-
name given to him on the score of his Arthurian fabrications ; but
the truth probably is that Arthur was the name of his father?
His connection with Monmouth is obscure; he may have been
born in the town, or educated at the priory founded there by
the Breton, Wihenoc. He was never, as he is commonly designated,
archdeacon of Monmouth, for there was no such archdeaconry in
existence. Whether he was by descent a Breton, or a Welshman,
we know no more than we do whether the famous “British book,"
which he professes to have used, was derived from Wales or from
Britanny. Neither matter is of much consequence. The “British
book” may very well have been an authentic document, since lost,
which was placed, as he tells us, at his disposal by his friend
Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Much Welsh and Breton folk-lore
doubtless reached him through monastic channels. Nennius and
Bede furnished him with matter which can be clearly traced in his
text? There can be little doubt, however, that the main source
of the Arthurian portions of his History was Geoffrey's own
imagination. The floating popular traditions about Arthur, and
the few documents which he had to his hand, plainly suggested
to him the possibilities of developing a new and striking romantic
theme. Geoffrey appears to have gauged the tastes and fancies of
the courtly readers of his day with an astuteness worthy of a
Defoe. Romance was in demand, and Geoffrey, giving the rein
to his faculty for decorative and rhetorical writing, responded
to that demand with an address that would have done credit to
the most alert of modern novelists. The time-honoured vehicle
of the chronicle was turned to new and unexpected uses. Sober
and orthodox chroniclers, like William of Malmesbury and Henry
of Huntingdon, are deliberately warned off the ground thus opened
out for the poet and the romancer. The “kings of the Saxons”
were their legitimate subject; the "kings of the Britons" were
1 Flis name is given as Gaufridus Arturus in the list of witnesses to the foundation
charter of the abbey of Osnoy in 1129. See Dugdale, Monasticon, vi, p. 251, and
Sir F. Madden in Journal of the Archaeological Institute, 1858, p. 305.
? A full, and most suggestive, discussion of the whole subject of Geoffrey's sources
is given in The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles by R. H. Fletcher (Harvard
Studies in Phil. and Lit. Vol. x, 1906).
E. L. I. CH. XII.
17
## p. 258 (#278) ############################################
258
The Arthurian Legend
outside their province, for “the British book" was to them a sealed
volume.
Geoffrey's relation to the Latin chroniclers of his time is dealt
with in another chapter; here, his contributions to Arthurian
story alone claim our attention. The glorification of Arthur in
the History lends some countenance to the supposition that the
work was written with an interested motive. Geoffrey probably
aspired, like most of his class, to preferment in the church, and
may have hoped that his book would ingratiate him with the earl
of Gloucester and with Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, to whom
he dedicated, separately, the “Prophecies of Merlin. " Assuming
him to have had such motives, Geoffrey's History is interpreted
as being a kind of prose epic, intended to celebrate the united
glories of the composite Anglo-Norman empire which attained
its widest extent under Henry II? It did, indeed, provide a hero
in whom Norman and Saxon, Welshman and Breton, could take
common pride. Moreover, the ancient birthright and the essential
homogeneity of the various races embraced in the Angevin empire
were attested by an account of their descent from a branch of the
Trojan stock celebrated in the Aeneid. Brutus, whose eponymous
connection with the country had already been suggested by Nennius,
became for Britain what Aeneas was for Rome. Geoffrey's chronicle
is thus the first Brut, the first elaborate, and possibly “inspired,”
adaptation of the Brutus legend for the glorification of Britain ;
and, in time, all records of the early British kings, whether in
prose or verse, which had this mythic starting point, came to
be called Bruts-presumably in imitation of the title of Vergil's
epic.
Apart, however, from its Trojan prelude, and its possible
political or diplomatic motive, there is little real analogy between
Geoffrey's Brut and the Aeneid. For Arthur, after all, and not
Brutus, is Geoffrey's ultimate hero. The flos regum of early
Britain, the warrior who vindicates the essential valour of the
British people, and who not only triumphs over his insignificant
enemies in Britain itself, but conquers a great part of Europe
and forces even the once victorious Romans to pay tribute to
a British king, is Arthur. In him was fulfilled the prophecy that
“for the third time should one of British race be born who should
? See the epilogue to Geoffrey's History.
* This hypothesis is advanced with much ingenuity, and plausibility, in the epilogue
to what is the best English translation of Geoffrey's History, by Sebastian Evans,
London, 1903.
## p. 259 (#279) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
259
obtain the empire of Rome. ” Thus, Geoffrey brings all his powers
of rhetoric, and all his imagination, to bear upon his delineation of
Arthur and his exploits. The first six books of the History tell,
with many embellishments of style and with incidental references
to contemporary events elsewhere, inserted as so many grave
guarantees of authenticity, the story of Arthur's kingly prede-
cessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin
appears on the scene; and Geoffrey pauses to give, in an entire
book, the fantastic prophecies attributed to that wonder-working
seer. Romance, frank and undisguised, now usurps the place of
sober, or affected, history. Merlin's magic arts are made largely
contributory to the birth of the most renowned Arthur. ” Uther
and Gorlois and Igerna and the castle of Tintagol, or Tintagel,
now take their place, for the first time, in the fabric of Arthurian
story.
Uther, with Merlin's assistance, gains admission to Igerna's
castle in the semblance of her lord, Gorlois, and begets Arthur ; upon
the death of Gorlois, Uther takes Igerna for his lawful queen, and
Arthur of due right succeeds to the throne. Crowned by Dubricius,
“archbishop of the City of Legions," at the early age of fifteen,
Arthur at once begins his career of conquest. The Saxons, Scots
and Picts are encountered and vanquished at the river Duglas ;
afterwards, with the aid of his cousin, king Hoel of Britanny,
Arthur subjugates the entire island and divides Scotland among
its original rightful rulers, Lot and his two brothers, Urian and
Augusel. Lot, we are told by the way, "had, in the days of
Aurelius Ambrosius, married Arthur's own sister, who had borne
unto him Gawain and Mordred. ” Having restored the whole
country to its ancient dignity, Arthur “took unto himself a wife
born of a noble Roman family, Guanhumara, who, brought up and
nurtured in the household of duke Cador, surpassed in beauty all
the other women of the island. " Ireland and Iceland are next
added to his conquests, while tribute is paid, and homage made
to him, by the rulers of the Orkneys and of Gothland. His
court now is the centre of a brilliant assemblage of knights, his
fear “falls upon the kings of realms oversea" and his “heart
became so uplifted within him” that "he set his desire upon
subduing the whole of Europe unto himself? ". Norway, Dacia
and Gaul fall in quick succession under Arthur's sway; Normandy
is made over to “Bedwyr, his butler,” and Anjou to “Kay, his
seneschal. ” Returning to Britain, Arthur next holds high court at
1 Bk. 1x, ch. XI.
17—2
## p. 260 (#280) ############################################
260
The Arthurian Legend
Caerleon-upon-Usk, then a city whose “kingly palaces” vied in
magnificence with those of Rome itself.
At that time was Britain exalted unto so high a pitch of dignity as that
it did surpass all other kingdoms in plenty of riches, in luxury of adornment,
and in the courteous wit of them that dwelt therein. Whatsoever knight in
the land was of renown for his prowess did wear his clothes and his arms all
of one same colour. And the dames, no less witty, would apparel them in
like manner in a single colour, nor would they deigu have the love of any
gave he had thrice approved bim in the wars. Wherefore at that time did
dames wax chaste and knights the nobler for their lovel.
The pomp and colour of the age of chivalry, and its ideals of
knightly love, are thus already beginning to qualify imaginative
conceptions of the Arthurian court; while the picture of Arthur
himself, as the head of princely vassals and emulous knights, makes
the transition easy to the fellowship of the Round Table, and to all
the other accretions of later romances. But Geoffrey does not,
any more than the early Welsh poets and story-tellers or the later,
and more deliberate, purveyors of fantastic fables, altogether
remove his Arthur from wonderland. The British king still slays
monsters; by his own hand he kills a Spanish giant at St Michael's
Mount, and a still more formidable foe, the giant "Ritho of Mount
Eryri, who had fashioned him a furred cloak of the kings he had
slain. ” Equally marvellous is Arthur's individual might in battle,
for, in his encounters with the Romans, "nought might armour
avail” his antagonists “but that Caliburn would carve their souls
from out them with their blood. ”
The great battle with the Romans, in which Arthur displayed
such prowess, was a fateful one. The British hosts did, indeed,
gain the victory; and Hoel and Gawain (Walgainus) performed
prodigies of valour second only to those of Arthur himself. But
the triumph was obtained at a heavy cost; many illustrious British
chieftains, and, above all, the faithful Kay and Bedwyr, were
numbered among the slain. The result of the battle was to fire
Arthur with the design of marching upon the city of Rome itself.
He was already beginning to climb the passes of the Alps, when
"message was brought him that his nephew Mordred, unto whom
he had committed the charge of Britain, had tyrannously and
traitorously set the crown of the kingdom upon his own head, and
had linked him in unhallowed union with Guenevere, the queen,
in despite of her former marriage? ". Arthur, taking with him his
British warriors only, returns home. Mordred meets him as he
18. Evans's trans. (London, 1903).
* Book , ch. x.
## p. 261 (#281) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
261
lands, and, in the ensuing battle, Gawain and many others are slain.
Mordred, however, is driven back, and Guinevere, in terror for her
safety, becomes a nun. The final battle is fought at the river
Camel in the west country. Mordred is defeated and slain, and
most of the leaders on both sides perish. “Even the renowned
king Arthur himself was wounded unto death, and was borne
thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds. "
Such, in brief, is the narrative through the medium of which -
Arthur made his triumphant entry to the kingship of the most
splendid province of medieval romance. Let Geoffrey have the
credit which is his due.
Its permanent value lies in its oft-sounded note of freedom, in its
metrical innovations, its discarding of the artificial for the natural,
its grasp of new methods, its new ideals and in the daring sugges-
tion it makes in connection with love. And, finally, it must be con-
fessed, the poet had travelled well. Though full of appreciation
for a foreign literature, he has not changed "his Country Manners
for those of Forraigne Parts”; he has “onely pricked in some of
the Flowers of that he had Learned abroad into the Customes of
his owne Country. " And in this way more than one of our poets
have since that day written.
## p. 243 (#263) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND
"A GRAVE there is for March” (or “Mark”)—80 runs a stanza
in one of the oldest extant Welsh poems__"a grave for Gwythur,
a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword ; a mystery is the grave
of Arthur. ” “Some men say yet," wrote Sir Thomas Malory,
many centuries later, " that king Arthur is not dead, but had by
the will of our Lord Jesu into another place. ” The mystery of
Arthur's grave still remains unsolved, for
Where is he who knows?
From the great deep to the great deep he goes.
Towards the end of the twelfth century, in the very heyday of the
British king's renown as a romantic hero, the monks of St Dunstan's
at Glastonbury-at the original instance, it is said, of Henry II-
professed to have discovered the mortal remains of Arthur in the
cemetery of their abbey church? Some sixty years before, William
of Malmesbury had given an account of the discovery in Wales
of the grave of Arthur's nephew, Gawain, but the grave of Arthur
himself was not, he said, anywhere to be found ; hence, ancient
songs: prophesy his return. It was thought that the illusory
expectations thus cherished by the British Celts could be dispelled
by the Glastonbury exhumation. But so sorry an attempt as this
to poison the wells of romance met with the failure it deserved.
Arthur lived on, inviolate in fabled Avalon. Graven on no known
sepulchre, his name,
a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.
The memory of no other British hero is so extensively preserved
as his in the place-names of these islands; "only the devil is more
often mentioned in local association than Arthur. "
" A poem, in triplet form, entitled The Stanzas of the Graves, preserved in The
Black Book of Carmarthen, a MS of the twelfth century.
2 Giraldus Cambrensis gives the longest account of the affair (De Principis In.
structione, vm, 126–9).
3 Antiquitas naeniarum. Gesta Regum Anglorum, Bk. III.
• Dickinson, King Arthur in Cornwall (Longmans, 1900), preface, p. vi.
1642
## p. 244 (#264) ############################################
244
The Arthurian Legend
The nomenclature of Arthurian fable, which has a voluminous
critical literature of its own, does not concern us here. No student
of Arthurian origins, however, can fail to be impressed by the
strange disproportion between the abundance of Arthurian place-
names in the British islands and the amount of early British
literature, whether in English or in the insular Celtic tongues,
dealing with the Arthurian legend. The early English Arthurian
literature, in particular, is singularly meagre and undistinguished.
The romantic exploitation of “the matter of Britain” was the
achievement, mainly, of French writers 80 much so that some
modern critics would have us attach little importance to genuine
British influence on the development of the legend of Arthur.
For, when all is told, Arthurian romance owed its immense
popularity in the thirteenth century to its ideal and representative
character, and to its superiority over the other stock romantic
matters as a point de repère for every kind of literary excursion
and adventure. Thus, the “matter of Britain” very quickly
became international property-a vast composite body of romantic
tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality
drew upon and used for their own purposes. The British king
himself faded more and more into the back-ground, and became,
in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless “land of faëry,"
which
None that breatheth living aire doth know.
His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they,
in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalisation, and
appear as natives of no known clime or country, moving about
in an iridescent atmosphere of fantasy and illusion. The Arthurian
fairy-land thus became a neutral territory-an enchanted land
where the seemingly incompatible ideals of knight-errantry and
the church were reconciled, and where even east and west brought
their spoils together as to some common sanctuary. “Pilgrimage
and the holy wars” writes Gibbon, “introduced into Europe the
specious miracles of Arabian magic. Fairies and giants, flying
dragons and enchanted palaces, were blended with the more
simple fictions of the west; and the fate of Britain depended
on the art, or the predictions, of Merlin. Every nation embraced
and adorned the popular romance of Arthur and the knights of
the Round Table; their names were celebrated in Greece and
Italy; and the voluminous tales of Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram
were devoutly studied by the princes and nobles, who disregarded
the genuine heroes and heroines of antiquity. ”
## p. 245 (#265) ############################################
Early Welsh Tradition 245
Britain, however, claimed the titular hero of the legend; and
it was on British soil that the full flower of Arthurian romance
in due course made its appearance. Sir Thomas Malory's
marvellous compilation superseded, for all time, each and every
"French book” which went to its making. And, as Caxton takes
occasion to emphasise in his preface to Malory's book, Arthur,
as the "first and chief of the three best Christian kings” of the
world, deserved “most to be remembered amongst us Englishmen. ”
It so happens, however, that, in our own, no less than in
Caxton's, time, “divers men hold opinion that there was no such
Arthur, and that all such books as been made of him be but
feigned and fables. " There is, indeed, much in the history of the
legend to justify the attitude of these sceptics. The first great
outburst of the popularity of the story was due to a writer who, in
the words of one of his earliest critics? , “cloaked fables about Arthur
under the honest name of history”—Geoffrey of Monmouth. The
historical Arthur-assuming that Geoffrey meant all that he wrote
about him to be taken as authentic fact-thus made his first
considerable appearance in literature under very dubious auspices.
The “British book” which Geoffrey professes to have used has
never been discovered, and is not unreasonably supposed by
many to have been a myth. Thus, they who would substantiate
Caxton's assertion that “there was a king of this land called
Arthur” have to produce earlier, and more authentic, evidence
than anything furnished by Geoffrey.
Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows absolutely
nothing of Arthur. Wales, alone, has preserved any record of his
name and fame from a date earlier than the twelfth century. But
even Welsh writers of an indisputably early date tell us very little
about him, and tell that little in a tantalisingly casual and
perfunctory way. Yet it is in a few obscure Welsh poems, in
one very remarkable but difficult Welsh prose tale and in two
meagre Latin chronicles compiled in Wales, that we discover the
oldest literary records of both the historical and the legendary
Arthur. A few stubborn critics still maintain, against the opinion
of the best Welsh scholars, that the Welsh works in question are
not, in substance, earlier than the twelfth century—that, in other
words, they contain no fragments of Arthurian lore which can be
proved to be older than the date of the MSS in which they are
preserved. None, however, will now dispute the approximate
dates assigned by the best authorities to Nennius and the Annales
1 William of Newburgh.
## p. 246 (#266) ############################################
246 The Arthurian Legend
Cambriae ; and it is in the two Latin documents bearing these
names that we have the earliest extant records of a seemingly
historical Arthur.
The Historia Brittonum, commonly ascribed to Nennius, is
a curious compilation, which was put into its present form not
later than the first half of the ninth century? About the year
800 a Welshman named Nennius–or, to use the native form,
Nynniaw—who calls himself a disciple of Elfođ, bishop of Bangor
in North Wales”, copied and freely edited a collection of brief
notes, gathered from various sources, on early British history and
geography. Nennius claims, in his preface, after the manner of
his kind, to be an original compiler. “I have,” he says, "gathered
together all I could find not only in the Roman annals, but also in
the chronicles of holy fathers,. . . and in the annals of the Irish and
English, and in our native traditions. ” Elsewhere he avows
himself a mere copyist, and tells us that he wrote “the 'Cities'
and the ‘Marvels' of Britain, as other scribes had done before
him. " Arthur appears in both the quasi-historical and the purely
legendary parts of Nennius's compilation. In what purports to be
the strictly historical part of his narrative Nennius relates how,
some time after the death of Hengist, Arthur fought against the
English along with the kings of the Britons and “was himself
their war-leader”-ipse dux erat bellorum-in twelve battles
In the eighth of these encounters, at the castle of Guinnion,
“Arthur bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders“,
and the pagans were put to flight with great slaughter. ” The
ninth battle was fought at the City of Legions"; the twelfth, and
the last, on Mount Badon, where “nine hundred and sixty men
fell before Arthur's single onsetde uno impetu Arthur. ” The
prominence given, even in these brief notices, to Arthur's individual
prowess shows that legend was already busy with his name. The
“Marvels of Britain " gives us nothing but legend ; here Arthur
* Zimmer contends (Nennius Vindicatus) that the History was completed in 796.
Thurneysen would fix the year 826 as the date of its completion (Zeitschrift für
Deutsche Philologie, Halle, 1897). Cf. the present volume, ante, Chapter v, pp. 70 ff.
? As a disciple of Elfod (Elbodugus), Nennius must have lived about 800. His
History, it may be further noted, was known under bis name to the Irish scholar,
Cormac (831—903).
| 3 Hist. Brit. ch. Lu.
* Of. Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1, 10:
“ Amazement runs before the towering casque
Of Arthur, bearing through the stormy field
The Virgin sculptured on his Christian shield. ”
o Caerleon, or Caerlleon, upon Usk-a city to which Geoffrey of Monmouth,
probably from interested motives, gives great prominence.
## p. 247 (#267) ############################################
Nennius and Gildas
247
is translated altogether into the realm of myth. In the Welsh
district of Buelt', we are told, there is a mound of stones, on the
top of which rests a stone bearing the print of a dog's foot. “It
was when he was hunting the boar Troit that Cabal, the dog of
Arthur the warrior, left this mark upon the stone; and Arthur
afterwards gathered together the heap of stones under that which
bore his dog's footprint, and called it Carn Cabal. ” Here we
discover an early association of Arthurian fable with the topo-
graphy of Britain. Another “Marvel" tells of a certain stream
called “the source of the Amir," which was so named after “Amir,
the son of Arthur the warrior," who was buried near it. The
allusion to the hunting of the boar links Nennius's narrative with
what is probably the most primitive of all the Welsh Arthurian
tales, the story of Kulhwch and Olwen? In that fantastic fairy-
tale the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth, which is Nennius's porcus
Troit, forms one of the chief incidents, and the hound Cabal there
appears under his Welsh name of Cavall.
The Welsh monk and historian, Gildas, mentions the battle of
Mount Badon in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. That
battle, according to Gildas, was signalised by “the last, almost,
though not the least, slaughter of our cruel foes, and that was
(I am sure) forty-four years and one month after the landing of
the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity. ” But Gildas
makes no allusion at all to Arthur's feats in the battle. Neither
does he once mention his name in connection with the general
struggle which he describes as being carried on, with varying
fortune, against the English. The only leader of the British in
that warfare, whom Gildas deems worthy of notice, is Ambrosius
Aurelianus, the last of the Romans, “a modest man, who alone of
all his race chanced to survive the shock of so great a storm”
as then broke over Britain. The silence of Gildas, who was,
presumably, a contemporary of the historical Arthur, would be
significant, were it not that he is equally reticent about the
achievements of every other native British chieftain. Gildas
belonged to the Roman party in the Britain of his time, and
1 Builth (modern Welsh, Buallt).
9 Included in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion.
3 Ambrosius, transformed by Geoffrey into Aurelius Ambrosius (cf. Tennyson,
Coming of Arthur, "For first Aurelius lived, and fought and died "), is known in Welsh
literature as Emrys Wledig. He appears in Nennius as Embreis Guletic. Guletic, or
Guledig, means "over-lord,” or “king,” and Arthur himself would seem to bear this
title in a Welsh poem in The Book of Taliesin (No. xv). See Skene, Four Ancient
Books of Wales, Vol. 1, p. 227.
## p. 248 (#268) ############################################
248
The Arthurian Legend
to exalt the prowess of any British prince would ill assort with
his pious lamentations over the absolute degeneracy of his race.
The battle of Mount Badon, together with another which was
destined to overshadow it completely in the later developments
of Arthurian story, is recorded, and dated, in Annales Cambriae
-the oldest extant MS of which was compiled, probably, in
the second half of the tenth century? There, under the year
516, we read: “Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders, and the Britons were
victors. " The reference to the carrying of the cross is, of course,
an obvious echo of the tradition recorded by Nennius about the
image of the Virgin Mary-either, or both, being doubtless the
device borne by Arthur on his shield? Of greater interest is
the second entry in the Annals. In the year 537 was fought "the
battle of Camlan, in which Arthur and Medraut fell. ” Medraut is
the Modred, or Mordred, of romance. The Annals tell nothing
more about him; but in this bare record lies the germ of the first
of the tragic motives of subsequent Arthurian story. Camlan is
"the dim, weird battle of the west,” where Arthur met "the traitor
of his house," and
at one blow,
Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,
Slew him, and, all but slain himself, he fell.
From these meagre notices of the early Latin annalists of
Wales we pass to such Arthurian traditions as are found embodied
in the songs of the oldest Welsh bards. This, indeed, is a perilous
quest, for it is beset with difficult problems of historical and
textual criticism upon which scholarship is still far from saying
its last word. It may, however, be premised with some confidence
that there lived in Wales, in the sixth and seventh centuries,
several bards of note, of whom the best known by name are
Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin. The compositions attributed
to these, and other bards of this early period, are found in MSS
the dates of which range from the twelfth to the end of the
fourteenth centuries. The oldest of all the MSS is that known
1 The most likely date is 954 or 955. See Phillimore's edition in Y Cymmrodor,
Vol. ix, p. 144.
? It is worth noting, as bearing upon the Welsh origin of this tradition, that the
old Welsh word for “shield,” iscuit, would be spelt in exactly the same way as
the word for “shoulder. " Both Nennius, and the writer of the Annals, appear to
have misread it. Geoffrey of Monmouth attempts to put the matter right (Hist. 11,
ch. IV) in describing Arthur as having "on his shoulders a shield" bearing the Virgin's
image; but he, also, confuses Welsh tradition in giving to the shield the name of
Arthur's ship, Priwen or Pridwen.
## p. 249 (#269) ############################################
Early Welsh Poetry
249
as The Black Book of Carmarthen, compiled during the latter
part of the twelfth century, the period to which also belongs the
oldest known MS of Welsh prose, that of the Venedotian code
of the laws of Wales. The Book of Aneirin, which contains
the famous Gododin, is the next oldest MS, and is probably to
be assigned to the thirteenth century. To the thirteenth century,
also, belongs The Book of Taliesin, while another famous MS, The
Red Book of Hergest, dates from the end of the fourteenth century.
These “four ancient books”i constitute, together, our chief
available repertory of the early poetry of the Kymry.
Amid much that is undeniably late and spurious, these collections
of Welsh poetry contain a good deal that is, in substance, of obviously
archaic origin. In many of these poems there is, in words applied
by Matthew Arnold to the prose Mabinogion, "a detritus, as the
geologists would say, of something far older"; and their secret
is not to be “truly reached until this detritus, instead of being
called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent,
is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story? " Nowhere,
however, is this detritus more difficult to disengage than in the
few poems in which Arthur's name appears. The most celebrated
of these early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên
and Taliesin never mention him; to them Urien, lord of Rheged,
is by far the most imposing figure among all the native warriors
who fought against the English. It is Urien with whom “all the
bards of the world find favour,” and to whom they ever sing after
his desire 8. ” Neither is Arthur known to Aneirin, who sang in his
Gododin the elegy of the Kymric chieftains who met their doom
at Cattraeth. “There are only five poems” writes Skene", "which
mention Arthur at all, and then it is the historical Arthur, the
Gwledig, to whom the defence of the wall is entrusted, and who
fights the twelve battles in the north and finally perishes at
Camlan. ” This is not a quite accurate summary of the facts; for
these poems, while pointing to the existence of a historical Arthur,
embody also a detritus of pure myth.
The most significant, perhaps, of all the references to Arthur
in early Welsh poetry is that already quoted from the Stanzas of
the Graves in The Black Book of Carmarthen. The mystery
1 The Four Ancient Books of Wales is the title under which the poems in these
MSS were published, with translations and copious dissertations, by W. F. Skene
(Edinburgh, 1868).
? On the Study of Celtic Literature.
* Book of Taliesin, XL (Skene, Vol. 11, p. 186).
* Four Ancient Books of Wales, Vol. 1, p. 226.
## p. 250 (#270) ############################################
250 The Arthurian Legend
surrounding his grave at once suggests the existence of a belief
in his return, and William of Malmesbury, as we have seen, knew,
early in the twelfth century, of "ancient songs" which kept this
belief alive. The currency of such a tradition, not only in Wales,
but in Cornwall and Britanny, at the very beginning of the twelfth
century is proved by an account given by certain monks of Laon
of a tumult caused at Bodmin in the year 1113 by the refusal
of one of their number to admit that Arthur still lived". Another
of the Stanzas of the Graves is significant, as containing an allu-
sion both to the battle of Camlan, and to "the latest-left of all”
Arthur's knights, Bedwyr, or Bedivere, who shares with Kai, or
Kay, the pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive
Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable:
The grave of the son of Osvran is at Camlan,
After many a slaughter;
The grave of Bedwyr is on the hill of Tryvan.
Bedwyr and Kai appear together in Kulhwch and Olwen; they
are there once met with, for example, on the top of Plynlimmon
"in the greatest wind that ever was in the world. ” “Bedwyr,"
the same story tells us, “never shrank from any enterprise upon
which Kai was bound. " The pair were united even in their death,
for, in Geoffrey's History, they perish together in the first great
battle with the Romans. Another of Arthur's knights figures as
the hero of an entire poem in The Black Book-Gereint, the son
of Erbin? In this poem Arthur is represented as the leader of a
number of warriors, of whom Gereint is the most valiant, fighting
at a place called Llongborth3:
At Llongborth saw I of Arthur's
Brave men hewing with steel,
(Men of the) emperor, director of toil.
At Llongborth there fell of Gereint's
Brave men from the borders of Devon,
And, ere they were slain, they slew.
Here we find Arthur in much the same rôle as that of the dux
bellorum of Nennius, or the comes Britanniae, who held "the
place of the imperator himself, when Britain ceased to be part
of the dominions of Romet. "
1 See Migne, Patrologia, 156, col. 983.
Gereint, the Son of Erbin is also the title of the Welsh prose romance which
corresponds, in its main features, to Chrétien de Troyes's Erec.
* Supposed by some to be Portsmouth. The Welsh name simply means “ship's
port. "
• Rhys, preface to Dent's edition of Malory, p. XXV.
## p. 251 (#271) ############################################
Early Welsh Poetry
251
Arthur, however, appears in a distinctly different character
in yet another poem included in The Black Book. In Kulhwch
and Clien, one of Arthur's chief porters answers to the fearsome
name of Glewlwyd Gavaelvawr, or Glewlwyd of the Mighty Grasp.
The Black Book poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between
him and Arthur. Glewlwyd would seem, in the poem, to have a
castle of his own, from the gates of which he questions Arthur
about himself and his followers. The description given of them
by Arthur is noteworthy as pointing to the existence of an early
tradition which made him the head of a sort of military court,
and foreshadows, in a rude way, the fellowship of the Round Table.
Several of the names found in it connect this curious poem with
Kulhwch and Olwen. The first, and the doughtiest, of Arthur's
champions is "the worthy Kei (Kai). ” “Vain were it to boast
against Kei in battle,” sings the bard ; "when from a horn he
drank, he drank as much as four men; when he came into battle,
he slew as would an hundred; unless it were God's doing, Kei's
death would be unachieved. "
Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the
only other old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made
to him. The poem in question is found in The Book of Taliesin,
and is called Preiđeu Annwon, or the Harrowings of Hell. This
is just one of those weird mythological poems which are very
difficult to interpret, and where, again to quote Matthew Arnold,
the author “is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully
possess the secret. ” Here Arthur sets out upon various expe-
ditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them had
as its object the rape of a mysterious cauldron belonging to the
king of Hades. “Three freights of Pridwen,” says the bard, “were
they who went out with Arthur; seven alone were they who
returned" from Caer Sidi, Caer Rigor and the other wholly
unidentified places whither they fared. It is in this poem that
the closest parallels of all are found with incidents described in
the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, and, as a whole, it “evidently
deals with expeditions conducted by Arthur by sea to the realms
of twilight and darkness? . " But, here, the British king is much
further removed than in Kulhwch from any known country, and
appears as a purely mythical hero with supernatural attributes.
The most remarkable fragment for the tale, as we have it, is
an obvious torso-of all the early Welsh literature about Arthur
Rhys, preface to Dent's Malory, p. xxxiv, where the poom's correspondences with
Kulhwch are pointed out.
her fared. un incidents veridently
## p. 252 (#272) ############################################
252
The Arthurian Legend
that has come down to us is the prose romance of Kulhwch and
Olwen. The oldest extant text of it is that of the early fourteenth
century MS known as The White Book of Rhyderch', where we
find many remarkable archaisms which have been modernised in
the version of The Red Book of Hergest; but the original form
of the story is assigned, by the most competent authorities, to the
tenth century. It is included in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation
of the Mabinogion; and, as that translation largely contributed
to the fashioning of the most popular presentment of Arthurian
romance in modern English poetry, a brief account of the entire
series of these Welsh tales may here be appropriately given.
All
the tales translated by Lady Guest are taken from The Red Book
of Hergest, with the exception of The History of Taliesin.
Taliesin, in the form we have it, is a compilation of obviously
late medieval origin, and is not found in any MS of an earlier
date than the end of the sixteenth century. The name Mabi-
nogion belongs, strictly speaking, to only four of the twelve stories
included in Lady Guest's book. Each of these four tales is called
in Welsh “ceinc y Mabinogi,” which means “a branch of the
Mabinogi”; and the correct title for the group should be “the
four branches of the Mabinogi. ” The term mabinogi signifies "a
tale of youth," or "a tale for the young. ” The “four branches” are
the tales known as Pwyll, prince of Dyved; Branwen, daughter
of Llŷr; Manawydan, son of Llŷr; and Math, son of Mathonwy.
They contain what is probably the most archaic body of Welsh
tradition in existence, are largely, if not entirely, mythological in
character and suggest many points of analogy with the mythic
tales of Ireland4. They deal, mainly, with the fortunes of three
great families, the children of Dôn, the children of Llŷr and the
family of Pwyll. In these stories, the Mabinogion proper, Arthur
does not appear at all.
Of the other tales, two—The Dream of Maxen Wledig and
Llud and Llevelys—are brief romantic excursions into the do-
main of ancient British history, later in date, probably, than
Geoffrey's Historia. Arthur does not figure in either. The
remaining five tales, however, are all Arthurian, but form two
1 In the Peniarth Library. Gwenogvryn Evans has an edition of this MS in
preparation.
* Rhys, Dent's Malory, p. xxxiv.
8 Thomas Love Peacock drew most of his matter for The Misfortunes of Elphin from
this tale.
* For a suggestive analysis of the probable origins and mythological significanca
of the “ four branches,” see Rhys, Celtic Folk-lore, vol. II.
A18 tale.
## p. 253 (#273) ############################################
The Mabinogion
253
distinct groups. In Kulhwch and Olwen and The Dream of
Rhonabwy we have two Arthurian stories of apparently pure
British origin, in which Arthur is presented in a milieu altogether
unaffected by the French romances. The second and better known
group, consisting of the three tales entitled The Lady of the
Fountain, Geraint, son of Erbin and Peredur, son of Evrawc,
are romances palpably based upon French originals. They corre-
spond, respectively, in their main features, to Chrétien de Troyes's
Le chevalier au lion, Erec and Le conte del Graal? .
The Mabinogion, as a whole, are the most artistic and de-
lightful expression of the early Celtic genius which we possess.
Nowhere else do we come into such close touch with the real
“Celtic magic," with the true enchanted land, where “the eternal
illusion clothes itself in the most seductive hues? " Composed
though they were, in all probability, by a professional literary
class, these stories are distinguished by a naive charm which
suggests anything but an artificial literary craftsmanship. The
supernatural is treated in them as the most natural thing in the
world, and the personages who possess magic gifts are made to
move about and speak and behave as perfectly normal human
creatures. The simple grace of their narrative, their delicacy and
tenderness of sentiment and, above all, their feeling for nature,
distinguish these tales altogether from the elaborate productions
of the French romantic schools; while in its lucid precision of form,
and in its admirable adaptation to the matter with which it deals,
no medieval prose surpasses that of the Welsh of the Mabinogion.
These traits are what make it impossible to regard even the later
Welsh Arthurian stories as mere imitations of Chrétien's poems.
Their characters and incidents may be, substantially, the same;
but the tone, the atmosphere, the entire artistic setting of the
Welsh tales are altogether different; and “neither Chrétien nor
Marie de France, nor any other French writer of the time, whether
in France or England, can for one moment compare with the
Welshmen as story-tellers pure and simple. "
i Le Conte del Graal is only in part the work of Chrétien.
» Repan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races. (Trans. Hutchison. )
* A. Nutt, in his edition of Lady C. Guest's Mabinogion, p. 352. Cf. Renan :
“ The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable serenity of the
Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense between a smile and a tear. We
have in them the simple recital of a child, unwitting of any distinction between the
noble and the common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that calm
and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto’s stanzas transport us. The chatter of the later
medieval French and German imitators can give no idea of this charming manner of
narration. The skilful Chrétien de Troyes himself remains in this respect far below
the Welsh story-tellers. " The Poetry of the Celtic Races.
## p. 254 (#274) ############################################
254
The Arthurian Legend
Kulhwch and Olwen, however, is the only one of these tales
that need detain us here, embodying as it does, in common with
the Welsh poems already quoted, Arthurian traditions far transcend-
ing in age the appearance of the Arthur of chivalry. Here, as
Matthew Arnold has said in an oft-quoted passage, the story-teller
"is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition
merely-stones ‘not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
greater, cunninger, more majestical. ” The main theme of the
story is the wooing of Olwen, the daughter of Yspađaden Pen
Kawr, by Kulhwch, the son of Kilyd, and the long series of
labours imposed upon the suitor in order to gain her hand
Olwen appears to have been well worth the arduous quest, for
“ her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were
her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone
amidst the spray of the meadow fountain," and "four white trefoils
sprung up wherever she trod. ” Arthur appears, here, not as the
ideal British warrior, nor as the hope and future restorer of his
race, but as a fairy king, overcoming uncouth and monstrous
enemies by his own and his followers' magic. All the same, he
is the lord of what is to the story-teller, in many places, a very
determinate realm; for, one of the most remarkable features of
Kulhwch and Olwen, as compared with the later Arthurian tales,
is the precision of its topography. The route of the boar-hunt,
for example-or the hunting of the Twrch Trwyth—may be traced,
without much difficulty, on our maps? .
Even more remarkable, however, than the topographical detail
of the story is the congeries of fabulous and fantastic Dames
grouped in it around the central figure of Arthur. This feature,
suggesting, as it does, the Arthurian court of the age of chivalry,
might be taken as evidence of the late redaction of the tale as we
have it, were it not that the story-teller gives details about most
of these strange characters which are evidently drawn from the
remnants of some lost saga. Arthur himself is introduced to us
in his palace, or hall, called Ehangwen, and thither Kulhwch comes
to crave his help to obtain Olwen; "and this boon I likewise seek,”
says Kulhwch, “at the hands of thy warriors. " These warriors
Kulhwch then proceeds to name in seemingly interminable suc-
cession. First in the long and weird list come Kai and Bedwyr;
others well known to early Welsh tradition include Gwynn and
to obtain Olwenien, and thither by
says Kulhwch
1 See Rhys's account of the hunt in Celtic Folklore, Vol. a, p. 572.
## p. 255 (#275) ############################################
one foot"; "Gure example, one Sol. 18 humour, briefly
Kulhwch and Olwen
255
Edern, the sons of Nud, Geraint, the son of Erbin, Taliesin, the
chief of bards, Manawyđan, the son of Llŷr. But, among the
company, there also appear several grotesque figures of whom
nothing is known save what the story-teller himself, giving rein,
as it would seem, to a deliberately mischievous humour, briefly
records. Thus we have, for example, one Sol, who “could stand
all day upon one foot”; Gwevy), the son of Gwestad, who “on the
day he was sad, would let one of his lips drop below his waist,
while he turned up the other like a cap upon his head”; Clust, the
son of Clustveinad, who "though he were buried seven cubits
beneath the earth, would hear the ant fifty miles off rise from her
nest in the morning. " Even familiar Arthurian heroes, like Kai,
are dowered with superhuman powers. “Kai had this peculiarity,
that his breath lasted nine nights and days under water, and he
could exist nine nights and nine days without sleep. ” “Very
subtle was Kai; when it pleased him he could make himself as
tall as the highest tree in the forest. " We are remote indeed,
in such company as this, from the knights of the Round Table;
but we are not so remote from the fairy world depicted in the
“Four Branches of the Mabinogi. ” The conclusion to which
Kulhwch and Olwen, and the few poems which mention Arthur,
clearly point is that the British king was far better known to
early Welsh tradition as a mythic hero than as the champion
of the Britons in their wars with the English. There may have
been a historical Arthur who was a comes Britanniae, or a dux
bellorum, of the sixth century, and his name, “re-echoed by the
topography of the country once under his protection," may have
"gathered round it legends of heroes and divinities of a past of
indefinite extent? . " What we do, however, know is that the
Arthur who emerges out of the mists of Celtic tradition at the
beginning of the twelfth century is an entirely imaginary being,
a king of fairy-land, undertaking hazardous quests, slaying monsters,
visiting the realms of the dead, and having at his call a number of
knightly henchmen, notably Kay and Bedivere, who are all but his
equals in wizardry and martial prowess. This mythical Arthur-
the creation of a primitive imagination altogether unaffected by
the sophisticated conceptions of chivalry and of conscious dealers
in romantic literary wares-belongs to early Welsh literature
alone.
The transformation of the Welsh, or British, Arthur into a
romantic hero of European renown was the result of the contact
· Rbys, preface to Dent's Malory, p. xxxvi.
## p. 256 (#276) ############################################
256
The Arthurian Legend
of Norman culture and, as it would seem, Norman diplomacy,
with the Celtic races of the west. It was doubtless from Britanny,
rather than from Wales, that the Normans derived their first
knowledge of the Arthurian stories. Indeed, it is probable that
the nameless story-tellers of Britanny fastened upon, and expanded,
a number of popular traditions which prefigured the Arthur of
romance much more clearly than anything told or written in
Wales. The Armorican “Bretons" are probably those whom
Wace mentions as “telling many a fable of the Table Round? . "
In Britanny, also, a belief in Arthur's return must long have been
current, for Alanus de Insulis records that a denial of it in the
second half of the twelfth century would be likely to cost a man
his life in the country districts of Britanny. By the middle of
the eleventh century the relations between the duchy of Normandy
and the Bretons had become particularly close, and the duke of
Britanny was one of William the Conqueror's staunchest allies at
the time of the invasion of Britain.
It is not, however, to Britanny that the great Latin ex-
ploitation of the legend of Arthur, under Norman auspices,
belongs, but to a section of Great Britain where the Norman
conquerors had, very rapidly, succeeded in establishing intimate
relations with the Welsh. By the beginning of the twelfth
century the Normans had effected a firm settlement in South
Wales. Now, it happens that it was a writer associated, at
least by name, with the South Wales border, and claiming the
patronage of a princely Norman who held that part of the country
in fee, who, most of all, is entitled to be called the literary father
of Arthurian romance. Robert, earl of Gloucester, and a natural
son of Henry I-for there is no evidence in support of the tradition
that his mother was the beautiful Nest, the daughter of the Welsh
prince, Rhys ap Tewdwr-acquired, early in the twelfth century, the
lordship of Glamorgan by marriage with Mabel, daughter of Robert
Fitz-hamon, conqueror of Glamorgan. Robert, like his father, was
a liberal and a diplomatic patron of letters. It was to him that
William of Malmesbury, the greatest historian of his time, dedi.
cated his History. To him was due the foundation of the abbey
of Margam, whose chronicle is a valuable early authority for the
history of Wales. On his estates at Torigni was born Robert de
Monte, abbot of Mont St Michel, a chronicler of renown, and a
lover and student of Breton legends. Above all, it was under his
1 Roman de Brut, 1. 9994.
• Prophetia Anglicana, etc. (Frankfort, 1603), Bk. I, p. 17.
## p. 257 (#277) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
257
immediate patronage that Geoffrey of Monmouth compiled his
romantic History of the Kings of Britain.
Of Geoffrey's personal history we know little. His full name
appears to have been, significantly, Geoffrey Arthur. His relentless
critic, William of Newburgh, takes “Arthur” to have been a by-
name given to him on the score of his Arthurian fabrications ; but
the truth probably is that Arthur was the name of his father?
His connection with Monmouth is obscure; he may have been
born in the town, or educated at the priory founded there by
the Breton, Wihenoc. He was never, as he is commonly designated,
archdeacon of Monmouth, for there was no such archdeaconry in
existence. Whether he was by descent a Breton, or a Welshman,
we know no more than we do whether the famous “British book,"
which he professes to have used, was derived from Wales or from
Britanny. Neither matter is of much consequence. The “British
book” may very well have been an authentic document, since lost,
which was placed, as he tells us, at his disposal by his friend
Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Much Welsh and Breton folk-lore
doubtless reached him through monastic channels. Nennius and
Bede furnished him with matter which can be clearly traced in his
text? There can be little doubt, however, that the main source
of the Arthurian portions of his History was Geoffrey's own
imagination. The floating popular traditions about Arthur, and
the few documents which he had to his hand, plainly suggested
to him the possibilities of developing a new and striking romantic
theme. Geoffrey appears to have gauged the tastes and fancies of
the courtly readers of his day with an astuteness worthy of a
Defoe. Romance was in demand, and Geoffrey, giving the rein
to his faculty for decorative and rhetorical writing, responded
to that demand with an address that would have done credit to
the most alert of modern novelists. The time-honoured vehicle
of the chronicle was turned to new and unexpected uses. Sober
and orthodox chroniclers, like William of Malmesbury and Henry
of Huntingdon, are deliberately warned off the ground thus opened
out for the poet and the romancer. The “kings of the Saxons”
were their legitimate subject; the "kings of the Britons" were
1 Flis name is given as Gaufridus Arturus in the list of witnesses to the foundation
charter of the abbey of Osnoy in 1129. See Dugdale, Monasticon, vi, p. 251, and
Sir F. Madden in Journal of the Archaeological Institute, 1858, p. 305.
? A full, and most suggestive, discussion of the whole subject of Geoffrey's sources
is given in The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles by R. H. Fletcher (Harvard
Studies in Phil. and Lit. Vol. x, 1906).
E. L. I. CH. XII.
17
## p. 258 (#278) ############################################
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The Arthurian Legend
outside their province, for “the British book" was to them a sealed
volume.
Geoffrey's relation to the Latin chroniclers of his time is dealt
with in another chapter; here, his contributions to Arthurian
story alone claim our attention. The glorification of Arthur in
the History lends some countenance to the supposition that the
work was written with an interested motive. Geoffrey probably
aspired, like most of his class, to preferment in the church, and
may have hoped that his book would ingratiate him with the earl
of Gloucester and with Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, to whom
he dedicated, separately, the “Prophecies of Merlin. " Assuming
him to have had such motives, Geoffrey's History is interpreted
as being a kind of prose epic, intended to celebrate the united
glories of the composite Anglo-Norman empire which attained
its widest extent under Henry II? It did, indeed, provide a hero
in whom Norman and Saxon, Welshman and Breton, could take
common pride. Moreover, the ancient birthright and the essential
homogeneity of the various races embraced in the Angevin empire
were attested by an account of their descent from a branch of the
Trojan stock celebrated in the Aeneid. Brutus, whose eponymous
connection with the country had already been suggested by Nennius,
became for Britain what Aeneas was for Rome. Geoffrey's chronicle
is thus the first Brut, the first elaborate, and possibly “inspired,”
adaptation of the Brutus legend for the glorification of Britain ;
and, in time, all records of the early British kings, whether in
prose or verse, which had this mythic starting point, came to
be called Bruts-presumably in imitation of the title of Vergil's
epic.
Apart, however, from its Trojan prelude, and its possible
political or diplomatic motive, there is little real analogy between
Geoffrey's Brut and the Aeneid. For Arthur, after all, and not
Brutus, is Geoffrey's ultimate hero. The flos regum of early
Britain, the warrior who vindicates the essential valour of the
British people, and who not only triumphs over his insignificant
enemies in Britain itself, but conquers a great part of Europe
and forces even the once victorious Romans to pay tribute to
a British king, is Arthur. In him was fulfilled the prophecy that
“for the third time should one of British race be born who should
? See the epilogue to Geoffrey's History.
* This hypothesis is advanced with much ingenuity, and plausibility, in the epilogue
to what is the best English translation of Geoffrey's History, by Sebastian Evans,
London, 1903.
## p. 259 (#279) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
259
obtain the empire of Rome. ” Thus, Geoffrey brings all his powers
of rhetoric, and all his imagination, to bear upon his delineation of
Arthur and his exploits. The first six books of the History tell,
with many embellishments of style and with incidental references
to contemporary events elsewhere, inserted as so many grave
guarantees of authenticity, the story of Arthur's kingly prede-
cessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin
appears on the scene; and Geoffrey pauses to give, in an entire
book, the fantastic prophecies attributed to that wonder-working
seer. Romance, frank and undisguised, now usurps the place of
sober, or affected, history. Merlin's magic arts are made largely
contributory to the birth of the most renowned Arthur. ” Uther
and Gorlois and Igerna and the castle of Tintagol, or Tintagel,
now take their place, for the first time, in the fabric of Arthurian
story.
Uther, with Merlin's assistance, gains admission to Igerna's
castle in the semblance of her lord, Gorlois, and begets Arthur ; upon
the death of Gorlois, Uther takes Igerna for his lawful queen, and
Arthur of due right succeeds to the throne. Crowned by Dubricius,
“archbishop of the City of Legions," at the early age of fifteen,
Arthur at once begins his career of conquest. The Saxons, Scots
and Picts are encountered and vanquished at the river Duglas ;
afterwards, with the aid of his cousin, king Hoel of Britanny,
Arthur subjugates the entire island and divides Scotland among
its original rightful rulers, Lot and his two brothers, Urian and
Augusel. Lot, we are told by the way, "had, in the days of
Aurelius Ambrosius, married Arthur's own sister, who had borne
unto him Gawain and Mordred. ” Having restored the whole
country to its ancient dignity, Arthur “took unto himself a wife
born of a noble Roman family, Guanhumara, who, brought up and
nurtured in the household of duke Cador, surpassed in beauty all
the other women of the island. " Ireland and Iceland are next
added to his conquests, while tribute is paid, and homage made
to him, by the rulers of the Orkneys and of Gothland. His
court now is the centre of a brilliant assemblage of knights, his
fear “falls upon the kings of realms oversea" and his “heart
became so uplifted within him” that "he set his desire upon
subduing the whole of Europe unto himself? ". Norway, Dacia
and Gaul fall in quick succession under Arthur's sway; Normandy
is made over to “Bedwyr, his butler,” and Anjou to “Kay, his
seneschal. ” Returning to Britain, Arthur next holds high court at
1 Bk. 1x, ch. XI.
17—2
## p. 260 (#280) ############################################
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The Arthurian Legend
Caerleon-upon-Usk, then a city whose “kingly palaces” vied in
magnificence with those of Rome itself.
At that time was Britain exalted unto so high a pitch of dignity as that
it did surpass all other kingdoms in plenty of riches, in luxury of adornment,
and in the courteous wit of them that dwelt therein. Whatsoever knight in
the land was of renown for his prowess did wear his clothes and his arms all
of one same colour. And the dames, no less witty, would apparel them in
like manner in a single colour, nor would they deigu have the love of any
gave he had thrice approved bim in the wars. Wherefore at that time did
dames wax chaste and knights the nobler for their lovel.
The pomp and colour of the age of chivalry, and its ideals of
knightly love, are thus already beginning to qualify imaginative
conceptions of the Arthurian court; while the picture of Arthur
himself, as the head of princely vassals and emulous knights, makes
the transition easy to the fellowship of the Round Table, and to all
the other accretions of later romances. But Geoffrey does not,
any more than the early Welsh poets and story-tellers or the later,
and more deliberate, purveyors of fantastic fables, altogether
remove his Arthur from wonderland. The British king still slays
monsters; by his own hand he kills a Spanish giant at St Michael's
Mount, and a still more formidable foe, the giant "Ritho of Mount
Eryri, who had fashioned him a furred cloak of the kings he had
slain. ” Equally marvellous is Arthur's individual might in battle,
for, in his encounters with the Romans, "nought might armour
avail” his antagonists “but that Caliburn would carve their souls
from out them with their blood. ”
The great battle with the Romans, in which Arthur displayed
such prowess, was a fateful one. The British hosts did, indeed,
gain the victory; and Hoel and Gawain (Walgainus) performed
prodigies of valour second only to those of Arthur himself. But
the triumph was obtained at a heavy cost; many illustrious British
chieftains, and, above all, the faithful Kay and Bedwyr, were
numbered among the slain. The result of the battle was to fire
Arthur with the design of marching upon the city of Rome itself.
He was already beginning to climb the passes of the Alps, when
"message was brought him that his nephew Mordred, unto whom
he had committed the charge of Britain, had tyrannously and
traitorously set the crown of the kingdom upon his own head, and
had linked him in unhallowed union with Guenevere, the queen,
in despite of her former marriage? ". Arthur, taking with him his
British warriors only, returns home. Mordred meets him as he
18. Evans's trans. (London, 1903).
* Book , ch. x.
## p. 261 (#281) ############################################
Geoffrey of Monmouth
261
lands, and, in the ensuing battle, Gawain and many others are slain.
Mordred, however, is driven back, and Guinevere, in terror for her
safety, becomes a nun. The final battle is fought at the river
Camel in the west country. Mordred is defeated and slain, and
most of the leaders on both sides perish. “Even the renowned
king Arthur himself was wounded unto death, and was borne
thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds. "
Such, in brief, is the narrative through the medium of which -
Arthur made his triumphant entry to the kingship of the most
splendid province of medieval romance. Let Geoffrey have the
credit which is his due.
