King Arthur in history and legend E-Book

Jones William Lewis

• Herausgeber: PubMe
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

If, in Caxton’s words, “such a king called Arthur” ever lived in these islands, he must have flourished during the period between the first coming of the Saxons and the middle of the sixth century. So much, at any rate, is clearly attested by the meagre historical records which profess to recount his deeds. Nothing, however, can be found in these records to warrant the belief that he ever became “king” of any part of Britain. His achievements as a warrior alone are mentioned, and all that we can gather besides from Welsh tradition only serves to emphasise the fact that his renown among the British people rested mainly upon his warlike prowess. His admission to the so-called “Celtic pantheon,” and his gradual evolution in Celtic tradition as a great mythological figure, are matters of purely speculative interest, and cannot be taken into account in an attempt to answer our first question—Who, and what, was the historical Arthur? In Welsh we read of an “emperor” Arthur, but this title, as we shall see, implies nothing more than that he was a war-leader, or a commander-in-chief of a group of more or less celebrated generals. His kingship, and his state as the head of a great court, are entirely the creations of later romance.

Leseprobe

William Lewis Jones

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Table of contents

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER I THE EARLIEST ARTHURIAN RECORDS

CHAPTER II ARTHUR IN WELSH LEGEND AND LITERATURE

CHAPTER III GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE CHRONICLERS

CHAPTER IV ROMANCE

CHAPTER V ARTHUR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

ADDITIONAL NOTES

FOOTNOTES:

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

THIS little book is an attempt to trace, in as clear and summary a form as possible, the origin and growth of King Arthur’s historical and literary renown, and follows, largely, the lines of a chapter contributed by me to the first volume of The Cambridge History of English Literature. Although I have had, necessarily, to refer to much literary matter which is purely mythological, I have not sought to give any account of the speculations of those who in our own time have endeavoured to reconstruct and interpret the myths and beliefs of pre-historic Celtic heathendom. Nor have I made more than the briefest allusion to the subsidiary legends which, mainly through the agency of French romantic scribes, came to be associated with Arthur’s name, and to be included in “the matter of Britain” as it emerged out of the age of high romance. The book deals, all but exclusively, with King Arthur himself, as he is known to chroniclers, romancers and poets.My obligations to particular writers will be found recorded in the paginal notes. I must, however, express here my special indebtedness to the writings of Sir John Rhys and the late Mr Alfred Nutt. To Mr Nutt, in particular, whose tragic and untimely death last year was a grievous loss to Celtic scholarship, I owe much private help and suggestion.In one or two chapters of the book—the second and the third, more especially—I have reproduced, almost verbatim, a few short passages from articles of mine which have appeared in The Quarterly Review, and in the Transactions of the London Cymmrodorion Society.W. LEWIS JONES.

INTRODUCTORY

“ It is notoriously known through the universal world,” writes Caxton in his preface to Malory’s Morte Darthur, “that there be nine worthy” kings “and the best that ever were,” and that the “first and chief of the three best Christian and worthy” is King Arthur. Caxton, however, finds it a matter of reproach that so little had been done in his own country to perpetuate and honour the memory of one who “ought most to be remembered amongst us Englishmen tofore all other Christian kings.” Thanks mainly to Caxton’s own enterprise, and to the poets who have drawn their inspiration from Malory’s book, there is no longer any cause to accuse Englishmen of indifference to Arthur’s name and fame. No literary matter is more familiar to them than “what resounds in fable or romance of Uther’s son.” And yet nothing is more “notoriously known” than that authentic historical records of the career of this “most renowned Christian king” are distressingly scanty and indeterminate. An old Welsh bard, who sings of the graves of departed British warriors, and has no difficulty in locating most of them,[1]tells us that “unknown is the grave of Arthur.”[2]Would that this were indeed the sum of our ignorance! To-day, as of old, Arthur remains but a shadowy apparition, clothed in the mists of legend and stalking athwart the path of history to distract and mystify the sober chronicler. A Melchisedec of profane history, he has “neither beginning of days nor end of life.” Neither date nor place of birth can be assigned to him any more than a place of burial, while undiscovered yet is the seat of that court where knights, only less famous than himself, sought his benison and behest. It is only romantic story-tellers, like the authors of the Welsh Mabinogion, who venture upon such positive statements as that “Arthur used to hold his court at Caerlleon upon Usk.”[3]Geoffrey of Monmouth is, indeed, even more precise and circumstantial than the professed retailers of legend, for he actually gives the reasons why Arthur settled his court at Caerlleon, or the City of Legions—a “passing pleasant place.”[4]That, of course, is only Geoffrey’s way, and illustrates the genius for invention which makes his so-called History a work unique of its kind. The “matter of Britain” is, much more than the “matter of France,” or even the heterogeneous “matter of Rome the great,” the despair of the historian.[5]But it is, for that very reason, the paradise of the makers and students of romance; and, as a result, the mass of Arthurian literature of all kinds which exists to-day,—prose and verse romances, critical studies of “origins,” scholarly quests along perilous paths of mythology and folk-lore,—is ponderous enough to appal the most omnivorous reader. The Arthurian legend has indeed been of late, both in Europe and in America, the subject of so much mythological, ethnological and philological speculation as to tempt the unsophisticated lover of mere literature to say, when he contemplates the mounting pile of printed critical matter, that Arthur’s sepulchre, wherever his mortal remains may lie, is at last well on the way to be built in our libraries.There is nothing in literary history quite like the fascination which Arthurian romance has had for so many diverse types of mind. Poets, musicians, painters, religious mystics, folk-lorists, philologists—all have yielded to it. For some people the study of Arthurian nomenclature is as engrossing a pursuit as the interpretation of ‘The Idylls of the King’ is for others, while there are those who derive as much pleasure from investigating the symbolic meanings of the story of the Grail as lovers of music do from listening to the mighty harmonies of Parzival or Tristan und Isolde. All this only makes us wonder the more why so obscure and elusive a figure as the historical British Arthur should have become the centre of a romantic cycle which presents so many varied and persistent features of interest. Even in Caxton’s time, as in our own, there were sceptics “who held opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all books as been made of him be but feigned and fables.” This is not surprising, when it is remembered that even when Geoffrey of Monmouth, some three centuries before, gave to the world his astonishing record of Arthur’s achievements, a few obstinate critics had their doubts about the whole matter, and one of them—the chronicler, William of Newburgh—roundly denounced Geoffrey for having, by his “saucy and shameless lies,” made “the little finger of his Arthur bigger than the back of Alexander the Great.”[6]Caxton’s way with the sceptics is ingenuous and short, but it is curious to note how his preface to the Morte Darthur succeeds, in its own quaint and crude fashion, in suggesting what are still the main problems of constructive Arthurian criticism. It will not do, he says in effect, to dismiss summarily all Arthurian traditions as so many old wives’ tales. They are too widespread and persistent not to have some basis of solid fact underlying them: besides, the people who believe them, love them, and write of them, cannot all be credulous fools. Caxton, in particular, cites the case of the “noble gentlemen” who “required him to imprint the history of the noble king and conqueror, king Arthur,”—one of whom “in special said, that in him that should say or think that there was never such a king called Arthur might well be aretted great folly and blindness.” This gentleman—of whom one would gladly know more—was evidently both an antiquary and a student of letters, and could give weighty reasons for the faith that was in him. First of all, Arthur’s grave, so far from being unknown, might be seen “in the monastery of Glastingbury.” Again, reputable authors like Higden, Boccaccio, and “Galfridus in his British book,” tell of his death and recount his life; “and in divers places of England many remembrances be yet of him, and shall remain perpetually, and also of his knights.” His seal, for example, “in red wax closed in beryl,” could be seen in the Abbey of Westminster; Gawaine’s skull and Cradock’s mantle were enshrined in Dover Castle; the Round Table was at Winchester, and “in other places Launcelot’s sword and many other things.” Caxton appears to speak in his own person when he goes on to re-inforce all this by mentioning the records of Arthur that remained in Wales, and “in Camelot, the great stones and the marvellous works of iron lying under the ground, and royal vaults, which divers now living have seen.” Moreover, Arthur’s renown was well established in all places, Christian and heathen, so much so that he was “more spoken of beyond the sea,” and “more books made of his noble acts,” than in England. “Then all these things alleged,” he concludes, “I could not well deny but that there was such a noble king named Arthur, and reputed one of the nine worthy, and first and chief of the Christian men.” Hence he decided in all good faith, “under the favour and correction of all noble lords and gentlemen, to enprise to imprint” the Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. And, in view of Ascham’s famous denunciation of the book as containing but “open manslaughter and bold bawdrie,” and of Tennyson’s sensitiveness to the touch of “ the adulterous finger of a timeThat hover’d between war and wantonness,”it is well to remember that Caxton held that all that was in it was “written for our doctrine.” “For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.”Caxton’s preface to the Morte Darthur has here been taken as a sort of preliminary text, not only because that famous work is, by general consent, the fullest and the most fascinating presentment in English of the great congeries of tales that make up the so-called Arthurian “cycle,” but also because Caxton’s own words, as already hinted, serve to raise, in a peculiarly suggestive way, most of the questions with which the critical student of the Arthurian legends and their origin has to deal to-day. The Morte Darthur itself, it has become a commonplace to say, remains unchallenged, in spite of its inconsequences and inconsistencies, the supreme Arthurian “prose epic” in English. The work is not, of course, “epic” in any strict sense, but it was issued by Caxton to the readers of his day as pre-eminently an English Arthuriad. Arthur alone of “the Nine Worthies” had not had justice done to him in his own country. The two other Christian “worthies,” Charlemagne and Godfrey of Boulogne, had been adequately celebrated abroad, and Caxton himself had contributed to spread the latter’s fame in England. Why should the great English “Christian king” remain unhonoured in his own land? It was, therefore, with the patriotic object of blazoning the fame of the greatest of English heroes that Caxton undertook the publication of Malory’s book. Now, the historical Arthur, so far as we know him, is not English at all, but a “British” hero, who fought against the Saxons, and whose prowess is one of the jealously treasured memories of the Celtic peoples, and particularly of the Welsh. By what process of transformation had this British warrior become, by Caxton’s time, the ideal “Christian king” of England? And why, again, should he be singled out as pre-eminently one of the three Christian kings of the world, and his name linked with “the noble history of the Saint Greal”? Here we come at once upon one of the disturbing influences in what ought to be a straightforward record of the doings of a fighting chieftain of early Britain. The quest of the Holy Grail had, originally, nothing to do with Arthur.[7]But, by Caxton’s time, the mystic, or religious, element in Arthurian romance had become so prominent as to make it impossible to think of Arthur except in association with the “high history” of the Grail. A further complication meets us when we are told that Malory took his material for his narrative of the deeds of the paramount English, or British, hero “out of certain books of French.” Why should Malory so constantly refer to “the French book” as his authority, and have so little to go upon that had been written in English, or in Welsh? Why is it that to-day, after four centuries of diligent search in both private and public libraries, the amount of extant British literature of an indubitably ancient date dealing with Arthur’s exploits is so scanty? For Caxton’s statement still remains substantially true that, down to the fifteenth century, “the books that had been made about Arthur over sea,” and in foreign tongues, far outnumbered those that had been made in Britain. How are we to account for the popularity which the Arthurian stories thus enjoyed on the European continent, and for the way in which they became, during the Middle Ages, practically international literary property?These are the main questions which have to be answered to-day by those who attempt to trace the origin and growth of the Arthurian legends, and they are all suggested in Caxton’s preface. This little book does not pretend to furnish a final answer to any one of them. It simply essays to present in a summary and, it is hoped, a clear form the substance of what is told about King Arthur in history and legend, together with a brief notice of the development of Arthurian literature mainly in England. No attempt will be made to trace the many ramifications of the subsidiary stories which have been grafted upon the original Arthurian stock. Characters like Perceval, or Lancelot, or Tristram, who figure so largely in the full-orbed Arthurian cycle, could each easily be made the subject of a separate volume far exceeding the dimensions of the present one. Here, attention will be concentrated, as far as possible, upon the figure and the fortunes of Arthur himself.

CHAPTER I THE EARLIEST ARTHURIAN RECORDS