King Arthur

The Age of Arthur

Arthur, the great King of the West, never truly died, the legends tell us, because at the end of his time, after the Last Battle, he was rowed by four otherwordly Queens across the water to the island of Avalon. Avalon: the Celtic derivation of the name means 'island of apples', for appletrees, the tree of knowledge and of eternal life, are symbols of the Otherworld. And then again some stories tell us that Arthur and his knights are sleeping in a crystal cave somewhere, awaiting their return to arms. Many times, over the centuries, Arthur has rowed back from Avalon and risen from his crystal bed. Many times, since the stories first began to gain wide currency, in the fifth century, after the fall of Rome and the withdrawal of the legions from the western provinces of the Empire, many times has Arthur been re-enthroned in Camelot.

The Arthurian mythos, above and beyond all others, is THE defining symbol and legend of the West. In it, as in a crucible, are all the strange and beautiful, terrifying and magical complexities of this thing we call Western culture: which has been created out of an ancient Indo-European base, steeped in the savagery of the steppes, sifted through the prisms of a dozen or more warrior cultures, scented with the beauties of dozens of ancient languages and belief systems, all over Europe. And out of that crucible has emerged this extraordinarily enduring myth, those shape-shifting, thrilling figures that are Arthur and Guinevere and Merlin and Morgan, and all the knights and heroes and otherwordly women that people the stories.

Every age has its Arthur, though the ideological ages tend to scorn him; for he is humanity writ large, a kind of secular Christ, suffering, troubled, brilliant, beloved, hated, wounded, bleeding, and heroic. The legend is far too complex and troubled and ambivalent for ideologues to cope with; similarly, the Church herself, in her more militant or dogmatic incarnations, found it rather troubling, and whilst it was not specifically forbidden, it was left to one side, not encouraged. Only in the fourteenth century when the idea of the Grail Quest began to percolate into the legends(many say inspired by Byzantine or other Eastern Christian rites and ideas)did the Church pay much attention at all to the legend. And that was because of the new element: the idea that the secular Round Table, with its highly developed notions of shame and honour and heroism, must be subsumed to the Christian Otherworld. Galahad, half-human, half-otherwordly, is both the Redeemer and the Destroyer of the Round Table; he brings death to the knights, and eternal life as well.

The story of Arthur first came to wide attention in Europe in the early Middle Ages, during what used to be called the Dark Ages, but well before that, the myth had blossomed. It appears to be Celtic in origin, and certainly many of the Arthurian stories have close parallels with Celtic myths(for instance, the story of Arthur's return to save his kingdom is analogous to the ancient British story of Bran the Blessed). Yet I have also read that in the century before Jesus' birth, the Romans discovered a shrine to a bear god in a cave in the Pyrenees: and local people told them that the god's name was Artehe. Of course, the name Arthur itself means Bear. .

In those early days, Arthur was seen as a great warrior who was not above resorting to trickery, as in the Welsh story, The Spoils of Annwyn, to achieving his aims. He is portrayed as a chieftain with a great following, often of Romano-British descent, attempting to save Ynys Prydein, or the Isle of Britain, from being gobbled up by the Saxon and Viking enemies. There is no Merlin in the earliest stories, though there is Taliesin; and though there's a deal of magic, it occurs in an offhand sort of way. There's certainly no discussion of idealism or tortured love.

But the greatest flowering of the Arthurian legend was in the period between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. This is whence most of the stories we know and love have come from. Here is where we meet Merlin, and Morgana le Fay, and Lancelot, and Gawain, and Galahad, and a myriad other characters from the court of Camelot and beyond. In the stories of Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Boron, Thomas Malory, and many, many others, we come face to face with that mixture of the mundane and the marvellous, of wit and wonder, savagery and spirituality, which is the hallmark of the High Middle Ages. It is extraordinary to think that it is the stories of a defeated, mysterious people--the Celts, in all their incarnations--which, jumping from mythology to legend to romance and back again, characterised that prolific, brilliant flowering of the High Middle Ages, without which the Renaissance would never have happened at all. It is extraordinary to think that it is the Celtic spirit, in its slyness, idealism, mysticism and sensuality, which animates the greatest of all Western myths.

But there is also the influence of many other streams of thought: and most vividly of all, the new cult of Woman, coming from the Southern courts of France: Sacred Woman, the Virgin Mary; and Secular Woman: the Beloved, represented by Queen Guinevere. Chivalry, courtesy, civility, love between equals: these did not exactly replace the old code of brotherly knighthood, but added to it. And these new ideals had been devised by women--most spectacularly, by the extraordinary, brilliant Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose life and career eclipses any romantic melodrama, and her daughter, the equally brilliant Marie, Countess of Champagne, who was Chretien de Troyes' patron. Strange, to think that in an age we are pleased to patronise as an unenlightened time when women were uniformly oppressed and subjugated, it was women who were driving the culture!

After that great flowering, and especially after the late, extrordinary introduction of the Grail Quest, which both infused new vitality and breathed death on the old, giving that yearning note of melancholy and nostalgia which the Arthurian legend has carried ever since, the story of Arthur fell into some disrepute. Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote is a pretty graphic example of just how far the legend had fallen from public estimation in the Renaissance. Of course, the irony here is that despite Cervantes' conscious intention to send up what he sees as dusty, irrelevant ideals, Don Quixote, far from being a ridiculous figure of fun, acquires the lonely dignity of the true Arthurian hero.

In general though, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not a good time for the legend, though Arthur never quite died, only languished unheralded in Avalon for a while. But the following century saw his triumphant return, celebrated in poetry, in art, and in ideals. Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites saw the Arthurian legend as embodying everything they most aspired to, whilst warning about everything they most saw as threatening humanity. And that triumphant march has never quite wavered, all through this century and into the next. The Modernist period, tied to realism and the new, was perhaps another sterile patch; though even this is not sure at all. After all, John Steinbeck himself consciously equated the rise of the Western mythos with the Arthurian myth. And the ultra-realistic detective novels of the 1950's and 1960's often had Arthurian overtones--for example, Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was originally going to be called Malory; John MacDonald's Travis McGee was called 'the tarnished knight'. Indeed, popular culture of all sorts in this century has been permeated by the Arthurian myth. Science fiction and fantasy, which along with crime, are the biggest popular modern genres, are full of references, conscious or not, to the Arthurian myth; film is riddled with it, from the overtly Arthurian, like John Boorman's extraordinary Excalibur, to the symbolic, such as The Fisher King. Take a glance at the Net and you will see how many Arthurian sites there are, and what lively discussions can be had with people of all ages on lists such as Arthurnet. Quite a few musicians, such as the angelic-voiced Loreena McKeenitt, have taken to Arthurian themes.

It seems, indeed, that our modern age can't get enough of the Once and Future King. We interpret him and his court in all kinds of ways: from the feminist readings of a Marion Zimmer Bradley to the Christian view of a Stephen Lawhead; from the humour of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the passion and serious beauty of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry. The interesting thing to me in this great modern revival is that it is not something that is seen clearly by the elite literary or cultural establishment; this is very much a groundswell movement, very much something hidden from the books pages of big newspapers or the cultural musings of 'experts'. And here is something for those who feel pessimistic about the way the world is going, the direction of Western culture: many young people love the Arthurian myth; many are very well-read in it. It is popular culture that has taken up the slack where elite culture turned its back. It is a subculture that has seen that the source does not dry up, that the well is not going to disappear, that has not forgotten the debt which the whole of the culture owes to this extraordinary myth. And so a shining thread is added to, the stream is not allowed to disappear, the world is re-enchanted, and Arthur comes again, over the water, from Avalon.

And here, a recent thoughtful Internet essay by U. S. writer, publisher and gamer Peter Corless, on Arthurnet(posted on December 2nd, 1998), deserves to be quoted at length for the light it sheds on the enduring appeal of the Arthurian myth:

'In this present Golden Age of Personal Computing/ Networking(circa 1975-on). . aside from our networking and communication capacities, our personal lives are at great risk. Families in both extremely highly-connected and extremely poorly-connected communities are in severe decay. Many children are growing up, like the characters of so many Arthurian legends, as fatherless sons. . . these children have ghost fathers, the first of which were displaced Vietnam vets, the latest of which are the dispirited urban poor. Children grow up with video movies, video games, computer games. electronic music, and electronic virtual pets, unable to learn how to deal with living creatures, such as the few rare siblings they might have, or animals other than humans in their homes. Television is the only way to experience most far, and wild animals, providing the illusion of proximity to nature. . .

. . I know that for many young people, a call to examine with new eyes the works of Arthurian legend is a relief and a joy. . Why the 11th-15th centuries created such a tapestry of stories of spirited, honourable warriors, who grew up without fathers, or parents, has probably been examined, but for those who never thought of it: Merlin's father was an unnamed spirit; Arthur's father Uther dies shortly after his birth; Gawaine's father Lot is killed in battle; Lancelot is taken away from his family by the Lady of the Lake; Galahad is separated early from his father; Percival's father absent or murdered; Tristran's father is dead; Mordred is separated from his father Arthur who tries to murder him. These characters are the central characters of the stories, and all share the trait of having been deprived of their fathers. This is one of the reasons I believe the stories are so vital today to young men. . .

It is increasingly difficult, in this virtual, faceless, statistically macroeconomical and religiously ambiguous times, to make sense of our lives. We're all receiving more input, forcing ourselves to process more work, more media, more leisure time activities, and so on. The world is a busy place, and it is hard to keep the flood of contacts down to a manageable and peaceful stream. . . The Arthurian myths succeed, as all myths do, by making analogy for our times. We are not Arthur, but we can relate to his desire for a righteous kingdom. We are not Galahad, but the Grail Quest has meaning for us. . I do know these Arthurian stories feel like a good and true compass for my own adventures through life. '

(with thanks to Peter Corless, Green Knight Publishing. )