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The
illustration on the right shows a detail of
a magnificent 21-by-16-foot tapestry of King
Arthur woven about 1385. The tapestry comes
from a set of the "Nine Worthies," who
were regarded in the late Middle Ages as the
greatest military leaders of all times. Chaucer's
French contemporary Eustace
Deschamps wrote a ballade about them as
a reproach to what he regarded as his own degenerate
age. Arthur and his knights, although believed
by most medieval people to be historical, are
almost entirely products of legend and literature,
made up by many authors writing in different
genres, beginning not long after the fifth
and early sixth centuries, the time when he
supposedly lived, and culminating with Sir
Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur in
the latter part of the fifteenth century (NAEL 8,
1.439-56). The very absence of historical
fact to underpin the legends about Arthur left
writers of history and romance free to exploit
those stories in the service of personal, political,
and social agendas.
The man who inspired the Arthurian legend
would have been a Briton, a leader of the Celtic
people who had been part of the Roman Empire
and had converted to Christianity after it
became the official religion of Rome. At the
time, the Britons were making a temporarily
successful stand against the Anglo-Saxon invaders
who had already occupied the southeastern corner
of Britain. The Roman Empire was crumbling
before the incursions of Germanic tribes, and
by the late fifth century the Britons were
cut off from Rome and forced to rely for protection
on their own strength instead of on the Roman
legions (NAEL 8, 1.4).
Arthur was never a "king"; he may
well have been commander-in-chief of British
resistance to the Anglo-Saxons. In the Welsh
elegiac poem Gododdin, composed ca. 600, a
hero is said to have fed ravens with the corpses
of his enemies, "though he was not Arthur," indicating
that the poet knew of an even greater hero
by that name. According to a Latin History
of the Britons around the year 800, ascribed
to Nennius, "Arthur fought against the
Saxons in those days together with the kings
of Britain, but he was himself the leader of
battles." Nennius names twelve such battles,
in one of which Arthur is said to have carried
an image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders.
The Latin Annals of Wales (ca. 950)
has an entry for the year 516 concerning "the
Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the
Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders
for three days and three nights, and the Britons
were victorious."
Not until the twelfth century, though, did
Arthur achieve a quasi-historical existence
as the greatest of British kings in the works
of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon
(NAEL 8, 1.118-28). At the same time, Arthur
was flourishing in Welsh tales as a fairy-tale
king, attended by courtiers named Kei (Kay),
Bedwyn (Bedivere), and Gwalchmain (Gawain).
It was in the French literature of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries that Arthur and his
knights came to embody the rise, and eventual
decline, of a court exemplifying an aristocratic
ideal of chivalry. In the verse romances of
Chrétien de Troyes, the focus shifts
from the "history" of Arthur to the
deeds of his knights who ride out from his
court on fabulous adventures and exemplify
the chivalric ethos. Chrétien's
works were adapted and imitated by writers
in German, English, Dutch, and Icelandic. The
new genre of romance focused not only on the
exploits of knights fighting in wars and tournaments
or battling against monstrous foes but also
on the trials and fortunes of love, and romances
addressed mixed audiences of men and women.
In the thirteenth century, a group of French
writers produced what modern scholars refer
to as the Vulgate Cycle, in prose. This consists
of a huge network of interlocking tales, featuring
hundreds of characters. The Vulgate Cycle presents
a darker side to Arthur and to the Round Table
as a center of courtesy and culture.
In the chronicle histories, as a Christian
king, Arthur had borne the cross and fought
valiantly against barbarian enemies and an
evil giant. In romance, both Arthur's role
and his character undergo changes inconsistent
with his reputation as one of the worthies.
His court continues to be the center from which
the adventures of his knights radiate, but
Arthur himself becomes something of a figurehead,
someone whom French scholars refer to as a roi
fainéant — a do-nothing king — who
appears weak and is ruled and sometimes bailed
out by one of his knights, especially by his
nephew Sir Gawain. The very idea of Arthurian
chivalry as a secular ideal undergoes a critique,
especially in the Vulgate Cycle. While for
the aristocracy Arthur's reign continued
to provide an ancient model of courtesy, justice,
and prowess, as it does in Deschamps's
ballade on the Nine Worthies, moralists and
satirists pointed out, with varying degrees
of subtlety, how far Arthur and his knights
fall short of the highest spiritual ideals.
Sir Lancelot's adultery with Arthur's
queen became an especially troubling factor.
In French romance, along with his uncle's,
Sir Gawain's chivalry becomes equivocal
and, in many respects, more interesting. In
Chrétien's Yvain,
Gawain serves as the advocate for male bonding,
who succeeds in wooing the hero of the romance
away from his newly wedded wife. In courtly
romances at least (there is an exception in
popular romance), Gawain never acquires a wife
or even a permanent mistress like Lancelot,
although there are covert and, occasionally,
overt affairs with different ladies. In one
late tale, Gawain agrees to woo a cruel lady
on behalf of another knight, who then discovers
Gawain in bed with that lady. The poet of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight may well be
referring to such episodes when in the first
of the three titillating bedroom scenes, he
has the lady of the castle reproach Gawain
for his lack of courtesy:
"So good a knight as Gawain is given
out to be,
And the model of fair demeanor and manners pure,
Had he lain so long at a lady's side,
Would have claimed a kiss, by his courtesy,
Through some touch or trick of phrase at some tale's end."
(NAEL 8, 1.189, lines 1297–1301)
French romance can help one appreciate the
subtlety and delicacy of the humor with which
the Gawain poet and Chaucer treat bedroom
scenes. The Gauvain of French romances, however,
contrasts with his English counterpart. In
English romance before Malory, Sir Gawain remains
Arthur's chief knight. Chaucer's Squire's
Tale praises the speech and behavior of
a strange knight by saying that "Gawain,
with his olde curteisye, / Though he were come
again out of fairye, / Ne coude him nat amende
with a word." In Arthur's nightmarish
dream in Layamon's Brut, Gawain
sits astride the roof of the hall in front
of the king, holding his sword (NAEL 8, 1.125,
lines 13985–87). The English Gawain does
get married in The
Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,
which is one of eleven popular Gawain romances
surviving in English in all of which Sir Gawain
is the best of Arthur's knights. That story
is of special interest because it has the same
plot as The Wife of Bath's Tale, except
that in this tale the hero is not getting himself
but King Arthur off the hook.
The legendary king of the Celtic Britons
and his nephew were eventually adopted as national
heroes by the English, against whose ancestors
Arthur and Gawain had fought, and that is how
they are presented by William Caxton in the Preface to
his edition of Malory's Morte Darthur in
1485, the same year in which Henry Tudor, who
thanks to his Welsh ancestry made political
capital of King Arthur, became Henry VII of
England. Caxton valiantly, and perhaps somewhat
disingenuously, seeks to refute the notion, "that
there was no such Arthur and that all such
books as been made of him been but feigned
and fables." Yet even after Arthur's
historicity had been discredited, his legend
continued to fuel English nationalism and the
imagination of epic poets. Spenser made Prince
Arthur the destined but never-to-be consort
of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene (NAEL 8, 1.808-12,
Canto 9.1–153); the young Milton had
contemplated Arthur as a possible epic subject
(NAEL 8, 1.1813, note 2).
The following chronology provides a selected
overview of historical events and Arthurian
texts:
Chronology
E = English, F = French, L = Latin, W Welsh
Date |
Historical Events |
Texts |
c. 450–525 |
Anglo-Saxon Conquest |
|
c. 600 |
|
Goddodin (W) Earliest Reference
to Arthur |
c. 800 |
|
Nennius, History of the
Britons (L) |
c. 950 |
|
Annals of Wales (L) |
1066 |
Norman Conquest |
|
c. 1136 |
|
Geoffrey of Monmouth,
History of the Kings of the Britons (L) |
1139 |
Outbreak of Civil War between
Stephen and Matilda |
|
1154–89 |
Reign of Henry II |
|
1155 |
|
Wace,
Roman de Brut (F) |
c. 1160–80 |
|
Romances of Chretien de Troyes
(F) |
c. 1190 |
Arthur's grave dug up |
|
1215–35 |
|
Arthurian vulgate prose romances
(F) |
1327–77 |
Reign of Edward III |
|
1337 |
Outbreak of Hundred Years' War |
|
c. 1380 |
|
Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight (E) |
1400 |
Death of Chaucer |
|
1454–85 |
Wars of the Roses |
|
c. 1469–70 |
Malory completes Morte
Darthur in prison |
|
1485 |
Henry VII first Tudor king |
Morte
Darthur printed by Caxton |
|
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