King Arthur in History and Legend
9781465676665
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“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, tells us that “unknown is the grave of Arthur.” 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.” 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.” 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. 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.
