Arthur

Summary

WE KNOW VERY LITTLE about the real Arthur. The scraps of history about him date from centuries after his death; it is as if all that we knew about the historical Elizabeth I was two sentences written down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the rest was either hearsay or the work of today's novelists. The image we now have of Arthur as a great medieval king, leader of a splendid company of chivalrous knights in shining armour, is pure fantasy, imagined by poets of the Middle Ages who wanted to create a kind of ideal court. The Round Table and the Holy Grail are dream-symbols, born out of the longing for justice and grace in an imperfect, brutal world.

Instead, we have to forget all this, and hunt for an obscure ruler who may or may not have actually existed. For the real Arthur, we have to rely on evidence which is shadowy and unreliable; he lived in an age when records hardly existed, in the dark times after the Roman legions had withdrawn from Britain, unable to defend it against the invading Saxons. We do not really know what happened in the century after the legions left, from about AD 450 to 550, and we have to rely on the archaeologists to piece together some clues. We have just one book that may be contemporary, Gildas’ On the Ruin of Britain; despite its promising title, it is a sermon on the vices of the rulers of his time, and Gildas does not mention Arthur at all. Instead, he portrays a land in the grip of warlords, petty kings who carved out territories for themselves in the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Roman imperial rule. The fact that Arthur's name survived may indicate that he achieved some great feat, such as winning a triumphant victory over the Saxons; and he may well have fallen in battle. The two earliest notes of his existence, in a very simple list of important events now known as The Annals of Wales, written down three hundred years after his death, tell us just this: