2 - The twelfth-century Arthur

Summary

King Arthur came into his own in the twelfth century. Around 1135 he acquired a biographer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and a few decades later a champion poet, Chrétien de Troyes, the pioneer of Arthurian romance. The fame of both these writers, in their own lifetime and beyond, amply justifies their status as the fathers of Arthurian literature. Its mother was an oral tradition about which we know much less. Not many fossils survive, but those that do are so varied and widespread as to leave us in no doubt about the vigour of the popular tradition on which Geoffrey and Chrétien grafted their invention. If we look across western Europe in the first decades of the twelfth century, we find Arthur and his knights in all kinds of unexpected places. For example, the early twelfth-century archivolt over the north portal of Modena Cathedral in Italy has a sculpture with inscriptions that clearly mark it as Arthurian: a woman, Winloge (Guinevere?), is held captive by a man, Mardoc (Mordred?); to the left, three knights, including Artus de Bretania, attack on horseback; to the right, another three knights, Galvariun, Che (Kay) and Galvagin (Gawain) advance, the latter jousting with Carrado (Curoi?). Around the same time, local charters reveal that Arthurian names were becoming fashionable among the aristocracy.