Search For Arthur Essay Research Paper Search

Search For Arthur Essay, Research Paper

Search for ArthurFrom the beginnings of the English Language there have been legends of great heroes. From the first settlements of Britain come stories rooted in ancient Celtic and Germanic imagination. Out of these stories, Arthur is undoubtedly the most preeminent. Interest in the legends of King Arthur and all things Arthurian, ie. Camelot, Avalon, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, the knights of the Round Table, etc., has prevailed into modern times, and is still the subject of numerous novels and movies. Attempts to find out the truth about the man, if such a man existed, have been going on for years. Arthur’s history, as Geoffrey Ashe reminds us in The discovery of King Arthur, is “more than just a medley of yarns, more than just a saga in the dream time’ of myth. It puts him within a definite period. It names definite places, and takes him to definite countries” (3). It is this fact, and the fragmentary, often contradictory references of an Arthur ( Latin “Artur,”"Arturius,” or “Artorius”) from ancient records, that lends enough credence to the story to set researchers on the trail of the legendary king. Yet progress has been stymied for a number of reasons, and even now we can say little of substance about the man behind the myth. A major difficulty facing researchers is that the role of the historian in the Dark Ages was rather flexible; seemingly a mixture of storyteller and propagandist, whose regional traditions, personal prejudices and loyalties were bound to greatly influence the nature of their material. In Arthur, Richard Barber elucidates on this fact, and speaks of the early tendency to use history as “an inspiration or as a warning to the men of the present, or as part of a vast divine scheme for man’s spiritual salvation” (7). He goes on to mention the early preoccupation with the whats of the past, rather than the whens, hows and whys that the modern historian is concerned with. “…all the sources are prepared to tell us is what,” concludes Richards, “and even that…is remarkably uncertain” (7). Another problem facing historians is that the earliest sources we have are never originals, but copies, or even copies of copies of copies, leaving plenty of time for errors to propagate. Even with the spell-checking capability of today’s computers it is possible for small mistakes to creep into written material. Usually this does not change the meaning, but in a highly inflected language such as Latin the changing of one letter can have drastic effects. A possible such error is found in the Annals of Wales, written in the tenth century. Its entry about the Battle of Badon claims that Arthur carried Christ’s cross on his shoulder for three days, but it is likely that the word “shoulder” should instead be “shield,” due to confusion between the Welsh words “scuid” and “scuit” (Alcock, 51-52). Now that we have seen some of the general problems in the quest for Arthur, let us delve into the particulars that face us when we examine specific sources. Perhaps the most well known of all Arthurian legends is that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. His History of the Kings of Britain, ca. 1136, “Besides planting highly erroneous notions of British history,…supplied a basis and framework for Arthurian romance and exerted an influence extending through Spenser, Shakespeare, and many others” (Encyclopedia 209). In it, Geoffrey recounts the history or Britain’s leaders back to the very beginnings in 1115 B.C. to King Cadwallader’s death in A.D. 689. Geoffrey’s account, though most agree that it is not strictly factual, offers a clear look into the events surrounding Arthur’s death, and is the starting point for much investigation. Geoffrey’s work was immensely popular, and was not criticized during his lifetime (Goodrich, 45). Modern historians, however, have many reasons to be skeptical of Geoffrey’s History. The most obvious problem is anachronisitic repesentation of a supposedly 5th Century king in a very Norman England. As was typical of historians in his day, Geoffrey superimposed his contemporary culture upon his depiction of the past. We can immediately dispose of these anachronisms and limit our search to the names, places and dates in his work. If there is an Arthur, he will not be a magnificent Christian king sitting astride a heavy Byzantine charger, accoutered in Norman plate armor. He will not be basking in a mighty castle between European excursions with a band of international knights. Rather, he will be no more than an unkempt and possibly pagan military leader with little if any armor. He will likely have a small entourage of hired regional soldiers, and live in no better than a crude wooden fortress. Amazingly, Geoffrey’s glaring inaccuracies were convincing enough to find their way into the Oxford History of England, written in 1937 (332). Geoffrey also made huge geographical errors, such as placing King Arthur in Cornwall (Goodrich, 42), and errors in church history such as placing an Archbishop in Canterbury in Arthur’s lifetime and an archbishop in Caerleon (Brooke, 202). And then there is the missing “ancient book” from “Brittania,” given to him by “Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford,” from which Geoffrey claims to have translated his History. The above mentioned anachronisms predictably cause scholars to dismiss this claim as spurious. Nevertheless, Geoffrey is “very positive about this book…Mentioning three contemporary historians–Caradoc