Pendragonry

Arthurian triads: the background

The late scholar Brynley Francis Roberts, who died in 2023 aged 92, described the function of triads in early Welsh culture in this way:

The triads are a classification technique devised by the guardians of Welsh tradition to facilitate the recall of this material by systematizing it and associating three characters or episodes with one another on the basis of a feature common to all three: the triad would then have a formulaic title, ‘the three [epithets, or adjectives] of the Island of Britain . . .’ 1991: 80-1.

The Trioedd Ynys Prydein, commonly referred to as the Welsh Triads or with the acronym TYP, were possibly compiled in the 11th or 12th centuries, but the earliest surviving version in manuscript dates from the mid 13th century; the so-called Later Version survives in two subsequent collections (The White Book of Rhydderch, and The Red Book of Hergest) from the mid and late 14th century, and in sundry other texts.¹

Additionally, Roberts noted that “the Welsh Arthurian world underlies the allusions to legends of Arthur found in Trioedd Ynys Prydein (The Triads of the Island of Britain),” a feature which has long attracted the attention of those whose first language isn’t Welsh.

But there are also the Arthurian triads from a later source, brought together by a certain Edward Williams in the late 18th century. However, these are often regarded as of questionable value, the reason being that Williams is better known by his bardic name, Iolo Morganwg – that is, Edward (Iorwerth) of Glamorgan. And Iolo is known to have forged or invented some of the material he pretended was traditional.

Whistling in the dark

The Discovery of King Arthur
by Geoffrey Ashe, in association with Debrett’s Peerage, 1985.

Humans make history, and histories about individual humans are particularly fascinating if not always fashionable among scholars.

Occasionally popular and scholarly tastes overlap, as we have seen in the case of the discovery of Richard III’s body under a car park in Leicester. But if anybody’s hoping in similar fashion to discover the body of King Arthur they might just be whistling in the dark.

Why? Well, frankly the historical documentation for Arthur is, to put it mildly, very sparse, some might say non-existent.

When was Arthur?

*Cover illustration of the Journal of the Pendragon Society issue in which the Speculum review first appeared, 1981. © C A Lovegrove.*

Below are the slightly edited texts of some reviews with some linking commentary, for those who like to muse on the historical origins of the Arthurian legends.

The Speculum review is from Pendragon XIV/3, summer 1981, and the book review appeared in Pendragon XVII/4, autumn 1984 (published February 1986) with an edited version to be published online here imminently.

Of necessity the arguments are involved and rather complex. Since this discussion was previously published on my Calmgrove blog on 9th November 2017, I’ve now slightly revised some sections in the interests of clarity.

Unholy grails

*‘Sir Galahad: the Quest of the Holy Grail’ by Arthur Hughes (1870).*

This piece, first published in the Journal of the Pendragon Society in the Winter-Spring 2008-9 issue (Pendragon XXXVI No 2), is here slightly adapted and updated. ‡

As has been noted by artist Ian Brown, the Holy Grail must itself be the “Holy Grail” for reporters wishing to indicate the ultimate or the unobtainable when referring to their chosen subject: for example, “The holy grail is the elusive Higgs boson,” reported The Week on September 6th 2008 in an article about the Large Hadron Collider, which was in the news at the time. [1]

The metaphor in question has become the hackneyed phrase that lazy journalists automatically reach for when other parallels fail them (they thus eschew the alleged diktat of a former editor of The Daily Express that “All clichés should be avoided like the plague”). Worse, the ultimate in ineffability, with its associations of sacredness and awe, is routinely demeaned by being appropriated for whatever’s trite and banal.

It has not always been thus. Back in the early 90s the holy grail of clichés was definitely not the object sought by incipient Galahads. The epitome of anything may well have instead been the jewel in the crown, and the unobtainable was likely to have been a will o’ the wisp or El Dorado. The phrase doesn’t, for example appear in the indefatigable Nigel Rees’ Bloomsbury Dictionary of Popular Phrases (1990, paperback 1992). But, as Richard Barber’s The Holy Grail: imagination and belief (Penguin) showed, the incidence of the term ‘Holy Grail’ in major newspapers – drawn from the electronic databases of two US papers, four UK dailies, and one paper each from France, Germany, Italy and Spain – rose during the 90s, revealing a steep increase in mid-decade.

The Grave of Arthur?

*Rex Artorius inscription. Image: Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett.*

Article first published in Pendragon, the Journal of the Pendragon Society XVI No 3 (1983), revised and expanded 12th April 2021 and again now when given a further airing.

Several Pendragon Society members over the past year [1982-3] brought to our attention news of two South Wales historians who have claimed to have discovered the grave of Arthur. So I wrote to Alan Wilson and Anthony Blackett of Penylan, Cardiff to get more details than those provided by press cuttings. A correspondence was begun in August and continued till November 1983.

They have clearly completed a lot of research over a decade, investing much of their savings, and some of it appears in books they have themselves published. One (Arthur the War King) is a novel, but three are factual: King Arthur King of Glamorgan & Gwent, which I have seen, is the first; King Arthur and the Charters of the Kings is the second (though, according to Charles Evans-Günther, most of this is an uncredited copy of Rev W J Rees’ edition of Liber Landavensis, the Book of Llandaf).

Finally, King Arthur’s Invisible Kingdom may already have been printed by the time this magazine is published.¹

A king for all seasons

*Arthur, from a 15th-century Welsh ‘Brut’.*

King Arthur: A Casebook.
Edited by Edward Donald Kennedy.
Routledge, 2002.

Originally published by Garland Publishing in 1996, this volume in their Casebook series was the first of many devoted to Arthurian Characters and Themes, and is a mixture of new and previously published academic essays, some translated from their French or German originals.

The sixteen essays are arranged in chronological order of their subject matter, starting with the relatively modern search for the “real” Dark Age warrior and ending with 20th-century responses to the figure of Arthur.

What can this scholarly casebook offer to the general reader?

Symbology and pseudo-mysteries

*Arthur Rackham’s illustration of the Grail maiden from Alfred Pollard’s 1917 ‘Romance of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table’*.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Corgi Books, 2004 (2003).

I was disinclined to enjoy this novel after all the signs pointed to a reliance on the pernicious pseudo-mystery of the ‘Priory of Sion’. But, following a friend’s recommendation and a subsequent reading, I have to admit that I shouldn’t really have judged this book by its cover alone. Most of the action takes place within 24 hours, about as much time as it took me to race through it, testament to a well-paced and well-written thriller for which, despite myself, I developed a sneaky admiration.

This is not to say that there are no faults. Professor Robert Langdon is supposedly a Harvard academic specialising in ‘symbology’ — properly this should be semiology or semiotics — but even I was ahead of the game in spotting some of the obvious clues in this chase through crypto-history. If you’ve read the rather turgid The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Richard Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln you will know the sort of fictive facts that the plot is predicated on: sacred bloodlines, devious anagrams, artful pentagrams and secret masters going back centuries.

Add the obligatory pretty but intelligent and feisty French female (significantly called Sophie, for those with a love of etymology), weirdo assassins, sinister organisations, modern technology, and sting and counter-sting, and you have an easy read with just a hint of intellectualism. Just don’t ever think that there must be “something in it”.

Just how does the Holy Grail link not just to obvious sites like Rosslyn Chapel but also to the Louvre, Saint-Sulpice, Westminster Abbey and London’s Temple Church? I’m not sure I’m any the wiser, but The Da Vinci Code certainly furrowed my brow. Now, after the preposterous plotline of The Da Vinci Code would I ever read Robert Langdon’s further adventures as penned by Dan Brown? I’ll leave you to be the judge, but it won’t take a genius like Leonardo to work out the likely answer.

This review, slightly expanded, was first published in Pendragon, the Journal of the the Pendragon Society XXXI no 4 (summer 2004).

Armchair travelling

*Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Camelot’ (detail) 1893*

A Traveller’s Guide to the Kingdoms of Arthur
by Neil Fairbairn.
Evans Brothers Ltd, 1983.
and
The Traveller’s Guide to Arthurian Britain
by Geoffrey Ashe.
Gothic Image, 1997.

Neil Fairbairn’s 1983 Traveller’s Guide inevitably invited comparisons with Geoffrey Ashe’s A Guidebook to Arthurian Britain (1980 and 1983, confusingly reissued as The Traveller’s Guide to Arthurian Britain in 1997).

This would be unfortunate as the two are different animals, each with its own particular strengths and weaknesses, though both include illustrations and maps.

The first obvious thing about Fairbairn’s Guide is that it is not only a hardback but also larger than Ashe’s paperback Guidebook, not pocket-sized. Certainly it’s glossier, and this may commend itself more to the armchair traveller, especially as the evocative monochrome photographs by Michael Cyprien are more of a delight than Ian Newsham’s often risible line drawings in the original Guidebook (which include the mortally wounded Arthur, en route in the barge for Avalon, in the anachronistic 14th-century armour of the Black Prince).

Secondly, Breton Arthurian sites are included by Fairbairn (hence the “kingdoms” of the title), and though many of these are historically dubious, to say the least, they make for a sense of completeness. However, Ashe stuck to Britain, and did so in the 80s with the authority then of well over a quarter of a century’s study.

It would be difficult to make a choice between Fairbairn (Alderley Edge to Wookey Hole) and Ashe (Aberffraw to Zennor). If faced with this dilemma, do as I did and buy them both. But do make sure you get the 1997 Gothic Image retitled edition of the Ashe book also with, yes, monochrome photos as well as new location maps.

See also my review of Arthur’s Britain: the Land and the Legend by Derek Brewer and Ernest Frankl and my review of F J Snell’s King Arthur’s Country.

This review was first published 1984, updated and revised for my Calmgrove blog 20th October 2014, and now reposted on Pendragonry.

Literal rather than literary

Three Arthurian Romances:
poems from Medieval France.
Translated with an introduction and notes by Ross G Arthur.
Everyman, 1996.

The three poems offered in translation here are Caradoc, followed by The Knight with the Sword and The Perilous Graveyard. Dating from around the first half of the thirteenth century, the language of the original poems doesn’t come across well in this English prose translation, as evidenced by clunky passages such as this one, chosen at random from Caradoc [line 10090 ff]:

This is the vow which the King made. He rose quickly and set out on his voyage at once. I tell you that he crossed the sea with a sorrowful heart, so anxious about Caradoc that his body and soul grew weak.

At least with this version, literal rather than literary, the lack of fluency may be a mark of honesty: no attempt to impose a mock High Medieval language as a Victorian or Edwardian rendering might have been tempted to offer.

The Death of Arthur

*‘The discovery of Prince Arthur’s tomb by the inscription on the leaden cross’* by *John Mortimer, 1797 (British Museum)*.

Portions of this piece were first published in Pendragon, the Journal of the Pendragon Society XIII, No 1 (winter 1979) 11-13, and revised in 2024 to include substantial additions, corrections, notes and updates.

It also includes material from my essay ‘King Arthur’s Glastonbury’, Research into Lost Knowledge Organisation Newsletter No 27 (autumn-winter 1985) 15-18.

Perhaps the best-known work of the Matter of Britain is entitled Le Morte D’Arthur (‘The Death of Arthur’). Malory’s narrative has the inexorable momentum of a Greek tragedy, as befits the subject of this work of fiction, but in fact we can take nothing for granted when we examine the earliest evidence for the death of Arthur – if in fact he ever lived, of course.

“539. The strife of Camlann in which Arthur & Medraut perished…”

So runs an entry in the 10th-century Welsh Annals, though some scholarship suggests that the date should have been calculated as 511.¹ Traditionally Mordred is said to be the treacherous nephew of Arthur, but this terse entry suggests no such thing; rather the reverse, that Arthur and Medraut fought on the same side.

More doubts come with Camlann itself. Romantics place it in Cornwall (by Slaughterbridge on the River Camel) or near the Somerset river Cam. Historians prefer Camboglanna (the Roman fort of Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall) which means ‘crooked bank’, as the fort overlooks a bend in the River Irthing.²

With such will-o’-the-wisp documented facts we could well start to believe the statement from the Welsh Stanzas of the Graves, “A mystery till doomsday, the grave of Arthur” – to which we can add William of Malmesbury’s assertion in the twelfth century that “the sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere known.” We will have reason to return to William later.

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