A good litmus test for popular conceptions of King Arthur comes with the newspaper cartoon. Along with the Round Table and the hand in the lake grasping the sword, the image of the sword in the stone is pre-eminent in Arthurian reference. CartoonStock.com includes typical examples, though for copyright reasons we can only describe a selection, not show them.
In a cartoon by Dave Carpenter, a medieval official remarks to a peasant clutching a résumé in front of a sword in a stone, “Actually there’s no interview necessary. Just pull out the sword and the job’s yours.” In another US cartoon (by ‘Kes’) an exhausted office employee, obviously unsuccessful in his attempts to remove the sword, is being addressed by a boss behind a desk: “Well, Foster. It doesn’t look like you’ll be getting that promotion after all.” A third cartoon reveals a knight who has removed the sword, only to retrieve the written message, “Congratulations! You may already be King!”
One cartoon minimises its impact by weak draftsmanship, though to be sure the caption is weak enough. Merlin is examining a giant safety razor in a stone, which we are told represents The Wilkinson Sword and the Stone. Another memorable image I’ve seen is of a boy, watched by his parents, struggling to remove a knife from his birthday cake.
Leaving aside the question of whether fans of Arthuriana will find these examples funny, we see that they aim to achieve their effect through sudden incongruity, synchronously juxtaposing two anachronistic but commonplace ideas. The now familiar image of a sword in a stone is so strongly associated with the young Arthur that it may then come as a shock to find that it is not exclusive to this legendary figure, and that in fact its origins may equally lie elsewhere.
A look at other possessors of wonderful swords and how they acquired them may help to put the young Arthur’s deed into context and explain why the story had (and still has) such resonances.
Rex Arturus: detail of 12th-century mosaic, Otranto Cathedral, Italy, depicting King Arthur astride a goat
This concise (but by no means exhaustive) listing in alphabetical order is a mere sampler of beasts appearing in Arthurian narratives: significant omissions are inevitable, and the scope excludes, for example, animals associated with Dark Age saints.
First published in 2005 in Pendragon, the journal of the Pendragon Society, ‘A concise Arthurian bestiary’ borrows from the concept of medieval bestiaries – compilations of weird and wonderful creatures that may or may not have existed, drawn from classical, literary and folkloric sources and often featured in heraldry and local legends.
I’ve kept the original references but slightly emended and expanded the text for clarification. It’s possible that the late fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones may have been influenced by this article when she began her posthumous novel, The Islands of Chaldea, later completed by her sister Ursula.
Arthur’s Britain: the Land and the Legend by Derek Brewer and Ernest Frankl. Guild Publishing, 1986 (1985).
Part of a series of souvenir guidebooks by Pevensey Press, Arthur’s Britain consists of about seventy photographs of Arthurian sites with expert commentary. This illustrated gazetteer has an authoritative introductory essay by the late Derek Brewer, a distinguished academic and publisher who died in 2008.
The illustrations which accompany the introduction all come from late medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and show how their techniques and purposes changed from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
The photographs in the gazetteer proper are by Ernest Frankl, with accompanying maps drawn by Carmen Frankl; I’m guessing that both Ernest and Carmen have since passed away as Trinity Hall Cambridge has an Ernest and Carmen Frankl Memorial Fund to cover travel for educational purposes.
‘The Boy’s King Arthur’ edited by Sidney Lanier, 1880, cover illustration by N C Wyeth, 1917
King Arthur: Chivalry and Legend by Anne Berthelot. Arthur et la Table ronde: La force d’une legende, translated by Ruth Sharman. Thames and Hudson, 1997 (1996).
First published by Gallimard in 1996, this English version is part of Thames and Hudson’s New Horizons series and follows a similar format: a well-illustrated chronological survey of the chosen subject, followed by extracts from select documents, bibliography, credits and index.
The author was Professor of Medieval French Literature — and then of French & Medieval Studies — at the University of Connecticut (does that make her a Connecticut Frank at the court of King Arthur, perhaps?) and so her discussion of developments in Arthurian literature, from Wace and Layamon up to 20th-century cinema, is authoritative and thought-provoking.
For instance, she clearly charts how the Matter of Britain moved from chronicle format to poetry(eg Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace’s Brut) and then back to chronicle style, and how this reflected shifts in taste from pseudohistory to the flowering of chivalry and courtly love and then returning to the burgeoning nationalistic stance in England, as evidenced by Malory.
It is when she deals with the historical context of the legend, however, that we get some curious interpretations.
Merlin: the Prophet and His History by Geoffrey Ashe. The History Press, 2008.
The late Geoffrey Ashe produced his first book on the Arthurian legends – King Arthur’s Avalon – in 1957, and over half a century later he still returned to the Matter of Britain, as in this overview of Merlin (first published in 2006 as a hardback by Sutton, now subsumed into The History Press).
In his own words Ashe “traces the evolution of the legend, the growth of Merlin as a character, his possible historical aspect, and the principal treatments of him in literature,” and adds a supplementary list of modern transformations.
There is a select group of illustrations which reflect different aspects of Merlin’s developing story, and a useful bibliography (would, however, that it had been divided up into fiction and non-fiction).
‘Arthur Draws the Sword from the Stone’ (1911) byWalter Crane
The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. Edited by Norris J Lacy et al. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1996 (1991).
With the publication of The Arthurian Encyclopedia in 1986 students were able to access, in one volume, academic discussion on a range of Arthurian topics — art, history, literature, fiction, drama, music and cinema for example — across space and time, all listed in alphabetical order.
In 1991 an updated hardback edition was published as – naturally – The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, followed by a paperback edition in 1996 which was itself supplemented by an addendum detailing video games and new fiction that had appeared in the intervening years.
Anybody remotely interested in Arthurian matters should own or at least have regular access to this last volume, despite a desperate need for it to be updated yet again some two decades on from its last publication.
Edward III’s tomb effigy, Westminster Abbey (Wikipedia Commons)
Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor: The House of the Round Table and the Windsor Festival of 1344 by Julian Munby, Richard Barber, Richard Brown. Boydell Press, 2007.
Historical re-enactments have always been popular, especially in the late 20th century, from the Society for Creative Anachronism in America, through English Civil War society The Sealed Knot and Dark Age re-enactment group Britannia in more recent years, to the 500th anniversary of the last great tournament in Wales (which was celebrated at Carew Castle in West Wales in May 2007).
Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a supporter of Henry Tudor before he became king, marked his admission to the Order of the Garter with what became known as the Great Carew Tournament of 1507, and appropriately enough his family’s poet, Rhys Nanmor, compared Carew Castle to King Arthur’s palace.
But the enthusiasm for historical re-enactment goes back much further back than this, as this book (volume 68 in Boydell’s excellent Arthurian Studies series) based on detailed documentary analysis and recent archaeological excavation shows.
Rex Arturus: detail of 12th-century mosaic, Otranto Cathedral, Italy
Concepts of Arthur by Thomas Green. The History Press Ltd, 2008.
Tom Green’s excellent study follows a growing scholarly trend to treat the hypothesis of an historical Arthur seriously, even if it means ultimately demolishing the case for a genuine hero of the same name. Nick Higham’s King Arthur: myth-making and history, for example, showed how the 9th-century Historia Brittonum (attributed to Nennius) was put together with a contemporary political agenda in mind, meaning it must not be relied on to accurately reconstruct post-Roman British history.
Unlike Higham, who accepted that there might possibly have been some Arthur-type warlord at the core of the Nennian construct, Green, I think persuasively, argues from the available documentary evidence that there never was such a prototype historical figure. Instead, the earliest sources (some contemporary with and others predating Nennius) make it clear that, first, Arthur was a mythological figure, defender of Britain from giants, monsters, witches and the like; and, secondly, that it is Nennius (or rather his anonymous source) who first historicizes Arthur. Nennius does this by pitting him against human adversaries (namely, the Angles and the Saxons) and attributing to him a selection of both mythological and genuinely historical battles.
Those critics who instinctively felt that Arthur was more an archetypal hero than a flesh-and-blood warrior may now feel more vindicated; those who believe that there was a real king called Arthur will vehemently disagree.
King Arthur: photo by Julia Margaret Cameron
If I have a criticism it’s this: that Green’s discussion frequently repeats itself within the dense text, perhaps reflecting the fact that much of his material appeared as scholarly papers online. This is a shame as his message and arguments, while needing to be academically rigorous, also deserve to be more generally accessible. If potential readers can stick with it, Concepts of Arthur is an inspiring read which does not disappoint those who want a satisfying contextualising of the very disparate evidence.
Green’s cover, incidentally, shows what may be the earliest surviving Arthurian portrait, not from Britain but from Otranto in Puglia, Italy. Labelled REX ARTURUS, Arthur is shown riding a goat in a vignette that is part of a staggeringly huge and detailed mosaic of the Tree of Life covering the whole floor of the cathedral. Amongst biblical scenes, the Zodiac, the months of the year and a few other notables such as Alexander the Great, Arthur is in a key position at the end of the nave, just before the crossing, flanked by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Abel offering his sacrifice of a lamb. What is a British hero doing in such distinguished company? And especially here in the heel of Italy sometime before the middle of the 12th century?
The answer must be related to the Norman invasion of much of the southern part of the peninsula in the century following the Norman conquest of England. The Normans of course included personnel from the rest of Northern France, including Brittany; and the Bretons remained linked, not least linguistically, with the culture of the insular Britons.
Quite how a warrior Arthur might become a goat-riding dwarf king is unclear, but the contemporary Welsh writer Walter Map describes just such a figure in a document entitled Of the trifles of courtiers. According to Map anybody (and that includes a Dark Age British king called Herla) who enters the dwarf’s underground kingdom, even for three days, returns to the human world two or more centuries later. Though Map doesn’t give this dwarf king a name, that very similar figure in an Italian mosaic doesn’t inspire confidence in the belief that Arthur, king or not, was a genuine historical figure.
‘Contextualising the evidence’ first appeared online on Calmgrove on 8th April 2013 and before that in the Journal of the Pendragon Society. ‘Tom Green’ is a pseudonym for Caitlin Green
The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend by Alan Lupack. Oxford University Press, 2007.
In the late sixties studying the significance of the Arthurian legends become surprisingly mainstream both in academic circles and in popular culture, spawning a library fit for a modern-day Tower of Babel. Alan Lupack’s Guide is the kind of vademecum that many students like me yearned for in those early days.
This massive survey (nearly 500 pages in the 2007 paperback edition) aims to introduce the general reader to a study of the Arthurian legends.
As well as a general bibliography of basic resources for such a study, each of its seven chapters concludes with its own more detailed bibliography. These seven chapters deal with historical approaches to Arthur from early literature through to historical novels, followed by the romance tradition inaugurated by Chrétien de Troyes. Then come specified chapters on Malory, the Holy Grail, Gawain, Merlin and, last but not least, Tristan and Isolt. As well as an indispensable index, the author includes a cross-referencing dictionary of Arthurian people, places and things, ranging from Accolon to Yvain.
Pendragonry 