Arthurian Legend
| There is no explicit textual evidence for Arthur
as king of Britain. There are two dates, 490 AD and 521AD, associated
with the battles of Badon Hill and Camlann, Arthur's first and last major
battles, but his name is not mentioned in the texts determined to be closest
in time to the events. The documents that purport to come from within
a hundred years of the latter date have been found to be composite texts,
some of which date from the tenth century.
The person who is mentioned by Gildas, the earliest writer, is Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Romanized Celt, who mobilized British resistance to the Saxons when the Romans legions were withdrawn in 428. That date makes him unlikely as the victorious leader at Badon, and legends have been taken as evidence pointing to "Arthur" as the person involved. On the other hand, the locations and the dates for the battles are debatable; if the battles took place at all, they may well have involved a local chieftain. Collateral evidence, presented by Geoffrey Ashe, has long supported the idea Arthur's historicity but his views are far from being universally accepted. O.J. Padel has advanced the idea that the stories represent the historicization of Celtic legends. On the whole, historians are more hesitant to admit to the historicity of a legendary figure. See the Britannia website link below for a good survey of historical texts from Gildas to the present day. The legend itself is a complicated blend of Celtic sources reaching back to the ninth century, assorted later British sources, and the French narratives of the twelfth century. The earliest Arthurian romances were composed between c. 1165 and c.1191 by Chrétien de Troyes. He is responsible, in his Le Chevalier de la Charrette (The Knight of the Cart), for the earliest version of the love-affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, and his Conte del Graal (Story of the Grail) or Perceval is the first Grail romance. The legend today represents the fifteenth-century reworking by Thomas
Malory and revived in the nineteenth century by Tennyson. The most
recent twentieth-century retellings reincorporate Celtic materials and
narrate events from the point-of-view of subsidiary figures.
The Arthurian Legend: A Short List For additional scholarly sources see the Arthurian
Bibliography. Primary Texts Malory, Works, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford). Available in three volumes with massive notes and in a one-volume edition. King Arthur and his Knights, ed. Vinaver (Oxford). A small collection of the best-known tales with modernized spelling. The Quest of the Holy Grail, tr. P. Matarasso (Penguin). The Death of King Arthur, tr.James Cable (Penguin) King Arthur's Death, ed. L.D. Benson (Bobbs-Merrill). Texts of the alliterative and stanzaic versions. Anthologies Coe, John B. and Simon Young, The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend, (Felinfach: Llanerch Publ.). The Romance of Arthur, ed. J. Wilhelm (Garland). Secondary Material Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis
Arthuriana, a journal of Arthurian studies A (Partial) Annotated List of Modern Retellings Page Updated February 10, 2015 |
