The arthurian handbook

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Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Norris J. Norris J. Lacy born is an American scholar focusing on French medieval literature. He is a leading expert on the Arthurian legend and has written and edited numerous books, papers, and articles on the topic. He received his Ph. He has served as president of the International Arthurian Society. Books by Norris J. When Dana Schwartz started writing about a 19th-century pandemic ravaging Edinburgh in her latest book, Anatomy: A Love Story, she had no idea Read more Trivia About The Arthurian Han No trivia or quizzes yet.

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A1 W49 N42 H L56 B55 v. M3 Y36 Tommy Clarke : up in the air. C55 Lena C. E44 B52 L48 B59 B57 D A8 D86 A8 M38 S76 P38 G7 D38 U48 L56 L View online. AHC He also married Guinevere. The early French tradition made Excalibur the property of Gawain before it belonged to Arthur, but most later versions reserved it exclusively for Arthur. Originally, too, it was distinct from the Sword in the Stone and was a sword given to Arthur by a hand that emerges from a lake.

However, some later accounts, especially in the modern period, identify Excalibur with the Sword in the Stone. Twelve years of peace and prosperity ensued. Arthur formed an order of knighthood that became celebrated throughout the nations. Among his followers were Kay, Bedivere, and Gawain. At length, he took to warfare again, conquering Norway and Denmark and wresting much of Gaul from the Roman Empire, which still held that country, though feebly.

After several years of campaigning and consolidation, he held court with great magnificence at the former Roman town of Caerleon-upon-Usk in Wales. Geoffreys long and splendid description foreshadows the Camelot of romance. A Roman demand for tribute and the return of his conquests, addressed to him by the western Roman ruler Lucius, provoked a fresh war. Leaving his nephew Mordred in charge at home, jointly with Guinevere, he shipped an army to Gaul. After a diversion caused by a fight with a giant living on Mont-Saint-Michel, he pressed forward and defeated the Romans.

The decisive battle took place in the neighborhood of Burgundy, and he pushed on into that region with a view to conquering more of the Empire. Arthur returned and routed the traitor by the River Camel in Cornwall but was grievously wounded himself and carried away to the Isle of Avalon for his wounds to be healed. Several parts of it were to supply themes for later authors—it is the source of the story of King Lear, for instance—but the Arthurian portion, comprising about one-quarter of the whole, was by far the most influential.

Geoffreys motives in his flight of imagination are none too clear. Perhaps he also wanted to flatter the Norman conquerors by giving their island realm a splendid pedigree and making out that their territories in France had been under the same crown before. Whatever precisely he was doing, he did it with a verve and narrative skill that were rare in his time.

Where did he get it all? And does he shed any further light on Arthurian origins? He is not a historian. His word can never be taken, unsupported, for any fact. Yet, except in parts of his pre-Roman story, he is not a pure fantasist either. And if thou hear nevermore of me, pray for my soul.

In the fifth century itself, besides his evident use of the Historia Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae or something similar, he has several characters based on persons who were real or reputedly so.

King Constantine is suggested by the imperial pretender of that name, who was proclaimed in Britain in and whose son Constans did leave a monastery. Vortigern and Vortimer are from Nennius. Significant also is the overall character of his conception of Arthur. The King is far more than a mere expansion of the war leader of the Welsh.

Even when the end was in sight, three of the last ineffectual western emperors were hailed in succession as the destined savior. His Arthur is closer to the ideals and aspirations of the fifth century than to those of the twelfth. When he is dealing with Vortigern, the villain of the fifth century, he simply expands the Welsh matter as supplied by Nennius. When he is dealing with Arthur, the hero, he does something conspicuously different. Even in the denouement itself, while he uses the tradition of Medraut and Camlann, he transforms the situation by superimposing the non-Welsh motif of a traitorous deputy ruler conspiring with barbarians.

MFrench MS l,fol. It looks as if Geoffrey is combining the Welsh story with another that he had in mind previously. If we admit this as a possibility, and look at the Gallic episode in that spirit, things begin to emerge. Notably, it supplies what the Welsh materials never do, a chronological fix.

This can only be Leo I, who reigned from to Did Geoffrey use a lost document locating Arthur in Gaul during those years?

We are clearly back with the possibility raised by Goeznovius, that Riothamus, who campaigned in Gaul precisely then, was believed to have been named Arthur. Riothamus took a British army to Gaul at the right time. He was betrayed by a deputy ruler, the prefect Arvandus, who conspired with barbarians. He is last glimpsed fading out of view after a fatal battle, with no recorded death.

Besides the names and dates, Geoffrey has all these themes, although in his characteristic way he takes them out of history and converts them into literature. Two objections resolve themselves easily and, indeed, supportively. The other difficulty is that Geoffrey says Arthur passed away in This is so wildly inconsistent with almost everything else that we might suspect what is common in medieval texts, the garbling of an exact numerical date, and it has in fact been shown that recognized processes of error, found in other texts, could have produced when the correct year was , the very one in which Riothamus drops out of sight.

The gap of time is wide, yet the coincidences are too many to dismiss, and Goeznovius, pointing the same way but not merely saying the same things, suggests a common source far back—a bridge.

As for Arthur-Riothamus himself, to coin a term, the evidence is contemporary or early. Nor does the theme stop there. It remains a major constituent. Arthur holds court in Brittany, and extends his power beyond, in the work of several of the chief romancers: Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Malory.

The question arises whether we might go farther and see Riothamus as the starting point of the legend as a whole, the inspiration of the Welsh matter, too, Arthur complete. One, who extends a chronicle by Sigebert of Gembloux, comes close to asserting the Arthur-Riothamus identity. He is the only documented person who does anything Arthurian. Nothing is at present known of him in Britain before he shipped his army to Gaul.

But that action may be thought to imply a recruiting ground of his own in the Arthurian West Country. On the other hand, a leader who vanishes in Gaul about can hardly have commanded at Badon and Camlann.

Still, there are other explanations. One is that while Riothamus is the starting point, the King Arthur of legend is a composite combining his deeds with those of at least one other leader. This, as we shall see in a moment, is the solution of even graver time difficulties with Merlin. No such presence is affirmed. The former have been largely unpersuasive: evidence is simply lacking that there was ever a King Arthur.

See bibliography for this and other theories. Thomas, and Linda Malcor. The Sarmatians were Iranian horse-nomads from the Caucasus. Even today, there is a legend among the Ossetians of the Caucasus concerning a great hero Batraz , whose marvelous sword is to be thrown into the sea before his death.

Here, likewise, he was not creating out of a void. In the first phase of his literary work, he knew dimly of a Cumbrian seer named Lailoken whom the Welsh called Myrddin. Lailoken, or Myrddin, was said to have incited an inter-British battle at Arfderydd now Arthuret on the Scottish border about the year Demented by the carnage and his own guilt, he was afflicted, like similar figures in other folklore, with a gift of prophecy and wandered in the forest of Celidon making strange pronouncements.

The Welsh claimed that he had consolingly foretold a Celtic resurgence. After putting all this in the History, Geoffrey learned more about the original Myrddin, including the fact that he lived much later. As in the Welsh poem The Spoils of Annwfn, there are reminiscences of actual pre-Christian sisterhoods. Morgen is the lady who becomes Morgan le Fay in Arthurian romance. Geoffrey makes her a benign healer who takes charge of Arthur as a patient.

In this final work, Geoffrey tried to reconcile the Myrddin or Merlin of authentic legend with the role he had assigned to him in the History. It could not be done. It is rather puzzling. On the face of it, Myrddin originated as a mythical figure ignorantly invented to explain the name of the town, but if so, why should the northern prophet Lailoken have been identified with him?

The Stonehenge connection has its interest here. It has often been claimed that the story of Merlin bringing it by sea from the west preserves a grain of factual tradition, since the bluestones though not the greater sarsens actually were brought by sea from the west, from a Welsh quarry in the Prescelly Mountains. W hat has not been noted so often is that if this is correct, the place of origin was not too far from Carmarthen.

Once Merlin was launched, he proved too alluring for subsequent romancers to drop. Not at once, but as the Arthurian legend grew in scope, he became far more than Geoffrey had made him. His knowledge extended to the map. He located major events in cities that actually were important during the Roman era and doubtless for a while afterward, and in at least one case he either made an astonishingly good guess or was aware of ORIGINS a place's post-Roman importance when no serious historian was aware of it till the twentieth century.

That place was Tintagel, which he chose as the site of Gorlois Js stronghold, where Arthur was begotten. Tintagel raises the whole issue of archaeology. It does, however, show that certain places where Arthurian stories were located did count for something at about the right time, so that a case exists for factual tradition rather than pure fancy. At Tintagel itself, the headland on the north Cornish coast has ruins of a castle. W hen Geoffrey wrote his History, it had not yet been built, and the headland was presumably bare.

But excavations by Ralegh Radford in the s revealed traces of a much earlier occupation. A British Tourist Authority photograph.

Geoffrey does not score so conspicuously anywhere else. Its monastery grew around a very old church. Geoffrey himself does not mention Glastonbury, but after his time the churchs builder was named as Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man who obtained the body of Christ and laid it In the tomb. Joseph also figured in romances about the Grail, and the Grail theme, Glastonbury, and stories of Arthur and his knights were intertwined.

M odern excavation in Glastonbury Abbey has confirmed that the monks dug where they said and found an early burial, though nothing shows whose it really was. On the Tor, the oddly shaped hill above the town, it has been shown that a settlement existed in the sixth century and perhaps the fifth.

This has been interpreted as a small fort—the citadel ofMelwas? As at Tintagel, the main point is that the Arthur connection, however fabulous the details, corresponds to a real and relevant antiquity. Cadbury Castle, also in Somerset, is on a different footing. This Iron Age hill-fort does not figure in medieval Arthurian writings. A good deal of local folklore has been recorded since, including a version of the cave legend. The hill could have been the headquarters of a fifth-century king, the original Arthur, so far as such a person existed.

The possibility was given more weight in the s by finds of imported pottery, as at Tintagel. Excavations in , directed by Leslie Alcock, disclosed that the hill had been inhabited up to the Roman conquest, then cleared of people by the conquerors, and then reoccupied. Buildings included a gatehouse, and a timber hall on the summit plateau.

Though many more hill-forts were excavated afterward, and post-Roman occupation was established in some of them, nothing like the stone-and-timber defensive system is known anywhere else in England or Wales during that period; a few instances in Scotland are much smaller and have no gatehouses.

Alcock s interpretation of the site was at first military but shifted in a political direction. Photograph by Simon McBride. Published by permission of Simon McBride. It continued in use for some decades, but not for very long. While it yields no names, it may have a tentative link with the Arthur-Riothamus hypothesis. His army proves that he had large resources of manpower, and his cross-Channel contact suggests that his home ground was close to the southern sea routes.

Study of Arthurian lore along these lines leads to certain conclusions about the geography. While stories of Arthur are spread out over hundreds of miles, it was remarked long ago that he has only one birthplace, only one grave. For practical purposes, Tintagel and Glastonbury have no real competitors. Both are in the West Country. N o xes References are to the appropriate section of the Bibliography. Post-Roman Britain Alcock 1 , Chapters Ashe 3 , pp. Campbell, Chapter 1.

Morris, Chapters Wood, pp. Riothamus in History and His Aftermath Alcock 1 , pp. Ashe 2 , pp. Campbell, p. Fleuriot, pp. Jackson, p. Morris, pp. Wood, p. Gildas Ed. Alcock 1 , pp. Lapidge and Dumville, passim. Loomis, pp. Bromwich, Jarman, and Roberts, pp. Ashe 3 , p. Tatlock 1. Early Welsh Literature Chambers, pp.

Jarman and Hughes, Vol. Lacy et al. Loomis, Chapters by K. Mabinogion Morris, pp. Arthurian Locations Lacy et al. Westwood, pp. Loomis, Chapter 7. Historical Arthur, Theories and Criticisms Alcock 1 , pp. Bromwich, art.

Goeznovius Ashe 2 , pp. Chambers, pp. Fleuriot, p. Tatlock 1 , pp. Lucius Artorius Castus Fleuriot, pp. Loomis, p. Loomis, Chapter 8 by J. Parry and R. Tatlock 2 , passim. Fletcher 1st edition , pp. Chronicles Ashe 3 , pp. Llongborth Poem Ashe 3 , pp. Merlin Bromwich, art. Geoffrey of Monmouth 3. Loomis, Chapter 3 by A. Jarman and pp.

Tolstoy, passim. Tintagel Ashe 4 , Chapter 3 by C. Ralegh Radford. Ashe 4 , Chapter 4 by Leslie Alcock. Castle Dore Alcock 1 , p. Ashe 4 , Chapter 3 by C. Glastonbury Alcock 1 , pp. Ashe 1 , passim, and art. Ashe 4 , Chapters 5 by C. Ralegh Radford and 6 by Philip Rahtz. Carley, pp.

Rahtz, passim, esp. Scott, pp. Cadbury Alcock 1 , pp. French MS l,fol. Curiously, however, from the very beginning the Arthur of romance differs significantly from the warrior-monarch presented by chroniclers.

Perhaps Arthur has become the victim of his own military and political successes, as recounted in chronicle material; he has already conquered his foreign enemies except for Rome.

In the romances, the court is often a static political entity, with Arthur as a passive figure at its head. In the first Arthurian romances, the works of the French poet Chretien de Troyes, the King has few if any enemies, and even later, when writers concentrate on his downfall, his only enemies are within: Mordred, for example, and especially Lancelot and Guinevere—those who were closest to him but whose illicit love eventually leads to the ruin of the Arthurian realm.

He occasionally participates in hunts, and often in feasts and other social events, but his function is largely to provide others with both the opportunity and the impetus for quests, journeys, battles, and other adventures. A good many of the romances to come will, however, give us reason to question that inference, or to reject it outright. A good number of romances will demonstrate that chivalry is capable either of serving society or of disrupting it.

All this leaves King Arthur in an ambiguous position. He is a great and renowned king, to be revered and served—-but he is also the head of an order that will prove to be a dead end. Having reached chivalric perfection, his order must either decay from within or be supplanted by a higher form Historiated 0: arrival at court.

Large initials within which a scene ispainted were seen in many Arthurian illustrated manuscripts. MS 80S,fol. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale. The following pages will survey the development of Arthurian romance and will trace, briefly, the dual process of perfection and degeneration. Thus, the Scottish view of him was, not surprisingly, mixed. Although most Scottish chroniclers accepted Geoffrey in the main, they scrutinized his work closely and tended in many cases to transform its spirit or the character of Arthur.

The Chronicle o f Scotland in a Part ca. It was assumed that the bones were those of Arthur and Guinevere. They disappeared after the monasteries were dissolved in the sixteenth century. There sit his knights, Each one equal to the next: They sit equally at the Table And are equally served. None of them can boast That he sits ahead of the next. None has a favored position, And none is excluded.

Little distance, in time or technique, separates Wace from the writers of romance, and within a decade or two will appear some of the masterpieces of Arthurian fiction.

Among the important manuscripts that preserve the Celtic Arthurian works, the Black Book of Carmarthen dates from around ; the W hite Book of Rhydderch, from the early fourteenth century; the Red Book of Hergest, from nearly a century later.

Several of these works were discussed in Chapter I. For example, although the earliest manuscript of the Welsh Culhwch and Olwen dates from the fourteenth century, the work itself is obviously much older than that, and the story may have existed in much the same form during the eleventh century or before, making it perhaps the earliest fully developed Arthurian story in Welsh.

The tale recounts the prodigious tasks accomplished by Culhwch, with the assistance of Arthur and his men, in order to win and wed Olwen. Earlier still, Celtic texts give evidence of an established Arthurian legend, although, again, the dates of most are uncertain. The bestknown poem from this collection named for a sixth-century poet who himselfbecame a character in early Welsh poetry is The Spoils ofAnnwfn, which describes an expedition undertaken by Arthur and his followers to a city, representing the Celtic otherworld, to obtain a magic cauldron.

A number of characters and events later integrated into the Arthurian matter were already, in Celtic lore and literature, the subjects of well-established independent legends. The verse is obscure and might originally have been accompanied by linking or explanatory prose sections, now lost. The older of the two manuscripts that transmit the poem dates from the sixteenth century, but the work itself was doubtless composed much earlier. Although Welsh Arthurian literature consists largely of indigenous compositions and certain works e.

Only one is complete: Y Seint Greal late fourteenth century is a translation, in a single work, of the French Queste del saint Graal and Perlesvaus. The title is a misnomer, although a thoroughly customary one. O f those four, the second, entitled Branwen, is of most interest here: in this text we find the character Bendigeidfran or Bran the Blessed , taken by some scholars as the prototype of the Fisher King, who in texts after Chretien will be given the name Bron.

Bran, like the Fisher King, had suffered a spear wound, as a result of which Britain had become a wasteland. Arthur himself does not appear in this story or in the other three branches of the Mabinogi , but a number of the characters in them are associated with the King in Celtic tradition. In the second half of the work, Arthur himself takes the primary role, indulging in hunts, quests, and the making of war and peace. The Dream ofRhonabwy is a satirical dream-vision that initially paints a picture of the Arthurian era as a heroic period and then deflates that myth.

The relationship between the Welsh and French compositions has never been conclusively established. The possibility of a direct influence of the French on the Welsh, although it cannot be discounted entirely, is remote.

It appears far more likely that both the Welsh author s and Chretien drew on a common body of narrative material. The Irish text is preserved in three fragmentary manuscripts, which together represent about two-thirds of the Queste. In addition to this translation, several Irish compositions from the fifteenth century on make prominent use of Arthurian motifs, characters, or settings.

In addition, the Irish tales of Diarmaid and Grainne appear to be related to those of Tristan and Iseut. There may well have been at one time a significant body of Breton Arthurian material, but little remains. As that date indicates, the extant version of the Dialog dates from the sixteenth century, but it may be derived from a traditional and considerably older work. Traditionally, certain scholars have emphasized Celtic influences on continental versions of the Arthurian story, although the extent of those influences is a subject of strenuous controversy.

First of all, much of it exists in the form of highly enigmatic poems or in the tantalizingly brief references offered by the triads. Moreover, much of it is difficult to date with any assurance and in many cases its relationship to continental Arthuriana is uncertain. There have been scholars who ascribed to French romances, and to virtually every sequence and symbol within them, a Celtic source.

Few would now go that far, and there have been a number of vehement attacks on Celtic theories. And if France was the dominant force in the creation and development of Arthurian romance, the dominant figure in that development was Chretien de Troyes.

He also wrote two lyric poems on Arthurian subjects, and he may also have been the author of a non-Arthurian romance entitled Guillaume d'Angleterre.

We know litde of Chretien himself. He either came from Troyes or spent some time there; he was associated in some way with the court of Marie de Champagne to whom his Lancelot is dedicated , and later he claimed as patron Philippe de Flandre. His Arthurian romances are all in the standard French narrative form of the period: octosyllabic lines of rhymed verse. Perceval also follows Gauvain Gawain through extensive adventures, and some scholars have suggested, though unconvincingly, that Chretien had intended for those adventures to become a separate romance.

In terms of their contribution to our knowledge of Arthur, the most striking fact about Chretiens romances is that, unlike the chronicles, they present the King as a secondary character. The romances focus on other characters, who give their names to the works, and Arthur has acceded or receded to the position of patriarch. The King only rarely initiates action and even more rarely participates directly in it. Erec journeys elsewhere to find a bride, but they then return to Arthurs court.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that those knights are expected to serve God, King, justice and morality, their ladies, and the cause of all who are in need. They are expected to develop their military skills, perfect their moral state, and exhibit appropriate social behavior.

Perceval, for example, falls into error and sin because, in order to become a knight, he rejects his youthful simplicity and purity in favor of a code ofbehavior that he cannot understand. Yvain represents the other side of the coin: he leaves Laudine immediately after their wedding, to seek chivalric adventures with Gauvain, and he fails to return on the agreed date. The resulting crises experienced by both Erec and Yvain require a lengthy period of repair and expiation before they can work out a proper balance oflove and chivalry.

Quite early, it referred also to the moral and military code of the knight, whom medieval manuals of chivalry exhorted to love and serve God, king, and companions in arms; to pursue justice; to protect the poor and the weak; to flee from pride; to remain clean in flesh and pure in spirit. Indications are that practice often fell short of the theory. In the twelfth century, courtly love was combined with chivalry to produce a social ideal of service to love and to the lady.

At least, such a balance between chivalry and love is possible in those romances. Lancelot perceives the same conflict, but in this romance it is real: love must rule supreme. By delaying for two steps, you showed yourself unwilling to ride in it. That is, he has briefly placed his concern for his honor and reputation before blind obedience to the dictates of love, and he nearly loses Guinevere as a result.

A complex phenomenon, courtly love includes the adoration of the lady, the desire to serve her devotedly, and the notion that such service ennobles the lover. It is often assumed that courtly love was necessarily adulterous, but some authors e. The unfinished Perceval provides the most complex expression of the paradigm established by Chretien.

The crisis occurs when Perceval observes aLancelot Riding in the Cart. The procession excites Perceval's curiosity, but having earlier been informed that a knight should not talk excessively, he refuses to ask about the Grail.

He later learns that, had he inquired, his question would have cured the maimed Fisher King. Curiously, he also learns that his failure was due to an earlier sin, which he committed by leaving his mother and thereby causing her to die of grief.

Whatever may be the precise connection between the two events that is, how his leaving his mother could have caused his tragic silence in the Grail Castle , it is apparent that in this romance Chretien goes well beyond creating a character whose understanding of chivalry is deficient. The implication is inescapable: this romance constitutes an indictment of Arthurian chivalry, not only as it had come to be practiced at court but perhaps in its theoretical conception as well.

The remainder of the work would surely have led him to a spiritual perfection, rather than a social or chivalric one. Chretien set the course of Arthurian literature in the Middle Ages, and not only because he was the first to write Arthurian romances.

He introduced the Grail into the Arthurian world, and he presented the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Yet he also exerted an important influence by his technique as well as by his themes. He is an engaging and skilled writer, adept in the establishment of character, in style and in the creation of striking images, and in the arrangement and unfolding o f events. Chretiens Grail was a platter or vessel that held a single mass wafer.

However, in Wolfram von Eschenbach. A maiden— beautiful, noble, and well attired— was carrying a grail. W hen she entered the hall, with the grail, there was such a great light that the candles lost their brightness, just as the stars do at the rise of sun or moon. The grail was of fine gold, and there were many precious stones set in the grail; they were the richest on earth, and they undoubtedly surpassed all other stones.

Chretien de Troyes, Perceval ca. Tell us, what is it called When it is named by its proper name? Peredur sat beside his uncle, and they talked. He saw two young men enter the hall and go into another room; they carried an enormous spear with three streams of blood flowing from the point to the floor.

Peredur early thirteenth century? When they ride out, as they often do, it is in order to seek adventure. These templars do this for their sins. A valiant host lives there, and I will tell you what sustains them: a stone of the purest kind.

If you do not know it, I will name it for you here. It is called lapsit exillis. The stone gives a man such power that his flesh and bone are immediately made young. The stone is also called the Grail. Then Josephus appeared to begin the sacrament of the Mass. After a brief delay, he took from the vessel a host made in the form of bread.

And when he raised it up, a figure in the form of a child descended from above; his red countenance seemed to burn like fire. As he entered the bread, those present saw clearly that the bread took on the form of human flesh. After he had held the host for a long time, Josephus returned it to the Holy Vessel. Then he took the Holy Grail to Galahad, who knelt down and received his Savior with a joyous heart and with hands clasped. Queste del saint Graal ca.

And then it seemed [to Galahad and his companions] that there came an old man and four angels from heaven. He was clothed in the likeness of a bishop and had a cross in his hand. And the four angels bore him in a chair and set him down before the silver table upon which the Sangreal was. And it seemed that he had on his forehead letters that said, You see here Joseph, the first bishop o f Christendom, the same one our Lord succored in the city o f Sarras in the spiritual palace. Then the knights marvelled, for that bishop had died more than three hundred years before.

Then they looked and saw a man come out of the holy vessel who had all the signs of the Passion of Jesus Christ, bleeding all openly. But you have not seen it as openly as you will see it in the city of Sarras in the spiritual palace. Therefore, you must go there and take with you this holy vessel, for this night it will depart from the realm of Logres, and it will never be seen here again.

The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord Drank at the last sad supper with his own. Half the knights had been killed—the best half. W hat Arthur had feared from the start of the Grail quest had come to pass.