Layamon’s
Brut
, a poem of some sixteen thousand lines, was composed at some point between 1185 and 1225. The loss of Normandy in 1204 has already been noted, so that Layamon’s “sense of ‘England’ is made all the more relevant.”
7
His preoccupation with the land is matched only by his emphasis upon “continuity” and his interest in “ordinary people.”
8
It is possible, therefore, that Layamon’s use of English and his adoption of the alliterative line were methods of evoking or even creating a natural and national community of English speakers. This emphasis may also account for the direct and dramatic use of dialogue within the narrative, the comparative lack of subtlety in the exposition, the interest in supernatural strangeness, and the weight placed upon historical associations or references. It was as if a lost past were being revived, and this first version of Arthur’s exploits in English provided “a unifying account of national origins and a focus for patriotic spirit.”
9
Other
dynastic chronicles
, written in the vernacular, followed. An alliterative version of
Morte Arthure
had been transcribed by the beginning of the fifteenth century; it is the product of a highly literate and sophisticated culture, to which has been appended in an unknown hand “
Hic jacet Arturus rex quondamrexque futurus
,” “Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.”
It is a legend of origin combined with the myth of revival; part of the power of the Arthurian saga lies in its uncertain significance so that the very absence of meaning, particularly in the ambiguous death of Arthur, has encouraged a hundred different meanings—national, social, tribal, cultural— to rush into the available space. Arthur himself lies suspended between heaven and earth, the significance of his equivocal posture matched by the sense of suspended significance in the texts devoted to him.
There are many other chronicles, romances and fables to be found in the eight compendious volumes of the French “Vulgate Cycle,” of which the authorship is unknown; they include no less than everything, the romance of Launcelot and Guinevere, the story of Merlin, the adventures of Bors and Gawain, the death of Arthur, their chronology “spanning the entire history of the Grail quest from its origin in the Passion of Christ to its successful accomplishment by the chosen Arthurian hero.”
10
But the chivalric fictions and spiritual allegories of the French writers were not necessarily to English taste, and the native English chronicles were prone to emphasise the violence and suffering of heroism while turning spiritual meaning into a vague sense of superstitious dread; the environment is local and detailed, blessed with any number of historical associations in order to lend the adventures a wholly English context.
There is an accompanying desire “to create a tradition of secular English literature to rival that in French.”
11
By native instinct or literary fortune the reign of Arthur was intimately attached to the national linguistic enterprise, so that his name and fame will live as long as the English language itself.
The English tales flourished for almost three hundred years, from 1250 to 1550, and we may reach tentative conclusions about the nature of early English sensibility in a comparison with their French counterparts. The stories tend to be narrated in a shorter and simplified form, with the vocabulary of love and courtesy excised; the “linear” English mind seemed to prefer an adventure complete with heroic and violent special effects. Great debates are foreshortened and reduced to practical discussion of pragmatic import. Psychological intimacy and interior drama are eschewed in favour of “the exaggerated and the grotesque” with “a marked preference for combats with giants and monsters rather than mere human opponents.”
12
This taste for sensation and horror has endured as long as the Arthurian legends themselves.
The inscrutability or ambiguity of those legends—the ever elusive “Holy Grail” is in that sense emblematic—has in turn meant that countless political allegories and historical associations have been cast upon them. In England the stories of knightly grandeur and chivalric honor, in the service of a strong central court, created a glorious past to which less glorious contemporaries might wish to attach themselves. In the late twelfth century the exhumation of Arthur in the grounds of Glastonbury, at the behest of Henry II, was meant to assure the disaffected Welsh that their great chieftain was well and truly dead. It is believed that a hasty reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth by the monks of Glastonbury had originally led to the rapid insertion of other bodies into the supposed Arthurian graves, together with various relics quickly inscribed with appropriate material; at first Arthur and Guinevere were found in the same tomb, but a more thorough reading of the text led to her being silently removed. Mordred, the treacherous nephew, also vanished from the grave site.
In the context of English history itself, however, the extent to which a powerful imagination or a passage of significant writing can affect external events—can in a real sense “create” history—is of absorbing interest.
The antiquarian concerns of the English encourage, also, a brooding over the past as if it harboured some secret message or inspiration. Thus in 1278 Edward I and Queen Eleanor visited Glastonbury and, having inspected the remains of the once and future king, ordered that he be taken in pomp and reverence to the high altar of the abbey there. Edward was at that moment facing an insurrection of the Welsh, advancing under the inspiration of Arthur, and the king wished to claim Arthur as his own with the manifest suggestion that Edward was the chosen and legitimate successor. An historical figment, at best an obscure war-lord, was so honoured by historians and chroniclers that he became a potent force in thirteenth-century dynastic politics. It is a signal example of the power of historical writing. In the fourteenth century it was affirmed that the object of the knights’ quest, the Holy Grail, was in fact the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper which had been brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea. Thus the cultic status of this spot of English earth grew and grew; it has often been surmised that fact and fiction strangely mingle in English biography and historiography, so the story of Arthur may be adduced as the harbinger of a great national tradition.
In 1344 Edward III decided to establish a fellowship of the Round Table, which pledge was modified four years later into the Order of the Garter. So the recipients of this honour have to thank an Oxford cleric named Geoffrey for their advancement. Henry V wrote to the Abbot of Glastonbury, in 1421, demanding that the remains of Joseph of Arimathea should also be miraculously recovered; but the king died before any exhumation could take place, and the site of Joseph’s supposed burial has never been revealed.
Then in 1486 Henry VII named his first son Arthur as a way both of reuniting the English nation after the dynastic “Wars of the Roses” and of affirming his own legitimacy as sovereign. There were jousts and banquets in medieval style, while the image of a young King Arthur was delineated on the walls of Richmond Palace. The “image of King Arthur riding a golden triumphal chariot through the sphere of the sun . . . was to have enormous significance for the development of the Tudor Arthurian myth.”
13
In fact the only two prospective heirs to the throne of England who were given the name of Arthur both died young. Would the myth of Arthur have survived so long without the untimely deaths of his later avatars?
In
the year before
the christening of Henry VII’s heir, the young Prince Arthur, a yet more splendid addition to the Arthurian legend emerged in the shape of Malory’s prose epic in eight books, under the title of
Le Morte
Darthur
.
Little is known of Thomas Malory himself; he was a soldier of an old Warwickshire family and was present at the siege of Calais in 1436. He inherited an estate at Newbold Revell but quickly lapsed into a career of violence, theft and extortion. He broke out of several prisons, on one occasion swimming across the moat, and he fought with Warwick against Edward IV. He died on 14 March 1471 in or near Newgate prison, in which gaol he is likely to have written the entire epic of Arthur, which closes “Praye for me while I am on lyve that God sende me good delyveraunce.” It is fortunate that we do not expect our greatest authors to live virtuous lives, since this thief, blackmailer and ruffian has produced what his editor has called “the one work of real poetic value in the whole field of modern Arthurian fiction.”
14
“ ‘What?’ seyde Sir Launcelot. ‘Is he a theff and a knyht? And a ravyssher of women? He doth shame unto the Order of Knyghthode and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pyte that he lyvyth.’ ” These words must be the finest evidence for an embarrassed author in the entire history of English literature.
Thomas Malory first began the enterprise by adapting an alliterative
Morte Arthur
which, at a later date, Caxton considerably modified; that strange archaising mode did not fit naturally with the printer’s idea of “standard ” English. Then Malory turned to the vast corpus of French romances, together with some English additions, and radically shortened their rambling theses on courtly love and other speculative matters; he cut the theology, while at the same time condensing certain of the stories. He introduced these stories one after the other as if they were organic accretions of some total design, in the manner of an English cathedral of the same period. Malory is also of a decidedly pragmatic turn. As an Arthurian scholar has put it, “he exalts the practical over the ethereal and spiritual”;
15
this will be seen to be a characteristically English response. Malory’s brevity is in fact an essential engine of the plot which turns upon sudden crises and arbitrary adventures; there are dramatic speeches rather than interior monologues, incidents rather than characters. This sensibility, deriving in part from the fierce reticence of the Saxons, runs very deeply through the English imagination.
The prose of
Le Morte Darthur
has the simplicity and vividness derived from great originals, while at moments of violence and high drama Malory reaches out for the alliterative tradition once more. The prose indeed generally registers that vernacular straightforwardness which Professor Chambers traced from
Beowulf
to the works of Sir Thomas More.
Sir Dynadan is dressed in “a womans garmente,” one of the earliest examples of that English taste for cross-dressing, “and when quene Gwenyver sawe sir Dynadan ibrought in so amonge them all, then she lowghe [laughed] that she fell downe; and so dede all that there was.” There are other examples of this colloquial register—“And there he lay lyke a fole grennynge and wolde nat speke”—which remains half the strength of written English prose.
There are certain principal themes in
Le Morte Darthur
, not the least of them being that great reverence for a distant past which is so much a part of national literature. But there are also certain key words which define this heroic world, among them “sothe,” “custom,” “aventure,” “worship,” “body,” “hole,” “felyship,” “marvayles,” “secretness,” all of them creating a charmed landscape of confrontation and of peril. The narrator makes mistakes, loses his sources, or refuses to endorse a certain section of the narrative; these are characteristically English manoeuvres, brought most delicately to life by Geoffrey Chaucer in his role as the embarrassed narrator. Malory is not an expert on “psychological individuality, and realistic time-schemes,” let alone causality,
16
but many later English novelists have suffered from these minor failings. The slightly surrealistic air of his prose is suggestive in another sense, however, because it contributes to “the strangeness of Arthur’s kingdom.”
17
It consorts, too, with the dominant note of the book, that “haunting elegiac tone or undertone . . . its sad suggestions of the vanity and transience of all things, of the passing away of pomp and splendour, of the falls of princes.”
18
It reflects the mysterious and arbitrary workings of providence, doom foretold and prophetic dream. It has always been noticed that Sir Lancelot is the real hero of Malory’s narrative, but the central brooding figure is that of Arthur, the once and future king whose connection with the Holy Grail was to excite the attention of Blake and Tennyson, Scott and Rossetti, Steinbeck and Eliot.
In Malory’s account, “The Day of Destiny,” Arthur’s sword is thrown into a lake. “And there cam an arme and an honde above the watir, and toke hit and cleyght hit, and shoke hit thryse and braundysshed, and then vanysshed with the swerde into the watir.” When Arthur is told of this he replies, “Alas, help me hens, for I drede me I have tarryed over longe.” He is placed in a barge, with fair ladies in black hoods; all of them “wepte and shryked.” As he is guided away Sir Bedyvere cries out to him, “A, my lorde Arthur, what shall becom of me, now ye go frome me, and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes?” “Comforte thyselff,” said the king, “and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the vale of Avylon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!” Arthur never was heard of again, in this life, and Malory adds a final paragraph:
Yet som men say in many partys of Inglonde that kynge Arthur ys nat dede, but had by the wyll of oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tombe thys: Hic Jacet Arthurus, Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus.
Here is “the peace that passes all understanding.” Yet in this account of dolorous departing, we seem to have mislaid the actual British warrior-king who fought against the English. What is the spell of this enchantment thrown over a thousand years of English literature and English art? It lies in its unknowability; the probability that Arthur was British rather than Anglo-Saxon serves only to emphasise his otherness. He is the other who is being continually sought, even if the encounter may destroy you. He represents blood kinship and tribal fealty for the heterogeneous and muddled race of the English; he represents sanctified leadership, uniting England and the Holy Grail. Yet at the same time he is an image of transience and of loss, the unendurable loss of one who just slipped away. He is the shadow on the page. John Milton invoked “
Arturumque
sub terris bella moventum
,” Arthur under the earth fomenting wars, and Dryden wished to compose an epic concerning “King Arthur, conquering the Saxons.” Both of them are images of ferocious national identity, not untouched by melancholy and decay.