A Guest Post by Fil Reid
Many great tomes have been written about this subject, and I have a very small space in which to lay out the barest of bones about this controversy here and no pretensions to being the most knowledgeable about it. I can only include a small amount of the copious quantities of information pertaining to whether Arthur was real and if he was, who he was.
Opinion is divided on this. Either you believe he was real, or you don’t. But whether he ever existed or not, he’s a source of never-ending inspiration for writers and has been ever since Nennius wrote his Historia Brittonum in about AD830. If he wrote it, that is. No one can even be sure of that. And whoever wrote it, they certainly did just what they said – gathered a heap of information together in a pile and did little else with it.
There is only one original source that is anywhere near Arthur’s supposed dates (anywhere from the mid-fifth century onwards unless you adhere to the suggestion he might have been Lucius Artorius Castus from the second Century, a Sarmation officer in the Roman army) – and that is Gildas. He wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae somewhere about the middle of the sixth century, and might or might not (depending on the translation you go for) have written it 44 years after the Battle of Badon.
However, Arthur is conspicuous by his absence from Gildas’s book. The scribe, known as Gildas the Wise, who may have been a son of Caw of Strathclyde and brother to Heuil who Arthur supposedly executed, does not mention Arthur even once. He confines himself to mentioning the five kings who are his contemporaries and whom he thinks are terrible (in some detail) and Ambrosius (long dead but whom he likes). His saving grace is that he makes the first ever mention of the Battle of Badon, although some think he intended Ambrosius to have been the victor of this battle and not Arthur.
There are various options here.
Gildas doesn’t mention Arthur because he didn’t exist.
He doesn’t mention him because Arthur executed his brother Heuil
He thinks everyone should know who Arthur was, so he doesn’t need to say
For my novels in the Guinevere series, I have chosen the second option.
The earliest mention of Arthur, if it’s genuine and not a later addition to the text, comes from a poem written about the end of the sixth century by the Welsh poet Aneirin – Y Gododdin. It’s about a battle at Catraeth which the British lose tragically and contains the following lines about a brave warrior –
‘He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur.’
Then there are the Triads which evolved as mnemonic devices to assist the recollection of narrative material in bardic schools, and many of which have Arthurian references.
Such as –
‘Three Generous Men of the Island of Britain:
Nudd the Generous, son of Senyllt,
Mordaf the Generous, son of Serwan,
Rhydderch the Generous, son of Tudwal Tudglyd.
And Arthur himself was more generous than the three.’
And -
‘Three Well-Endowed Men of the Island of Britain:
Gwalchmai son of Gwyar,
and Llachau son of Arthur,
and Rhiwallawn Broom-Hair.’
But all of the above are not in their original form. In fact, all of what we have today has been copied many times over and a form of Chinese Whispers will undoubtedly have taken place, with words miscopied and bits added in that each copier thought might fit in well. One example is the description of Arthur having the image of the Virgin Mary on his ‘shoulder’ which is now thought to be a mistranslation of ‘shield’. A much more likely place to carry an image.
To return to the early ninth century, Nennius, or whoever it was made that heaped compilation, gives us Arthur’s twelve battles – which rather suspiciously rhyme. That doesn’t mean they aren’t Arthur’s though, and nor does the fact that even though, for example, there is a known battle of Chester some years later, there wasn’t one Arthur could have fought. No one knows where any of these battles were though, and there have been countless pages of speculation and discussion about their location over the years.
For my novels I chose to follow Nennius’s list. Firstly, because he’s an early source (even if not all that trustworthy) and secondly because in a work of fiction it’s nice to stick with elements of the legend that people know. So, my Arthur gets to fight all twelve battles plus a few I added in from out of my own head. And I got to choose which of the suggested locations I preferred from the endless list of alternatives. Hence for the Battle of the City of the Legion I went against the grain and chose York instead of Caerleon or the much-mooted Chester, as York is on the East of the country, where the Saxons were, and the other two are in the West. And because I had the power to choose.
I did run into a few problems in writing a novel about battles told entirely by one female protagonist in the first person. However, my main character, Gwen, is a girl from the twenty-first century, where women do go into battle and have a say in their own futures, and she’s in the Dark Ages/Early Medieval period long enough to educate the men around her, so by book four she’s becoming the Warrior Queen of that volume’s title.
After Nennius came the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which was originated in about AD890 by Alfred the Great, but like Gildas, omits any mention of Arthur. However, as this was written by the Anglo-Saxons, and they would not have included any defeats, this could be why there might be no mention of any victories won over them by men such as Arthur and Ambrosius. History is written by the victors, and by AD890 the Anglo-Saxons were very much the victors.
The Welsh Annals, however, do mention Arthur and both the Battle of Badon and the Battle of Camlann. At Badon Arthur carries the Cross of Our Lord on his shoulder for three days (probably should be shield) and at Camlann Arthur and Mordred die. It’s silent on whether Arthur and Mordred were on the same side or enemies. And it’s not at all certain that these events were not added in a lot later, not to mention the fact that the Annals were compiled several hundred years after the events mentioned. A bit like us writing a history of the Napoleonic Wars or the English Civil War without anything written down about it to work from, and only a vague idea of who did what and when things happened. We’d be just as bad as these chroniclers were and no doubt resort to the same sort of guesswork as they all did.
I will skip on to that most inventive of chroniclers – Geoffrey of Monmouth, who created a wonderful pseudo-history of Britain and laid the foundations for the medieval Romance figure Arthur was to become, with his court at many-towered Camelot, and his knights of the round table. He based his Historia Regum Britanniae on works that I’ve already mentioned, plus some ‘lost books’ he claimed he was able to reference. Whether this was true or not, we’ll never know, but his version of the Arthurian legend took hold and became the dominant idea for hundreds of years, expanding in all directions with many additions to the tales.
But who was the real Arthur? If he existed at all, and I’m convinced he, or someone very like him, did, then he was a Dark Age warrior lord, based in a hill fort such as South Cadbury Castle, where in the 1960s Lesley Alcock discovered major refortification had gone on at exactly the right time for Arthur. He didn’t live in a stone castle, and he had warriors, not knights, probably using weapons and armour left over from the Roman occupation. He travelled about Britain on Roman roads that were to last hundreds of years after the departure of their builders, and fought battles against the enemies of the British. And above all, he was not English. We, the English, were his enemies, although modern thinking and science now prove that we are a mixture of all those who have invaded this island. So, although we might think we’re Anglo-Saxons, in reality we still have the DNA of Arthur’s warriors running in our veins.
*****
Guinevere by Fil Reid is a six-book series set in a very realistic version of Dark Age Arthurian Britain. Fil has Asperger’s Syndrome and King Arthur has been her lifelong Aspie obsession, along with horses. The first book in the series,
Guinevere: The Dragon Ring, came out on January 11th, 2022,
book two, Guinevere: The Bear’s Heart, came out on March 17th, 2022
and book three, Guinevere: The Sword, is out on May 31st, 2022.
Published by Dragonblade, a US company, they are available on Amazon.
Three further books not out yet are –
Guinevere: Warrior Queen,
Guinevere: The Quest for Excalibur
and Guinevere: The Road to Avalon
A very interesting article. Thank you very much.