Dr Mary Bateman
Appearances
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No, maybe they left him behind. They don't all go on the quest, just the useful ones.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Like a kind of rogue figure.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It's a very, it's a really complicated question. Monmouthshire is in what is now modern day Wales. But for much of the Middle Ages, it was in what we call the Welsh March. So that kind of border between Wales and England. And we don't really know the extent to which Geoffrey had familial Welsh connections or whether he came from the kind of Anglo-Norman elite who were ruling or kind of...
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, who were the leaders in the marches at that time. He's kind of extremely famous in the Arthurian tradition because around 1136, 1137, he produces this book called The Historia Regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain. I think you probably have heard of this one. Yeah, yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And you might notice an overlap there with the Historia Brittonum. And that is a major source for Geoffrey. But he's a lot more elaborate on Arthur's life than what has come before. So much so that people think, did he make all of this up? Is it completely his own invention?
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
In the ancient Welsh, the British language.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No. I think people are overly keen to be really, really sceptical about Geoffrey. I would imagine that if he'd grown up in Monmouthshire and if he did indeed have Welsh family, he would have been familiar with oral stories that we know were circulating about Arthur. But I think a lot of the detail is his own biographical elaborations, if you like. And it is so, so popular.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So there's, I think, something like 215 copies that survive from the Middle Ages.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And not even just in Latin, which it was written in.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And that's big. Like, that's big. You know, like, Bevis of Hampton, one of the other really popular romances in the Middle Ages. there are far fewer copies than that in English.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It's just like a huge, huge change in terms of the record of the history of Britain.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, massively. So because we don't have much of a biography of Arthur before, what Geoffrey adds in terms of details is incredibly important for the romancers. And even though Geoffrey is much more interested in what Arthur is doing during wartime than during peacetime, which is what the romancers are interested in, the details added are a great starting point.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
We find out about Arthur's conception, which is not a very nice story. He's the son of a king called Uther Pendragon. His mother was married to someone else. And then Merlin helps Uther to trick her by disguising him as her husband. And it's all not very consensual. Yeah. What else is familiar here? He has a wife called Guanhamara, who's essentially, again, Guinevere.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
He's betrayed by his nephew, Mordred, which becomes a very crucial part of Arthur's story. He has a relative called Morgan Le Fay.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
She's really done dirty by later authors.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No. Is that nonsense? Well, we'll come to that later. But not here, no. So Morgan Le Fay, I think, is Arthur's half-sister here. And she's a healer and a sorceress, essentially.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Oh, yes. She is mentioned in the Green Knight story. And by that point, she's not very nice by that point. Because she wants to frighten Guinevere to death, which is horrible.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Caliburnus, which makes sense. You can see how the Latin could become Excalibur very easily.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Well, funnily enough, it's supposed to have been forged at Avalon.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Which I find super interesting because I know that at Glastonbury Tor they found traces of early metalworking. on the tour. It's real. I mean, it's not. But it's just, I like it when there's funny little circumstances like that that line up. And Merlin is the other important addition here.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
There's an earlier figure in the Welsh tradition called Myrddin. Right. And he's a poet and he's a prophet as well. But Geoffrey takes him and gives him a much more detailed story. He's not limited to the reign of Arthur. So he's a sort of royal advisor from Arthur's forebears right through down to Arthur.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. He's also supposedly responsible, according to Geoffrey, for bringing Stonehenge over to Britain. Yes. So he's got some interesting stories connected with him.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Let me give you a clue.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
The sound in Welsh is produced with letters that look like a double D. So it looks like Mervyn.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Wow! Yeah, that's the running theory anyway.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Shitty the Prophet doesn't really have the same ring to it.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, essentially.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I think Geoffrey leaves it open to question. And that becomes a lot more prominent later. So a lot of Geoffrey's other kings, we're told they died in this state. They were buried here quite often. With Arthur, we're told that he's taken off to Avalon for healing after this terrible final battle at Camelan. And then the crown passes to the successor.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
But we're not actually given that information about whether he dies or how he dies. And people love to elaborate on that later on. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I think fan fiction is an excellent way of describing it. I've heard it called that in my lectures, particularly as it really snowballs. So what Greg's referring to here is the romance tradition that starts in Europe, which is very hard to summarise because it just explodes so quickly. Geoffrey's text is translated, so it's originally in Latin.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
a handy lingua franca for the period, and it's translated very, very quickly into French by a Channel Islander called Wass, into English, translations of it all across Europe and into Welsh as well, actually. So, yeah, from the 12th century, we start to see Arthurian literature being composed.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
The lion's share of Arthurian romance, really, most innovative Arthurian romance that we see at the earliest date is in French, which, of course, is a prestige language in much of Europe.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Essentially. Yeah. So in French, these texts are called romans, which is still the word for novel today in modern French. And then in England, when you start seeing these texts called romance, it's clear that they are, it's actually used for any text that's written in French originally, it doesn't even have to have like knights and everything else.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, so we think it's to do with romance, like literature originally being written kind of in Latinate. Some of these authors in particular, I'm thinking here of Marie de France, who I'll talk about in a second, also Chrétien of Troyes, Chrétien de Troyes.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
They really are interested in these big questions about how a knight balances his chivalric, his martial obligations with, you know, being courtly and refined and being a lover.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And Arthur in these texts becomes, we call him a raffinéant, a do-nothing king. He's a lot less important than his knights and all of their affairs and adventures and things like that. And Lancelot is actually, he isn't even in the Arthurian tradition prior to Roman.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
The round table is first mentioned in... Do you remember earlier I mentioned Wass, the Channel Islander, who translates Geoffrey and adapts it, makes it more interesting.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yes, and one of the additional details that he includes is that a circular table is produced that can seat knights all the way around it with no hierarchy. So it's to get rid of squabbling about seniority. In the Grail texts, this is developed a bit, so there's always a seat that's left vacant called the siege perilous or the dangerous chair, the dangerous seat.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. And the idea being that it's deadly to sit in. The only person who can sit in it has to be the most pure knight going. And that's the only one who can achieve the quest for the Grail.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Crotien says that it is a flat serving dish for presenting the Eucharist wafer. And there's moments where they see this vision of it being brought out in a sort of parade. And it's actually gained a lot more importance since the romance. It's kind of become this huge object that people are looking for.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
But actually, the original Grail romance, it's part of a collection of mystical objects, really, if you like.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, so it ranges from 12 nights up to a lot more than that, sometimes 150. In the Welsh tradition, 24. Sometimes 225, sometimes 300. If you want to know how crazy it gets, Lachamon, who is the English translator of Geoffrey, Geoffrey's text, in Lachamon's Brute, he says that a carpenter builds this fold-out portable table that can be carried around that can seat as many as 1,600 knights.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
That's a lot. That's pretty good. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
There's hundreds of them. There's so many.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Other mainstays include Gehaerys, Agravain.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, so she's a really important figure because, first of all, there aren't many female Arthurian authors, to be honest, at this early date that we know of. And Marie de France translates this group of stories that she says are Breton lays, which were kind of sung to a harp in Brittany, which is very intriguing because that might suggest a route into the French tradition.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, potentially. And some of these lays are Arthurian in nature. And some of them are quite typical. Some of them are a bit more unusual. There's one called Lanval about a knight who is overlooked by Arthur and Guinevere and just not treated very well. And he ends up being rescued by a fairy lover who he has... a very good time with in a meadow in a tent somewhere.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And she rides in to rescue him and he leaps on the back of her horse and rides off just as he's about to be given this terrible trial at Arthur's Court.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So she's great. I love Married France and they're a good length as well. You can just kind of dip in it.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, a little bit. It's also really the first time that we start to see a lot of these disparate stories being brought together into a kind of very epic, coherent whole. But yeah, the Vulgate cycle, we're not sure exactly who wrote it, but we think it may have been written by someone, possibly a secular author who had spent time in Cistercian circles.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And they were all about kind of mystical things, which explains why... So they were monks? Yes, which explains why the Grail is such an important part of that.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, and so it really is answering to that image of the ideal knight as a Christianised kind of a knight. And it also raises the question as to whether there are forms of knighthood that shouldn't be idealised so much.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And I think by drawing that connection between the Grail quest and the death of Arthur, the mortatou, which is kind of the end point in the story, in the Vulgate collection, if you like, it's really reinforcing the potential for... The failure to achieve something as being potentially something that could lead to the downfall of somebody great. Yeah. Like Arthur.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I mean, it's really massive. We think Mallory was using sources written in French and sources written in English. But there is at least one book in the book. It's a book split into books, confusingly. And there is at least one book in there where we don't know what his source was, which is very intriguing.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It's an amazing fate of being able to synthesize a huge amount of stories and weave them together into a master narrative.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It does massively give the game away. The original title in English was different. It was the whole book of King Arthur and his noble knights of the round table, which I think is more... It leaves you to guess what the ending's going to be.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So it's written in 1469, 1470. So we're talking quite late at this point in the Middle Ages. Quite a bit later than the other romances we've been talking about.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No, absolutely not. And actually, the first mentions that we really get of a possible Arthur figure are a lot earlier than this, and they suggest Arthur is a lot earlier than this. They place him in kind of post-Roman Britain. Okay, so just after Emperor Honorius has withdrawn troops in 410, there's that couple of hundred years that we often hear called the Dark Ages. Boom!
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Wars of the Roses. Yeah. And it's 1485. It's actually printed. And it's printed by this printer called William Caxton. And Caxton retitles it Le Morte d'Arthur. Presumably because it sounds kind of classy.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
We had an episode on him.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Well, we had three candidates. We weren't sure which Thomas Mallory Knight who was imprisoned it was. As it turns out, there were three candidates. But the one who looks most likely, he was from Warwickshire. And yeah, he had a very colourful career, shall we say. He was a sheriff. He was a justice of the peace. Five times he was an MP. Wow.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
But he was also accused of some pretty terrible crimes and spent time in prison for them. And these range from cattle rustling and things like that to robbing a local abbey. All the way up to attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, theft, rape and extortion. So all in all, not known as being a particularly nice guy.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And yet he's accused of all these terrible things. And actually, we think that he may have written Le Morte d'Arthur, which I don't know if you've ever seen a copy, but it is massive. It's huge. It's one of those books that people say that they've read sometimes when they haven't read all of it because it's so, so long.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And we think that he wrote it during a period of imprisonment, possibly Newgate prison or possibly... Tower of London. Maybe somewhere where he would have had access to manuscripts... that contained enough of his source material that he could use then.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It's the book of Sir Gareth.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So it takes you right from Arthur's conception through his rise to the throne. You've got the sword and the stone story in there about him pulling the sword from the stone and becoming king. He goes over to Europe and conquers the Roman Empire after a nasty challenge from a Roman emperor. We're introduced to all of his round table nights, as in some of the other romances.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Quite a lot. Lancelot is more important than in other English romances in Mallory because of his French sources. And this is where you get the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, that great love triangle. Mallory's kind of squeamish about the sex stuff. So they don't have sex.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. Well, and possibly a slightly more prudish audience. I don't know. Until quite late in the text. And then after everything goes wrong for Arthur and he's betrayed by Mordred and the knights fall into kind of infighting and factions, partly because of what happens with Lancelot and Guinevere. It all goes very wrong. Arthur is mortally wounded and is taken off to Avalon.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
This is one of those texts where we are told some people think he doesn't live anymore. And this is where we first hear Arthur called the once and future king. And then there's a funny postscript with Lancelot and Guinevere where they become a monk and a nun, respectively, which is greatly elaborated upon by Mallory.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, I know, I feel the same. This is when some of the earliest texts place Arthur's rule as having happened, which makes sense because the province of Britannia is being invaded and raided by a series of different groups. You have the Picts and the Scots from the north, and you've also got Angles, Saxons, Jutes coming in, those Germanic groups who would form the first kingdoms in England.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
The grail quest is very much in there.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Does a grail, gets made a king, dies. Yes.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I think we think of Arthurian tourism as a kind of post-Victorian thing, but absolutely not. You know, like people were going to pilgrimage sites and churches and things like that that claimed to have objects connected with Arthur and all of the people who populated his world. Some of these were kind of clearly propaganda objects as well, right?
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So when Edward I defeats Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, he seizes a crown from him that is supposed to have been Arthur's crown that then gets stored quite safely in Westminster for a while. Oh. There's Arthur's sword.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yes, he does. He gives it to, I think, King Tancred, I think. He gives it to the King of Sicily.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yes, and we know this based on people who visited and tell us that they were shown Arthur and Guinevere's chamber, Garwain's skull and his bones because he dies in Dover, according to Geoffrey.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yes. Edward III built it? I think Edward I, we think possibly to do with a grand tournament. And it's still hanging there. You can go and see it. Clearly not authentic in any way. Henry VIII had it repainted as well. Beautiful. So it's been continually an object of royal propaganda. Sure.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, this is kind of a period that we call the Arthurian revival when interest in Arthur just explodes again. And there's various reasons for this. Arthur is, you know, a powerful Christian imperial symbol. You can see how he might be appealing to certain Victorians.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. Helpful. Yeah, all of that. He's a morally upright figure at a time when people are being more thoughtful about morals and particularly morals among the upper classes as well.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Some of the more dodgy bits of the medieval Arthur, like things like the incest story where Arthur kills a load of babies because he doesn't want Mordred to come and overthrow him, his incest child. The Victorians don't like that very much.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, it's very King Herod.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Mallory is actually republished. It's censored, like some of the nastier bits are tweaked for Victorian tastes. And then Tennyson. So Tennyson actually kind of rediscovers a lot of the Arthurian stories, partly through Mallory, but also partly through the Welsh tales that by that point had been translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. and by other people that he knew.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And he's really well known for his rewrites of the Arthurian story. You've got his poem, The Lady of Shalott, which is very, very famous. And also his grand Arthuriad, which is called The Idols of the King.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Britain needs a hero and so there are lots of bits of poetry written about heroes and this is where we see the first mention of Arthur. So the earliest texts we have about him seem to suggest he might have been a military leader of some sort in post-Roman Britain. We're talking sort of 450 to 550 CE, so about a thousand years earlier than your pointy hats.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, and actually I would suggest that we can partly thank women for the Arthurian revival. Only partly though. You know, they were interested in the Arthurian stories even when people were passing them off as kind of frivolous and not valuable. I mentioned already Lady Charlotte Guest.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
You have poets like Louisa Stewart Costello, whose funeral boat probably influenced Tennyson with his Lady of Shalott, which is interesting. One of my favourites is Elizabeth Stewart Phelps. So she's actually writing in America. She's American, but she's writing in the same sort of time period as Tennyson. And she's an early feminist.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So she paints these amazing reimagined stories featuring Arthurian characters, but very much set in kind of contemporary, lower and middle class America. So you'll get a vision of Guinevere with a toothache sat on her little cricket stall by the fire, lusting over their lodger. That sounds amazing. And opium fever dreams and everything. I've never heard of that.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, a lot of people haven't, but actually some of the most important innovators, I think, in Arthurian literature at this time were not Tennyson and that lot. It was actually some of the female authors. I'd love to read some of that.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Interesting stuff. And then also in the art world as well. So there's a photographer called Julia Margaret Cameron.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Very well known, yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, and her Arthurian portrait series that she is asked to do for Tennyson for an 1874 edition of his Idols is very, very famous. It contains these kind of photo portraits of people from the Arthurian world.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. Julia Cameron was born in Calcutta and she owned coffee plantations in Sri Lanka. And her and Tennyson were both very, very pro-Empire. And they saw the Arthur story as a story about a king who's a civilising force. I mean, Tennyson's poems describe... Yeah, it really is. I mean, Tennyson describes Arthur taming people like wild beasts. It's all very uncomfortable.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
There's a famous painting, actually, by George Frederick Wyatts of Sir Galahad that is hung not just in Eton, the original, but all over schools and nurseries across the British Empire as a kind of propaganda tool, really.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Ideal, upright, civilised masculinity.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
okay yeah what where and they're written at the time or they're written later key question they're a bit later yeah they're sort of set at the time aren't they yeah they are quite a bit later yeah so the the earliest references um to arthur are very enigmatic and fragmentary which just add to his appeal really there is a very early welsh poem now i say welsh but we think it was written in the very very north kind of south of scotland north of england
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Tintagel is still a massive tourist hotspot. One of English Heritage's most successful. Obviously Glastonbury, people still flock to Glastonbury.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Was found there by some Glastonbury monks in 1191.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
They'd had a disastrous fire.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Six years later. I fancy that. There's all sorts of stories even today about Arthur sleeping beneath a hill or in a cave somewhere ready to come back. That's classic though, isn't it?
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Well, Mount Etna in the Middle Ages. Is there? Yeah, it's theorised as this is where Avalon was in a medieval text.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Sleeping king, yeah. You've got Snowdon, Alderley Edge in Cheshire.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Arthur's Seat, Arthur's Oven in Scotland as well. There's all sorts of landmarks with Arthurian names.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Hull up in the northeast. Why Hull? It's a very long story that I don't have much time to get into today. Can you do it quickly? I can do it really quickly. This particular coat of arms with the three crowns on blue was used by other figures as well. Hull was the king's town founded in 1299.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Kingston upon Hull. I don't think that the arms date to that early, but they were used later on and continue to be used. And they happen to be Arthur's coat of arms, you see most commonly as well.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Okay, so we haven't spoken much today about the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, and that's because a lot of people think of this as an Arthurian nadir. No one is interested in Arthur, no one is writing about Arthur. And actually, this is the time when you see some of the weirdest and funniest texts being written about Arthur.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I'm going to give two examples today, but there are tons of others. Two of my favourites. The first is a little pamphlet published by a famous balladeer called Martin Parker, A Famous History of King Arthur. 1660, so just on the cusp of monarchic restoration.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And it seems fairly normal until you delve into his massive list of Arthur's knights, which alongside Garway and Lancelot includes names like Sir Doggery, Sir Bored, Sir Frisky and Sir Bigot.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And I love this because people talk about Parker and this particular text as examples of royalist propaganda and it just goes to show how even the more sober Arthurian genres at this time are becoming playful. There's some tongue-in-cheek stuff going on here. It's not attempting to be history anymore and because of that things get a lot more diverse and interesting.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Because we mentioned Hull earlier, did you know that there is a Merlinic prophecy, a prophecy supposedly attributed to Merlin about Kingston upon Hull and its invasion by parliamentary forces? Lots of people don't and I don't know why you would. But I find it really funny that Merlin, who is a royal advisor...
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
is co-opted as a prognosticator, as a prophet for parliamentarianism, you know, around the Civil War period. I just find that completely wonderful. And a great testament to how even in this nadir, things can continue to be reinvented.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
called A Godothan. It's part of a bigger text by a poet called Aneiron. It's a series of laments about fallen soldiers who've been involved in great battles. And in A Godothan, which is about this battle that we think happened somewhere near Catterick in modern day Yorkshire,
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
We seem to share the knowledge between us, which I love. Everyone has something a bit different.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
there are lots of men who fall, and one of them has a very Arthur-y sounding name, but he's not Arthur, and we're told he's not Arthur, because the poet says that his name was Gwathur, but he was no Arthur. Oh. Which is really interesting, because it suggests that Arthur is well-known enough that he can just be used offhand like that as a point of comparison.
You're Dead to Me
Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Thank you so much. This has been great.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, he's commemorating him.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
But no Arthur. It's a bit of a backhanded... It's a bit mean, isn't it?
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And the thing about this poem is we don't know how old it really is, because as with a lot of these early Welsh texts that we'll talk about today, they're not written down until quite a long time, we think, after they were originally being circulated and composed orally. And to make matters more confusing, there's two versions of a good Arthur as well, and one of them does not mention Arthur.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
So that makes it even more enigmatic.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Just to return to these early texts, the really important mention, the first detailed mention we get of Arthur comes quite a bit later in around 830. And it's in this text called The History of the Britons. For a long time, we thought the author was this guy called Nennius. Now we're not sure. Oh, really? Yeah, we're not sure anymore.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Me too. Well, people call him Pseudo-Nennius.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And it's an attempted history that traces the origins of Britain right back to this hero called Brutus.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
The Trojan dude, yes.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. Exactly that. And yet you see him in the Middle Ages being called the founder of Britain and there seems to be a kind of oversight of these giants who were originally there.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. There is a prequel that comes up later about some giant sisters who lived there before.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah. I think Totnes is the place where Brutus's right-hand man chucked one of the giants over the edge of the cliff.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No. Crucially, he describes these 12 battles that Arthur has led people in, but he's not described as a king. He's described as a dux bellorum, which means a leader of battles in Latin.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Well, I mean, the big problem for all of the Arthur truthers is that there is really only, because it is Dark Ages, scare quotes, there is really only one piece of writing, piece of writing about what's going on in Britain... that is roughly contemporaneous with Arthur. And it's written by a British monk called Gildas, who, again, we don't know much about.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And for a Briton, he doesn't really big up his own team very much. The text is called On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, De excedio et conquestae Britanniae. It basically describes Britain as being kind of a muddled mess at this time.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
He thinks that Britain's downfall is due to a series of just not very nice, very ungodly, immoral rulers. He does say that there is a British victory at the Battle of Baden, which sounds exciting and, oh, you know, it could match up, but he doesn't connect it with Arthur. He connects it with another victor, another figure, called Ambrosius Aurelianus, which is another wonderful title.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It means the golden immortal in Latin. Ambrosius Aurelianus.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
A Romano-Briton, yeah.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yeah, there are still military commanders, we think, in Britain after the Romans have left because they've left lots of skills and training and things in place.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
That's great, yeah, a mabinogion. And actually that's a collection of texts, a mabinogion. Within this collection of tales, there are some interesting Arthurian examples. The mabinogion, it doesn't appear, as with my other example, until quite late in manuscript form. We're talking sort of 14th, 15th century manuscripts.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
But we think the texts contained within them were actually probably first written down as a collection much earlier in the 11th or 12th century. And here's the kicker, they probably have oral origins, some of them that are even earlier than that.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I would say so, yeah. The stories themselves seem to have much earlier roots, a bit like a Godothan, really. There's a few of them that mention Arthur, but one of my favourites and one of the earliest is a tale called Coluch a Colwen. You sometimes hear it in English called How Coluch Won Olwen. This seems to have really quite early roots.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It doesn't bear any resemblance to the other kind of big Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition Arthur texts. And Arthur is most definitely a king in this story. At last! Yes, he's got there. And it's just a fantastic story. So basically, Arthur has a cousin called Culloch, or Killoch, who's a young man. And he's fallen in love, potentially through a curse, but never mind, with a young woman called Olwen.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And her father is a terrible giant called Isbav Arden, chief of all giants. In order to win Olwen's hand, Killoch is given a series of tasks, impossible tasks, 40 of them he has to complete. He can't do this on his own, you know, he's just a weedy young guy. So he goes off to King Arthur's court and enlists the help of Arthur and his kind of almost superhuman knights, his superhuman retinue.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Yes, it's really complex.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Hi, thank you so much. What a joy to be here.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
It's him, it's you. Yeah, no, that's the climax point really of the whole. So these 40 tasks are very varied and they involve some quite scary things from kind of impossible husbandry, agricultural tasks to retrieving a magic cauldron and the blood of a black witch who lives at the uplands of hell. And the climax is this hunt for this boar called Turchuth.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And the interesting thing is about half, like a large number of the tasks relate in some way to preparing for this great boar hunt that happens at the kind of climax of the story. And the reason why they need to hunt Toichtruith is that this giant scary boar has between his ears on his hairy little head... He's got a male grooming set. Yes, he does.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Is that what you were thinking when you were thinking it's quite out there?
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Exactly, yeah. But this is not the Arthurian map that we know. OK, so first off, there's no Camelot here and it's nowhere near Kilion, which is where it is for much of the Middle Ages after later writers get involved. Arthur's court is called Kellywig and it's in Cornwall. So in quite a different place.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I think that's a later development which comes with Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are other candidates put forward all the time for Kettlewig and where it might have been based on the place name and things like that.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Arthurian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Arthurian tat. Yeah. I mean, there was an early 20th century scholar who said that there is no name more ubiquitous in the British landscape other than the devil than Arthur. So, yeah, he really is everywhere. He gets absolutely everywhere.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
No, it's not. It's called Kaledwilch, which means hard cleaving. So it's a serious sword. But there are some recognisable characters here. So amongst Arthur's superhero knights, there is Kay or Kay. When the author is describing all of the superhuman characters, qualities that this massive list of names from Arthur's Court has. Kai has lots.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
He's kind of, I don't really know much about superheroes, but he would be the superhero that has all of the superpowers.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
There are familiar names. So we have Bedvir or Bedwyr, Gwalchmai, which doesn't sound very familiar, but it's the Welsh name for Gawain.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And Arthur's wife here is Guinevere, which sounds very familiar.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
And there's lots of weird names in Arthur's court as well.
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
Sight, son of Seer, who has amazing eyesight. Okay, that's good. Which sounds useful, but then you also have Penpingyan, who walks on his head to save his feet. LAUGHTER
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Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth
I assume he's just walking around upside down on his hands all the time. But surely that's a superpower. Not a very helpful one. I don't think his nightly peak years are going to last him long, to be honest.