Among all the figures of Western legend, one of the most enduring is King Arthur. Along with his friends and enemies, he has appeared in many different media, from novels and poems to musicals and comic books, over a period spanning more than a thousand years. Different authors and different times have given rise to countless variations on the story, producing a complicated web of narrative.
The best-known version of the Arthurian saga is that of medieval romances. However, prior to the Middle Ages, Arthur was well-known in Celtic legends, specifically those of the Welsh. In this context, he is portrayed as a protector of the land, fighting both natural and supernatural threats and having connections with the “otherworld,” Annwn. He figures prominently in several poems attributed to Taliesin, as well as in a collection of tales labeled the Mabinogion; one of the better-known stories, “Culhwch and Olwen,” not only tells of how he helped a kinsman to perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks, but also includes a list of over two hundred of his followers, a number of whom would evolve into the Knights of the Round Table.
After these early contributions of the Celts, the next significant addition to Arthurian literature is a work in Latin, the Historia Regum Britanniae, completed in c. 1138 by another Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia traces the lineage of Arthur from Brutus, supposedly a Trojan exile who fled to Britain, and makes him a world conquerer wresting Gaul from Roman control. It also introduces such elements as Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon, his wizard advisor Merlin, his climactic battle with his nephew Mordred, and his removal to the magical isle of Avalon. As many of Geoffrey’s contemporaries could tell, this was no history at all, but instead a propagandistic fiction exalting the Welsh over the English—yet, despite or perhaps even because of this fact, the Historia soon became immensely popular, and exerted a great deal of influence over the later developments of the legend.
Knowledge of Arthur was not confined to Britain, as poems about him and his court were widespread on the Continent. Some of the best were written between approximately 1170 and 1190 by a Frenchman, Chrétien de Troyes, who was one of the first to place Arthurian legend in its now-familiar feudal setting. He introduced what were to be two especially important themes, Lancelot’s disastrous adultery with Guinevere and the quest for the Holy Grail. Later French works began to return to prose, the most important being the Vulgate Cycle, in which the character of Galahad first appeared, and the Post-Vulgate Cycle, whose dominant focus was the Grail. Partially based on these was one of the last medieval versions of the legend, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur. Composed in English, it was an attempt to synthesize the various stories into a comprehensive whole and has been a key source for modern writers.
As the Middle Ages drew to an end, Arthurian legend began to lose its audience, particularly with the coming of the Renaissance and the exaltation of reason and logic over fantasy. It was not entirely abandoned, but what little use was made of it often involved allegories of contemporary political situations. Not until the advent of Romanticism did Arthur regain his high place in the imagination, inspiring poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson (whose Idylls of the King was a bestseller), William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne. Even when the Romantic Age was succeeded by another that was, in many ways, all too realistic, Englishmen Thomas Hardy and John Masefield wrote Arthurian plays, and American E. A. Robinson three book-length narrative poems.
Since then, despite increasing cynicism about “chivalry,” Arthur largely remains as strong as ever, entering popular literature through novels as diverse as T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, upon which the famous musical Camelot was based, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, a feminist re-interpretation emphasizing Celtic paganism over the legend’s traditional association with some form of Christianity. The elaborate comic strip Prince Valiant brought Arthurian adventures to legions of newspaper readers, and numerous movies have further served to usher the king into the twentieth century and beyond. As historical investigation has become a modern pastime, interest in depicting a “real” Arthur also has grown, with efforts being made to place him in an earlier, more accurate setting, free from the medieval anachronisms.
Across wide expanses of space and time, King Arthur has continued his role as one of the greatest heroes of the European tradition, appearing in the works of Welsh bards and paperback fantasists alike. Today’s world may be far removed from the days “when knighthood was in flower,” yet the tales of him and his companions retain much of their original appeal.
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