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What do you think -was King Arthur a real person, or is he purely the stuff of legend? Either way, he makes for a good story.
TABLE TALK
In England, the most popular tales of chivalry are the Welsh legends
of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. No one knows for sure
if there was a real person who served as the inspiration for Arthur …or
if so, which historical figure it was. The earliest known mention of
Arthur is a reference to a mighty warrior in “Gododdin,” a Welsh poem
written about 600 AD. Another 200 years would pass before Arthur would
receive another mention, this time in
The History of the Britons, which credits him with winning 12 battles against Saxon invaders.
It’s
likely that tales of Arthur were also spread by word of mouth, because
when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote down the tales of Arthur in his
History of the Kings of Britain
in 1135, he recorded Arthur’s birth in the late fifth century,
childhood, military conquests, marriage to Guinevere, relationship with
his mentor Merlin, and his death in 542 when he was mortally wounded in
battle by his treacherous nephew Mordred. Geoffrey is also the first
person to identify Arthur as a king, not just a warrior.
COOKING THE BOOKS
So where did Geoffrey of Monmouth get his information? He claimed to
have gotten it from a “certain very ancient book written in the British
language,” but did not identify it by name. Historians now believe
there was no such book. They theorize that Geoffrey simply recorded the
popular tales of his day, and when needed, made up his own details to
fill in any gaps, drawing from legends surrounding leaders like
Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. That didn’t stop readers from
taking
The History of the Kings of Britain seriously -it served as the standard text on British history for more than 600 years.
Geoffrey
of Monmouth wasn’t the first to invent tales about King Arthur, and he
certainly wasn’t the last. In 1155 another writer, Wace of Jersey,
introduced the concept of the Round Table; five years later the French
poet Chrétian de Troyes wrote five Arthurian romances that are credited
with introducing the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot’s affair with Queen
Guinevere. A 13th-century French poet, Robert de Boron, contributed the
famous story of the orphaned Arthur winning his crown by removing a
magic sword from a stone.
TIME WARP
One thing historians agree on is that even if “King Arthur” really
did live in England in the early sixth century, he and his knights did
not live in castles, wear suits of armor, or fight in tournaments
-because none of those things existed in the sixth century. So why is
Arthur so closely associated with them? Because Geoffrey of Monmouth and
other contributors to the Arthurian legend had no sense of how
different life had been 600 years earlier. They, not Arthur, lived in an
age of castles and knights in shining armor, and they filled their
stories with the trappings of their own era. In the process they created
a world for King Arthur that he, if he did really exist, would never
have recognized.
YOU CAN LEAD A KNIGHT TO WATER…
What
about the generations of knights that grew up listening to the
chivalrous tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table -how
well did they live up to the noble example set by their hero? Did they
give to the sick and the poor? Did they protect orphans and the elderly?
Did they respect woman and treat captured knights with the same respect
they’d show upon guests?
Not quite -medieval knights preached chivalry, but practicing it was
another story, as Will Durant writes in The Story of Civilization:
Theoretically the knight was required to be a hero, a
gentleman, and a saint. All this, however, was chivalric theory. The
hero who fought one day bravely in tournament might on another be a
faithless murderer. He might [preach] of protecting the weak,and strike
unarmed peasants down with a sword; he treated with scorn the manual
worker and with frequent coarseness and and occasional brutality the
wife whom he had sworn to cherish and protect. He could hear Mass in the
morning, rob a church in the afternoon, and drink himself into
obscenity at night.
Walking Away on the Streets of New York, 1948 by Stanley Kubrick
Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and
economic purpose. But that does not mean it can or should be unlimited.
It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal
principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the
interests of the moguls of Hollywood.
Is
it hot enough for ya? Don’t you hate hearing that? Imagine a world in
which no one, except maybe the movie theater, had air conditioning. In
1998, playwright Arthur Miller wrote a nostalgic piece about the New
York City summers of his youth in the 1920s, during which people had to
use their creative juices to beat the heat.
