Everything You Wanted To Know About The Legends Of King Arthur | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Was the Anglo Saxon expansion as violent as depicted in Arthurian legend? So Harrison's talking about these Germanic peoples who were thought or considered by some to have come in and and occupy something of a vacuum in the, in the aftermath of the Romano British period.’...
‘It's now an enormous and unresolved debate among experts in the post Roman, early medieval period. The problem is the dramatic contrast between the literary evidence and the archaeological. In the literary evidence, there is absolute unanimity among the sources on both sides, the native British and the Anglo Saxon, that the Anglo Saxon occupation was an extremely violent and traumatic event or series of events, with massacres, the storming of fortresses and the widespread displacement of people. And the linguistic evidence also backs that up because large areas of the island change quite rapidly from speaking a form of Welsh or the Roman Latin to speaking English with very few loanwords in English from the Welsh, suggesting the two people simply don't mix. But in archaeology, there's very little trace of violence, and farming systems, field systems, estate boundaries seem to carry on very much unaltered from one age to the next. And so at present most archaeologists are arguing for a slow and peaceful occupation by limited numbers of Anglo Saxon incomers. And the historians are still faced with texts that tell them the exact opposite. So we're a really interesting situation of an unresolved problem at the moment. And as yet, I can't see a way out of it.’...
‘What, if any of the Arthurian story can we be fairly certain of as fact?’
‘Just one thing, and that's the Battle of Mount Baden… because of a near contemporary text. The list of complaints against current kings of the British by a man called Guilders, which mentions the battle and mentions the battle because it anchors the time at which Guilders himself was born. So this battle is a historic fact, the real problem is that we're still not certain if there was a historical Arthur actually linked to it and he won it. We haven't yet found a credible contender to win it instead of Arthur. But it's the one point at which history and the early Arthurian story connect.’...
‘What is a hero for one generation is not a hero, for for the generation coming after that. So what tends to happen as you go through literary history is that once famous heroes undergo a process that we call epic degeneration. They decline. This you see throughout Arthurian literature. For instance, Gawain, who we might think of as one of the great knights, and is certainly an exemplar of heroism. In the earliest romances by *something*, becomes in the later romances, something of a womanizer and a traitor. It's the same with Lancelot. I've mentioned Lancelot as being one of the great knights being driven to greatness by love of the Queen. But in the Quest of the Holy Grail, he is the person who cannot achieve the Grail quest. And he is eclipsed by his son who is spiritually pure. So I would say maybe Galahad the knight I just mentioned is the only knight in the Arthurian legend who cannot be said to decline in any way because he is taken up to heaven. And that's the end of him’
‘Okay. Do you think it's fair to say that Arthur himself is a victim of epic degeneration during the course of these stories?’
‘Yes, he is. I think you could perfectly well say that. In the chronicle tradition, he is the great conquering King. And what you see in the later romnances is that his role as much more passive. And in Chretien’s late and unfinished romance, which is the story of the Grail, Arthur is even shown as nodding off. He falls asleep as he’s, as he presides over the round table.’...
‘You're an expert in magic and things like that. You've studied it a lot. Does the place of Merlin and the things he gets up to, does that inform us much about attitudes to to magic in this period?’
‘Yes, because the image of Merlin changes constantly. There is no doubt that medieval scholars had a real problem with Merlin, because on the one hand, officially, magic is not something which respectable people do. There's no such thing as a respectable wizard, or magic. That is, a series of apparently superhuman acts carried out with supernatural power by human beings must be the work of the devil, because otherwise the person would be a saint and the Act would be a miracle and powered by God. But Merlin is clearly regarded as a good thing, by the Arthurian tradition. And so medieval authors bent themselves and the story into all sorts of shapes, trying to keep Merlin respectable.’...
‘Why do you think the stories of Arthur still resonate today?’...
‘Well, I think partly Arthur represents a moment of sort of imaginary greatness of Britain. You know, when Britannia ruled the waves and so on. If you wanted to think of a king who conquered, who unified not only Britain, but went out to conquer most of Europe, then of course, you have a fine, you have a fine model there in King Arthur. I think the Arthurian romances offer a very different kind of interest. And it's the taste for adventure. Which isn't, which isn't really to do with, with prowess or control, it's often to do with, with finding your destiny. Discovering what fate has in store for you. Whether an adventure or a chance moment is going to lead you to destiny. Those are different kinds of impulses. But the reason we like them is that they obviously answer to the human interest.’...
‘Another appeal of the legend is that there are so many colorful characters involved in it. Both female and male, of very different kind, that they can provide a galaxy of different plot situations and relationships between them. Arthur has so many satellites orbiting him. And even in the Middle Ages, people took different attitudes the same characters who could be treated as extremely attractive in some stories and extremely unattractive in others. But also Arthur is so variable in his own nature. One extreme, he is the Butch hero of the Historia Britonnia, who can single handedly bump off 960 Saxons in one day. At the other extreme, he becomes Tennyson's put upon wimp. He can be mixed up with the most elevated kind of religion, or the most sordid kind of domestic sexual intrigue. He can be a Welsh hero, a British hero, or an English hero, or even for that matter, a Breton one. Arthur is infinitely malleable, while at the same time retaining the central core of associations, geography, characteristics and companions that give you a sense of solid tradition.’"
