Abstract

Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars

© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002

The Medieval Image

Arthur was a manifestation of the suppressed Christianity of the first century that had a transfusion of blood from the related myths of the Celts and the Germans. Lady Charlotte Guest rendered a service to Celtic sources and Celtic influence, with her translation of the Welsh Mabinogion. Arthur’s knights are a collection of Celtic gods known already in the Mabinogion. Further elements appear in Provence also in the tenth century, suggesting a link, however unlikely, between the Celtic lands and Languedoc. In the eleventh century, it exploded in Languedoc with the troubadour chivalric image expressed in poems and songs.

The troubadour was a poet, whether a poor wandering minstrel or a king. An early and prominent troubadour was Pierre Vidal who wrote about hospitality. The places he mentioned were all Cathar cities and fortresses. Troubadours reviled the clergy and their protectors, the feudal lords.

They liked best to lead the wandering life of the Cathars, who set off along the road in pairs.

David De Rougement

The Roman Church had supposedly set moral standards for almost 1000 years but morals were at the level of the gutter, and the emerging class of nobles, keen that their inheritance should not go to other men’s sons, wanted a more reliable moral code than the Church offered. It seems they found it in the Christian heresies that had lingered among the poor for the whole of this time. In the south of France, the local nobles found the heresy worth adopting.

Our modern attitude to the Middle Ages was set by nineteenth century Christians who tended to eulogize them as the “age of faith” when people easily accepted the moral benefits of “spiritual authority”, and consequently the poor were not as badly off as many had become in the slums of the East End. Even city dwellers often lived a semi-rural life because the town and the country were not as alienated from each other as they now are. Victorians like William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites most of all had a romanticized idea of chivalry. A less romantic view sees the Middle Ages as nakedly showing off man’s utter inhumanity at the height of Christendom.

From the turn of the millennium, the offices and doctrines of the Church pressed more closely into the lives of people than before. Many people had become disenchanted with empty promises of spiritual salvation when life was so bleak. It had given rise to a spirit of rebellion against the Catholic religion, the religion that claimed universality. Eugene Mason, the translator of medieval romances and legends from the French, rightly noted:

It may be found in many strangely different shapes, in the life of Abelard, in the extraordinary spread of witchcraft, and—in its supreme literary expression, perhaps—in a famous passage of Aucassin and Nicolete.

He seems to mean the intrusion into a romance, apparently about the nobility, of an appeal by an ugly, ragged ploughman, who effectively said to the nobleman, Aucassin, “You worry about a lost dog—you should have my worries, mate!”. Were the Middle Ages years of sheer lyric beauty, or years of inexpressible ugliness and filth? Do we remember the romance of knights in armour and pretty ladies in pointed hats, while ignoring the misery of the poor, the lack of hygeine, bathing, toilets and even handerchiefs, so that, in the latter case, sleeves had to suffice. Greensleeves indeed:

A dream of loveliness having its roots in slime and squalor.

E Mason

Troubadours and Chivalry

The trouvère, troubadours, were poets of Languedoc, a country then separate from France, and closer to Catalonia, northern Spain, and northern Italy, who wrote in the Language of Oc (Occitan), the lingua Franca of the time, from the end of the eleventh century to the end of the thirteenth. Successful ones lived in some nobleman’s castle, composing his tales for reciting before the lord and his court, on a garden terrace in the summer, or after supper in the great hall in the winter. He was not entertaining ordinary folk directly, but he did indirectly, giving wandering minstrels copies of his work. Less successful ones were wandering minstrels.

The minstrel was a strolling player, wandering the length of the land, sometimes with a little troupe of “bears”—singing and dancing boys and girls. The life of a well known minstrel of the thirteenth century, no doubt exaggerated with poetic licence but substantially true, is recorded in the autobiography of Rutebeuf. His cupboard was bare, his lodging unfurnished, he coughed with cold, and gaped with hunger, he only had straw for a mattress. Everything he had was in pawn, and he could not face his dowryless wife with another story why he had no money for food and rent, so he wasted his time and what money he had earned in the tavern playing dice.

A good day was when a nobleman called him in to give his entertainment before the court, but often he had to resort to begging. He was popular with common folk, before the church or on the village green, though they were mainly impoverished themselves, so only able to give him meagre rewards. The Catholic clergy considered him debauched and mischievous, but he might be forced to try his luck at a monastery, and might get free overnight lodgings, but often would be turned away with hard words, because S Bernard had said “the tricks of the jongleurs can never please God”.

Chivalry began as the rites of passage of the young lord into feudal society as a warrior, and his recognition of his duty to his own lord in a hierarchy that notionally extended up to God. It then acquired a mythology that gave its practices added stability and confidence, buttressing its objectives and moral needs. Amour courtois, first appeared in the country of the Cathars around 1100. Out of it came an amazingly open society so soon after the worst of the Dark Ages, with standards of good manners and honour that made the lord’s job of handling the small but confined town, that his castle staff was, less oppressive. The lord and lady were the father and mother figures of the whole household—“mi don” and “ma dame”. But the lord had duties beyond the castle, to the rest of his estates that were often dispersed, and to the king, hunting and fighting, and so the lady was in charge for much of the time, and she it was that had to be treated honorably and respectfully by all.

Do not imagine that the lady was necessarily an old dowager. “Ma dame” was often still young and attractive, having married for title or wealth often in her low teens. Thus, Eleanor of Aquitaine married Louis VII at fifteen, had a child but divorced him at thirty and married Henry II of England, being thus a wife to a long serving English king and mother to three others, with nonconformist consequences that are never recognized.

The staff of the castle consisted of the court itself—a body of young men and women of noble blood in their own right placed as apprentices with the lord from the age of about twelve to learn the noble skills of warfare, hunting and management. The youths were learning to be knights and the girls, as attendants to the lady, were learning the skills of household management. The were training to be rulers, and were not expected to marry for romantic love but for political reasons and for the betterment of their family and prospects.

Yet in these narrow confines, pubescent boys and girls had to live together for many years without spoiling their future chances of success by having love-children. The adolescent sexuality of the young princes and princesses had to be controlled. Christianity never had any high regard for women, as we can see in its origins in Essenism, but the established Church had written them off as beneath contempt, whereas it seems that the primitive Church treated women with respect, perhaps out of fear of their powers of temptation. This respect of women proved a better way of controlling adolescent sexuality than the disdain of the Church. After all, disdain of women invites rapage, and that was not what the feudal lords wanted within their own demesnes.

Cathars had accepted women as equal to men. Their souls were equally certain to be saved. Hildegard of Bingen thought people would rise to be angels, and directly experience God, a Cathar belief in so far as it was certain. Respect of women had to be conditioned, and young men were taught a sense of their own honour as knights and a respect for women that made them hesitate to be dishonourable.

So, throughout a long apprenticeship, the young squire was trained to utter loyalty and devotion to his lady, as if she were the mother of God. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin was the distinguishing religious feature of those times. The goal to be achieved was knighthood when the squire came of age as a warrior, a ceremony that took on a mystical significance. In practice, the knights had no general regard for common women. They had a regard for ladies! If they came across common pretty girls who were defenceless, or, of course, foreign women such as they did during the crusades, they were likely to be treated as sex objects, and just as likely murdered to climax their misfortune.

The troubadour’s deity was the Lady, the idealised woman, in whose service the aspirant won the prize of the Rose—chivalric or courtly love. Maureen Duffy tells us of the eleventh century manuscript poem kept at Canterbury which describes “the Spring wherein everything renews save only the lover”, written in the first person feminine. Troubadour lyrics were often written from the woman’s viewpoint. Establishment Christian fanatics had scraped other similar poems from the pages but had somehow missed this one. Christ, the son of David (the Lover), loved the earth and that renewed all. It is sun god mythology, with Christ being Balder or Mithras, showing the roots of a primitive Christianity that became Catharism.

Courtly Love

The ideal of courtly love is that it is true yet it is unrequited, and so is given as selfless and adoring service. All the young men could aspire to love the lady of the house, but it was a love they knew could not be returned in a personal way, and to expect particular requitement of it was dishonourable. All Cathars sought the ultimate spiritual union with God, so God was loved spiritually, but it could not be a singularly requited love because God necessarily loved everyone, and no one could be singularly loved by Him. God loved every soul equally and therefore none in particular, unlike the personal and mutually self-congratulating image that modern Christians have of their God.

The Cathar ideal was one of chaste love, and this it was that the troubadour celebrated. When the object of your love loves everyone equally, then your own singular love is unrequited in the same singular way. The best love was therefore unselfish, given freely, but not demanding any personal response. The troubadour ideal was this platonic love. Practising it helped them touch the spiritual goal that Cathar Perfects sought in their ascetic existence. The squires could woo and flatter the lady and her attendants, but it was an elaborate game that had no physical outcome for the honourable knight—it was training for heaven—the Holy Grail. Like Cathar Croyants, honourable knights extolled chastity even if they did not always achieve it as knights errant!

The young ladies in waiting simply had to resist temptation, seeking help from the older ladies and praying to God on her knees in the chapel if necessary, but should she yield, the honourable squire would not take advantage of her weakness. He could notch up a victory for his charm and—in his refusal to take advantage—for his honour, and, if he still felt frustrated, could turn to a village wench. Chivalry was restricted to the nobility. There was no dishonour in having bastards among the lower class. The two levels of lovemaking distinguished, were like the distinction between Croyants and Parfaits, a worldly level and a spiritual level. The latter was the ideal, requiring no physical love at all, but was much superior.

The women of the court were much flattered by this new ideal, having been generally treated as sex objects or drudges by their men since Christianity triumphed. Troubadours popularized the chivalrous idea by which women were all treated as a lover who was unreachable. All of them were the Holy Virgin—Maid Marian in the Robin Hood sagas. Such love was the fount of all virtue and nobility. In Ancren Riwle (c 1200), a rule for Anchoresses, Christ courts the human soul, but it is an unresponding lover. In Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, Gawain is tempted by the Grene Knight’s wife but is too moral to accept, and finds that it was a test.

The system mainly worked. Love was romantic but unattainable with anyone that the young knight might truly desire among his equals. Courtesy and chivalry grew up to restrict wantonness among the ruling class. The troubadour and minstrel were to remind them constantly in poetry and song of their duty and honour, and how nobles should behave towards each other.

The point of these stories for the feudal courts was that they canalised the hothouse sexual atmosphere of the feudal household into harmless “gestes”. They released sexual tension, permitting sexual fantasy while reinforcing through it a code of sexual morality. Notionally, courtly love was fantesied adultery. Real adultery was dishonourable, but many of the lays of the minstrels and storytellers were about adulterous relationships, naturally often seeming wonderful but ending unpleasantly or sadly. Adultery per se was not condemned but it had to be external to the extended family of the lord and his retinue, and would end in tragedy otherwise. Even then, it was only at the invitation of the lady, not the wish or whim of the honourable knight. He wins her by being worthy. The separation from home is signified by a journey which takes the hero away beyond a shore, a river or the edge of a forest. Only at a suitable distance can he accept a maiden’s advances.

Among the heretics, more even than the Roman Church, the human soul was the “Bride of Christ” and sexuality was sinful, but heretics accepted that the soul had to learn not to sin and to aspire to God, and could not be forced to, as the Catholic Church did. For the heretics, force and ritual magic could never make a wicked soul good. The wicked soul would have to undergo reincarnation to give it chance to learn righteousness. Chivalry was therefore training of the soul, and a serious matter, but a lapse could atoned for by greater endeavour. This was the original Zoroastrian idea. Good works were all that could balance out wickedness at Judgement Day.

Aucassin and Nicolete

The cante fable was for recitation, with gesture, and the accompaniment of instruments. Aucassin and Nicolete is familiar, having much in common with Joseph and Aseneth. The solar theme is plain, but seems to be here used as an allegory of the struggle between heresy and the Catholic Church. Aucassin, the only son of the Count of Beaucaire, passionately loves Nicolete, a beautiful Saracen girl, whom his father will not permit him to marry, calling her a witch and a heathen. Aucassin is a word from the Greek, augazo, to shine. He is the sun god, the bearer of light, Lucifer! Nicolete is from the Greek words which mean “a victory for the people”. So the love match is the yearning the people have for God, the shining light, the summer sun, not the old sun represented by Aucassin’s lord, the old and feeble but bigoted Count Garin of Beaucaire.

Beaucaire is attacked by the Count of Bougars, representing the Bogomiles, so Beaucaire is allegorically the Catholic Church. Aucassin’s father promises to let Aucassin speak to his girl providing that he fights Bougars. Nicolete, like Aseneth, is imprisoned by her guardian in a tower to keep her from Aucassin’s wicked father. Meanwhile, Aucassin has captured Bougars and finds that his father has lied. He was not allowed to speak with her, so he lets Bougars free with the promise that he will do every harm to Beaucaire. Aucassin seeks out Nicolete’s guardian to ask where she is, but the guardian, who had been threatened with burning by Beaucaire, will not say, telling Aucassin that by taking her to bed he would never go to heaven. Aucassin replies:

And what of that? Who is it that wins to heaven? Old priests and cripples that grovel and pray at altars, and tattered begars that die of cold and hunger. These only go to heaven, and I do not want their company. So I will go to hell. For there go all good scholars, and the brave knights that died in wars, and sweet ladies that had many lovers, and harpers and minstrels, and great kings. Give me but my Nicolete and I will gladly keep them company.

Catholics go to heaven, but Catholicism is Satanism to the Cathar, so the Catholic hell must be Cathar heaven. His father now locked Aucassin in a dungeon, the opposite pole from Nicolete’s tower, doubtless a metaphor for hell. In a night in May, after the start of the medieval summer, Nicolete escaped from the tower prison, lifting her kirtle to keep it from the dew. Nicolete found Aucassin in the dungeon, where they discussed their love, and she was almost caught by Beaucaire’s soldiers, but was warned by a song of the gaoler. Nicolete escaped to the forest where, at a point where seven paths met, she built a beautiful bower of leaves and flowers. She paid some country boys to tell Aucassin of the beast in the forest that would cure his pain.

Beaucaire had thrown a great feast to take Aucassin’s mind off the girl, but he remained dolorous and took the advice of a knight to seek solace in the forest. He met the boys who told him of Nicolete’s bower, and the pair were reunited. They fled to the shore and took a ship to Torelore where they lived for two years until they were captured by Saracens and put into different ships. Aucassin’s was shipwreacked on the shores of Beaucaire where he discovered that he was now the Count, his father having died. Nicolete was taken to the Saracen kingdom of Carthage, and because she was plainly a noblewoman was taken to the king, who recognized her as his own daughter whom Christians had carried off.

Nicolete’s father was ready to marry her to the king of Paynim, but Nicolete disguised herself as a minstrel, and again went in seek of Aucassin. She found a ship to Provence, and by it was able to get to Beaucaire. Finding Aucassin despondent among his barons, she offered to sing him a song, in which she related their story and invvited him to recognize her. So they were finally united, married and became the Lord and Lady of Beaucaire. The people achieved victory, uniting with the true God.

Chivalric Lays and Romances

In France, the twelfth century witnessed a change of taste in stories which spread all over Europe. The chansons de geste were the old national epics, meant for the hall, for Homeric recitation after supper. The French romances were dedicated to noble ladies, and represented everything that was most refined and elegant in the life of the twelfth century. The old French poet’s well-known division of stories according to the three “matters”—the “matter of France”, the “matter of Britain” and the “matter of Rome the great”—imperfectly sums up the riches and the variety of French romantic themes, even when it is understood that the “matter of Rome” includes the whole of antiquity—tales of Thebes and Troy, and the wars of Alexander.

By about the year 1200, French literature dominated Christendom, not only sending abroad the French tales of Charlemagne and Roland, but importing into France plots, scenery and so forth, from many lands, Wales and Brittany, Greece and further east, and giving new French forms to them, which were admired and re-adapted by foreign nations. The Song of Roland was almost as popular in Italy, where the hero was Orlando, as in France.

Legend and love were the two main themes of the twelfth century literary revolt against earlier religious traditions, and they were the themes of a new creation—the romance. The idea of courtesy spread throughout France and England and then into the rest of Europe. William, Duke of Aquitaine who died in 1127, had the reputation of being the first troubadour, yet courtly love was already widely known. Women had come to be regarded as of more importance than ever in the community. The literary tendencies which made for love-tales found their counterpart in the striving towards higher ideals of conduct in relation to woman. Manners became more refined and a code of chivalry was evolved. Heightened sensibility was revealed in the increased appreciation of the beautiful—the beauty of womanhood, the beauty of nature, the beauty of noble conduct. And the refinement of fancy made fairyland seem possible.

Many romances fall outside the classification into the three “matters” of France, Britain and Rome. The movements of the crusaders brought the west into closer touch with the east. Before The Arabian Nights, the east began to affect western imaginations. The romance, Flores and Blancheflour, could be found there—the adventures of the two young lovers cruelly separated. The favourite story from the French epics was that of Oliver and Fierabras, where the motive is the opposition between Christian and infidel.

The relation of the romances to popular ballads is not easy to understand. The ballad is essentially a lyrical form, and has its own laws, independent of all forms of narrative poetry in extant medieval English. The two forms of lyrical ballad and narrative romance were independent through all the Middle Ages. The romances, as a rule, end happily, but there is no such law in ballads. The question is made more complicated by the use of ballad measure for some of the later romances, like The Knight of Curtesy, a strange version of The Chevalier de Coucy. Robin Hood and Adam Bell and such might be ranked with ballads or with romances.

The Ipomedon of Hue de Rotelande competes with Chrestien de Troyes. Its theme is the proud young lady and the devoted lover, the true love beginning “in her absence”, before he has ever seen her. It relates his faithful service in disguise, his apparent slackness in chivalry, his real prowess in three days of tournament. It is not set in the court of Arthur, but in Apulia and Calabria. The knight is a gallant if capricious lover. Marriage having been proposed between young Ipomedon, prince of Apulia, and the beautiful queen of Calabria, he determines to woo her for himself. He arrives incognito at the court of the queen, wins her favour by manly exploits, and then just leaves!

Hearing that a tournament is to be held of which the queen herself is to be the prize, he returns, but loudly proclaims his dislike for tournaments, and goes hunting on the days of the contests. Actually, he goes to a nearby hermitage, changes and returns for the tournament clad, on successive days in red, white and, black armour, a favourite medieval method of disguise adopted by Sir Gowther and others. He wins every joust and then rides off without claiming his prize nor revealing his identity.

Soon afterwards, the queen is troubled by a neighbouring duke, and the hero appears again in her defence, this time disguised as a fool. After more adventures, he declares his love with a happy result. In this romance, the knight-errant persues his quest of love. Assumed slothfulness and fondness for disguise were frequent attributes of the medieval hero—the one added interest to actual exploits, the other assured that the love of the well-born was accepted on merit.

The Norman clerk, Wace (1100-1174), in 1155, was the first French writer to use Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle. According to Layamon, Wace wrote up the stories (Roman de Brut, 1155) for the Norman counrt of Henry II (1154-1189) and “gave” his book to “the noble Eleanor, who was the high king Henry’s queen”, emphasising the courtesy and chivalry of it.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was, from the age of fifteen, the duchesse of Aquitaine, a prosperous duchy in France. She married the King of France, Louis, but they separated amicably until she then married Henry of Anjou, who soon was to become Henry II of England. Since Henry, with this marriage ruled half of France as well as England, Louis was not pleased. Eleanor and Henry did not get on well and even though they had five boys and two girls, they finished up estranged, with Eleanor more or less confined while Henry pursued his amours. Two of the sons were Richard the Lion Heart and King John, who signed the Magna Carta.

A daughter was Marie Countess of of Champagne, and both she and her mother were fans of the troubadours, and their philosophy of courtly love, and, perhaps too, the Cathar theology of it. Eleanor of Aquitaine was the grand daughter of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, he whose soubriquet was “the Troubadour.” Marie encouraged Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote some of the main courtly love stories in the Arthurian cycle. Troyes was the chief town of Champagne, a major center for trade and hosiery, and a city for travelling troubadours and escaping Cathars. The counts of Champagne at Troyes, had set up under Cathar influence a school of Jewish and eastern studies, which had flourished from 1070 AD. The Council of Troyes, in 1128 AD, set up the Knights Templar, and the city remained important to the Templars afterwards. Marie’s son, Richard the Lion Heart’s nephew, Henry of Champagne, became King of Jerusalem, so the grail romances must have been recited by the crusaders about 1200. Chrestien died around 1188, before he could finish his work. Gautier, Manessier, and Gerbert continued Chrestien’s tale in their “continuations”.

Wace was a courtly writer, and Arthur appears as the ideal knightly warrior of the chivalric imagination. He adds picturesque detail and colour all his own, and had access to romantic traditions unknown to Geoffrey. The Round Table is first heard in Wace, who says, “the Bretons tell many a fable” of it. It was made by Arthur to settle all disputes about precedence among his knights. Geoffrey’s account of the passing of Arthur is expanded. The British king is not merely left in Avalon “to be cured of his wounds” but is still there, the Bretons await him, and say he will live again.

Layamon (c 1200) emphasized the other-worldliness of it, introducing many of the strange features of the Arthurian myths such as magic weapons, Merlin, Arthur taken by the Elves at birth (whence the fairies present at Christenings in the French fairy tales), and the death of Arthur. He describes the birth of Merlin:

Then came before me the fairest thing that ever was born, as if he were a tall knight, arraigned all in gold. This I saw in a dream each night in sleep. This thing glided before me, and glistened of gold. Oft me it kissed, and oft embraced. Oft it approached me, and oft it came to me very nigh. When I at length looked at myself—strange this seemed to me—my flesh to me was loathsome, my limbs unusual.

This is plainly enough meant to be the Cathar Christ, the archangel Michael:

There dwell in the sky many kinds of beings that there shall remain until Domesday arrive. Some are good and work well. Therein is a race very numerous that come among men. They are called Incubae Daemones. They do not do much harm but deceive folk. Many a man in dream oft they delude, and many a fair woman through their craft have no children, and many a good man’s child they beguile through magic.

Layamon seems to be trying to make his tale acceptable to the Catholic Church which had started to persecute heretics. So, the fairy lover is an incubus, a demonic spirit but one which does no serious harm. The Church did not hear and before long those who had demonic lovers by night were being tortured and burnt at the stake. S Theresa, a few hundred years later, was lucky not to be burnt as a witch instead of worshipped as a saint.

What the English wanted was adventures—slaughter of Saracens, fights with dragons and giants, rightful heirs getting their own again, innocent princesses championed against their felon adversaries. They were purveyed by popular authors, who took from the French what suited them and left out what the French authors liked best—ornamental passages. The English romance writers worked for common minstrels and their audiences, and were not particular about their style. Their style is popular and hackneyed. The authors were well enough pleased to have it so. They did not attempt to rival their eminent French masters.

Layamon is much nearer to the robust singers of the Old English period than to the courtly French poet, although he takes most of his material from Wace. Arthur was restored to his rightful place as the champion of Britain, and the great Christian king, but Elfland claims him, both at his birth and at his death. Elves received him into the world. They gave him gifts, to become the best of knights and a mighty king, to have long life and to be generous above all living men. At his passing, Arthur says he will go to Argante (Morgan la Fay), the splendid elf, who will heal him of his wounds, so that he will return again to his kingdom. Arthur’s byrnie (coat of mail) was made for him by Wygar, the elvish smith, his spear by Griffin of the city of the wizard Merlin (Caermerdin). Caliburn, his sword, was wrought in Avalon with magic craft, the Round Table by a strange carpenter from beyond the sea.

The Romance of the Rose

Next come the metrical romances—of which the works of Chrestien de Troyes are at once the typical and the most successful—concerned with the exploits of the separate knights of the Arthurian court. But first an apparent digression. The Roman de la Rose, an encyclopedia of love, was begun about 1240 AD by William of Lorris and finished about 1280 AD by John Chopinol (Jean de Meun). The science of the static world of the middle ages could only be the collection and categorization of the order of creation ordained by God. The Scholastics tried to cover every aspect of philosophy and theology, and poets tried to cover everything else in long detailed poems celebrating such as the seeking of love, as this was. Some Christian churchmen were offended at such an allegory, and re-allegorized it, thinking it was a purely erotic work, as most have thought it. The book celebrates the search for erotic love, but it was nonetheless an allegory of the search for divine love, or was already a re-writing of an original which did allegorized this search. When the rose is kissed the spiritual kingdom is entered. Johan Huizinga says:

To formalize love is the supreme realization of the aspiration of the life beautiful.

It is a question of what the beautiful life was. As a poetic encyclopedia of love, it is the noble chivalrous life here on earth, and that was meant to aspire to perfection. But Perfection is a heavenly quality, and so the life meant is the life of the righteous spirit re-united with God in His kingdom. Erotic love is love nonetheless, and to imagine achieving it perfectly is to think of attaining perfect love—God’s love. Those who aspired to reunite with god were the Perfects of the Cathar religions.

Ritualizing love is no different from the rites of the ancient hierogamos, a ritual of the Jews to judge from the many broad hints of it in the bible, culminating in the mysterious wedding at Cana in John. Marriage is an authorization of the act of copulation, an act of blissful uniting. Entry to heaven was the act of uniting an errant spirit with god. The church placed all its emphasis on the chastity of its founding Essenes—men who aspired to perfection, like the heretical Parfaits—consequently losing touch with the hierogamos and its wider significance allowing it to separate sexual union from the sacrament of marriage, declaring one to be sacred while the other was sinful in an utter absurdity.

The gist of the story, told as a dream, is that the hero comes in May to the secret garden of desire, was led inside by Idleness, entered and described it. Eventually taken to see the roses, he fell in love with a rose, becoming a vassal of Cupid and receiving his commandments, but was unable to approach the rose. Danger, Foul-Mouth, Fear and Shame discouraged him. There is a struggle. Reason, from her high tower, and Friend advised the distraught Lover, then Venus appeared and allowed the Lover to kiss the rose. Angered by this, Jealousy built a fortress around the roses, and a tower in which to imprison Fair Welcome. The Lover was despairing, but stayed faithful to his quest.

Reason examined the Lover’s problem. She explained friendship, fortune, wealth and finally justice, urging the Lover to abandon Cupid and Fortune, and to follow her. The Lover rejected Reason’s proposal, and criticized her use of indecorous language. She explained his error and left. Friend advised the Lover how to outwit his enemies. She explained the importance of wealth to a lover’s quest, and described his own impoverishment, the corruption of love since the Golden Age, how a modern Jealous Husband might address his wife, the Jealous Husband and the bad effect of domination upon marriage, the Golden Age and the decline which has followed it, and at last the rules for a lover to follow.

The Lover, though pleased with Friend’s advice, was frustrated in his quest and was rejected by Wealth. He mollified Foul Mouth and received a promise of help from Cupid. Cupid assembled his forces including False Seeming, who addressed Cuoid’s company. The assault began. False Seeming killed Foul Mouth. Cupid’s forces captured the Old Woman, guardian of Fair Welcome, and induced her to give her ward the Lover’s gift. Then the Old Woman addressed Fair Welcome, whereupon, with their help, the Lover was admitted to the fortress and approached the rose, but was repulsed by Danger, Fear, and Shame.

The author digressed by defending his poem against charges of obscurity, indecorous languages, and ecclesiastical satire.

The forces of Love were defeated, and Love called upon his mother, Venus, for help. Nature, though struggling with Death, entered the conflict. She sent Genius, a priest, to pronounce an anathema. Genius addressed Nature. Nature confessed to Genius in which God’s creation of the world, the effects of celestial bodies upon the earth and its inhabitants, necessity and free will, the weather, illusions, phantoms, and dreams, and that comets do not announce the death of kings are explained. True nobility was the result of virtue. More information on comets and other incorruptible celestial bodies, until it is clear that, of all God’s corruptible creation beneath the sphere of the moon, only man ignored Nature’s laws. Nature sent Genius to Cupid, complaining that man transgressed her commands by not procreating like all other species.

Genius addressed the host of Love, then was welcomed by Love and Venus. He excommunicated the enemies of procreation, condemned virginity, encouraged procreation and appointed hell for those who rejected Nature. Jesus, the son of a virgin, was a white lamb in a field eating the incorruptible grass in a permanent daylight—the eternal midday sun being the symbol of timelesness in the original good creation of Zoroastrianism. He urged his hearers to live virtuously, so as to enter the beautiful park of the Lamb. He explained at the end of the Golden Age, Saturn was castrated, and lastly contrasted the park of the Lamb with the garden of Desire.

Venus shot a burning brand at the tower, and with God, Genius of the allegory, ignited the universe. The enemies of Love, Shame and fear, departed and the Lover finally entered the rose garden for the hero to pluck a rose, whereupon the dreamer woke up.

Huizinga says: “It is impossible to imagine a more deliberate defiance of the Christian ideal”, but it is the ideal of a distorted and incomplete form of the original religion, a branch that was cut off. Catholic Christianity was a heretical branch of primitive Christianity. Here are remnants of the original itself. Only the elect were allowed into the garden of delight. Love allowed them, but they had to be free of hatred, avarice, envy, hypocrisy and other obnoxious qualities, to which were added poverty and old age, for no one in heaven was old or poor. They were some of its benefits. Yet the desirable qualities of the lover were those meant to attract women, perhaps logical in the apparent nature of the work, but doubtless a cynical rewriting of the original allegory of the ascent into the spiritual heaven of the true God at the core of this encyclopedia of fancy. It became a cult work among the aristocracy, even if it was meant to be a parody of an heretical mystical work, but woman detested it, and so too did many clerymen, though not all. Some of them, like John Gerson, tried to re-allegorize it for Catholics in which the rose was Jesus.

Chrestien’s Work

Arthur has little direct involvement. Chrestien’s Yvain is translated into English, but the French romance of The Fair Unknown of Renaud de Beaujeu is not the original of the English story of Sir Libeaus, which, like the old Italian version, had a simpler and earlier form. Likewise, the English Sir Percevall must come from something older and less complicated than Chrestien’s Conte del Graal. These two romances belong to an earlier type, such as may have been hawked about in England by French or French-speaking minstrels, and they are different in their plots, not merely in their style, from the French works.

Chrestien de Troyes and Benoit de S More were courtly people, putting into their work the spirit and graces of gentle conversation, particularly amatory sentiment. Germany was quick to learn from the French and to rival them. Hartmann von Aue translated Chrestien freely—the romance of Enid, the tale of Yvain. Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival uses the substance, but the spirit is his own, because it has a different kind of nobility. The English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reject this extreme romanticism of style. They like the adventures and perhaps the love aspects no less but they are bored by eloquent monologues of passionate damsels. There is only one English version of a romance by Chrestien, Ywain and Gawain. It is late—from the time of Chaucer. It is not rude, but it cuts short the long speeches of the original. Chrestien’s Yvain (Le Chevalier an Lion) has 6818 lines, the English version 4032.

Besides Chrestien de Troyes and his peers, other poets wrote a simpler kind of French romance that the English liked better. They are the work of Marie de France and the shorter romances taken from Breton lays, such as Sir Launfal, Sir Orfeo and the Lai le Freine. Breton lays were, for the English, short stories in rhyme taken from Celtic sources. The Breton lays are nearer than other romances to the popular beliefs out of which romantic marvels are drawn. Here, there is no superabundance of monologue and sentimental digression. The clear lines of the original could be followed by the less sophisticated English without too much difficulty, but they are not Arthurian.

Sir Orfeo is the English poem—no original is extant in French—of Orpheus and Eurydice. The classical myth is turned into an original fairy tale, a rescue from the fairy, for Pluto has become the fairy king, and everything ends happily—Eurydice is brought back in safety. It is utterly different from the rambling tales of chivalry, having much of the quality that is found in some of the ballads, and indeed, it became a ballad in Shetland with a Norse refrain.

Sir Launfal came from Marie de France. Sir Launfal is taken off to the Isle of Avalon, also called Oleron and Oliroun, by his fairy lover, Tryamour. Göttfried von Strasburg in Tristram refers to “Avalun, the Fays country”. The story is one of the best known—the fairy bride:

The kinge’s daughter of Avalon,
That is an isle of the fairie
In ocean full fair to see…

and the loss of her, through the breaking of her command. Avalon is thought of as an island in the ocean, seemingly the same as the Celtic, Isle of the Blest. Afal means apple, and Avalon has traditionally been associated with Glastonbury, in Somerset, the Town on Glass, possibly meaning the appearance of the shallow green water that surrounded it.

In Ogier le Danoir, Avalon is a castle of loadstone “not far on this side of the terrestrial paradise, whither were rapt in a flame of fire Enock and Helios”. So, this old tale shows us that someone in those days knew that Enoch, who famously “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him”, was the same as Helios—the sun! Morgan la Fay lived in Avalon, and when Ogier saw her he mistook her for the Virgin Mary! Ogier is plainly meant to be dead in his sojourn on Avalon, but Morgan la Fay allows him to return to life after 200 years to save the world from the Paynims—Pagans, meaning in this case the Moslem Infidel. Having done this, he was again taken and was never seen ever again.

The Wedding of Sir Gawain, which, in another form, is The Wife of Bath’s Tale, is of the same mythical type. The Wyf of Bath’s Tale is that a knight is condemned to death for rape by Guinevere. His chance of life is to discover what women desire most. The errant knight sets out to find the answer, and eventually a poor, old and ugly peasant woman promises him the answer in return for whatever she herself desires if she proves to be correct.

On returning to the castle with the answer, not a single woman of the court would dissent from the old woman’s wisdom—all women want sovereignty over their husbands and lovers. The knight was pardoned, and the old woman demanded her desire—the knight must marry her. Unhappily, he agrees to it, as he must do in honour, but on the wedding night, she tells him in response to his distress that she could be young and beaitiful, but then would be unfaithful, wheras otherwise she would not. In the light of her previous wisdom, he leaves her to decide, thus having the mastery over him. She agrees and reveals herself as a beautiful maiden, promising to be faithful anyway. Of course, she will not be, because she is the earth goddess rejuvenated by the spring sun, and he is the fertilising sun god of the year. Next year, there must be another one. The knight is explicitly Gawain in The Wedding of Sir Gawain.

The romance of Sir Libeaus, “the fair unknown”, the son of Sir Gawain, is less simple and direct than Sir Orfeo or Sir Launfal, but has some of the virtues of the fairy tale. The plot is the expedition of a young and untried knight to rescue a lady from enchantment, a pure romance of knight errantry, and chivalry. Sir Libeaus has many adventures reaching the palace of the two enchanters—“clerkes of nigremauncie”—who keep the lady of Sinaudon under their spells in the shape of a loathsome worm.

In the romance of Amis and Amiloun, not courtly love but friendship is the knightly virtue, an all-absorbing quality which involves, if neccessary, the sacrifice of the both family and conscience. Amis and Amiloun are two noble foster-brothers, much alike in appearance, whose lives are indissolubly linked together. Amiloun generously, but surreptitiously, takes the places of Amis in a trial by combat. For his unselfishness, with the deception involved in it, he becomes a leper. Some time afterwards, Amis comes across his friend but he is in such a state he cannot recognize him. After a dramatic scene, the discovery is made, and Amis, grief-stricken, remove his friend’s leprosy by sacrificing his own children. Such a sacrifice is not permitted to be irrevocable, and, when Amis and his wife Belisante go to view their slaughtered children, they are hust asleep.

There are also the prose romances, compiled about the end of the twelfth century, and expanded, interpolated and edited until about the middle of the thirteenth century. Many, like Merlin and Lancelot, give greater prominence to Arthur’s own deeds and fortunes. The more elaborate French Arthurian romances were not the only authorities for the English tales. Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, cannot be referred to any known French book for its original.

Walter Map, who called the Welsh his fellow-countrymen, brings Wales and the Angevin court into touch with the development of the Arthurian legend. Eleanor and Marie would have been aware of the tradition of Celtic romance from their British connexions. The Celtic element revealed love as a passion in all its fulness, a passion laden with possibilities, mysterious and awful in power and effect. It opened up avenues to a fairy-land peopled with elvish forms and lit by strange lights. It pointed to an exalted chivalry and lofty ideals, to a courtesy which was the outcome of a refinement of sentiment.

The Celtic Church was for long considered heretical by the Roman Church, and this might be why the troubadours picked British myths to elaborate as stories of good and ill and the search for spiritual salvation. The misty and mysterious castles and magic symbolic objects appear everywhere in Celtic myth. The four Celtic treasures, sent to earth for the eternal glory of man, appear in the Arthurian cycle:

1. the invincible sword, Excalibur
2. a spear
3. the stone of destiny, on which a king is crowned, and inscribes his name before he can be king
4. the cauldron of plenty.

The story of Lancelot is a late, and a non-Celtic, graft on the Arthurian stock. It embodies the ideal of amour courtois, and shows most clearly the influence of chivalry on Arthurian story. Chrestien says in the foreword to Lancelot that Marie of Champagne inspired and gave the sources of the poem. Lancelot first appears as the lover of Guinevere in Chrestien’s Chevalier de la Charrette, a poem written at the instance of Marie. Chaucer tells us that in England, women held “in ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake.” The book to which Chaucer refers will be the great prose romance of Lancelot, associated with the name of Walter Map. The Lancelot of Walter Map is in three parts—Lancelot, the Quest of the Holy Grail and the Morte Arthur. One version of the Quest is inscribed by him “for the love of his lord, king Henry, who caused it to be translated from Latin into French.”

The prose Lancelot du Lac published in 1594 has Merlin the enchanter as “demon-born” and, in it, Vivienne, the Lady of the Lake, is described as…

…a fay, and in these times all these women were called fays who had to do with enchantments and charms—and there were plenty of them, principally in Great Britain—and know the power and virtues of words, of stones and of herbs by which they were kept in youth and in beauty, and in great riches, as they devised.

In the rhyming Mort Arthur, first occurs the story of the maid of Ascolot, and her fruitless love for the noble Lancelot. The narrative treats the pathos of love, and here, as in Tristram, the treatment is subtle. Lancelot is Guinevere’s champion. The queen is under condemnation, but is rescued by Lancelot, who consequently endures a siege in the Castle of Joyous Garde. The end of the Arthurian story begins to be visible in the discord thus introduced between Lancelot and Gawain, Arthur and Modred. The alliterative Morte Arthure is more consciously historical. Arthur is represented as returning home from his wars with Lucius on hearing of Modred’s treachery. He fights the traitor, but is mortally wounded, and is borne to Glastonbury, where he is given a magnificent burial.

Characters, unknown to the chroniclers, and themselves the heroes of independent legends, make a dramatic entry upon the Arthurian stage. Tristram and Lancelot and Perceval divert attention from Arthur himself. A history of Arthurian romance must cover legends which have only the most artificial connexion with the original Arthurian tradition. Some of these legends are as archaic and as purely mythical as the fables about the British Arthur, and were probably current in popular lays before they appeared in the Arthurian tales.

The Church thought the troubadours were subversive, and sought to excommunicate them and the story tellers who were singing and reciting romantic stories, as agents of the Devil! Then it set the Cistercian monks founded by S Bernard of Clairvaux the task of making these stories safe for the Catholic listener. They rewrote the epic poems as the Vulgate cycle, in a heavily Christianized version, just when the robber barons were set loose to massacre the Cathars of Languedoc by Innocent III.

King Arthur

Arthur is “arta”, order, but is born out of disorder—adulterously! Arthur’s sister, Morgan la Fay, has two sons, a good one, Gawain, and a wicked one, Modred. Here seems to be a slight variant on the normal solar or seasonal myth in which the annual sun has two demi-annual sons. Arthur seems to be the uncle of the two sons of his sister Modred, but the hint of incest between the brother and the sister means that Arthur was properly the father. Moreover, since the Father, the annual sun, comprises both the half annual sons of the previous year, it follows that he is both father and uncle to the twin suns of the following year. Arthur was crowned at fifteen, the year of manhood in the Aryan tradition we know from Persian religion. These God the Father figures are perhaps the same as the Celtic Dagda or Eochaid Ollathair, the Father of All, equating with the Aryan, Dyaus Pitar.

Guinevere is the perpetual virgin. She remains young and attractive to each new generation of knights, just as mother earth does to each fertilising sun in the spring or the wet season. She is a Celtic Venus, and her union with Arthur in the myth is fruitless. Guinevere has no children in the stories, either to Arthur or to Lancelot, and is called a barren woman by some commentators, but surely her childlessness is a direct expression of her perpetual virginity. The true “sons” are Arthur’s nephews. In these solar myths, the twin sons of the annual Father are the suns of winter and summer, in the north, or dry and wet seasons in the ancient Near East. Arthur, the Father, ages, and a good son succeeds him in his adventures.

In the annual cycle, the two suns are opposed to each other, and each dies in turn, only to be born again the following year. Modred tries to usurp Arthur, but the king returns and defeats the usurper, but is wounded and eventually dies. In this act, he is being the fertile sun, a role that Gawain has otherwise, but God the Father is God the Son, and so Christianity is paralleled. He is “the once and future king” because the story is repeated annually.

For the rest of the cycle of Arthurian tales, Arthur recedes into the background. He is the High King standing for the High God representing Order—chivalry. Arthur is lord and Guinevere lady in the chivalrous feudal sense that they are the Father and Mother of the court, all the nobles being their sons and daughters by adoption. The kings of all the lands that Arthur conquers offer him a son to adopt. The Round Table with its twelve or twenty four knights suggests the annual cycle. The equivalent court is found in the bible with God sitting with all his sons representing the nations of the world. Yehouah is in this the god only of the Jews, but he usurps his father. Arthur’s chief knights too take on the role of the Good Son in turn—Gawain, Perceval, Lancelot, Galahad. Gawain is unmistakeably a solar hero.

R S Loomis thought Lancelot was the sun god Lugh. Lancelot’s name, which is not a natural one, is plainly composed to mean a little spear, with military and sexual connotations. Lancelot is besotted by Guinevere, the virgin lover, even though notionally she is older than he. Lancelot is also called Galahad, and soon appears as Galahad, the virgin knight of the later versions. Guinevere recognized Galahad as Lancelot reincarnated as soon as she saw him. Yet Catholic Christianity had no knowledge of reincarnation. It was heretical! The heretics obviously saw the seasonal cycle as a natural demonstration of death and reincarnation. Even S Paul thought the grain of wheat sown in a field died before it was revivified in its appropriate form by God. The heretics saw the ultimate incarnation, like Paul, as a spiritual one. The earthly favours of knights and ladies are training for the soul, and, when it is ready, the quest for God’s favour has been achieved, and the cycle of reincarnations ends with the soul re-uniting with God.

The amount of early British literature dealing with the Arthurian legend is strangely meagre and undistinguished. Its exploitation was the achievement of French writers. It became an international body of romance, which poets and story-tellers across Europe used for their own purposes. The British king faded into the background, becoming overshadowed by his knights. All become natives of a neutral fairy-land of fantasy and illusion. Not much later, Chaucer links all that he knew about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of the fairy world:

In th’ olde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye:
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.

The British Arthur has his unquestioned place as the supreme king of fairy-land, an enchanted land where incompatible ideals of knight-errantry and the church eventually were reconciled, and where east met west. Gibbon writes:

Pilgrimage and the holy wars introduced into Europe the specious miracles of Arabian magic. Fairies and giants, flying dragons and enchanted palaces, were blended with the more simple fictions of the west, and the fate of Britain depended on the art, or the predictions, of Merlin. Every nation embraced and adorned the popular romance of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Their names were celebrated in Greece and Italy, and the voluminous tales of Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram were devoutly studied by the princes and nobles, who disregarded the genuine heroes and heroines of antiquity.

The Celtic Arthur

The “early” poetry of the Cymry is not that early in the versions we now have, but parts can be attributed to an earlier period. The Black Book of Carmarthen, was compiled during the latter part of the twelfth century. The Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin, are the next oldest, from the thirteenth century, while the Red Book of Hergest, the basis of the Mabinogi, dates from the end of the fourteenth century. Arthur is not in the four branches of the Mabinogi, though he appears in the incidental tales in the Mabinogion. The hero of Llywarch Hên and Taliesin, the most celebrated of the early Welsh bards, is Urien, lord of Rheged, not Arthur. Nor does Aneirin speak of him. The Stanzas of the Graves in the Black Book of Carmarthen, introduces the mystery surrounding his grave and begins the belief in his return. A monk caused a tumult at Bodmin in the year 1113 by refusing to admit that Arthur still lived.

The Welsh folklore scholar, Professor John Rhys, says Arthur occurs in what seems to be early Gaelic myth as Artur, a son of Nemed who fought the Fomors. From being this minor figure in some old myths, he suddenly appears as a king, and not just a mortal king. The gods of earlier myths are all paying him homage, and Lludd and Arawn are among his knights. A votive offering to a Celtic god, Mercurius Artaius, has been found in south west France, so Artaius was identified by the Romans with Mercury, perhaps in the form of a Hermes. Cuchulainn is plainly phallic in some of his descriptions, and it might have once been more obvious in these heroes. Arthur is plainly from the same world as Finn and Cuchulainn. Arthur’s deeds are supernatural so he is a god, even though he is depicted as human. He is at least a demi-god. Many of his companions are old Celtic gods, judging by their names and their characteristics, and the magic objects of Celtic mythology appear again in Arthurian romance.

In the Book of Taliesin, is the Harrowings of Hell, in which Arthur travels by sea to the realms of twilight and darkness, appearing as a purely mythical hero with supernatural attributes, doubtless a rendering a a myth about the setting sun. Of the stories in the Mabinogion, Culhwch and Olwen and the Dream of Rhonabwy are purely British Arthurian stories, unaffected by the French romances. The Lady of the Fountain, Geraint, son of Erbin, and Peredur, son of Evrawc, correspond in their main features, to Chrestien de Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion, Erec and Le conte del Graal, respectively. However, even the later Welsh Arthurian stories are not mere imitations of Chrestien’s poems. Their characters and incidents may be substantially the same, but the tone, the atmosphere, and the setting of the Welsh tales are different. Says E Renan (The Poetry of the Celtic Races):

The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense between a smile and a tear.

Gwydion, son of Don, was the British Odin. Professor John Rhys noted that, of the earlier gods, Gwydion and his immediate retinue are absent from among the ranks of Arthur’s retainers. Lludd, Gwyn, Arawn, Prideri, and Manawddan, all appear, as do the other sons of Don, Amaethon, and Govannon—but not Gwydion. Some of the figures of Brythonic mythology missing by name in the Arthurian cycle seem to have been renamed as Arthurian characters. Gwalchmai, the “Falcon of May”, is the old Lleu Llaw Gyffes, a god of light, Mabon, Owain, Gawain and Peredur Paladhir (“Spearman with the Long Shaft”), and becomes Percival, Lancelot (“Little Spear”) and Galahad (Gwalchaved, “Falcon of Summer”). Medrawt, Gwalchmai’s brother, and the enemy of him and Arthur is the old Dylan, god of darkness and malice, and becomes Mordred. Morgan, Arthur’s sister, is an old goddess called Gwyer (“Gore”), later the sister of Gwydion, Arianrod. Merlin (Myrddin) seems to have once been a high god of the British. Britain was called “Merlin’s Enclosure”. Carmarthen (Merlin’s Castle) is named after him. He was married to a sky goddess, so seems to have been a British Zeus. He is a manifestation of Odin, the sky and sun god of the Teutons, in his sagacious aspect. He is Math, Lludd and Emrys. Kay was new, but his descriptions says he was fire, sometimes small and sometimes tall as the highest tree. Mark, king of Cornwall, or sometimes the whole of Britain, is March, a Celtic god of the underworld, probably Morc of the Fomors of Irish myth. The Fomors had animal features, and March means horse. Urien was a god who was the patron of the bards. His symbol was a raven (“bran”), and so he was probably a form of the god, Bran. In confirmation, in one poem, Urien does as Bran does, ordering his head to be cut from his wounded body.

The various forms of sun god, and different names for apparently the same god, to judge by their characteristics, is the result of syncretism of the gods of many Celtic clans, probably influenced by the attempts to forge a unity against Roman, Saxon and Danish invaders. Bran was Urien was Pwyll was Pryderi and so on. They often seem to be gods of the underworld as well as of light, so were perhaps gods of the setting sun. The Greek place of dead heroes was Elysium, and the after life for the Celts seems to have been equally happy, and not at all the awful places of the non-heroic Greek, and less still the punishment of Hell conceived by the Christians. The sun sank down into the sea as a red mass in the evening, going into the underworld to procreate and rest before morning. The sun is like an engorged phallus, flushed and red, and enters the earth goddess at sunset to keep the earth fertile. Thus the underworld was a place of pleasure, and the fons et origo of all things. It was “Summer Land”. When the Brythons occupied the bulk of Britain the western land of Somerset was identified with the setting sun, and Avalon, near Glastonbury, was the British Elysium. In Cornwall they called it Melwas, and in Wales Gwyn. The underworld castles of Celtic myth are often of glass and stand up on an island in a calm sea. Caer Sidi is a castle of glass. The Irish Fomors lived on Tory island in a glass tower.

Arthurian Celtic myths often parallel the myths of Gwydion. Both Arthur and Gwydion are types of Orpheus or Odin, guardians of culture and arts, and both engage the forces of darkness. In Scotland, Arthur leads the Wild Hunt, suggesting he was identified with a god like Odin. There are differences. Arthur cannot get a single pig, but Gwydion manages to steal them from Pryderi. Yet Arthur raids Annwn and gets the magic cauldron of bardic inspiration, though his forces are reduced to only a handful, and even some of them seem to be dead!

From the areas where Arthurian place names abound and where he supposedly operated in the legends, Arthur was undoubtedly British. The memory of no other British hero is so well preserved in the place-names of Britain:

Only the devil is more often mentioned in local association than Arthur.

His exploits do not extend to the highlands of Scotland or to Ireland. The exploits of Finn mac Cool seem to have taken the place of Arthur in Ireland, and are often so similar to Arthur’s that it suggests a common myth has been extended in two directions. Thus, the supposed Christian origin of the Grail tradition is false. It is based on a more primitive tradition than the Roman Catholic one.

When the Romans left Britain, it seems a man called after the Celtic Mercury, Arthur, shortly became Count of Britain, the representative of Rome still, though there were no Roman military present to defend this part of the empire. For this reason he was considered to be the emperor, and is so called in some myths, while in the supposed histories, he ends up conquering the whole continent.

These tales were told by bards like Taliesin, the sixth century poet, who claimed a mythical existence himself, but was writing these down in the Christian period and subject to Christian influence. Nothing important ever happened that he had not personally seen! The list of events he offers as proof mixes Christian myths with Pagan Celtic myths. Thus, Taliesin could bragg he was in heaven when Satan fell from grace, helped build the Tower of Babel, and so on. Taliesin was claiming to be an incarnation of the Celtic Orpheus, thought by Rhys to have been Ossian. Perhaps all bards were the same. It was the source of their inspiration, but, though the myths seem fairly free of overt Christian influence, it was plainly there as Taliesin shows.

Arthur is born of Uther Pendragon. Dragon is a title attached to the name meaning duke, so he is the Duke Uther Pen. Uther Pen is “Uther Ben” meaning “Wonderful Head”. He is Bran! Arthur’s wife, Guinevere (Gwyhwyvar), is the daughter of what seems to be Bran yet again—Ogyrvran (Ocur Vran—the Wicked Raven). She appears in triplicate in Welsh traditions suggesting she is the moon, and the moon is the celestial aspect of mother earth.

In one Arthurian tale, evidently of Cornish origin because the villain is Melwas not Gwyn, Melwas waited in ambush for a year to steal Gwynhwyvar to his castle at Avalon. Arthur beseiged the strong hold and won Gwynhwyvar back. An Irish myth of Airem, Etain and Mider is an exact parallel of this British version of this myth where the villain has to be Medrawt, Arthur’s nephew. Even the Irish names resonate with the British ones. Arthur and Airem are taken, on the basis of Celtic “ar” being a plough, to mean “ploughman”, suggesting that Arthur and Airem were originally agricultural gods, the women’s names mean “shining” or “white”, and Medrawt and Mider are from a common root meaning something like “Decider”. Here again is Charles Squire’s “eternal strife”. In the later romance, Guinevere’s lover is Lancelot, but Mordred still plotted to rebel against the king and take the queen by force. So, the tradition of the Welsh Triads is still maintained, whereby Arthur and Medrawt slog it out, raiding each other in turn in the constant battle of summer and winter.

In the Christianisation of the Arthurian myths, the Grail, supposedly the vessel which held the pascal lamb of the Last Supper, and which held the blood of the crucified Christ is transparently an evolution of the magic cauldrons of Celtic mythology. The Dagda’s fed all that came to it and all were satisfied, like the feeding of the five thousand. Bran’s brought the dead back to life, like the communion Eucharist. Another offered inspiration, like the Christian Holy Spirit, and had to be brought from the Glass Castle where everyone lived forever, feasting and revelling, the Christian heaven and Greek Elysium.

The owner of this Cauldron was Pwyll, but it was stolen by Arthur. The Seint Greal says no one could ever get sick or die in the Grail’s presence, and this version also describes the Grail as kept in a revolving castle (seen by Peredur) surrounded by water (seen by Gawain) just as Pwyll’s castle was described by Taliesin as revolving, and the glass castles were always on islands. In the later romances, the Grail is owned by Pelles, who kept it, Malory says, in the Castle Carbanek, a corruption of Caer Bannawg, the “Square Castle”. Pwyll’s castle was four cornered.

The Grail was borne or accompanied by pretty maids, while the Cauldron of Inspiration was attended by nine muses—enneads and triads of goddesses signify the moon. The Grail knights always found its revelation accompanied by a generous feast, like the Dagda’s pot. The Grail was invisible to sinners, an apparent Christian revision of the cauldron never feeding cowards. The essential difference between Arthurian myth and romance is that Arthur gets the cauldron in the myth, but his knights get the grail in the romances.

The main theme of Culhwch and Olwen is the wooing of Olwen, the daughter of Yspadaden Pen Cawr, by Culhwch, the son of Cilyd, and the long series of labours imposed upon the suitor to gain her hand. Indeed, the real point of the romance is to itemise the thirteen “Treasures of Britain”, and how Arthur’s men won them. They are like the labours of Hercules. Olwen’s “skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain”, and “four white trefoils sprung up wherever she trod”. Arthur is a fairy king, overcoming uncouth and monstrous enemies by his own and his knights’ magic, but he is lord of a precise place. The places mentioned can be found on maps of Wales.

Arthur is the king of a court apparently of the age of chivalry, but the details about the characters are drawn from some lost saga. Arthur himself is introduced to us in his palace, or hall, called Ehangwen, and thither Culhwch comes to crave his help to obtain Olwen. Well known people appear like Cai and Bedwyr, Geraint, the son of Erbin, Taliesin, the chief of bards, although often superhuman, but so do several grotesque figures of whom nothing is known except what the author relates of them, such as Sol who “could stand all day upon one foot”.

The “Historical” Arthur

Rhys attrributes the ambivalent character of Arthur to his being a Romano-British duke called Arthur, to whom the characteristics of a god called Arthur have been added. It is not uncommon, and is part of the way myths get extended. Jesus was a Jewish rebel, devoted to his own faith and the law of Moses, but he was adopted by the gentiles as a dying and rising god, and given the attributes of a sun god. Rhys believed Arthur defeated the Saxon invaders in some battles that could hardly have been more than skirmishes, and did not change the course of later history, but was hero worshipped and given the characteristics of a god. Both were gods, but Arthur was up against Jesus and the Christian Church and so had to be brought firmly down to earth! He was romanticised and Christianised as a historical figure even though his exploits are often supernatural.

Tales like Culhwch and Olwen, show that the British king was better known to early Welsh tradition as a mythic hero than as the champion of the Britons in their wars with the English. There may have been a historical Arthur who was a comes Britanniae, or a dux bellorum, of the sixth century, and his name gathered round it legends of heroes and divinities of the past, but there is no historical evidence of it. The historical evidence is the Annales Cambriae, the Historia Brittonum, Y Gododdin which mentions Arthur in passing as an exemplary hero but with nothing to confirm him as historical, and the few occurrences of the name Arthur in sixth and seventh century contexts. Parents name their child after a god they revere, and the child proves to be a great man in his own right. Before long, his exploits have been added to those of the god, and the man becomes the god. More than that, of course, when tribes are merged by marriage or conquest, so too are their gods, and so the exploits of their heroes are similarly merged. The trouble is that the evidence is against it. Arthur was not a common name until as late as the sixteenth century. The few Arthurs are Gaelic not Briton, given by Irish settlers in Wales and Scotland not natives. The name Jesus has been regarded as too holy for everyday use by some Christians, but others use it commonly. The same might have been true here. Britons revered their god, Arthur, but only the Irish, through admiring him, felt able to use his honorific name.

The Historia Brittonum was written in 829/30 and ascribed to Nennius. The author was learned enough for the times but did not use historical sources. He makes Hengest and Horsa, the Saxon horse gods, into historical Saxon leaders. He describes Arthur in a mock antiquarian or biblical style as engaging in twelve battles, scarcely sounding historical, and distinctly sounding religious, whether for Christian didactic purposes, or because Arthur was really a Celtic Hercules. Nennius relates how, some time after the death of Hengist, Arthur fought against the English along with the kings of the Britons and “was himself their war-leader” (ipse dux erat bellorum) in these twelve battles. In the eighth of these encounters, at the castle of Guinnion:

Arthur bore the image of the holy Virgin Mary on his shoulders, and the pagans were put to flight with great slaughter.

The ninth battle was fought at the City of Legions, the twelfth, and last, on Mount Badon, where “nine hundred and sixty men fell before Arthur’s only sally”. Of the other battles one sounds like the Celtic battle of the trees (Cat Coit Celidon), and the battle on the river Tribruit elsewhere is against a pack of wolves! Nennius is post-900 and unreliable. By the end of the ninth century the idea of Arthur as a historical figure had arisen.

The Welsh monk and historian, Gildas, mentions the battle of Mount Badon in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, but he does not mention Arthur in the battle, or anywhere in the Saxon war. The leader of the British Gildas does mention is Ambrosius Aurelianus, the last of the Romans. The silence of Gildas, who should have been contemporary with Arthur, is blamed on to his bias—he favoured the Romans and railed at the British, so declining to exalt any British prince.

The Annales Cambriae, of the tenth century, records under the year 516:

Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders, and the Britons were victors.

And, in the year 537 was fought:

The battle of Camlan, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.

Medraut is the Modred, or Mordred, of romance. Camlan is suspiciously like Cumhal, the name of the Brython’s sky god, suggesting the battle took place in the sky. One of the Stanzas of the Graves alludes to the battle of Camlan and to Bedwyr, or Bedivere, who shares with Cai, or Kay, the pre-eminence among Arthur’s knights in Welsh fable. Bedwyr and Cai appear together in Culhwch and Olwen, assigned by competent authorities to the tenth century. Bedwyr never shrank from any enterprise upon which Cai was bound. The pair were united even in their death, for, in Geoffrey’s History, they perish together in the first great battle with the Romans. Another of Arthur’s knights figures as the hero of an entire poem in the Black Book—Gereint, the son of Erbin. The Annales Cambriae to 613 is a paraphrased Chronicle of Ireland (late eighth century), and later material is north British and local traditions kept over the next 200 years. The Badon entry in the Annales depends on Nennius’ account of Arthur’s eighth battle at Guinnion Castle, in which Arthur carries an icon on his shoulders into battle with him. The other entry on the Camlann battle is widely considered to be a contemporary addition.

There is no historical Arthur, but has Arthur the god been mantled with the victories of someone more anonymous? In Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae, Ambrosius leads the British defence which culminates in the battle of Badon. Another candidate as the original Arthur is the second century Lucius Artorius Castus, partly because his name fits. A more compelling argument (Littleton and Malcor, 1994) might relate to Scythians stationed in Britain by the emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He had conquered the Sarmatians—a Scythian tribe famous for armoured cavalry—and taken the title Sarmaticus. They had been attacking the frontier from about 20 AD, and Marcus had campaigned against them across the Danube determined to stop them for good and all. In fact, a rival emperor forced him to settle quickly, but with hard terms imposed on the enemy. The Sarmatians had had to send 8000 cavalry to the Roman army.

5500 came to Britain, a legion of Sarmatian cavalry led by Lucius Artorius Castus. The Sarmatians were dispersed in the northern regions behind Hadrian’s Wall in units of 500, no one knows where, except that inscriptions indicate a Sarmatian cavalry unit of 500 in the fort of Bremetennacum at Ribchester on the Ribble near Lancaster, which became a settlement of veterans, albeit under supervision, implying they were ever pressed men, unless they were supervised there as cavalry horse breeders and trainers. They seem never to have returned home. A centurion was appointed commander of this Sarmatian unit with the title praepositus regionis. Two are known, one between 222 and 235, the other just after 238. Also, in the Roman fort at Chester on Hadrian’s wall was an eye-shield from a Sarmatian cataphract horse, and beads typical of the Sarmatians in Hungary. And a funerary stele shows a Sarmatian horseman at Chester, identifiable by his dress and dragon standard.

Myths like the sword in the stone, the Holy Grail and the return of Arthur’s sword to the lake are known in the horse riding culture of the Scythians. Arthur is Batraz, the hero of the Scythian tales, coming to Britain via the Sarmatians. Lancelot is the same hero spread on the continent via the Alans, a related tribe. The hypothesis fails in that these elements are all late elements of the Arthurian romances, whereas such an early Roman origin requires them to be already present in the myths that precede Geoffrey of Monmouth.

In another hypothesis, Arthur is Art-gwyr, Bear-man—from the Welsh for bear, “arth”—which when compounded is Artur. The connection between Arthur and the bear was made by medieval authors. The Celts had divinities such as Dea Artio “bear goddess”, Andarta “powerful bear”, Artgenos “son of the bear”, and Artaios “like a bear”. Latin texts use the name Arturus not Artorius. Arcturus was an alternative form of the name and relates to the northern constellation the Great Bear, Arctos in Greek, from which we get the terms Arctic and Antarctic. Lucan called the Gauls “arctoas gentes” “people of the north”. Arcturus was not just a Bear-man but was also a Northerner. This latter idea has the advantage of Brythonic origins and antecedents.

O J Padel concludes that, before Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur was in all the sources a figure of mythology, associated with the underworld, supernatural enemies and superhuman deeds, not history. He is mythical—a variant of king George and the archangel Michael, a fighter of dragons and monsters, and the saviour of his people—a Celtic Mithras. Padel notes the parallel with Finn, an entirely mythical character, originally a god, in Gaelic literature, who became historicized as a hero fighting against the incursions of the Vikings. As a similar type, Arthur naturally took the same role for the Britons against the Saxons.

Supposed supermen just cannot be assumed to have been historical, unless there is confirmation from independent sources, and, when there are pre-existing myths of similar heroes, it seems more likely that the supposed figure has been made to seem historical, though simply a popular hero of folklore. As Thomas Green shows, the context of the evidence really has to be considered properly. When monks are well known for forgery—as many medieval monks were—then a deed they possess that claims to be genuine has to be considered with deep suspicion. Arthur was widely known as a mythical hero, so when he appears in a few dubious historical sources, his claim to historicity is negligible. It is a general principle! In the Marvels of Britain Arthur is mythical. In Wales is a stone with the print of a dog’s foot.

It was when he was hunting the boar Troit that Cabal, the dog of Arthur the warrior, left this mark upon the stone, and Arthur afterwards gathered together the heap of stones under that which bore his dog’s footprint, and called it Carn Cabal.

The hunting of the boar links Nennius with the earliest of Welsh Arthurian tales, the story of Culhwch and Olwen, where Nennius’s porcus Troit is the boar “Twrch Trwyth”, and the hound, Cabal, is in Welsh the hound, Cavall. The boar, the winter animal, often replaces the dragon to represent the ravages of winter in these stories—it wastes and slaughters everything it meets—and is killed by the summer sun as the archangel Michael alias S George, in the mummers plays and games. Culhwch has to capture the boar and its seven young to get the magic artefacts to win Olwen from her giant father. He succeeds and kills the father to release the daughter. Giants stand for the Father, the old sun or year, that often has to be killed to make way for the new one. As a Father, the giant stories take on many psychoanalytical aspects of the parental type. In either case, dragon or giant, the reward for the successful knight is tha maiden—often the king’s daughter—meaning Nature.

The Arthur who emerges from the Celtic tradition of Welsh literature at the beginning of the twelfth century is an imaginary being, a king of fairy-land, undertaking hazardous quests, slaying monsters, visiting the realms of the dead, and having at his call a number of knightly henchmen, notably Cai and Bedivere, who are all but his equals in wizardry and martial prowess.

By the beginning of the twelfth century, Robert Fitz-hamon had conquered Glamorgan, and the Normans had a firm settlement in South Wales. Robert, earl of Gloucester, and a natural son of Henry I, acquired, early in the twelfth century, the lordship of Glamorgan by marrying Robert Fitz-hamon’s daughter, Mabel. Robert, like his father, was a liberal and a diplomatic patron of letters. William of Malmesbury, the greatest historian of his time, dedicated his History to him. He founded the abbey of Margam, whose chronicle is a valuable early authority for the history of Wales. On his estates at Torigni was born Robert de Monte, abbot of Mont S Michel, a chronicler of renown, and a lover and student of Breton legends. And, under his patronage, Geoffrey of Monmouth compiled his romantic History of the Kings of Britain.

In the “matter of Britain”, the history (1135) of Geoffrey of Monmouth (c 1100-1154) made king Arthur into an English national hero, the British counterpart of Charlemagne. The main source of the Arthurian portions of Geoffrey’s History was his own imagination. The first six books tell, with incidental references to contemporary events elsewhere, the story of Arthur’s kingly predecessors. At the close of the sixth book, Merlin appears and Geoffrey spends this entire book on his fantastic prophecies, and his role in the birth of Arthur.

Of all the legends, closest to Arthur himself is the story of Merlin. In Welsh tradition, Myrddin, or Merlin—the change of the Welsh consonent was necessary to avoid an unpleasant sounding French word!—is similar to Taliesin—a wizard bard of the sixth century. His first association with Arthur is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who identifies him with the Ambrosius of Nennius and makes of him both a magician and a prophet, to whose magic arts the birth of Arthur was largely due. His character is further developed in a Latin hexameter poem, Vita Merlini, composed about the year 1148. Merlin appears in French romantic poetry in a fragment of a poem supposed to be by Robert de Borron, dating from the end of the twelfth century. Upon this poem was based the French prose romance of Merlin, part of which is assigned to Robert de Borron. It exists in two forms—the first known as the “ordinary” Merlin, and the other as the Suite de Merlin. For the Christian, Robert de Borron, the enchanter’s arts are manifestations of the powers of darkness. Merlin himself becomes the devil’s offspring and most active agent.

Geoffrey’s History celebrates the united glories of the Anglo-Norman empire which soon attained its widest extent under Henry II, in the Angevin empire. It provided a hero in whom Norman and Saxon, Welshman, Breton, and Aquitainian could take common pride. Geoffrey does not explicitly say that Arthur becomes emperor of Rome, perhaps because is was demonstrably untrue, but it is implicit in the legend. The empire should perhaps be read as the Holy Roman Empire, and the tradition expresses a wish rather than a historical fact. Arguably, he is urging the Angevin kings to emulate the British hero and conquer Europe or take the Holy Roman Emperorship. The wish is for an honourable, and therefore heretical, Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor, 1155-1190) also having the title “the once and future king”.

The alliterative Morte Arthure, derived from Geoffrey, alludes to contemporary history and the wars of Edward III. Arthur “set his desire upon subduing the whole of Europe unto himself”. The chivalric ideal is plainly there. The ladies would not “deign have the love of any save he had thrice proved himself in the wars. Wherefore at that time did dames wax chaste and knights the nobler for their love”.

In the battle with the Romans, Arthur displayed his prowess, the British hosts gained the victory, and Hoel and Gawain were nearly as valiant as Arthur himself, but many, particularly Cai and Bedwyr, were slain. The outcome fired Arthur with the ambition of marching upon Rome itself. But Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, left in charge of Britain, usurps the throne, and Arthur has to return with his British knights. Mordred meets him as he lands, and Gawain and many others are slain, but Mordred is driven back. The final battle is fought at the river Camel in the west country, where Mordred is slain, and most of the leaders on both sides perish. Guinevere, in terror of her safety, becomes a nun.

Even the renowned king Arthur himself was wounded unto death, and was borne thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds.

Geoffrey knows nothing of Lancelot, Tristram, the Holy Grail and other famous characters and incidents of the fully-developed legend. Geoffrey’s History puts Arthur, a formally unknown hero, at the hub of the greatest of the romantic cycles, but, in most of the stories, Arthur is unlike this imperial monarch and conqueror. He has nothing particular to do, except to be present at the beginning and end of the story. The hero is Sir Perceval, Sir Ywain, Sir Gawain, or the Fair Knight Unknown (Sir Libeaus), but not Sir Erec (Geraint) in any extant English poem before Tennyson. Geoffrey’s Arthur is a Norman Arthur, and details and incidents in the narrative are from his observation of Norman courtly manners.

In Brittany, a belief in Arthur’s return must also have been current, for Alanus de Insulis records that a denial of it in the second half of the twelfth century might cost a man his life. By the middle of the eleventh century the relations between the duchy of Normandy and the Bretons had become particularly close, and the Duke of Brittany was one of William the Conqueror’s staunchest allies at the time of the invasion of Britain.

Development of the Cycle

The last famous legend to be attached to the Arthurian group is, in its origin and character, the most Celtic of them all—the story of Tristram and Iseult (Tristan and Isolt), probably the oldest of the subsidiary Arthurian tales. With scarcely any trace of Christian sentiment or, compared with the story of Lancelot, the conventions of chivalry, the legend of Tristram radiates its Pagan, and Celtic, origin. Its setting, its character and its motif mark it out as Celtic.

Tristram and the fair Iseult are fatally united by the magic love-potion, quaffed in spite of Iseult’s approaching union with Mark of Cornwall. Their love persists in spite of honour and duty. Tristram marries Iseult of the White Hand and is wounded in Brittany. His wife, distracted with jealousy, falsely announces the sail of the ship coming over the sea bringing the Irish Iseult as black. Iseult runs into the palace horror struck, to expire on the corpse of her former lover. The tragedy of love has been remorselessly enacted. A comfortable medieval ending is sternly eschewed. A sense of mystery and gloom enfolds it all “like mists sweeping over cairn and cromlech”:

Tristram was the nephew of king Mark of Cornwall, and his uncle’s favourite. Cornwall was tributary to the Kingdom of Ireland, and every three years king Mark has to send to Ireland thirty youths and thirty maidens. Like Theseus, Tristram objected to it. Next time the huge brother of the Queen of Ireland came for his booty, Tristram killed him in single combat, but was wounded himself by a poisoned sword. The Irish Queen could cure the wound, so Tristram went to Ireland in disguise. The Queen did not know him and, helped by her daughter Iseult, nursed him back to health. Back in Cornwall, he told his uncle of the beauty of the Queen’s daughter, and his uncle sent him to bring her to Cornwall to be Mark’s queen. Tristram did so, but on the ship they drank a love potion left by the princess’s maid, and fell passionately in love. Though she became Queen of Cornwall, Iseult deceived her older husband, meeting the young man secretly many times. Finally, the king found out and ordered them burnt them alive.

Tristram escaped and rescued Iseult. Hiding in the the forest of Morrois, they led a wild and idyllic life, like Deirdre and Naoise after their flight from king Conchubar. But the old king persuaded Iseult to return to him, and swear on holy relics she has been faithful all along. Heading across the White Land to where the relics were, a beggar seized the Queen as she was crossing a ford, and tried to carry her over piggy-back, but stumbled. The ford became known as Le Mal Pas, the False Step. Tristram was the beggar, but he made good his escape. However, it allowed Iseult to swear truthfully that the she had only ever had her legs around two men, the king and the beggar who had tried to carry her on his back over the ford! Tristram escaped to Brittany, where he was again wounded. He sent a messenger to Iseult to bring her to him, with instructions to hoist a white sail if Iseult was abord, but a black one if she was not. The ship carried the white sail, but the other Iseult, of the White Hand, was jealous, and told Tristram the sail was black. Weak as he was, the hero died heart broken. Iseult landed, found her lover dead, and she died too. King Mark brought the bodies back to Cornwall to be buried. From the tomb of Tristram grew a briar rose, which always drooped over the tomb of Iseult.

The tale looks like an elaborated solar myth. Tristram appears, under the name of Drystan son of Tallwch, as a purely mythical hero in an old Welsh triad, which represents him as the nephew, and swineherd, of Mark—March ab Meirchion—protecting his master’s swine against Arthur’s attempt to get at them. Mark, in the earliest poetical versions of the tale, is king of Cornwall. It is said of March, or Mark, that he was “according to legends, both Brythonic and Irish, an unmistakable prince of darkness”. Iseult, the primal heroine, is a daughter of Ireland, while the other Iseult, she of the White Hands, is a princess of Brittany. A literary critic writes that the story breathes the air and reflects the dim, misty half-lights of the western islands beaten by the grey, menacing sea.

At a crossroads, a mile and a half north of Fowey is a pillar, over seven feet high. One of its faces has an inscription in Roman script in two vertical lines—“Drustanus Hic Iacit Cunomori Filius”, ’Here lies Drustans, son of Cunomorus’. The letters are not clear, and the reading of the name Drustans has been disputed. Langdon, a student of Cornish crosses, read it as Circusius. S Paul Aurelian, who lived in the sixth century AD, according to a Cornish monk, had a quarrel with a king of Cornwall called Quonomorius, indeed, “Marcus dictus Quonomorius”, ’Mark called Cunomorus’. He was Cynvawr, the king of Dumnonia in the sixth century. In Breton Christian folklore, he is a wicked opponent of the saints. The punishment of burning alive suggests the Catholic punishment for a heresy, and if there are here allusions to primitive Christian belief, perhaps the “saints” who were the enemies of Mark were their Perfects or saints of the Celtic Church hounded by a Pagan king, or perhaps an early Catholic one. Drustan is a Pictish name, and is unusual so far south, and the Ulster lovers, Deidre and Naoise escaped to Scotland in their myth. Interestingly, Deidre and Naoise in death both succoured trees which embraced each other, forming a tree of life, which, like the Indian Bo Tree seems to be two trees embracing, usually a fig or vine growing around an upright tree.

The Tristram legend was likely preserved in many detached lays before it came to be embodied in any poem. The earliest known poetical versions of the story are those of the Anglo-Normans, Béroul (c 1150) and Thomas (c 1170), of which we posses only fragments, and which were the foundations, respectively, of the German poems of Eilhart von Oberge and of Gottfried von Strassburg. In fact, many isolated poems dealing with characters and incidents subsequently drawn into the Arthurian medley must have been based upon traditions popularised by the rude art of some obscure minstrels, or story-tellers, Breton or other.

One of the best known examples of such poems is Marie of France’s Lay of Lanval, a Celtic fairy-tale quite unconnected, originally, with the Arthurian court. Even more ambitious works, such as the Chevalier au Lion, or Yvain, and Erec, of Chrestien, were almost certainly founded upon poems, or popular tales, of which the primitive versions have been irretrievably lost. For the Welsh prose romances of the Lady of the Fountain and of Geraint—the heroes of which, Owein and Geraint, correspond respectively to Chrestien’s Yvain and Erec—while resembling the French poems in their main incidents, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for except on the supposition that the stories embodied in them originally existed in a much older and simple form than that in which they are presented by Chrestien.

The Grail cycle, in its fully developed form comprises stories of mythical and Pagan origin, together with later accretions due entirely to the invention of romancers with a deliberately ecclesiastical bias. The palpably mythical character of the earlier quest versions points to their being of more archaic orgin than the early history texts, and they are almost certainly to be traced to Celtic sources.

The texture, the colouring, the essential conception of the older Grail Quest stories can be paralleled from early Celtic mythic romance, and from no other contemporary European literature.

Alfred Nutt

Joseph Campbell divided the literature of Arthur, Merlin and the Holy Grail into four overlapping phases:

1. Anglo-Norman patriotic epics: c 1137-1205—Arthur and Merlin.
2. French courtly romances: c 1160-1230—the knights of Arthur’s court, including Perceval and Gawain, whose adventures were described in Chrestien’s Perceval and Le Conte du Graal.
3. Religious legends of the Grail: c 1180-1230—the Church hijacked the popular courtly romances to promote Christian doctrines
   • the writings of Robert de Borron, in particular his Joseph d’Arimathie (1180-1199) in which the Grail became, for the first time, a chalice
   • the Vulgate Cycle (1215-1230), including L’Estoire del Saint Graal and La Queste del Saint Graal, in which the Grail is a dish
4. German biographical epics: c 1200-1215—the core Grail mythos peaked in the work of Wolfram.

The quest appeared before it had a Christian history. Many writers explaining the Grail stories do not distinguish between the dates of the stories, and yet they plainly evolved from largely, if not entirely, non-Christian stories to Christianized versions of them. No doubt there are plenty of Christian tricksters who do not want any distinctions to be made. So, the romances are also in two categories or rather strata of legend, which are independent of each other:

• the Quest—concerned with the quest of the Grail, and with the adventures and personality of the hero of this quest:
  • the Conte del Graal of Chrestien de Troyes and his continuators, 60,000 verses composed between 1180 and 1240, and the German epic poem Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, written between 1205 and 1215. The Welsh folk-tales of the Mabinogion also have Arthurian stories such as Peredur.
• the Early History—concerned with the history of the Grail:
  • the oldest is the metrical trilogy of Robert de Borron, composed between 1170 and 1212, of which only the first part, the Joseph d’Arimathie, and a portion of the second, the Merlin, are extant, and the Quête del S Graal attributed to Walter Map. A complete prose version is preserved in the so-called Didot manuscript, where the history of the relic is set forth. The Perceval is the conclusion of some short romances, the two preceding being the Joseph of Arimathea and the Merlin.

In the “Quest” forms of the legend the interest is mainly on the personality of the hero, Perceval, and upon his adventures in search of certain talismans, which include a sword, a bleeding lance and “a grail” (either a magic vessel, as in Chrestien, or a stone, as in Wolfram). The search for the talismans is connected with the healing of an injured kinsman, and with the avenging of the wrong done to him. In the fifteenth century English metrical romance of Sir Percyvelle, the vengeance of a son upon his father’s slayers is the sole argument of the story. The early history versions dwell, chiefly, on the nature and origin of these talismans.

The Benedictine monks of S Dunstan’s at Glastonbury had a copy of Geoffrey’s Historia from c 1170. According to Giraldus Cambrensis, in 1184, in the heyday of Arthur’s renown as a romantic hero—at the instance of Henry II—the monks found the Glastonbury cross naming King Arthur as the occupant of the grave in the cemetery of their abbey church, and so they found the bones of Arthur and Guinevere. Sixty years before, William of Malmesbury had written of the discovery in Wales of the grave of Arthur’s nephew, Gawain, though the grave of Arthur could not be found. So, bards wrote of his not being dead, and minstrels prophesied his return. Perhaps, the Glastonbury exhumation was meant to dispel this idea while directing Celtic nostalgia to Glastonbury to the advantage of the monks, who wanted to exploit the popularity of the tales and give pilgrims a reason for visiting their church. The Joseph story was one of their publicity stunts.

The Arthurian and its kindred legends came about when there was comparatively closer literary contact between the European nations than there is now. The Normans suceeded in bringing Britain and France into closer contact than has ever existed between them since, and the literary destinies of Europe during the great romantic period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was centered in what is now France. The south of France and the northern “Celtic fringe” contributed, but, it was the conjunction of the two, mediated by the Normans, that gave us Arthurian romance.

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on Celtic solar belief, and sun gods as atoning saviours
• More on Mithras, and something about Zoroastrianism

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