Fil Read examines the evidence for the existence of King Arthur, or someone very like him, from early texts in Latin, Old Welsh and Old English, and finds conflicting accounts. This has left her plenty of space to choose which elements of the Arthur stories to use in her Guinevere series of time-slip novels, including her latest, The Sword.
There are many great tomes on this subject, and I can only include here a small amount of information pertaining to Arthur’s existence.
Opinion is divided. There is only one original source from near Arthur’s supposed dates (anywhere from the mid-fifth century) and that is Gildas. He wrote his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae somewhere before AD547 when plague carried off one of the kings he named.
However, Arthur is conspicuous by his absence from Gildas’s book. The scribe, known as Gildas the Wise, who may have been a son of Caw of Strathclyde and brother to Heuil (Hueil, Huail) who Arthur supposedly executed, doesn’t mention Arthur once. He confines himself to naming five contemporary, and in his opinion terrible, kings, and Ambrosius (long dead, but whom he likes).
Gildas’s saving grace is that he makes the first ever mention of the Battle of Badon, although it’s possible he credits Ambrosius with the victory, not Arthur.
There are various options here: that Gildas didn’t mention Arthur because he didn’t exist; he avoided mentioning him because Arthur executed his brother Heuil; or he thought everyone knew who Arthur was, so he didn’t need to say.
The earliest mention of Arthur, if it’s genuine and not a later addition to the text, comes from a poem written about the end of the sixth century by the Welsh poet Aneirin – Y Gododdin. It’s about a British defeat at Catraeth and contains the following lines about a brave warrior:
“He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur.”
Then there are the Triads, which evolved as mnemonic devices to assist the recollection of narrative material in bardic schools, and many of which have Arthurian references, such as :
“Three Generous Men of the Island of Britain:
Nudd the Generous, son of Senyllt,
Mordaf the Generous, son of Serwan,
Rhydderch the Generous, son of Tudwal Tudglyd.
And Arthur himself was more generous than the three.”
However, none of the above are original versions. In fact, all of what we have today has been copied many times over and a form of written Chinese Whispers has taken place.
One example is the description of Arthur having the image of the Virgin Mary on his ‘shoulder’ which is now thought to be a mistranslation of ‘shield’. A much more likely place to carry an image.
In the early ninth century, the monk Nennius gives us Arthur’s 12 battles – which rather suspiciously rhyme. That doesn’t mean they aren’t Arthur’s, though. Nor does the fact that even though there is a known battle of Chester some years later, Arthur didn’t fight one there first.
As all these battles sites remain undiscovered, there have been countless pages of speculation about their location over the years.
For my Guinevere novels I chose to follow Nennius’s list. Firstly, because he’s an early source (even if not all that trustworthy) and secondly because in a work of fiction it’s nice to stick with elements of the legend people know. So, my Arthur gets to fight all twelve battles plus a few I added in myself.
And I chose which of the suggested locations I preferred from the endless list of alternatives. Hence, for the Battle of the City of the Legion I chose York instead of Caerleon or Chester, as York is in the East of the country, where the Saxons were, and the other two are in the West.
Writing a novel full of battles with a female first-person protagonist did cause a few problems. However Gwen is a girl from the 21st century with a modern outlook, and she remains in the ‘Dark Ages’ long enough to educate the men around her. By book four she’s becoming the Warrior Queen of that volume’s title.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, composed in retrospect about AD890 for Alfred the Great, covers the Arthurian period. However, like Gildas, it omits any mention of Arthur. As this was written by the Anglo-Saxons, and they would not have included any epic fails, this could be why we find no mention of defeats by men like Arthur and Ambrosius.
History is written by the victors, and by AD890 the Anglo-Saxons were very much the victors.
The Welsh Annals, however, do mention Arthur and both the Battle of Badon and the Battle of Camlann. At Badon Arthur carries the Cross of Our Lord on his shoulder, and at Camlann Arthur and Mordred die. It’s silent on whether Arthur and Mordred were on the same side or enemies.
However, the Annals were compiled several hundred years after the events mentioned, and it’s uncertain whether these events were not added in a lot later. A bit like us writing a history of the Napoleonic Wars without written sources, and only a vague idea of who did what and when things happened, and randomly adding Waterloo in where we think it ought to go.
Now onto that most inventive of chroniclers – Geoffrey of Monmouth, who created a pseudo-history of Britain and laid the foundations for the medieval Romance figure Arthur became, with his court at many-towered Camelot, and his knights of the round table.
Geoffrey based his Historia Regum Britanniae on works I’ve already mentioned, plus some ‘lost books’ he claimed he’d found. Whether this was true or not, his version of the Arthurian legend took hold and became the dominant idea for hundreds of years.
But who was the real Arthur? If he existed at all, and I’m convinced he, or someone very like him, did, then he was a sixth-century warrior lord, based in a hillfort such as Cadbury Castle, where in the 1960s Leslie Alcock discovered major refortification had gone on at exactly the right time for Arthur.
He didn’t live in a stone castle, and he had warriors, not knights, probably using weapons and armour left over from the Roman occupation. He travelled about Britain on Roman roads and fought battles against the enemies of the British.
And above all, he was not English.
The ‘English’ were his enemies, although DNA testing proves that modern English people are a mixture of all those who have invaded this island. So, although we might think we’re Anglo-Saxons, in reality we still have the DNA of Arthur’s warriors running in our veins.
The Sword, Fil Reid‘s third Arthurian timeslip novel, is out on 31 May.
Her six-book Guinevere series is set in Arthurian Britain. The first two were The Dragon Ring and The Bear’s Heart; the next will be Warrior Queen. Fil has Asperger’s Syndrome and King Arthur has been her lifelong Aspie obsession.
Read more about Fil’s book.
You may also enjoy Nicola Griffith’s look at the stories connected with Arthur in History, historicity, historiography and Arthurian legend.
Images:
- Gallos statue of King Arthur at Tintagel: Pixabay (public domain)
- Detail from De Excidio Britanniae by Gildas showing the mention of ‘obsessionis badonici montis’, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.27: © Cambridge University Library via Biblissima (CC BY-NC 3.0)
- Page from the Book of Aneurin, MS c. 1275. From the 1908 facsimile edition by J, Gwenogvryn Evans: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Page from Historia Brittonum by Nennius mentioning Arthur, part of Recueil Français d’Ouvrages Historiques, second half of the 12th century: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (public domain)
- Earliest depiction of Arthur, from Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, c1136: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (public domain)
- Prospect of Camalet Castle. 15 Aug 1723 (Cadbury hillfort) by William Stukeley: Wikimedia (public domain)
