The Arthur of the English poets

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

This book has grown from a course in English Literar ture which I planned for my students at Harvard University and Badcliffe College in the spring of 1900. I thought that there was enough interest in the Arthurian legends to warrant a course of lectures which should give an account of their origin, development, and history in our poetry, to those who, without caring to study mediaeval literature extensively, desired some knowledge of its finest poetic theme. Such knowledge it was dif&cult to obtain, for almost the only book on the subject both accurate and readable was Mr. M. W. MacCallimi's TeTvnysons Idylls and Arthurian Story, and that dealt chiefly with the Arthurian legends from Malory to the present time. My purpose was to tell more f uUy of the early days of the legends, their origin and growth, and in discussing their later history, to keep more closely to English countries than Mr. MacCaUum had done. Of necessity treating much of the material that he had treated, I have been indebted to his work for many valuable suggestions in preparing both my lectures and my book, though in general my methods of approaching the subject have been different from his.

Because my lectures as first given, and as repeated viii PREFACE

two or three times, have had a reasonably favorable reception, I have tried now to make them acceptable to a larger audience than that for which they were first intended. In doing so, I decided, as in the lectures, to discuss no authors who have not written in English except those — like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troies, and Richard Wagner — who have directly or indirectly influenced the poetry of the English race. I have not sought to advance new theories regarding the origia and the development of the Arthurian legends, though here and there may be found some new suggestion. My purpose has been rather to select what seem to me the sanest of the frequently conflicting opinions on the Eound Table stories which students of mediaeval literature have held, and to present them clearly. Nor have I sought to mention every. Arthurian author in the United Eangdom or America, but only to indicate the general tendencies of Arthurian literature in the English world from its first appearance to the present.

In preparing my book I have been helped by the advice and information of various of my colleagues and other friends, whom I now take pleasure in thanking. Especially are my thanks due, and most heartily I offer them, to Professor Wendell, Professor Kittredge, and Mr. Bentinck-Smith.

H. M.

Cambbidge, Massachusetts, November, 1906.

Contents

I. The Vigor of the Arthurian Legends . 1

II. The Historical Arthur .... 6

III. The Arthur of Popular Story . . .32

II The Historical Aethur

The stories of Arthur, as we know them, and of his knights of the Table Eound, have two main sources, one of which is easy to discover, the other, difficult; both more or less connected with the history and traditions of the Celts. The source which is easily traced, about which scholars to-day are virtually agreed, is the historical. It carries us far back of the years when the Arthurian romances first took literary shape. The other, which we may call the popular source, is traced less easily. It carries us even farther back into the past ; according to some scholars, at times to immemorial Celtic antiquity. No two scholars agree about it exactly, and some eminent German and eminent French scholars have held opinions regarding it in many respects diametrically opposite.

The historical source is found in the English conquest of Britain, a conquest especially remarkable in that it was the beginning of the end for one of the great members of the Indo-European family of nations. With the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the days of the last Celtic independence were numbered.

And yet time was when no Indo-European race was more powerful than the Celts. Spread over Europe in the days of Herodotus,^ from the upper Danube to the

1 Herodotus is the first Greek to use the noun Celt (KcXriis), though before him Heeataeus of Miletus, a Greek who wrote a geographical work, r?s nep(oSo$, late in the sixth century b. c, spoke of

Straits of Gibraltar, these Celts, for some reason or other, came to be filled with the same spirit of unrest which later sent the Germanic tribes pouring over the Roman Empire. One result was the Celtic invasion of Italy, with the subsequent capture of Bome in 390 by the Gauls, as the Latins called the Celts. This was the culmination of Celtic power in the Italian peninsula. Had the Gauls continued to occupy Rome, they would have changed the history of the world; but they hurried off to fight the Veneti, selling their victory for Eoman gold — a failure to enjoy the fruits of victory characteristic of the Celts in all ages. " Good soldiers," says Mommsen, "but bad citizens," they " have shaken all states and founded none." ^

Nyrax, a Celtic city (which I belieye is unknown to-day) — Nilpaf ir((Au KeXriiefi, — and of Massilia bordering on Celtic territory — yia<rtra\la v6\is TTJs MyvaTiKijs, KOTck TJ|K KeAtik^k. This is the earliest known mention of the Celtic peoples.

Herodotus, as is well known, was horn at the time of the Persian Wars, whose historian he became. He introduces the name " Celt " in connection with the Danube, which river he says (in bk. ii, ch. 33, of his history, written about 445 E. c.) rises among the Celts — &c KeAtui/ — and flows across the middle of Europe. He speaks of the Celts as living also outside of the Pillars of Hercules.

After this, Greek references to the Celts become more and more frequent. Why the Greeks gave them the name which has stuck to the race to this day, is not surely known. Probably it was the name of that tribe or branch of the Celtic race with which the Greeks first came in contact, for their first settlement in Celtic territory was at Marseilles, according to Hecatseus, as just noted, near Celtic territory, and the name of the tribe was extended to the whole race. It is certain that it was not the generic name of the Celts themselves. Confirmation of this theory as to the Greek use of " Celt " for the whole race we seem to get from C^sar in his Gallic War, bk. i, ch. 1, who implies that the name Celt belonged only to the people of a definite part of southern Gaul : " qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur." Livy (v, 34) also speaks of the Celts as a part of the Gauls : " Celtarum quae pars Galliae tertia est . . . " For all the early history of the Celts, cf. H. d'Arbois de Jubainville, Cours de LitUratwe Celtique.

1 Theodore Mommsen, History of Bome, bk. ii, ch. 4.

The Italian movement was only one form of the Celtic migrations. For some time, in this same fourth century before Christ, the Celts threatened northwestern Greece. Then, after the division of the Macedonian Empire, which followed the death of Alexander the Great, the Celts, now called Oalatce by the Greeks, swept down on the Grecian states, pushing thence across the jEgean Sea to establish themselves perma^ nently in a province of Asia Minor, which from them received its name, Galatia.^

The Celts were now stretched across the world from Asia Minor to Ireland ; but the " bad citizens " could not hold what the " good soldiers " had won. In the year 225 b. c, the Gauls, who had been menacing Some more or less ever since their capture of the city, suffered an overwhelming defeat in Etruria. Two years later the Eomans, crossing the Po, for the first time gained a victory over the Gauls in their own territory. From then till now the history of the Celtic nations may be summed up in that quotation from Ossian which Arnold saw fit to put at the head of his Essay on the Study of Celtic Literature, — " They went forth to the war, but they always fell."

The details of this shrinking of Celtic power are not known. In the East it seems to have waned gradually, disappearing last in Galatia in the thu-d or fourth century of the Christian era. Of the conquest of the Western Celts we know more, thanks to the Eoman historians ; but even of this we have no

1 Neither the origin of the later Greek name, ra\i£Toi, nor of the Eoman name for the Celts, " Galli," ia known. Possibly each is connected with an old Irish word, " Galdae," meaning " brave." In time both " Gallns" and " raAc£T„s" came to be restricted in use as are their derivatives to-day — " Gaul " and " Galatian."

full account prior to Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War. Through these, every schoolboy knows something of the conquest of Gaul, and of the first tentative expeditions of the Eomans into Britain. Yet they made no permanent settlement there till 43 A. D., in which year, in the reign of Tiberius Claudius, began the Eoman occupation, which was to last for three centuries and a half. This we must consider with some care ; for in the events of its last years we find the historical root of the Arthurian romances.

It took the Bomans long to pacify Britain. There were several revolts — the most famous, that of Queen Boadicea, who, after causing the death of thousands of Romans, was defeated, and took poison rather than fall into the hands of her conquerors. Conditions remained disturbed tiU the proconsulship of Agricola, from 78 to 85. He carried the Eoman armies to the north of Scotland; he buUt a chain of forts between the Clyde and the Forth ; he even stood with his legions at the southwestern extremity of Scotland, looking over to the misty Irish hOls and meditating a descent on Ireland, which he never made. But Agricola was more than a good general ; he was also a man of tact and kindness — qualities which seem to have accomplished more than his generalship in pacifying the British. Through his efforts, many of the young chieftains of the island lived in companionship with the Bomans, learned the Latin language, and put on the Boman toga. Yet the Bomans did not remain in secure possession of all the territory which Agricola had conquered. The Wall of Hadrian, built about the year 120, from the Tyne to the Solway, marks the limit of their settlement. North of this, the land up to the Forth, though owing allegiance to Eome, was much overrun by the Picts. South of the Wall, Britain was a fairly peaceful province, as Roman remains in aU parts of the coimtry show. StUl it was never entirely peaceful ; and towards the end of the fourth century, as the disruption of the empire approached, the condition of the province became turbulent.

About 383 the Eoman general, Maximus, then commanding in the island, mutinied, and with an army, probably of both Eomans and Britons, crossed into Gaul and thence into Italy, where he maintained himself in imperial state tiU he was put to death in 388 by the Emperor Theodosius, who had come from Constantinople to the rescue of the Western Empire. After this there were more revolts in Britain, which the few Eoman legions now left there had difficulty in quelling. Then in 410 came the final separation of Britain from the Empire. In that year the Goths sacked Eome and plundered Gaul. Some historians believe that the Britons took advantage of the weakness of the empire to expel the last remnant of the Eoman Legions: others believe that the weak Emperor Honorius recalled the Eoman troops from Britain in order to oppose them to the invading Goths. At any rate, there is little doubt that in the year 410 he wrote a letter to the Britons, telling them to be their own guards against their plundering neighbors, the Picts and the Scots. The wording of the letter is such that it may have been either an exhortation to the Britons to hold out till the Eomans could help them again, or a warning that henceforth the Britons must protect themselves without help from

Eome.^ Yet the meaning of it is clear, — that in the year 410 the Eoman legions had left Britain.

At the beginning of the fifth century, then, Britain was again free. What is more, it was the only part of the Celtic world, once so extensive and so powerful, to retain its independence or even its own tongue. In Gaul, in the remotest corners, the last vestiges of Celtic language had disappeared in the fourth century. The Celts of Central Europe, along the Danube, had been crushed out between the Germans on the north and the Homans on the south. In the. eastern Celtic land of Galatia, assimilation with neighboring people had destroyed all Celtic nationality. And so in Britain only was the Celtic race distinct.

But it was not now as it had been four hundred years earlier; during the Boman occupation the Britons had changed considerably. When Csesar first saw them, they were, according to his account, savages. He tells us 2 that they raised few crops, and lived almost entirely on milk and flesh ; that they clothed themselves in skins and painted themselves horribly ; that they shaved all the hair from their bodies except on the upper lip and the head ; and that men had wives in common.^

The Romans no doubt suppressed the most savage practices of the Britons. They set them the example of city life ; they constructed roads and bridges ; they introduced villas and baths, so much like those of their own country that, to this day, in Bath, by going down

2 Gallic War, bk. v, oh. 14.

' Cf . the Pictish custom of matriarchy.

from the Pump Room, dear to Jane Austen, Sheridan, and Smollett, to the Eoman bath under it, which still exists almost in its perfection, you may feel yourself suddenly transported from eighteenth-century England to imperial Rome. Moreover, during the Roman occupation, the Britons became converted to Christianity. When the Romans left, therefore, the civilisation of the Britons must have been considerably higher than when the Romans entered the land. Nevertheless, it is a fact that Britain, though somewhat civilised by the Romans, was not Romanised. In France and Spain the Italian conquerors left their language behind them ; in Britain scarcely a trace of their language remained. The explanation must be that the occupation of Britain was in the main military. Of the Latin inscriptions on stone which have been discovered in England in late years, a very large number refer to military affairs ; and the names of the Roman officers in Britain, so far as we know them, point to a military occupation. In short, the Roman occupation of Britain must have been analogous to the present English occupation of India. There the English have stopped the progress of the Car of Juggernaut ; they have suppressed Suttee and other barbarous customs ; they have built railroads and great public buildings. Throughout the country, especially in the hiU districts, are English villas more or less like English coimtry houses. The English, too, have carried their sports to India, as the Romans carried their baths to Britain. Some of the Indian princes have taken on a certain amount of English civilisation. They go from time to time to Cambridge or Oxford to be educated; they put on flannels, to play cricket, frock coats for afternoon functions, and swallow-tails for evening, as some of the British chieftains, at the persuasion of Agricola, donned the !Roman toga. Yet if the English occapation of India were to cease to-day, or were to last two centuries more and then cease, at which time it would have endured as long as the Boman power in Britain, India, though it would have learned much from the English, would be by no means AngKcised. And Britain, though owing much to Home, was by no means Romanised.

It is probable, though, that at least in the towns some Latin-speaking population remained after the legions were withdrawn : the nucleus of a Roman party in the island, who would grieve to see the imperial connection severed. Apart from their loyalty, they had reason to grieve. Directly the protection of Home was removed, mere shadow though it had been at the last, the Britons even more than before were vexed by the harrying Picts,i who came down over Hadrian's Wall from the north, and by the plundering Scots, who came across the western seas from Ireland. Meanwhile, with Germanic pirates from time to time ravaging the eastern coasts, many of the Britons, like Tennyson's King Leodogran, must have

" Groan'd for the Boman legions here again, And Caesar's eagle : " . • •

And so we are not surprised to read in the pages of Grildas, the earliest British historian whose work is extant, who in 647 wrote an historical sketch of Britain, that many of his countrymen besought the help of

^ In spite of their ravages, "there is no evidence that any . . . Picts were able to effect a single settlement south of the Clyde or the Forth." J. Rhys and David Brynmor-Jones, The Wdsh People, p. 105, London, 1900.

Borne again in a letter which eloquently and concisely set forth their sad condition.

"The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these two kinds of death we are either murdered or drowned."

In spite of this, Kome had to leave the Britons to take care of themselves; and they struggled on, with varying fortunes, against the Picts and the Scots, until a worse scourge came upon them in the shape of the Anglo-Saxons. In just what year these began to settle in Britain is uncertain, for it is a remarkable fact that scholars have never determined exactly the date of that momentous event which changed Britain into England, and so into the mother of the most wideruling race that history has known.

Probably it was in 428, and not in 449, as most historians say, that the English made their first permanent settlement in the island.^ The history of their arrival, though dressed out with many legendary adornments, seems in the main founded on fact. According to thb usual account, one of the British princes, Vortigern, had somehow made himself chief king of Britain. One day he was surprised to hear that three ships, full of taU, light-haired strangers from Germany, had

' R. Thumeyaen, Warm sind die Germanen nach England geJcommen ? Englische Studien, xxii, p. 177, thinks Gildas was mistaken in saying that these complaints referred to the ravages of the Scots and Picts. It was really in reference to the later ravages of the Saxons. The letter was said to have heen written to Aetius, for the third time Consul— " Ter Conanli." The third consulship of Aetius was in 446.

2 Cf. W. F. Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales, i, p. 36, and R. Thurneysen, op, cit.

appeared in the mouth of the Thames. "When their leaders, Hengist and Horsa, were brought before Vortigern at Canterbury, he expressed regret that they worshipped heathen gods, but nevertheless received them gladly as possible helpers against the Picts and the Scots and certain disaffected subjects of his own.^ If the strangers would assist him, Vortigern promised them grants of land ; and he gave Hengist permission to build a castle on as much ground as might be included within a bull's hide. Hengist, resorting to the same sort of trick which is related of Dido when she got her land for Carthage, cut up the hide into the smallest possible twine, with which he was able to include g;round enough for a strong castle. Meantime, more Saxons came over from Germany, among them Hengist's fair daughter Eowena, with whom Hengist hoped Vortigern would become infatuated. The British king fell into the trap. He asked for the hand of the Lady Eowena, which Hengist granted with seeming reluctance. In return he received Kent as a home for his people.

Though the Saxons,^ according to their promise, helped Vortigern, they kept coming into the country in such increasing numbers that soon there was friction between them and the Britons, and then open war. For years the Saxons carried everything before them. Then came a brief turn in the tide : the Britons won several victories. According to Qildas, the historian already mentioned, their leader at this time was one Ambrosius Aurelianus, a noble of Eoman descent.

1 Cf . Nennius, Historia Britonum, § 31.

* The first German settlers in Britain have always been called Jntes. They seem to have differed little from the Saxons who soon followed them.

According to a later British historian, Nennius, who wrote early in the ninth century, the British leader was a certain Vortimer, a Briton with presumably no Eoman blood. However this may be, the check of the Saxons was only temporary; they pushed on soon more fiercely than ever. Vortigem and Hengist and Horsa died, and all their generation, and the Lady Eowena and all hers, but the storm of conflict never ceased. Then came a lull, thanks to another and greater success for the British arms. About the year 600 the Britons, under the generalship, tradition has it, of a man named Arthur, won a series of victories — the chief of which seems to have been that of Badon Hill (Mons Badonis, or Mons Badonicus) — that for something like fifty years held the English in check.

Here, then, for the first time appears Arthur, but so dimly that he has often been supposed only a crear ture of the imagination. Nowadays, however, most scholars think him to have been a man of flesh and blood. What the man was, I shall presently try to show. Beforehand, in order better to understand how he became world-famous, a glance is necessary at the later events of British history while the Anglo-Saxons were establishing themselves in their new dominion.

During the half century following the British victory at Badon Hill, the Germanic invaders did not cease entirely from crossing over to Britain. In 519 the kingdom of thp West Saxons was established ; and by the middle of the century the English advance began again. In 552 the Britons were defeated in a battle near Salisbury. In 577 a great victory at Deorham made it possible for the Saxons to push on to Bath and Gloucester. They had now reached tidewater on the western coast; they had cut the British lines and divided the British population into two parts.

In the next century the Germanic advance was chiefly in the north, in the districts which the Angles overran. In the year 607 ^ ^thelfrith led his army to Chester, and there made a great slaughter of the Welsh. The neighboring country now lay open to the Angles, who, like the Saxons, had reached tidewater in the West. The British lines were again cut ; and the British population was now split into three parts — one in the northwest of the present England and in the southwest of Scotland ; another, and the largest, in the present Wales and the land just east of it ; and a third in the present counties of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset. Finally, in the eighth century, the Anglo-Saxons tore away from the Welsh principality of Powis the land between the Severn and the present boundary of Wales. A kind of wall, built from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye, and corresponding roughly to the present boundary between England and Wales, marked the division between the two races.

While Celtic supremacy was dying in Britain, a new Celtic land was being born on the Continent. Thither fled certain Britons, who saw in emigration the only escape from their Saxon foes. They did not flee to Ireland, whose nearness seemed to make it their natural refuge, because they were at feud with the Irish. The next nearest foreign country was the Gallic peninsula south of the British Channel, and they

1 Oreen, Short Bistory, 607 ; J. Rhys and D. Brynmoi-Jones, The Welsh People, 616.

took refuge there solely because of its proximity. The Britons could have felt no kinship with the inhabitants of Armorica, as the peninsula was then called, for it was entirely Latin.

The Celtic occupation of Armorica is even more obscure than the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britain, Gildas tells us that his countrymen began to seek lands beyond the sea — " transmarinas regiones" — before the British victory at Mount Badon. After this victory, it is to be presumed that for a time the British migration ceased. Then, with the renewed Saxon advance against the southwestern Britons, emigration began again. This was probably the time when the Britons left their country in the greatest numbers. So many of them crossed the Channel that by the end of the sixth century the whole Armorican peninsula was Celtic and had received the name of Britannia. The Britons seem to have had an easy conquest of their new land, until, as they pushed east and south, they ran against the Franks, who checked them in the southeast. They still pushed along without much trouble in the northeast, till they were in the region which later became Normandy, where they might have established themselves permanently, had not the Normans arrived in the second half of the ninth century, and forced the Britons back into the present province of Brittany. This event, at the beginning of the tenth century, virtually fixed the divisions of the Celtic peoples as they are to-day. Since then the tendency has been for the French on the Continent, and the English in the British Isles, gradually but resistlessly to crush out Celtic dialects and customs.

These facts of history show that from the early fifth century, for hundreds of years the bitterest foes of the British branch of the Celtic family had been Germanic — the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and on the Contiaent the Franks, whom possibly the Britons recognised as akin to their enemies at home. All this time the greatest success of British arms had been the series of victories about the year 500, which for nearly half a century stayed the Saxon advance. These fifty years, then, were a remarkably bright page in the history of the Britons, in whose traditions, it is not fantastic to surmise, still lingered reminiscences of the tragic downfall of their race from those days of power, when their ancestors may have been among those who made Kome and Greece tremble. If the Britons were going to cling to the memory of any past years, it would be to the memory of these of comparatively recent victory, when for a while the Celtic prowess of centuries past seemed to have come again. If they were going to make any part of their wars with the Saxons the foundation of a hero-story, it would be this part. Now if we find the nature of the British Celts such as to make it likely that they would lengthen this page of their history, on which were inscribed the victories of the general called Arthur, into an epic, then we may say with tolerable certainty that there is historical foundation for the stories of wide British conquest which we read of in so many mediaeval chronicles and in the pages of Malory and of Tennyson.

That the British Celts would thus lengthen this page of their history is likely for two reasons. Even more than most primitive peoples, the Celts seem to have been fond of exploiting the feats of their great men ; and they have been inclined, more than any other Indo-

European raxje, to keep their customs unchanged from generation to generation, from century to century, under varying conditions of success or disaster. The earliest accounts of the Celts show that from Galatia to Ireland they gave official recognition to a literary caste which they held in high esteem. In this caste were the bards,i -yyliose duty it was to put into song, or recite, the glories of kings and chieftains, in which hero-tales of ancestors took their place with praise of the living. At the time of Caesar, and in the half century before him, we first hear of such bards in G&vl, who accompanied their songs of praise with musical instruments, something between harps and lyres. The flag of Erin stiU testifies that the bard's harp was dear to the later Irish. In the tenth century, in Wales, bards were so important that in the Welsh code of law drawn up by King HoweU Dha (Howell the Good), much is said about the bard of the king's household. His place, his privileges, and duties are carefully fixed. Gray's Bard bears evidence to the wide currency of the tradition that more than two centuries later, when Edward I conquered Wales, the bards were still influential there. And earlier, in the twelfth century, when the Norman- Welsh writer, Giraldus Cambrensis, was describing Wales, the fondness of the people for their bards and for what they recited or chanted was the same. When guests arrived at a Welsh house, Giraldus teUs us, they were entertained throughout the day with music of the harp.

1 Bdpioi is the name given to them by the earliest Greek g'eographers and historians, Posidonius and Diodorus Sicnlns, who mention them. Compare H. d'Arhois de JubainTille, Cours de LitUrature Celtique, i.