Did King Arthur really exist? – Part II

Hoping to make your English learning easier, dear friends, we continue to present the possible conclusions that arise from studying the legend (or the true story) of King Arthur.

We have reached the two most influential sources of information about the legendary king: the monk Nennius, who wrote about him in the 9th century, and the priest Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived at the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century. In his research, the retired medievalist Nicholas Higham, who published the book King Arthur: The Making of the Legend in 2018, says that the sources describing the famous warrior are at least three centuries removed from the events connected with him and therefore cannot be considered reliable evidence of his existence.

According to Higham, this heroic literature and this inspiring image were created during a very difficult period for Britain, in order to serve as motivation and a reason for unity. The Saxons — the enemy of that time — are depicted as wild barbarians, while Arthur himself is actually a figure carried over from the era of Roman rule on the Isles. Higham even goes so far as to accuse the monk Nennius of “borrowing” information about a Roman commander from the Punic Wars named Artorius, which completely undermines confidence in the old written sources.

But the Arthurian legend took on a life of its own. The story grew richer over time, eventually reaching our own day with John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur, featuring the young Helen Mirren and Patrick Stewart. Geoffrey of Monmouth himself gives Arthur and his knights full vitality while at the same time providing the Welsh with their own — and indeed glorious — history, at a time when they were said not to be sufficiently civilized. His writings about the king of Camelot go hand in hand with the political aims of their author. There are even doubts as to whether Geoffrey ever visited North Cornwall at all. More likely, he knew the place only as a mystical land with impressive cliffs, which seemed to him a fitting backdrop for a dramatic and heroic story.

According to other researchers, the battle in which King Arthur is mortally wounded may be the real Battle of Camlann, borrowed from a story in the Welsh Annals — a book that contains a mixture of historical facts and fiction about those lands.

Even in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth was accused of falsification by the medieval historian William of Newburgh, who claimed that the entire story was obviously invented. Yet even then, the very mention of Arthur held enormous fascination for many people. When in 1191 the monks of Glastonbury Abbey dug up two graves and found in them the skeletons of a man and a woman, a rumour spread that these were the graves of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere, and crowds of medieval visitors flocked to the abbey.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story became one of the most widely read books not only on the Isles but also in Europe, second in popularity only to the Bible. In 12th‑century France, the writer Chrétien de Troyes, working under the patronage of the Plantagenet dynasty and regarded as the father of the chivalric romance, borrowed Geoffrey’s story and added the knight Lancelot, the Holy Grail, and other intriguing details still known today.

Friends, it seems that the most likely conclusion from everything told so far is that the legendary King Arthur is a figure assembled from various heroic tales of battles and that he served the British as a symbol of unity in difficult times. But perhaps it is wonderful to believe that somewhere, in the darkest of centuries, a young king inspired by God drew his sword from the stone and led his people to victory until his own heroic death.

Author: Iveta Radeva