The problem with Arthur is that he didn’t exist. Not in any meaningful sense. There are – as there have always been – charlatans happy to persuade the gullible to part with a pound to see what, it is said, was the place of his birth or the site of his death. But it isn’t true. As Simon Armitage admits in his introduction: “There are no bones, no crowns, no credible documents and no archaeological evidence of any type, and those geographical sites across Britain which claim some connection with his birth, his life or his death are either those of legend and fancy or tourist destinations conceived by the heritage industry or avaricious monks.”
But that doesn’t matter because the magic of the myths and the mysteries is more powerful than the dull, prosaic truth – and that is why the legend of Arthur has echoed down the years. As Armitage says, he lives on in the collective imagination, “not just in literature but as a star of screen and stage and in many forms of popular culture and high art. No matter how many times he receives his death blow and is carried to Glastonbury or ferried to Avalon, Arthur remounts and rides again as the once and future king”.
Tales of Arthur seem to date from the period, after 410, when the Roman legions left Britain (what they called Britannia was, roughly, what we know as England and Wales) and the country was attacked by Teutonic tribes from north-west Europe. He appears, first, in Welsh poems such as Y Gododdin, and some attributed to Taliesin, as a Celtic hero defending the people of the west from their enemies –
the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Frisians and Jutes. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about Arthur in his History of the Kings of Britain in 1136 when, as Armitage dryly points out, “literature and history were not necessarily approached as independent disciplines”.
Wace introduced the Round Table in his Roman de Brut (1155), La?amon the magical aspects of Morgan le Fay in Brut (c1190) and Chrétien de Troyes the ideals of courtly love, the chivalric code and the pursuit of the Holy Grail in his Arthurian Romances. Sir Thomas Malory, in Le Morte Darthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485, drew on his predecessors to imaginatively retell the stories in prose in a form we can recognise today – they were known to Tennyson when he wrote his Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King between 1855 and 1874 – and Armitage says “Malory had certainly read the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the academic and unglamorous title” given to a Medieval epic poem of 4,346 lines, of which this is a new translation.
Armitage has a bit of form here. Five years ago, he published a glorious translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century poem of 2,530 lines about courage, loyalty, temptation and chivalry. While not as faithful as other translations – JRR Tolkien’s (1953) is a better student crib – Armitage managed to retain the four-stress rhythmic line and alliteration of the Middle English original while peppering the poetry with modern idioms. It is, as I said in these pages at the time, amagnificent achievement; a powerful and exciting new version of one of the jewels of Medieval English literature.
This poem was written some time around 1400, we don’t know the name of the author, and there is only one manuscript copy – in the library of Lincoln Cathedral – in existence. “Typically”, says Armitage, “each line of the original has four stresses, two falling either side of a caesura, and contains three alliterating syllables, usually two on the left side of the divide then one on the right, followed by an unalliterating stressed syllable”.
Technically, Armitage is right on the money, writing of “all the red gold and the riches of Rome” and telling how “our brave, bold king had entered the battlefield / with battalions in formation and banners unfurled.” It’s brutal, bloody stuff – “fetched him a blow of such force in the forehead / that the burnished blade bit through to his brain” and “through the bladder and bowels he drove that blow, / piercing his privates, ripping them apart” – but beautifully written, like this line of Cador’s as he sees the King of Libya die at his feet: “Find comfort if you can as you cool in the clay.”
There are some wonderful set pieces – the dream of a dragon which brings Beowulf to mind, the death of Kay, and Arthur’s hand to hand combat with the monster of Mont St Michel – but it is the way that Armitage manages to sustain the energy of his version for 156 pages – “till the fame that we fought for has frittered away” – that is most impressive. His translation is a revelation which has rescued a Medieval epic from obscurity.
