Finding Arthur (39 page)

Aneirin did not explain who the Arthur of
Y Gododdin
was, presumably because he expected everyone to know who he was. Was this Arthur a man who lived the best part of one hundred years before
Y Gododdin
, far away in the south of Britain without a Gododdin connection, or was this Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, the man who led the
Gododdin to victory in The Great Angle War twelve years before
Y Gododdin
?

We have a choice. We can have a southern Arthur, unknown to history, who died three generations before
Y Gododdin
was written, some three hundred miles south of where it was written, or a northern Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, who died four years before
Y Gododdin
was written, some thirty miles from where it was written. Which is more likely?

It was probably through his Gododdin connection that Aneirin’s poems survived to be taken south with the wave of Gododdin refugees who fled in the face of Angle threats and incursions in the 610s and 620s and again in increasing numbers following the Angle capture of Edinburgh in 638.

Human nature is what it is, and it is impossible to believe that the defeated Britons of the north, seeking shelter in the halls of their southern cousins, would not have regaled their hosts with tales of how they had been ignominiously ejected from their lands. It is almost certain they would have told and retold tales of the time when, under Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken, they had crushed the Angles in battle after battle.

Their southern British cousins may not always have appreciated hearing of these victories, particularly as they had no Arthur of their own and so no equivalent victorious war against the Angles. It would be unsurprising therefore if these southerners took the stories of Arthur that had been brought south and gradually, over decades, over centuries, removed northern references and retold them as if they had occurred in the south.

Eventually stories of Arthur that had originated in the north, in Scotland, became rooted in the southwest and west of Britain, in Devon, Cornwall, and Wales. In time the people who lived in the south came to think of these songs and poems as their own, and so we have the modern consensus that the stories of Arthur originated in the far west and southwest of southern Britain.

Why did the people of Scotland not claim these stories? They probably did but the Scots had disadvantages.

The Picts, who united with the Scots to create the nation of Scotland
in the mid-ninth century, would not have appreciated stories of Arthur, because Arthur had destroyed their armies in six battles. Neither would the Angles, well settled in the southeast of Scotland by the seventh century, have thanked a poet for stories of Arthur, because Arthur had also destroyed their armies in six battles. History weighed against stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken thriving in the north.

In the south, stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken had an inherent flexibility, because they had no historical or geographical roots. This allowed them to be easily adapted to local conditions. Arthur could be portrayed as a local man, which explains why Arthur has no fixed abode in the south, not in history, not in geography. Neither is he firmly fixed culturally. He starts off as a Briton, but, despite the fact that everyone agrees the historical Arthur made his name fighting Angles, he ends up as a legendary Englishman. Unencumbered by history, people in the south were free to tell whatever tale of Arthur worked for them and to set the scene wherever they wanted it to be.

The evidence that survived in Scotland, while rooted in history, was also censored and warped. In Jocelyn’s
Life of Kentigern
, written in Glasgow in the twelfth century, Saint Mungo Kentigern is meant to be the hero (although he still comes across as a monster). Despite this, in the last few chapters of Jocelyn’s
Life
it is Merlin-Lailoken who stands out, albeit in a passage that has been heavily bowdlerized. Jocelyn could have told us even more about Merlin-Lailoken but dared not. So it was with Arthur. The authorities wanted his name obliterated, but they could not achieve this end and so they took him up and changed his story to suit their own ends. Just as this was not completely successful with Merlin-Lailoken, it was not completely successful with Arthur.

Over the centuries English armies have invaded Scotland determined on cultural extermination, most famously at the time of the Wars of Independence at the turn of the thirteenth century, when the records of Scotland were taken south to be neglected, lost, and destroyed. This cultural denigration still goes on today, consciously or unconsciously. Places like Damnonia, Strathclyde, came to be confused with Dumnonia, Cornwall, as the legend of a southern Arthur gained momentum. Fortunately these changes do not prevent us from seeing what really happened and where and when, although it is a near run thing. Even
today
Damnonia
, Strathclyde, is simply translated as
Dumnonia
, southwest England.
³
These exercises not only diluted the Scottish national consciousness, they also prevented much that might have thrown light upon the historicity of Arthur being available today.

Many factors weighed against the survival of the memory of Arthur in Scotland, but the weightiest was probably competition from the increasingly popular southern Arthur. Stories of Arthur probably lived on in Scotland for a while but could not survive in the long run in the face of a burgeoning “English legend,” bolstered as it was by social, political, religious, and commercial powers. There was no room for two Arthurs of legend. One version of the story of Arthur had to go, and the Scottish version went.

The Aneirin–Arthur Mac Aedan connections find corroboration, literally, on the ground in Edinburgh. To suggest that the Arthur after whom Arthur’s Seat is named was not the Arthur of legend but another Arthur would require the
invention
of another legendary Arthur. Once it is accepted that Arthur’s Seat was named after the legendary Arthur, questions arise. How did the man who became the legend that is Arthur come to be associated with Edinburgh? What did he do there that made such an impression upon the people of Edinburgh that they called the most prominent feature in their city by his name?

There is only one reasonable answer to this question—the man whose name and fame gave rise to the legend of Arthur, Arthur Mac Aedan, saved the people of Edinburgh in the Great Angle War in the 580s and in the hands of Aneirin became not only the greatest hero of the Scots, the Gododdin Britons, and Britons of the south but one of the greatest heroes in the common ken of the western world.

Wyatt Earp only became famous when he was taken up by pulp-fiction writers, the legend writers of their day. It seems likely that Arthur only became as famous as he is because of Aneirin, and other poets like Aneirin.

A
VALON

Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
is stuffed with magic-miracles, especially when it touches on Arthur’s funeral rites and the place where he was
buried. Unable to say that Arthur died a man of the Old Way, because the Church would not have countenanced such a thing, or that Arthur was buried in Scotland, because this would have been unacceptable to his audience, Malory took events that were rooted in the Old Way and in the north of Britain, and added a Christian, southern gloss. He had no real choice in the matter—it was too dangerous to cross the Church and too expensive to disappoint readers. The result is an awkward, clumsy, contradictory (but still wonderful) story, through the cracks of which it is possible to see what really happened.

Malory’s Arthur is mortally wounded fighting and killing his illegitimate son, Mordred, at the Battle of Camlann. When the battle is over, Bedevere, one of Arthur’s “knights,” carries the wounded Arthur from the field. Knowing he is close to death, Arthur says to Bedevere, “Take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to yonder water side and, when thou comest there, I charge throw my sword into that water, and come again and tell me what thou seest.”
⁴

Bedevere takes Excalibur, leaves Arthur, and goes to the nearby waterside, but he cannot bring himself to throw Excalibur into the water. Instead he hides it under a tree, goes back to Arthur, and tells him that he has obeyed his instructions. When Arthur asks him what he saw when he threw Excalibur into the water, Bedevere answers, “I saw nothing but waves and winds.” Arthur knows this cannot be true. He berates Bedevere and tells him to obey his orders.

Again Bedevere goes to the waterside and takes Excalibur from the place where he has hidden it, but again he cannot bring himself to throw it into the water. Back again he goes to Arthur and again Arthur asks him what he saw. Bedevere, who is obviously as lacking in imagination as he is disobedient, tells Arthur the sword simply slipped beneath the waves.

For a third time Arthur tells Bedevere what he must do. This time, Bedevere obeys the order he has been given; he takes Excalibur and hurls it as far as he can from the shore. “And there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword into the water.”
⁵

By Tennyson’s account the arm that came up out of the water was,
“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.” This arm and hand are usually said to have belonged to the “Lady of the Lake.” Malory’s Bedevere goes again to Arthur, one last time, and tells him of the hand that rose from the water and took Excalibur. This time Arthur is content with Bedevere’s report.

This account is almost entirely obvious fiction. Anyone who has read the children’s story “The Three Bears” will recognize the triplet device that has Bedevere go to the waterside three times: this is the storytelling equivalent of cosmological constant in physics—it makes things work. To tell the tale this way, Malory had to deposit the wounded Arthur some way from the water side, despite the fact that in the next chapter he has Bedevere carry Arthur to the shore, thus begging the question, Why did Bedevere not take Arthur to the shore in the first place? If he had done so, this would have allowed Arthur to see what Bedevere did with Excalibur. Of course, this would have spoiled the story. Clearly Malory was determined to use the triplet device before his big finale: the “Lady of the Lake” reaching out of the water to take Excalibur, even if this meant Arthur had to be offstage when it happened.

Such plot devices are suspect, especially if, as in this instance, they are part of an episode that involves romance or magic-miracles. However, there is reason to believe that Malory did not invent this story in its entirety. Malory, a man of the late Middle Ages living in the heart of England, is unlikely to have invented the idea of throwing a sword into water or the idea that lakes contained something supernatural. If he had invented this, it would be an amazing coincidence, because, almost one thousand years before, in the time of Arthur Mac Aedan, it was a common practice among Celtic people of the Old Way to throw valuable objects, such as swords, into water, as tribute to the spirits that some of them believed resided there.

Malory continues, “Then Sir Bedevere took … [Arthur] upon his back, and so went with him to that water side.”
⁶
Women wearing black hoods arrive in a barge into which they place Arthur before taking him away to Avalon to be healed. “Comfort thyself … for I will into the vale of Avilion [
sic
] to heal me of my grievous wound,” Arthur says.
⁷

Geoffrey, writing more than three centuries before Malory, calls
Arthur’s last resting place the “Isle of Avalon.”
⁸
Avalon is described as an island by almost everyone; the main exceptions being those who like to say Avalon was Glastonbury (which is not an island, although many people have gone to tortuous lengths to claim that at one time it was).

It was, literally, more than Malory’s life was worth to write something that overtly challenged the power of the Church. He had to dilute his source material with copious dollops of Christianity, sufficient to prevent it being too obvious that the story of Arthur was steeped in the Old Way. It would have been especially dangerous for Malory if he had left Arthur in the hands of obviously capable independent women, because such women suggested the Old Way of the druids. Even if this were not so, the women were still capable and independent, and capable independent women were definitely unacceptable to the Church.

Consequently, at this point Malory sprinkles his account of the death of Arthur with some clumsy Christian symbolism. The day after Arthur is supposed to have been taken away by the women in black hoods, Malory has Bedevere come to a chapel in which he finds a tomb and a hermit, who until recently had been nothing less than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
⁹
This retired archbishop tells Bedevere that the night before, some women had arrived with a dead body. Bedevere tells the hermit-archbishop that the body was Arthur’s—so much for Arthur being taken to Avalon to be healed of his grievous wound. Bedevere then joins the erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury in some fasting and praying.

In this passage, written almost one thousand years after the actual death of Arthur, Christianity and the Old Way clash (although, as we will see, there is a possible historical foundation upon which both versions might stand). The matter of the Archbishop and his chapel has clearly been clumsily grafted onto an original and better story that had Arthur taken away by women in a barge to Avalon. It is impossible to believe that Malory really wanted his Arthur buried in a retired Archbishop’s chapel within walking distance of the place where he had just said Arthur had gone off in a boat to a mysterious island with black-hooded women. (Malory’s Bedevere should have gone in the barge with the women and saved himself a walk).