Legend vs. History

It will be necessary to focus on time.  When the wounded Arthur left the coast of Britain in 542 to be ferried to his hidden island for surgery or ancient burial practices we will never know for sure where he went or how he traveled.  The dark ages were upon this section of the world.   In that sense he was a last Roman, as historians have frequently observed, a last king of the ancient world.  Arthur fell as Rome itself was falling.  Eastern England had already submitted to Saxon rule, there an admirable, efficient new race of Saxon kings – who never succeeded for long in conquering Arthurs’ kingdom before or after his death – rose to the fore.  They soon subscribed even more ardently than the older Celtic kings to King Arthur’s legend.  They were pleased by the thought, however, erroneous, that he was buried in Glastonbury, a Saxon town. 

Dr. Goodrich says:  The purpose of my search for King Arthur was to solve several of the problems handed down through the ages and in stripping the legend to thereby present a fully authenticated portrait of the king and his kingdom.  At its most exciting the search yielded the day when I opened an Ordnance Survey map and moved my finger to the spot where so many centuries ago the Grail Castle stood, at its most enchanting it offered the day, a year later, when my husband and I stepped from the punt onto the little island and saw before us the soft-colored orange ruins of later fortresses.  Within minutes, the sun disappeared behind rosy clouds and a deluge of driving rain obscured even our hands before our faces – just as the medieval manuscripts said happened daily on the Isle of Avalon in the middle of those dangerous, dark blue western waves.

But behind the desire to bring a lost Golden Age to light, there lies my strongly held belief that such discoveries are infinitely enriching, that they amount to more than just setting the record straight.  From King Arthur –from his bravery and daring action, his charisma and dynamism, his dignity and his honorable life – we can draw renewed hope.

The time has come for the legend to take a back seat to the historical King Arthur, a superior leader of the ancient world.

The Regnal List

Part IV: The Regnal List

Part 4:  Many English historians became discouraged with the myths and mystification of the Arthurian literature.  And, only a specialist of medieval languages can read the manuscripts in their original form anyway, a task compounded in difficulty by the fact that one must figure out each writer’s idiosyncratic style and vocabulary.  There were neither grammar texts for Old French, nor dictionaries in the Middle Ages.  One was free to write as one liked – this of course complicates the reader’s task no end.

Confronted with swan knights, tyrants, giants, dragons, and sword bridges, and weary of imputations of incest, adultery, and treachery, many historians must have willingly handed both King Arthur and his supposed kingdom back to the Old French writers of romances. 

Therefore, a good knowledge of medieval French is essential to the understanding of the manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  This is when Old French was the official language of Britain.  It will prove to be the key that opens the doors to discovery and allow us to pierce not only the upper level of the texts but their hidden, secret language.  This is where someone like Dr. Goodrich steps in as her command of this language and interest in the relationship of language to Anthropology helps one see through the cryptic messages.

Another key lies in the approach.  I have positioned Arthur as living in Britain at a time for which there are virtually no extant records or chronology or annals.  Thus, when it comes time to seek his probable birthplace, the search will be not for ruins of a medieval castle but for a barely discernible castle mound of piled earth – a construction characteristic of the Dark Ages.  I think of Arthur being not in those territories which he could not have conquered but in those which the Saxons failed to overrun.  This is why, with Goodrich’s help I will forgo looking for him in Cornwall, or in England for that matter, or modern Wales, where his name does not appear in the regnal lists. 

Regnal chronology is, specifically, the study of king lists or more generally put: sequences of governance in the history of a state, and the organizing of such data.