Northern Earth Special Book Review
THE REIGN OF ARTHUR - FROM HISTORY TO LEGEND by Christopher Gidlow.
Sutton Publishing Limited. ISBN 0-7509-3418-2. 268 pp. £ 20 hb.
Of the making of books about Arthur, there literally is no end - understandably, because of the endless fascination of the story itself, whether in its most basic form, of a briefly successful Dark Age fight-back against North Sea invaders which .for a moment, seemed as though it would keep post-Roman England a Celtic land, or in its medieval transformation into a highly-coloured story of chivalrous knights serving a great king, then following a holy quest, and of their ruler being brought down to final doom by his wife's fatal betrayal .And, to strengthen still more the grip of such archetypal stories, we're faced by the compulsive puzzle as to the historicity of those Dark Age origins - the search for "the real Arthur" - since none of the classic "Big Six" questions, "who, what, why, when, where, and how ?", have ever been definitively answered, or rather, from ambiguous scraps of clues surviving to us from those times, far too many competing answers have been derived.
What, then, does this book do that should make someone interested in "the great Arthur puzzle" want to add it to the - perhaps already groaning - shelves? Perhaps the answer had best begin with what it does NOT do. To use the recent jargon, it's not sexed-up. A rarity among such books, it doesn't purport to dramatically discover yet another new candidate for the "real" historical Arthur. Instead, thoroughly sane in its approach, it assesses thoroughly what can plausibly be drawn from those early sources we do have - including one often neglected, the Welsh triads, those three line mnemonics used by bards to remind them of stories they wished to recite - in the process also soberly weighing the main previously suggested theories.
This is by no means an entirely new approach, but Gidlow seems conspicuously fair-minded, and, faced by the voluminous mass of previous theorising, notably thorough in assessing all the likelier possibilities. [On that point, it is worth remarking that he avoids any involvement with the later chivalrous romances - it is often suggested that they embed, in garbled form, (rather as Stephen Hawking now thinks information can escape from a black hole) traces of far earlier Celtic matter, but steering clear of such hard-to-focus speculation greatly helps in keeping the book to manageable limits].
Gidlow analyses all "the usual suspects" in the way of primary sources, from the only text almost contemporary with Arthur, although not naming him, Gildas. Through the first mention of Arthur in the Gododdin battle poem, Nennius' ragbag of heaped-up historical materials, the year-lists of the Annales Cambriae. The Saints' Lives that mention Arthur, the folktaleish material of the Mabinogion and the triads, to the 12th C best seller that turned Arthur into a Europe-wide phenomenon, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Brittonum.
To begin with that last, he plausibly suggests that Geoffrey's claim to draw on a mysterious book in the British language, often dismissed as an attempt to conceal how much of his "history" is his own fantasising invention, is likelier to have a basis in truth, i.e. that he did genuinely draw on earlier material. Gidlow shows how some of Geoffrey's unlikelier statements could stem from misunderstandings or misreading of such sources - for instance mistaking Hibernius for Hiberius could have led him to convert plausible conflict with an Irish raider into preposterous war against a Roman emperor!
On our first source, Gildas, Gidlow is extremely interesting, both in the way he goes back to Biblical references to tease out what message the sharp-tongued monk may have intended when he used animal imagery to describe the kinglet-cum-warlords he denounced. And how he explores the possibilities raised by "the dogs that weren't barked at", i.e. other British rulers who must have existed but were spared monkly flaying.
A related geographical strength in his approach is to look back to the Roman administrative structure for clues to the ever-vexed question as to where in Britain Arthur "belonged", i.e. why references to his activities cluster in some widely separated areas - the far North and the South-West in particular, and to a lesser extent Wales - and are near absent from others. He even finds intriguing clues to this puzzle in the two "Wonders" of Ercing in Herefordshire, the stone that supposedly bore the paw print of Arthur's hound, and the size-and-shape changing grave of the son that Arthur killed, both, despite being recorded by Nennius himself, usually briskly dismissed as foolish folklore.
It would be possible to quote innumerable more instances of how Gidlow's valuably open-minded approach informs and enlightens without unwisely trying to force possibilities to become certainties, but a few more examples must suffice: his re-trial of the accusation that the Glastonbury monks faked Arthur's grave; his rediscovery of, and tentative support for, a forgotten but plausible Victorian candidate for the location of the battle of Badon, which, as Gildas said, stopped the Saxon advance for over forty years .and is, as Gidlow points out, the strongest single argument for the existence of .if not Arthur, someone surprisingly like him - after all, SOMEONE must have led the British there, so if not Arthur, who? His analysis of alternative explanations for the strange fact that the first two leaders of the West Saxons both had Celtic names; relatedly. In terms of genealogies, he also raises the intriguing question why later Celtic rulers never claimed descent from Arthur - after all, although a little more restrained than Saxon ones beginning with the god Woden, Welsh royal genealogies often boldly began with the rebel Roman emperor Magnus Maximus, so why did none instead dare claim descent from their own great war-leader? And finally, my personal favourite discovery in Gidlow's book, the first plausible explanation I've seen as to why a triad listed Arthur as one of the "three frivolous bards of Britain."
To sum up, this book (very readable in style, incidentally, with good maps and photographs that, if few in number, are of real interest) would, I believe, be enjoyed as much by those who begin with no knowledge of the controversies surrounding the historicity of Arthur, and simply want a clear idea as to where the bottom line of truth might plausibly be, as by those who already have some, maybe even fairly extensive, knowledge, but need help in cutting through the ever-thickening tangle of rival theories and speculations.
The author, currently Events and Live Interpretation Manager for Hampton Court and the Tower of London, was president of Oxford University Arthurian Society during his history degree.
Reviewed by Steve Sneyd
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