The survival of King Arthur
Why is a hero who almost certainly didn't exist still so powerful.
The ancient story of King Arthur, based on no more than the minimum of evidence, is still powerful today through books and movies.
He didn't exist. Well, not as a king, anyway, and there's no firm contemporary record of any real man behind the stories or any of his deeds. But King Arthur continues to grip most of the English-speaking bits of the world, and a fair proportion of the rest of the planet, through books, movies and endless archaeological and scholarly debates. Why?
Myths normally work by using a story to explain the otherwise inexplicable, or to explain origins of customs, living conditions and the geographic location of particular tribes and nations. Sometimes they transform into religions, or are the husk of a once great religion in which all have lost faith. And in many cases, the characters and places in those myths are vaguely, often very vaguely, based on real people and places, or at least on their memory. None are created completely from scratch.
So where does King Arthur fit into all this? Most of the time he is a medieval knight gadding about the countryside with his Knights of the Round Table, guarding his queen Guinevere from allcomers, including Sir Lancelot, and overseeing the quest of the Holy Grail. Since movies were invented he has looked like Robert Taylor, Sean Connery and Nigel Terry, among others. He's meant to represent all the heroic bits of English chivalry who vanquish foes and save damsels in distress.
So bearing in mind that there never was such a king in the medieval period, perhaps he is a nostalgic whim of tea-swilling English people who is meant to remind everyone of how they are supposed to act in a sunny neverland of right winning over wrong. But myths go deeper than that.
First of all, why call him Arthur? It's a corruption of a Roman name, Artorius, and the Romans ran Britain as they ran the rest of the known world of the time for a few centuries up to the early 400s after Christ. That's hundreds of years before "knights were bold".
To explain the survival of the name during that gap, let's go into a bit of medieval monastic politics. Glastonbury Abbey was probably the richest monastery in Britain in the twelfh century. But a monk left a candle too close to a manuscript one day and the whole place burned down, with the rebuilding costs hugely outstripping the wealth even of Glastonbury.
The abbey needed money and one day, lo and behold, the tomb of "Arthur and Guinevere" was found. They were already known from vague Welsh legend and romance and there were lots of places apart from Glastonbury which claimed an association with them. Glastonbury itself had also attracted myths, being the place where Joseph of Arimathea alegedly brought Christianity to Britain together with the Holy Grail, so the two legends together exerted a great pull on the national imagination. As a result of the tomb discovery, Glastonbury managed to attract pilgrims, pilgrims with money, and eventually King Henry II graced it his presence, support - and money.
And that was it. Henry was fired with the idea of an English national hero and English national myth and, being of French extraction as were many of the Kings of England after 1066, he saw Arthur as his way of becoming more naturalised and acceptable to the natives. From then on Arthur (whether or not someone of that name was or was not found in Glastonbury - there's nothing there now) became centre of the English national myth.
He stayed there, through many rewrites and additions to the story, until the definitive story - the Morte D'arthur - was written by Thomas Malory in 1485. Then, as Europeans colonised much of the rest of the world, Arthur became an international hero and in many cases lost his English-ness and his cultural and national origins. Apart from the international growth of the story, helped by subsequent literary treatment by the likes of Tennyson (Idylls of the King) and TH White (The Once and Future King, part of which was later filmed as "The Sword in the Stone) the legend did not die. Movies later helped keep it alive.
And it's still there. Sadly, the Welsh orgins of the story appeared to die out and it's only with modern scholarship and archaeology that some of the original sources of the story (whether true or not - and there's little chance of ever verifying that because little was written down at the supposed time of the "original" Arthur) have come to light. Meanwhile the recent film King Arthur did much to put paid to the knights in shining armour image and resurrect the Romano-British origins of the story.
But like much mainstream religion, great myths never go away. There will be more Arthur stories and more Arthur films. There will be more searches for the Holy Grail. And more and more people will come to Glastonbury, whether the monks were lying about their lucrative discovery or not.
