Refining the Arthurian Question

It seems like “Did King Arthur exist in any real sense?” is a good question to ask. I’ve asked it, read about it, thought about it. But, says Geoffrey Ashe in The Discovery of King Arthur, this is the wrong question. If you mean, “Was there ever an Arthur who was King of All Britain, seated with his Knights at the Round Table, chivalric defender of all good, beholder of the Holy Grail, aided and counseled by Merlin the Magician?” the answer is clearly, “No.” End of story. This Arthur begins to appear (some features of him at least) in the twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, whereas Arthur, if he was real, lived many generations before in (depending on your sources) the fifth or sixth century. Ashe says that the proper question is, “Which historical figure did Geoffrey have in mind when he created the legend?”

I enjoyed Ashe’s book a lot. A lot! And I like his answer: Looking only at the contradictory chronicles from Britain, it is difficult to pinpoint a person who might be the source of the legend. But if we note that Geoffrey of Monmouth three times associates Arthur with the reign of Emperor Leo (r. 457-474) and has him traveling to Gaul near the end of his life, we find a historically documented person who matches: Riothamus, called “King of the Britons,” who came to Gaul in 469 at the request of the western emperor to fight off Euric, King of the Visigoths. (It appears that Riothamus could be a romanization of a Brittonic word meaning “high king,” which could explain why no British document includes the name. “Riothamus” presumably corresponds with some “Arthur” or “Aurelius” in one of the British or Saxon chronicles.)

But is Ashe’s question really the right one, either? Am I satisfied to know that Geoffrey of Monmouth, when he gave us the greatest king in British history (whether real or imaginary), had in mind a fellow whose exploits in Gaul are the only historically certain facts? I am not. Maybe it will help to think of the problem.

The problem is that, since the protectors of civilization and education, i.e. the Romans, had abandoned Britain in the early fifth century, and illiterate barbarians, i.e. the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, had begun to swarm in around the middle of that same century, there is no consistent British record of British events written at the time. It’s hard for us to imagine in an age when almost any Google search brings up hundreds of thousands of written pieces of information, but we only have a few documents out of Britain from the time when Arthur supposedly lived or even from the next couple of centuries. Now, the authors of those sporadic treatises had to have learned to read and write somewhere, so presumably literacy was preserved in some tiny pockets, but those grocery lists and inventories and theological musings have all disappeared. What we have left are just a few writings, spread out over centuries, that mention various kings with little consistency of names or dates (or dating systems). So the question can’t be “Which established historical personage of British history from the time is the prototype of the legendary King Arthur?” There are no clearly established historical personages since the document record in Britain is so sparse and erratic.

Geoffrey of Monmouth mentions an “ancient British book” that he used as a source. Now, he might have been pulling our leg. Cervantes claimed that his book of Don Quixote came from a history by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Goldman says that The Princess Bride is an abridgement of a book by S. Morgenstern. These authors merely used a fun device to make their fiction seem more worthy of our suspension of disbelief. Geoffrey might have done the same thing. On the other hand, he might conceivably have been in earnest about his source, and so one might propose that The Question is “Where is that missing ancient British book?” Since that question has not been answered satisfactorily in nine-hundred years, however, we should set it aside for now. Besides, is that really what you or I want to know? A handful of historians, I’m sure, would die happy to have found that book. And I would be very excited to hear that it had been discovered in some monastic cellar. But surely the whereabouts of that book cannot be the central question we all have in mind about King Arthur.

So what do we in fact want to know? I suggest that the question is simply, “Did some king unite the Britons for a while in the dark times of Saxon invasion?” And the answer to that question is clearly, “Yes!” Whatever his name was – Arthur, Aurelius, or Riothamus (I think his name was probably Arthurius Aurelius and that the Romans in Gaul knew him as Riothamus) – all those otherwise irreconcilable documents and all other evidence agree that a high king once led the petty British kingdoms and kept the Saxons at bay for a while. Maybe it was in the 460s; maybe it was in the 530s. If we depend on British sources, we’ll never know. But they all agree it happened: the world as Britons knew it was ending, yet some king held off the apocalypse for a season. And that’s a story that gets handed down, even in Dark Ages of illiteracy. That’s a story that acquires legendary status and then legendary episodes and characters. That’s a story that could inspire Geoffrey of Monmouth to get the ball rolling on the greatest theme in British literature, what has become known simply as the Matter of Britain.

Yes, that king, whom we know as King Arthur whatever his real name might have been, existed. And now, having read Ashe’s work, I believe that that king must be the same as Riothamus, because only a king who had quelled the waves of Saxon invasion in Britain could have afforded to take his army to Gaul to help out there.