LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR Richard Barber THE BOYDELL PRESS LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR selected and presented by Richard Barber THE BOYDELL PRESS Introduction, selection and adaptation © Richard Barber 2001 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2001 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 0 85115 837 4 Arthur and Tristan originally appeared in Legends of King Arthur, published by The Folio Society in 2000, and are reprinted with their permission. The editor and publishers are grateful to the following translators and publishers for their permission to reprint extracts from copyright material: The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1966), copyright © Lewis Thorpe 1966; The High Book of the Grail, translated by Nigel Bryant (D.S. Brewer, Cambridge 1978), copyright © Nigel Bryant 1978; The Death of King Arthur translated by James Cable (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1971), copyright © James Cable 1971; Roman van Walewein (Arthurian Archives: Dutch Romances I) translated by David F. Johnson (D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2000) copyright © David F. Johnson; Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, translated by A.T. Hatto (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1960), copyright © A.T.Hatto 1960; The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, retold by Joseph Bédier, translated by Hilaire Belloc (George Allen & Company Ltd, London, 1913) copyright © the Estate of Hilaire Belloc. The text has been slightly modified from the editions cited above in order to harmonise spelling of names and to avoid abrupt changes of style and vocabulary. Such changes have been kept to the minimum required to ensure that the text reads easily. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Keith Harrison (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998) copyright © Keith Harrison 1983, 1998. The translation was originally commissioned by The Folio Society. The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA Printed in Finland CONTENTS Introduction 1 ARTHUR 5 ARTHUR THE EMPEROR 13 ARTHUR AND THE ROUND TABLE 53 GAWAIN 153 SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT 159 THE ROMANCE OF SIR GAWAIN 225 TRISTAN AND ISEULT 315 TRISTAN AND ISEULT 323 TRISTAN THE COURTIER 395 Acknowledgements 461 Further Reading 462 ILLUSTRATIONS Arthur fights a Roman general, from The book of the treasure of histories, written and illuminated about 1415 Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, MS Arsenal 5077, f. 298 King Arthur and King Ban plan a tournament as Queen Guenevere and courtiers watch Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, MS fr. 95, f. 291 The Wedding of Arthur and Guenevere in Chroniques de Hainault © Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, f. 39v The lady tempts Sir Gawain: from the unique manuscripts of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight By permission of the British Library, MS Cotton Nero X, f. 125v James Archer, La Mort d’Arthur, oil painting 1860 © Manchester City Art Galleries The Tristan stained glass for Harden Grange executed by Morris & Company, 1862 Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, West Yorkshire, UK/Bridgeman Art Library James Archer, Iseult Private Collection Introduction Introduction INTRODUCTION THE IMAGE OF ARTHUR has haunted the poets and writers of western Europe for nearly nine centuries, and there is no sign of an end to the reign of the ‘once and future king’ in the world of literature. The Arthurian epic is as popular a subject now as it was when it was first fash- ioned, and the stories about Arthur and the heroes associated with him come in a bewildering number of guises. There has never been just one authentic version of his deeds, and new Arthurs are still being created apace. All this springs from a figure so obscure that we cannot even be sure that he existed, a shadow of a shadow in the fragments of history and poetry that survive from sixth-century Wales. His deeds have often, if not always, been those of other men; even the twelve great battles which the Welsh chronicler Nennius tells us about in the eighth century may be those involving other leaders, and his last victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon, centre of so much speculation and invention, is not attrib- uted to him in the one contemporary record of it. What inspired the Welsh poets, however, was not the hero himself, whoever he may have been, but an idea, an idea which was a rallying-call to a people in retreat, driven by the Saxons into the western extremities of the land that had once been theirs: ‘Their land they shall lose, except wild Wales.’ Arthur, who had once held the Saxons at bay, would return to conquer them. And, in a manner of speaking, he has done so. Later medieval stories about him make him emperor of much of Europe; and his story was called ‘the matter of Britain’. The other great ‘matters’ which medieval poets celebrated were those of Troy and France, tales now long forgotten or best known in other, older versions. Arthur came to play a leading part in the literature of France and Germany, and later of England, conquering minds and imaginations if not bodies and lands. It is he, obscure and perhaps fictional, who is the archetypal medieval heroic figure, not the real and imperial Charlemagne, around whom the matter of France revolved. 2 Introduction Much of the credit for the creation of this figure must go to Geoffrey of Monmouth, probably of Welsh blood, but trained in the courts of the Norman kings and the schools of Paris. Seeking to record what scraps he could find of the Welsh past, he shaped a history of the British people which matched the exploits of Rome and France, in which Arthur almost conquers Rome, echoing the careers of the emperors of the later Roman period who began as British generals. It was fiction, but far from implau- sible, and it caught the imagination of his contemporaries; a few grumbled that there was no trace of Arthur in reliable books, but for the most part Geoffrey’s work was taken up with enthusiasm, and incorporated into historical chronicles, where it filled an awkward blank in the past. From chronicles in Latin, poets retold the story in French verse; and with the advent of a new and sophisticated court literature in French and German, the Arthurian legends began to take shape. The most remarkable thing about the stories grouped around Arthur is the extraordinary rapidity with which they were created. The first romances appear in the middle of the twelfth century, about 1160; by 1225 there was a huge and complex mass of interwoven tales, a ‘cycle’ of stories about the heroes of the Round Table – which itself had only appeared in the 1150s. Even more dramatic was the growth of stories about the Grail, invented in the early 1190s; within twenty years there was not just one fully developed romance, but at least three widely differing versions of its story. It seemed that the legends gathered up in their wake whatever was new and exciting: the idea of courtly love, the new enthu- siasm for chivalry, the sport of tournaments, even the spiritual teachings of the Cistercian order and the debate about the real presence of Christ’s body in the Mass. Perhaps precisely because there was no real historical core to the stories, they were free to develop according to each writer’s own agenda. We find a huge range of styles. There is an entrancing simplicity to some of the early Tristan poems; yet Gottfried von Strassburg tells the same story in an exceptionally sophisticated, highly philosophical style. Chrétien de Troyes explores the psychology of his characters in long monologues, while later writers prefer to plunge into lengthy descriptions of the phys- ical violence of the tournament. Wolfram von Eschenbach envelops the Grail story in alchemical lore and eastern mysteries, ranging magpie-like through a vast store of knowledge. And the creator of Galahad draws on Cistercian theology to create a didactic story on the spiritual values of knighthood. Yet by the mid-thirteenth century, something akin to an accepted core of stories had emerged. At the beginning of that century, an obscure writer called Robert de Boron had taken the story of the Grail and had given it a Introduction 3 prehistory, a kind of Hollywood ‘prequel’, which in a stroke of aston- ishing boldness created a chronicle of the guardians of the Grail from Joseph of Arimathea, who had overseen the burial of Christ, to King Arthur’s days. The story of Arthur, in this version, was intimately bound up with the story of man’s redemption through Christ, and this over- arching concept is present in the so-called ‘Vulgate Cycle’, which spans the period from the Crucifixion to Arthur’s death, bringing in the tale of Arthur himself, the adventures of Lancelot and the quest for the Grail, before recounting the tragedy of the last days of Arthur’s reign. Later writers reshaped and extended this material according to their own tastes; Lancelot’s story predominates in one version, and the Grail story is drawn into this entirely secular tale of the love of Arthur’s greatest knight for his queen, Guinevere.