Short ruminations on Arthur.

Finding the Dux Bellorum

Separating fact from fiction is a huge part of looking at the Brythonic Heroic Age, and especially Arthur. The problem is where do you draw the line, and how do you avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water? There must be a skeptical approach to many things, and second guessing yourself should be a consistent theme in research. There is no one correct approach for this, but there are a few pitfalls that one may err into that I would like to talk about.

The first is the creation of a ‘real’ Arthur directly from Monmouth. Deciding that Monmouth’s work is true and factual through and through (which as we have seen before in earlier articles, Geoffrey is garbled at best, and straight fiction at the worst). Many will then take this and create their own largely fictional (and I do mean fictional, not speculative) work including almost no other contemporary evidence whatsoever. This is largely done by just taking events from Geoffrey, swapping his later names for ‘earlier’ Welsh names (which actually are closer to being contemporary to Geoffrey’s time than Arthur’s), giving it a coat of Sub-Roman grime and then calling it a day.

This is enormously appealing because as an author you have a simple all inclusive account of Arthur’s life ready to go, with no real critical look at what other sources say. I have at length spoken of the approach Geoffrey Ashe took with his ‘Arthur as Riothamus’ theory, being that one must assume that all mentions of Arthur are mentions of your proposed candidate, and I do not disagree overall, but there are incongruencies that plague this approach if one assumes that Geoffrey’s Arthur, the Arthur of Y Gododdin and Taliesin, and the Welsh folkloric Arthur are all the same.

Monmouth’s Arthur has clear echoes of Magnus Maximus, and Geoffrey Ashe makes a strong case even that Riothamus IS Monmouth’s Arthur, corroborated by evidence from Legenda Sancti Goeznovii. This is where the incongruity becomes involved, as Riothamus is almost certainly not the Arthur who found victory at Badon. Dating of Badon through Gildas, who as Andrew Breeze points out was very likely writing around the early days of the Volcanic Winter of 536, and states Badon as happening 44 years before writing, This places Badon around 492. Bede also mentions Badon as happening 44 years after the Adventus Saxonum, which he gives as happening in roughly between 446-450, giving Badon the years of 490-494. Bede was obviously using Gildas as a source for the period, and some have taken the discrepancy in interpretation of Gildas’ 44 years to possibly mean that Bede may have been working from an earlier copy of Gildas, and is likely more correct on the matter. The interesting element here is the overlap in the early 490s regardless. This Annales Cambriae’s placement of Badon in 517, which when taking into account an error interpreting ‘from the Incarnation of Christ’ to be ‘from the passion of Christ’ corrects to roughly 490. Most evidence considered leads to 490 making the most sense.

Badon sits strongly as the anchoring point for Arthur’s legend. While Gildas doesn’t tell us the victor of Badon, almost every other mention of it attaches one name, Arthur.

Many approaches to finding Arthur lead to vague entities of a generic ‘Southern Arthur’ often claimed to be a lost leader of the sub-Roman remnants of the Silures, and this vagueness works in favor of the theory. The same can be said with a vague ‘Arthur of the North’, with no clear connection or corroboration of a historic figure. That is not to say that these can’t be correct, but a figure such as the ambiguous ‘Silurian Arthur’ or even ‘Dumnonian Arthur’ lead to flights of fancy of a pan-island High-King, an extremely improbable situation in sub-Roman Britain. When pared down to the basics, such as conjectural instances like Moffat’s idea of a vague Calchfynydd based Northern Arthur, this approach is overall extremely safe. This isn’t unacceptable by any means, but it also further limits the greater picture that can be painted.

On the other hand, the approach of ‘THIS GUY IS ARTHUR” (I’m even poking at myself a little here), often lead to digging for evidence to prove it instead of examining evidence and coming to a conclusion. This often involves lengthy exercises in reevaluating chronology, misplacing figures where needed to fit the ‘acceptable’ chronology. This is an extremely precarious situation as it leads to a feedback loop. ‘If so and so is wrong in the accepted chronology, then just maybe this guy is in the wrong place as well” leading to continuous redating until everything falls into place to fit a persons wanted narrative.

This is one reason why I have taken a step back from Arthur himself for a while other than high-points that I think the Coeling candidate for Arthur Arthwys ap Mar seems to have accounted for. I have stated before that Arthur as he comes to us in later literature is certainly a composite, possibly even as early as some of the legendary Welsh matter. While I am not saying that this approach is the only correct one, I have found that it gives me pause before attributing everything that is found say, in Caradoc’s ‘Life of Gildas’ to Arthwys ap Mar, when it easily could have been another figure, or wholly apocryphal. Abandoning any sort of nuance and trying to account for all of the literature with a candidate is just flat out folly, and leads to all sorts of issues that strain credulity. You can’t however just willy-nilly throw everything out either, because then you are left with… nothing at all, and a world without Arthur would be a sad one indeed.