Infectious enthusiasm

‘Arthur Draws the Sword from the Stone’ (1911) by Walter Crane

Illustrating Camelot
by Barbara Tepa Lupack, Alan Lupack.
D S Brewer (Arthurian Studies), 2008.

As befits a study on Arthurian book illustrations, Illustrating Camelot has a generous helping of examples of the genre – forty in monochrome and thirty-two in colour. If a picture is worth a thousand words then we have a text automatically augmented by 72,000 words!

And what a text it is. Using thirteen named illustrators as her framework, Barbara Tepa Lupack takes us through two centuries and more of imaging the court of Arthur, commenting on the politics, mores and personalities of the times and their inter-relationship with the depiction of the Arthurian ideal.

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A tragical history

King Arthur: photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain by W Shakespere,
in The Tragedy of Arthur, a novel
by Arthur Phillips.
Gerald Duckworth & Company, 2011.

A lost Elizabethan play and a legendary king: one can hardly go wrong with two cultural icons such as Shakespeare and King Arthur, can one? And if a unique copy were to turn up linking the two then this would indeed be a high point in the literary and historical calendar, would it not?

In 2011 bestselling American author Arthur Phillips claimed to possess a quarto of The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain and even offered us an annotated modern rendition of the drama, preceded by a memoir chronicling how it came into his possession.

Of course The Tragedy of Arthur was a cleverly contrived piece of fiction or even metafiction, proclaiming both its authenticity and its fakery and thus having its cake and eating it. But the appended five-act play still stands in its own right: ingenious forgery or not, does it stand up to scrutiny either as a piece of theatre or as an evocation of the playwright’s style?

A treasure chest of relics

King Arthur’s Round Table in Winchester’s Guildhall by Christophe Finot

The Medieval Quest for Arthur
by Robert Rouse and Cory Rushton.
The History Press, 2005.

Today a book possibly entitled The Invention of King Arthur might imply subterfuge and forgery. Several centuries ago, when “to invent” would simply mean “to chance upon”, it would instead imply a re-discovery of what already existed.

Nowadays we are rightly wary of Arthurian relics such as Arthur’s Tomb at Glastonbury, Arthur’s Seal, Gawain’s skull, Lancelot’s sword and the Winchester Round Table, as objects more likely to be “invented” in the modern sense of “made up” rather than pre-existing.

In Caxton’s 15th century, with fewer critical tools at their disposal, people were more inclined to accept such chanced-upon unprovenanced evidence at face value (though then as now there were always doubters and detractors, as the wholesale destruction of saintly relics in the English Reformation was to demonstrate); however, I am of course aware that weeping stuatues and their ilk still excite the credulous in our own time.

Passionate but not persuasive

King Arthur: photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

Arthur And The Lost Kingdoms
by Alistair Moffat.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.

Thank goodness these “lost” kingdoms are not “holy” kingdoms, as is claimed by conspiracy theorists from southeast Wales! At least we don’t have to suffer a rant about secret histories suppressed by the ignorant English and the arrogant establishment familiar from similar “histories”, “true” stories and “final” discoveries.

Instead, the major part of this book is given over to a study of the area between the Walls, both Antonine and Hadrianic, before, during and after the Roman occupation of Britain. Moffat, a native of the Scottish Border country, sympathetically evokes the Celtic tribes (the Damnonii, Novantae, Selgovae and Votadini) who, squeezed between Gaelic, Pictish and Anglian peoples, forged successor kingdoms in the Dark Ages.

He is clearly trying to restore a sense of forgotten history to the Lowland Scots and, several quibbles aside (such as projecting back late and post-medieval lore onto the Iron Age and early medieval period, and a lack of caution over placename evidence), I think he is largely successful in that restoration. It is, however, when we come to the association of Arthur with this area that the real problems start.

A reliable overview

King Arthur: photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

King Arthur: Hero and Legend, by Richard Barber
Boydell Press, 2004.

Richard Barber’s classic Arthurian study was deservedly dusted off and re-issued to coincide with the film of the same name (the very curious King Arthur, starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley), though there was absolutely no other connection between the two other than the title.

Its first appearance in 1961 (as Arthur of Albion), despite being presented to a middle-brow audience, by its style betrayed its origins in academic research; it still occasionally appears on second-hand bookshop shelves. Next, King Arthur in Legend and History appeared in the 70s during a boom in larger format non-fiction paperbacks; unfortunately the glued binding was poor quality and all the colour plates in my copy fell out.

The present revised and extended reincarnation is substantially the same as that which appeared in both hardback and paperback in the 80s and 90s, and this time the plates stay put and the format is more friendly.

Not academic but accessible

Original artwork by Simon Rouse for the Pendragon Society

The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends by Ronan Coghlan.
Element Books, 1992.

Often plundered and even plagiarised – frequently online and most notably in print by Mike Dixon-Kennedy in his Arthurian Myth and Legend: an A-Z of People and Places (1996) – this was the first really accessible dictionary of Arthurian personages, locales and other miscellanea.

While not an academic publication the Encyclopaedia at least references most of its entries (unlike its main rival, mentioned above) while still striving to be user-friendly.

This original edition includes full-page line drawings by Courtney Davis in a neo-Celtic style, but soon gave way to a fully-illustrated full-colour coffee-table edition which must have sold in even more numbers.

Modern Arthuriana: a bibliography

Original artwork by Simon Rouse for the Journal of the Pendragon Society

Ann F Howey and Stephen R Reimer (editors).
A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500-2000),
D S Brewer, 2006.

What is Arthuriana? The authors choose to define it as “the Arthurian legend in modern English-language fiction”, and include such manifestations as literary (but not non-fictional) texts, audio-visual media (film, television, radio, audio-books) and aspects of popular culture such as graphic novels and games.

Aimed at students (the general public as well as scholars), collectors and librarians, this compilation is ideal both as a reference work and as a treasure chest to dip into.

Six sections (prefixed by the letters A to F) list works under authors, performers or titles, as appropriate. The listings (literature; comics and graphic novels; film, TV and radio; music; games; fine art and graphic design) are supplemented by an index and a catalogue of Arthurian characters and themes; for most of the entries there are annotations after the publishing details, some terse, others more extended.

An engrossing enquiry

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Damsel of the Sanct Grael’ (1874)

The Quest for the Grail:
Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840-1920
by Christine Poulson.
Manchester University Press, 1999.

The author, a now moderately successful crime-writer, was at the time of writing a Fellow of the Centre for Nineteenth-century Studies at the University of Sheffield, but The Quest for the Grail is no dry-as-dust academic publication. Plentifully illustrated with fourteen colour and sixty monochrome plates, this is an engrossing enquiry into the 19th-century renaissance of the Arthurian legend in representational art, stimulated by the 1817 re-publication of Malory and by Tennyson’s later reworkings of the tales.

Nostalgia for the sixties zeitgeist

Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Camelot’ (detail) 1893

The Quest for Arthur’s Britain, Geoffrey Ashe editor.
Pall Mall, 1968.

The 60s saw a rapid rise in interest in all things Arthurian, spurred on by a New Age zeitgeist which embraced all forms of fantasy from Tolkien to comics and by other aspects of popular culture, including musicals like Camelot.

In the middle of it all a more archaeological approach to the little-understood post-Roman period in Britain was emerging which sought to throw light on what was popularly known as the Dark Ages; and the epitome of this approach was the five-year investigation (from 1966 to 1970) of the Somerset hillfort of South Cadbury Castle by the provocatively-named Camelot Research Committee.

Perhaps as a direct result of the publicity surrounding the excavations the 1967 film of Camelot actually featured a map which placed the court roughly where the hillfort was situated.

The Grave of Arthur?

Rex Artorius inscription. Image: Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett

Article first published in Pendragon, the Journal of the Pendragon Society XVI No 3 (1983), and here slightly revised and expanded

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Several Pendragon Society members over the past year [1982-3] brought to our attention news of two South Wales historians who have claimed to have discovered the grave of Arthur.

So I wrote to Alan Wilson and Anthony Blackett of Penylan, Cardiff to get more details than those provided by press cuttings. A correspondence was begun in August and continued till November 1983.

They have clearly completed a lot of research over a decade, investing much of their savings, and some of it appears in books they have themselves published. One (Arthur the War King) is a novel, but three are factual: King Arthur King of Glamorgan & Gwent, which I have seen, is the first; King Arthur and the Charters of the Kings is the second (though, according to Charles Evans-Günther, most of this is an uncredited copy of Rev W J Rees’ edition of Liber Landavensis, the Book of Llandaf). Finally, King Arthur’s Invisible Kingdom may already have been printed by the time this magazine is published.¹