Fairy Tales: The Real King Arthur, Maybe

Researching King Arthur was the first major research I did on my own as a teen. And it wasn't the clanking armor version that enthralled me--or the musical. 

I had already begun to delve into King Arthur, mostly the clanking armor version and musical, when I ended up in a revival meeting in Southwest England. 

Okay, not really. My mother and I were in England touring the area around Glastonbury Tor. Somehow we ended up in a little room with extremely earnest people telling us how Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus to England as a lad and then later returned with the Holy Grail. 

Throughout the presentation, my mother became more and more and more rigid--at this late date, I realize that she was nearly busting a gut not to start arguing with the presenters about history and the Bible and so on and so forth. She was also worried that I was "buying into" what was basically a folk story being sold as religious doctrine. 

I wasn't. The idea of Joseph of Arimathea in England was cool but I almost immediately dismissed it. I was never that interested in stories of Jesus as a lad. The Gospels truly don't need that much help. 

What enthralled me was King Arthur--and not the clanking King Arthur but the unavoidable implication that circa 35-70 A.D., a New Testament figure like Joseph of Arimathea wouldn't be handing off a holy grail to anybody in clanking armor. Arthur's time is circa 400 C.E.--and no, still no clanking armor, not the late-medieval kind. 

I don't remember if the evangelists mentioned the sparse research on King Arthur, but they did have books for sale in their gift shop, and I bought Geoffrey Ashe's King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury for 3-1/2 pounds. 

It was my first introduction to the gray areas of history, the half-stories, the pieces that grow into legend. 

A possible Roman-British officer, a recruited Celt, Artos, may possibly have overseen a stockade of some sort on Glastonbury (it is a good vantage point). Artos may possibly have been involved in a series of confrontations, which were likely, frankly, more skirmishes than battles, between Celts and Saxons after the Romans left Britain and the Saxons swept in. A monk named Gildas wrote passionately and rather nuttily about the whole thing. (Just think of Gildas as the first political pundit complaining about immigration.)

I was fascinated--even more so as I came to realize that the stories of King Arthur that show up in Morte d'Arthur by Malory and then find their way into Camelot and T.H. White's The Once and Future King are based on oral tales that crossed the channel. Some of the characters likely originated abroad. Others have clear and deep Welsh/English roots. 

As I reference in my post on Æthelred, it makes a great deal of sense that King Arthur tales took such hold. Times of enormous social change, anticipated or not, tend to throw up folk tales. Think of them as coping mechanisms. 

Although the "historical" King Arthur interested me most, and I tried my hand at a few tales--here is one; a second, based on Gawain and the Green Knight, later published, is also available--the primary result of my foray into the King Arthur legend was a passing familiarity with the tropes. The first C.J. Cherryh I read, Port Eternity, is a fascinating novel about a group of individuals cloned to be Arthurian characters headed on a spaceship to a distant planet. And one of my favorite series growing up, The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, uses Arthurian legends to create a fascinating problem and a great Merlin.

I recommend Over Sea, Under Stone by Cooper first.