The Legend of King Arthur Through the Ages

Guest Post  by Samantha Knepper 

The legend of King Arthur is one that has captured the attention of the public throughout centuries. Each interpretation and reimaging of the legend reflects the time the author lived in. By tracing the Arthurian myth throughout centuries, the myths that emerge from the different time periods are not just about King Arthur but also the time in which they were created. As much as I would love to go into detail about each reinterpretation, I am using broad strokes and just touching on the major changes with a little bit about each one to give big picture view.

There are mentions of figures before The History of the Kings of Britain that could have been Arthur or were named Arthur, however the legend we are familiar with today really takes off in the twelfth century.  In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote The History of the Kings of Britain, which was finished in 1136. Monmouth more than likely had a version of Historia Brittonum, ‘History of the Britons’, written by a Welsh historian called Nennius. Nennius drew from numerous chronicles to create a history of the British people, a list of the 28 towns in Britain, and genealogies. The salient point for the Arthurian story is that Nennius mentioned twelve battles that a King Arthur fought. This is more than likely where Monmouth took the idea of King Arthur. I say more than likely as we have none of the sources today that Monmouth possessed. 

The Archbishop presents the sword to Arthur before the people. The inscription on the stone is: 'Whoever pulls this sword out will be king of the land.' c. 1316 France, N. (Saint-Omer or Tournai) From http://www.bl.uk.

Monmouth gives us several key ideas that have stayed with the Arthurian tale: Arthur was conceived due to Merlin’s interference, conception at Tintagel, and Arthur’s mortal wounding but leaving for Avalon instead of dying. Monmouth details the heroic feats of Arthur, making him one of the most outstanding British heroes. Monmouth’s History had numerous copies made, demonstrating its immediate popularity, and inspired other writers. French romance writers picked up the story, most famously Chrétien de Troyes, a French medieval poet, who wrote a serious of Arthurian romances – such as Lancelot and Perceval. German writers were also picking up the story and Wolfram Von Eschenback wrote Parzival. There were a series of prose adaptations that were written called Le Roman de Laurin, the Arthurian Prose Vulgate. The use of Arthurian stories continued, but they were changed in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.  

These new interpretations of the Arthur legend had the basic outline of Monmouth’s version of events: Arthur was a king of Britain who was a hero and a warrior. Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur (‘The Death of King Arthur’) in 1465, which signaled a change in the story and a change in society. Aside from being one of the first books printed in England, it was about the golden age of knighthood dying. Changing the images and narrative surrounding Arthur once again. Henry VIII, who took the throne in 1509, took the image of King Arthur and the idealized age of knighthood to heart and even had the Winchester round table of Edward III painted over so that he was on top, imaging himself as the new Arthur. Times were changing and the story was being reinterpreted.

Richard Blackmore wrote two King Arthur epics, Prince Arthur in 1695 and King Arthur in 1697, but the story was being used during this time as an allegory for the political struggles during this period. Tom Thumb was also used in this way, Henry Fielding’s plays, for example, had an Arthurian setting but Arthur was comedic rather than the romance character that had emerged in the late Middle Ages. In the early nineteenth century, a renewed interest the Arthurian legend took place. 

La mort d'Arthur, James Archer (1823–1904), Manchester. From https://artuk.org. 

The renewed interest was due to the romanticism, Gothic Revival, and medievalism that had developed. Chivalry, an ideal code of conduct that was a large part of the medieval romances, was also a part of the medieval Arthurian romances. In the early part of the nineteenth century Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was reprinted. Alfred Tennyson rewrote the King Arthur story for the Victorian era in Idylls of the King. In this work Arthur was the ideal of manhood but failed due to the weakness of being human. The ideal of manhood was the Victorian ideal, changing the Arthurian story to fit a new time. This generated even more interest in the Arthurian tale and there were further editions and other writers who wrote their own Arthurian tales. The popularity of King Arthur continued into the twentieth century.

There was a comic strip featuring Arthur that started in 1937, Prince Valiant, along with numerous novels such as Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, in 1953 and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King in 1958. Marrion Zimmer Bradley wrote The Mists of Avalon in 1982, which reimagined the story from a feminist perspective. Other tales have included values like equality and democracy, values that would have been foreign to the writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In addition to the novels, as technology developed, the Arthurian legend was brought into new media.

Illustration from page 306 of The Boy's King Arthur: the death of Arthur and Mordred – 'Then the king ... ran towards Sir Mordred, crying, "Traitor, now is thy death day come."' From https://commons.wikimedia.org.

Disney adapted one of the stories from the first half of the twentieth century, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone into their movie of the same name. In 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out, in the 1990s there was a miniseries that aired on television called Merlin, and in 2004 there was another movie called King Arthur, demonstrating the enduring popularity of Arthurian legends. This year, another movi

e, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, has been released. This movie, like all the others, reflects the values of our times rather than the medieval values that Arthur had first been endowed with. There is still something that captivates people about Arthur and allows for a reinterpretation to reflect society today, whatever it is, it connects our past with our present, allowing us to feel good about where we came from. 

King Arthur’s statue at Tintagel. From http://www.independent.co.uk.

Further Reading

For further reading I highly recommend any of the literature I discussed along with watching the movies, and TV shows mentioned. My specialty is medieval warrior culture in twelfth to fourteenth century France and England, so I can only speak for that era in terms of history. For those interested in the medieval Arthur and his values I recommended the following books (along with medieval literature) that deal with society and violence: R. W. Barber’s The Reign of Chivalry, John France’s Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, Richard W. Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, and Maurice Keen’s Chivalry.

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Samantha Knepper lives in San Diego and can be reached at SamanthaLKnepper@gmail.com, http://medievalknightsandmore.com, and on Twitter @Slknepper. She received her MA in History from Norwich University and her capstone looked at the idolization of heroes from the past in twelfth to fourteenth-century France and England. She loves discussing all things medieval and hopes to learn how to joust this year.  

Guest Post by Amy Ellis-Thompson: Manuscript culture: poets, scribes and compilers or the modsnottor mon of the medieval manuscript

Consideration of the medieval manuscript is not merely that of a single hand in an isolated monastery, etching words of devotion into a well-treated animal hide, but a train of investigation that spans the entire medieval period. Manuscript culture applies to all literary production before the introduction of the printing press, from Germany into England by William Caxton in the 1470s. Although early medieval manuscripts were primarily religious and Latinate, the four extant vernacular poetic codices (Exeter, Vercelli, Cotton Vitellius or ‘Beowulf’ and Junius) contain between them the entire gamut of Old English literature that we read today. Late Medieval manuscript culture considers the parallel existence of print and manuscript in the 14^th and 15^th century. As print became dominant, the scribal system fell into disuse, and the use of ‘rude speche’ and ‘olde bookes’ was homogenised into the faster-moving dissemination of printed pamphlets and sonnet sequences. 

Scop poetry in the Old English Exeter Book

The manuscript itself problematizes our modern perception of both book and author. Authorship in the Anglo-Saxon period was not of the importance it is today, so the textual production and culture of the Old English poem comes to the fore in the absence of an authorial biography. The compiler of a manuscript florilegium (excerpts of other writing; literally a gathering of flowers) does not seek to present a single authorial voice, but constructs a complete entity from a diverse selection of vernacular poetry. The codices of Old English poetry are often themselves hearkening back to tradition: gatherings of poems based on earlier oral traditions of a scop or Anglo-Saxon minstrel. Such self-conscious references to orality (seen, for example in the scop poems Deor and Widsith of the Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, compiled c. 950) makes the Exeter Book a collective product of the Anglo-Saxon imagination.  Despite the restricted literacy of tenth century Anglo-Saxon England, the codex was written within a literate, monastic context, drawing upon secular and religious sources for its Christian readership.

The important consideration for the modern reader is that there is no single author of the codex: when we read the Exeter Book we are considering a manuscript arranged by a compiler. This may or may not be the same person as the single scribe who copied out all of the poems over a length of time, who differs again from the original poets of each text, who may have written the texts generations apart. There may potentially be more than fifty authors of the Exeter Book. Without explicit information regarding the original composition of each poem, they can be considered within the context of a single volume: the arrangement in which they have been placed by the compiler.

The other three extant Anglo-Saxon vernacular poetic codices – the Vercelli, Cotton Vitellius or ‘Beowulf’, and Junius manuscripts – are also florilegia, although arguably not as diverse in theme and style. The Exeter Book ranges from the Christology beginning the codex through saint’s lives, elegiac narratives, maxims, riddles, a bestiary triptych and homilies, entirely in verse. Although the Exeter Book is the most diverse collective example of early vernacular poetry, there is a lack of uniformity to all four codices.

Beowulf begins: immortal lines from the Cotton Vitellius manuscript

The structure of a single manuscript, and the compilation of a diverse range of poetry, is tantamount to a consideration of what that codex offers the reader. The ordering of the manuscript, in the absence of any information about the original authors of the poems, can help us make sense of what the compiler of, for example, the Exeter Book is trying to achieve, what wisdom can be gained from reading the manuscript as a whole from start to finish. Basically, what the point of the entire codex is. Palaeographical and codicological evidence (see Patrick Conner) has shown that the Exeter Book codex is made of three separate manuscript booklets. However, it is not written in stone (or etched on pig-hide) what literary issues bind each booklet as one entity within the entire codex. Each reader, considering the literary themes of the poetry of the Exeter Book alongside the codicological facts of how the manuscript as a physical book was put together, may come up with different suggestions to this engaging riddle.

From the 10^th to the 14^th century, the medieval manuscript exists in a very different context. The monastic scribe and Christian emphasis shifted into a commercial venture. The 14^th C illuminated Auchinleck manuscript, for example, allows us to raise issues of authorship and identity on a different level to that of the Old English Exeter Book. It is a collection of Middle English lays, copied by four of five different scribes, and its use of both the vernacular and impressive illuminations suggest it is a commercial venture. L.H. Loomis proposed the production of the Auchinleck manuscript in a London ‘bookshop.’ Recent criticism has suggested that the scribes were not working in a physical ‘bookshop’ under one roof, but were operating under similar scribal principles. There is an undeniable sense of unity and ordering throughout the entire manuscript. The use of the vernacular shows issues of national, rather than authorial identity: England struggling to reclaim its language and identity over three hundred years after the Norman Conquest. Like the Exeter Book, the Auchinleck MS tells its own story of culture, authorship and the literature being read by a pre-Chaucerian generation

Eye-catching: the visually appealing pages of the Auchinleck Manuscript, containing Middle English lays for the 14^th C secular reader.

The medieval manuscript allows us to read more than Old or Middle English literature: it allows us to read the medieval reader themselves. Manuscript annotations show us which elements of a medieval text were emphasised or even disputed. The 15^th C red-ink annotations on the 14^th C Middle English devotional vernacular prose text The Book of Margery Kempe (see Kelly Parsons) provide us with a laymen’s reading alongside a text scribed by Carthusian monks. The annotations in red ink underline and repeat for emphasis words in the text referring to ‘seculer pepil,’ and women, as well as the readers own ‘amen amen amen(s)’ of affective piety in the margins. Not only do we have a medieval spiritual biography, but a record of the particular chords it struck with a late medieval reader.

The Book of Margery Kempe: annotations in different hands add small drawings and comments around the text.

Manuscript study allows us to read around the words of the Old or Middle English poem itself, considering poets, scribes, compilers and annotators, as well as the culture of textual production, to consider ‘authorship’ in an entirely different and fascinating way.

Amy Ellis-Thompson is an MA student in Medieval Literatures at the University of York. Contact email: amy.ellisthompson@gmail.com

Further Reading:

Brown, Michelle P. ‘Anglo-Saxon Manuscript Production: Issues of Making and Using,’ in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, eds. Philip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).

Conner, Patrick W. ‘The Structure of the Exeter Book Codex (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501)’, in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, ed. M. P. Richards (London, Garland Publishing, 1994), pp. 301-315.

Jayatilaka, Rohini. ‘Old English Manuscripts and Readers,’ in A Companion to Medieval Poetry, ed., Corinne Saunders (Wiley and Sons: Oxford, 2010), pp.51-64.

Lerer, Seth. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

Parsons, Kelly.  Kerby-Fulton, Kathyrn and Hilmo, Maidie ed., 'The Red-Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and his Lay Audience,' in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe and Gower, (Canada: Victoria, 2001), p. 143.

Shonk, T.A. ‘A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century,’ Speculum, 60 (1985) pp. 71-91.

Guest Post: Historical Writing in Medieval England: A Very Short Introduction - Michael Tansini

When people think of medieval literature, they think of the Knights of King Arthur searching for the holy grail, hordes of Vikings running around various parts of Europe, and Beowulf overcoming the monstrous Grendel (and, if the 2008 film starring Ray Winstone is to be believed, overcoming some pretty serious Oedipal issues). The idea of some medieval monk or cleric writing genealogical histories does not filter through to public consciousness, or, if it does, it is only before a Monty Python-esque giant foot stomps on the poor writer. However to ignore historical writing in the Middle Ages, and especially writing in England is to ignore some of the most exciting literature of the whole period. 

(Alas, there are no historical writings about the Giant Foot outbreak of 1178) 

When we think of history today, it is of dates and events and people that can be clearly traced with historical records and archaeological evidence. In the High Middle Ages (roughly late 11^th to early 14^th century) it was different. Many noble families, especially in Norman England and France, could barely trace back their family line three of four generations. The lost grandeur of Rome inspired many to attempt to create an ancestral link to justify their present rule. Moreover the Norman invasion of England had resulted in the overthrow of English government. Though the basic Anglo-Saxon administrative framework remained, English religious leaders and landowners were removed in favour of Norman ones; the English language, which had been unique in Europe for featuring a good deal of historical writing, rapidly fell out of use. So in the twelfth century, when historians such as John (or Florence, depending on which critic you believe) of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and Eadmer, start writing histories of Britain, and in particular the Anglo-Saxon ‘English’, it must be seen in the context of radical societal upheaval. 

(A Medieval scribe, looking bored)

Nor is this historical writing limited to the English. Orderic Vitalis was an Anglo-Norman clergyman whose monumental ‘Ecclesiastical History’ is symptomatic of divided loyalties. He praises Henry I as a lion but condemns William the Conqueror for his Harrying of the North and describes the Norman subjugation as a ‘yoke’.  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘History of the Kings of Britain’ is often derided as falsifying and myth-making but it also represents an attempt by Welsh Britons to commemorate their own history that English writers (like Henry of Huntingdon) have ignored). Geoffrey was the first writer to depict King Arthur as we recognise him, and his depiction of Arthur’s life and Merlin’s Prophecies were the foundation for the growth in Arthurian literature.

Even works now considered literary had a strong historical background. It is important to note that while there was the difference between ‘fabula’, roughly translating to a story and a ‘historia’, history, these genre boundaries were far from fluid. Thus the writers Wace and Gaimar wrote literary stories about the history of England in Anglo-Norman which contain clear genealogical elements in addition to their underappreciated literary merit. And Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, though often shelved in the history section of a university library, uses a flexible metrical structure, dashing heroic speeches and bloody battles in a portrayal of Henry II’s war against the Scots.

(Henry II in less murderous times)

This can only be a rudimentary sketch of the exciting and (from a literary perspective) underappreciated burst of historical writing in England. I have not mentioned the historical writers of the thirteenth century, notably Matthew Paris, nor the wealth of writing on the Continent. It is a type of writing which undermines genre, ethnic national boundaries as quickly as these boundaries are set up, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Michael Tansini is an MA student in Medieval Literatures at the University of York

List of Works Mentioned

Eadmer, Lives and Miracles trans. and ed. Muir and Turner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006)

Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, trans. and ed. Ian Short. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. and ed. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)

Henry of Huntingdon, History of the English People 1000-1154, trans. and ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford: OUP), 2009

John of Worcester, Chronicle, trans. and ed. McGur, 3 volumes. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)

Jordan De Fantosme, Chronicle ed. R.C Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)

Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History trans. and ed. Marjorie Chibnall 6 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1969-80)

Wace, La Roman de Brut, trans. and ed. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002)

Two interesting Critical Studies

Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England 550-1307. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)

Partner, Nancy. Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977

Heroes in Literature, Part One: William of Orange

William of Orange (or Guillaume d'Orange in Old French) is the central hero in a number of chansons de geste, including: Chanson de Guillaume, Enfances Guillaume, Couronnement de Louis, and Aliscans, amongst others. These poems along with others about William's family make up the 'cycle' of chansons known as the Cycle of William of Orange (the other two cycles are known as: The Cycle of the King, and The Cycle of Barons in Revolt).


Perhaps the most well known epic that has William as the hero is the Chanson de Guillaume (The Song of William). It is one of the oldest chansons and was the founding poem of the entire William of Orange cycle. It is likely that it was the popularity of the central hero William that inspired further song-tales of him and his family.

Figure 1. Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert

 The fictional character William of Orange has been identified with the historical Count William of Toulouse, a cousin of Charlemagne who was known for his defence of Christian land against Spanish pagans. After the death of his wife William befriended a monk, and later became one himself in Aniane. He founded an abbey in Gellone, which eventually became known as Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert after him. William of Toulouse died on 28 May 812, and was canonised in 1066.

Figure 2. William of Orange?

This image is within the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert (currently housed at The Metrapolitan Museum in new York). It was once believed to depict Daniel in the lions' den, however it has been suggested that it could instead be William of Orange with the lion from his coat of arms (described in various works, including Couronnement de Louis).


I'll end this post with a small extract from the Chanson de Guillaume, which in my opinion is one of the finest of the Old French epics. This extract has Count William bravely arriving to the battlefield with back-up; persevering with the fight against the odds (a key theme throughout the poem): 

     The Count set off with Sir Girart and leading

     Knights fully armed and thirty thousand liegemen

     To Archamp field and Desramed the Heathen;

     They journeyed through the cold night air, unspeaking

     Till break of dawn and light of day appearing;

     When they arrived at Archamp on the seaboard,

     The Moor had won; the French were fled or beaten;

     (. . .)

     A league or more they'd ridden from the beaches,

     When William the Count rode up to meet them

     With well-armed knights and thirty thousand liegemen,

     One half of whom were very keen to greet them

     With blows of iron to show their strength of feeling!

     They cried: "Mountjoy!" and moved to strike them fiercely;

     Those Pagan lords were helpless to receive them:

     They had no arms to counter blows or deal them;

     They turned in flight towards the shore, retreating

     Inside their ships and sundry other sea-craft;

     They seized their arms and roused themselves to wield them.

Sources Used

• Figure 2 is from William P. Gerritsen and Anthony G. van Melle (eds.), trans. by Tanis Guest, A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes: Characters in medieval Narrative Traditions and Their Afterlife in Literature, Theatre and the Visual Arts (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2008), p. 134; see also pp. 132-6.

• The extract of Chanson de Guillaume is from Michael Newth (trans.), Heroes of the French Epic:Translations from the Chansons de Geste (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2005), p. 77; see also pp. 31-142.

• ‘The Coronation of Louis’, in Joan M. Ferrante (trans.), Guillaume d’Orange: Four Twelfth-Century Epics (Columbia University Press: Chichester, 2001), pp. 63-139.

• ‘The Song of William’, trans. by Muir, Lynette, in Glanville Price (ed.), William, Count of Orange: Four Old French Epics (J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd.: 1975), pp. 131-203.