From a series of 6 lectures together with R.W.Gladish
 Le Matière de Bretagne

        The search for the origins of the Arthur and the Grail legends must be almost as intriguing, and even as daunting as the Quest for the Grail itself. The questor  must battle his way through complicated ceremonial traditions of the Christian Church, separating true symbol from commercialized relic; then plunge into the tangled web of Celtic Mythology with its dreamlike episodes, only as reliable as is the oral tradition.  Mystery rites of the Ancient Near East seem close to the journey's end, but secrecy is their very name.

        Exhausted after disentangling original sources from their legion copies, we are wont to fling ourselves down on a mossy bank, like the Grail hero, and in a confused stupor, wait for some light to come. But unlike that hero, who, when arriving at the Grail Castle, and observing  the mysterious Grail procession through shimmering veil, stunned and baffled, neither knowing what is happening or even what question  he should ask, we, I believe, know what question to ask: The important question is not so much whence came these legends, fascinating as this may be; the important question is why? Why have these legends, more than any others of Western Europe, persisted through centuries, going underground at certain periods, presumed to have finally died, only to reappear in certain times, in new garb and in glorious profusion; perhaps because of the times, or perhaps to change the course of the times. Some have thought these legends appear in times of civil war and anarchy, times of changing mores, when order and ideals are sorely needed; others believe they have been consciously disinterred, like Arthur's bones, to suit some great royal ambition.

        In England, three dramatic returns of the legends have been cited, closely associated with unusual English dynastic situations The first time that this great underground stream burst forth was in the Twelfth Century, during the struggle for power between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen. Most influential at this time was the work of the priest, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia   Regum Brittanai, The History of the Kings of Britain, of 1147, which, Geoffrey said, he translated into Latin from a very ancient Welsh manuscript, Brut, brought to him from Brittany by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Of Geoffrey's twelve book history, three books are about Arthur; these establish for the first time the main tradition of the Arthurian Epic.

       Despite the fact that his history seems wild beyond belief, nearly two hundred full manuscripts of it have survived, some fifty of which trace back to the Twelfth Century. Geoffrey's patron who encouraged him in this revival of Welsh legends was Robert of Gloucester, natural son of Henry I and a Welsh mother, thus the half brother to the Empress Matilda.

        It was, however, on the Continent at this time that the legends were most widely expanded and embellished. Here we find the romantic and strong willed Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, later joined by her daughter, Marie de Champagne, reigning in their Court of Love, creating a lively climate for love and romance. Having just returned from the Second Crusade with her first husband, Louis VII of France, the vital Eleanor was already plotting to have her marriage to Louis annulled. Louis had become a little too saintly for her tastes and she had her eye on Matilda's young and vigorous son Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, aspirant to the throne of his Grandfather, Henry I of England. Many young poets clustered around these courts dominated by Eleanor, glorifying the ideal of courtly love between a knight and a highborn, frequently otherwise-married, lady.

        Geoffrey's history was soon translated from Latin to French in 1155, one year after Henry II mounted the English throne. The Anglo-Norman poet, Maistre Wace, brought out a paraphrase, called Roman de Brut. In 1175 the Arthur legend was taken up by the famous Chretièn de Troyes, protegé of Count Philip of Flanders and Marie de Champagne; his works, a lost poem on Tristram, Erec et Enide, Le Chevalier au Lion, and Perceval, or Le Conte du  Graal, set the pace for the great French romances, casting the legends in a strangely unreal, ethereal setting in which love was a kind of religion. From France the legends went back to England, this time into the vernacular. Layamon, a Worcestershire priest, translated Wace's Roman de Brut into the first English version of the Arthur legends, Brut, elaborating and expanding the legends of the common people.

        Back and forth across the channel the legends traveled, translated from Welsh to Latin to French and thence to English; many versions, many copies, poetry and prose. Also back and forth across the Channel raced Henry and Eleanor, fighting wars, settling kingdoms, restoring monasteries, supporting and encouraging religion and all of the arts. Did they and mother Matilda, in order to prepare for the return of the rightful heir, young King Henry, stir up this "Matter of Britain," evoking the power of the promised return of the Good King Arthur? It is interesting to note that the first grandson of Henry and Eleanor born in 1187 and was named Arthur; this is the tragic Arthur of Brittany who is said to have been  murdered by his uncle, King John.

        Was it the Crusades to the Holy Land that stimulated and scattered the legends, encouraging the production of literally hundreds of Arthur stories during a short period around the year 1200? This period is noted for its magnificent flowering of church architecture as well as creativity in other arts. Abbot Suger of St. Denis, Bernard of Clairvous, and many other great names of the Church, were close associates and confidents of Eleanor of Aquitaine. We wonder how much one woman could have stirred up, even if she were the granddaughter to the romantic Duke of Aquitaine, Willliam the Troubadour. Wife of two kings and mother of two kings, Eleanor’s  influence was certainly profound.

        Widespread interest in the legends seems to have died almost as suddenly as it had appeared, after the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Only scattered indications of interest are evident for the next two hundred and fifty years until another great Henry planned an invasion from France to claim the English throne, also through the inheritance of his mother. Henry Tudor, son of Welshman Owen Tudor ascended the English throne in 1485, the very year William Caxton published the tremendously popular Mort  de Artur by Sir Thomas Malory. At the close of the Middle Ages, this English version of the French romances gave the legends organization and coherence. Of Lancastrian descent, Henry Tudor, ending the Wars of the Roses, married Elizabeth of York. They named their oldest son “Arthur.” This Arthur was baptized at Winchester, which Malory had identified with Camelot; contrived politics or romantic opportunism? Or did the state of civil war between Lancaster and York breed the climate conducive to the return of the legend? For the second time the heir apparent named Arthur died before he could assume the throne. Arthur Tudor's death left his kingdom and his young wife, Catherine of Aragon, to his younger brother, Henry VIII.

        Through the period of the Tudor dynasty, which was coincident with Renaissance England, court poets kept the tradition alive but no great flowering occurred as far as the Arthur legends were concerned. John Leland, interested antiquarian, snooped around in Arthur country and recorded evidence of interest to today's archeologists.  He addressed verses to Henry VIII calling him “Arturius Redivivus.” Edmund Spenser, in dedicating his Faerie Queen to "Elisabeth Glorianna", implies that the Tudor dynasty is Britain restored, and sometimes seems to equate his young prince Arthur with Christ.

        When James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, billboards all over London proclaimed "Charles James Stuart claims Arthur's Seat,” Two seventy foot pyramids were erected outside the Strand for his coronation day, showing his descent from Arthur on both sides of his family. In order to assume Arthur's mantle, James I chose the name Great Britain for his combined Kingdom; all through the thousand years of Saxon times, the country had been called England (Angle land) and only "Greater Britain" as opposed to Little Britain (Brittany).

        As the popularity of the sovereigns waned during the Stuart struggles with Parliament, so the Arthur mystique failed as a political tool.

 Roundhead Milton, epic poet though he was, could not bring himself to use the Arthur theme, so closely associated as it was with the monarchy, in royalist and Jacobite propaganda.

        Only a very few isolated references appeared within the next two hundred years. Dryden's opera was one instance, and in 1757 Thomas Grey wrote "The Bard", about a Welsh prophet. These seemed to mark the beginning of a revival of an interest in Welsh history and Celtic literature. Almost shunned during the age of enlightenment, the motif seemed to burst full flower again at the dawn of the Romantic Movement of the Nineteenth Century. Characteristic of the drama of the romantic revival was William Blake's grand pronouncement: "The stories of Arthur are the acts of the Giant Albion". The giant first stretched and shook his bones with the publication of Owen Jones' Myvyrian Archeology of Wales, in 1807, and Lady Guest's publication of her English translations of Welsh Legends, in her 1833 Mabinogion. Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Bulwer Lytton, Thomas Hardy, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Wagner, all were inspired by the legends, and each contributed his own special magic to the revival, but no one who has involved himself in this Matter of Britain has captured the imagination as has the Poet Lauriate of our studies. Tennyson's Idylls seem to have had a rare effect on the people of the Victorian age. Some feel that Tennyson's Arthur had a tremendous shaping and moulding effect on the English concept of limited monarchy. Was it the shocking immorality of Victoria's Georgian progenitors which set the stage for the return of Arthur? Or conversely was it the return of Arthur that inspired Victorian social reforms? Was it the connection between the very name of Tennyson's dear friend Arthur Hallam, and the tragedy of his early death, which sparked the lightening circuit of the Idylls’ inspiration? Was there something deeper than the occasion of the Prince Consort's early death and Tennyson's heartfelt duty to Queen and Country which pushed him so seriously onward “ever onward,” reworking and perfecting his Idylls?

        That the Arthurian legend returns in full flower periodically is a continually recurring marvel. Early in this (20th) century the children were treated to a royal feast with Arthur and his knights by Howard Pyle, Sidney Lanier, and James Baldwin. Then a temporary enforced period of realism surrounding two World Wars appeared to have killed the legends. But perhaps, stimulated by the archeological digs in Cornwall, and Somerset at Cadbury Castle, and Glastonbury, or perhaps because of the heartbreak and confusion surrounding the Vietnam War, a new rash of Arthur books appeared in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Consider the relationship between the production of the play “Camelot,” based on the T. H. White Once and Future King, and the martyrdom of the young President creating the “Kennedy Mystique;” was it again a case of something consciously contrived: or do some strange subconscious currents operate to influence the affairs of men? Fine new versions of the Arthur story pluck the same heartstrings: Sword  at Sunset, by  Rosemary Sutcliffe, and Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave, Hollow Hills, and Last Enchantment.  Are these the surface ripples of man's deepest hope: death is not the end; ”my Redeemer liveth;” He will return?

        Where did it all begin? I believe it began back beyond the gates of Eden, with the first prophecy that the Lord would be born, that He would bruise the head of the serpent but the serpent would bruise His heel.

          I. 6The Historic Arthur 

             Before we search for spiritual causes let us hunt for the natural Arthur, Arth, the Bear. The historical Arthur is presumed to have been a minor chieftain of Celto-Roman background, who lived and fought against the devastating invasion of the Saxon tribes from Continental Europe. In the face of barbarian invasions all over Europe the last of the Roman legions left Britain in 410, leaving the fine old civilization at the mercy of the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Backed up into crude hilltop fortresses of the West Country of Cornwall and Wales, Arthur is pictured gathering by means of his inspiring leadership, the remnants of the finest of Celtic manhood, trained and organized in Roman military ways, to defend Christian Britain.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in the opening lines of his Idylls of the King, 1 says it all:

"And this land of Cameliard was waste,
Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear
came night and day, and rooted in the fields,
And wallow'd in the gardens of the King.

And ever and anon the wolf would steal
The children and devour, but now and then,
Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat
To human sucklings; and the children, housed
In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,
And mark their foster-mother on four feet,
Till, straightened they grew up to wolf-like men,
Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran,
Groaned for the Roman legions here again
And Caesar's eagle."

        The poet paints us a frightening picture of the British terror of the bestial Saxons, and perhaps, allegorically he describes the end of an age. The word groans gives us a clue to one of  Tennyson's sources. A pathetic message has been preserved, dispatched by some desperate British leader, to Aetius, the Roman general in Gaul in 446.

        "To Aetius, three times Consul, the groans of the Britons; the barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two forms of death we are either massacred or drowned."2

        We don't know whether Aetius ever came to their aid, but in 731 The Venerable Bede tells us a similar story: "Public and private buildings were razed, Priests were slain at the alter; bishops and people alike, regardless of rank, were destroyed with fire and sword, and none remained to bury those who had suffered a cruel death. A few wretched survivors captured in the hills were butchered wholesale, and others desperate with hunger, came out and surrendered to the enemy for food, although they were doomed to lifelong slavery even if they escaped instant massacre. Some fled overseas in their misery; others, clinging to their homeland, eked out a wretched and fearful existence." 3

        Enter Arthur; or is it "Ambrosias?" Here is where the difficult quest for the historic Arthur begins. The so-called "histories" seem to range from the barely plausible to the fantastic; sometimes the casual references of the Bards seem more trustworthy. Gildas, the earliest known British historian, (upon whose records much of this earliest history is based) writing De Excidio at Conquestu Britanniae  around 540 A.D. mentions the conquest of Ambrosius Aurelianus at the Battle of Mt. Badon, in 516, the year Gildas says he himself was born.  Several other references firm up the Battle of Mt. Badon as a stunning victory for the British against the Saxons, but why did Gildas not mention Arthur when Welsh tradition is unanimous that Arthur was the great victor? Some say it was because Gildas rarely mentioned any names; a 12th century biographer of Gildas says Gildas was very angry at Arthur because Arthur had killed Gildas' brother. Gildas admits that he wrote his whole diatribe out of anger at the leaders of the day. Still others say that Gildas didn't need to mention Arthur because it was so well known that Arthur was in charge. Gildas does mention a great fighter called "the Bear," however. It is interesting that the Welsh word for “bear” is “Arth!" 4

       The “Venerable” Bede, writing two hundred years later, does not mention Arthur either and credits the same Ambrosius Aurelianus, of royal Roman descent, as victor at Mt. Badon. However scholars say that 516, pretty well agreed upon as the date for the Battle of Mt. Badon, is too late for Ambrosius (Gweleldig Emrys) whom Bede himself describes as being in his prime in 470.

        Arthur makes his first appearance in an historical chronicle of the Welsh monk Nennius who writes c.800. Nennius is considered reliable when he describes the twelve great victories which Arthur commanded as “Dux Bellorum” because the locations seem logical and the names are not otherwise well known, and yet are mentioned by bards and other historians in connection with other heroes. Geoffrey Ashe, in charge of excavations at Cadbury and author of the recent book, Quest for Arthur’s Britain,5 says, "the strongest point in Nennius' favor is his sheer badness as a writer and scholar. He has made a heep of all he has found in rummaging among ancient parchments and translating Welsh stories into clumsy Latin. The result is not a literary fraud like Geoffrey of Monmouth's because Nennius is plainly not equal to it. The ingredients of his heap are authentic." Nennius comments that fantastic legends had already clustered around Arthur; among these he mentions the marvels of the grave of Arthur's son Anir, which changes dimensions every time anyone measures it; then there is the story of the footprint of Arthur’s dog, Cabal, which was left on a stone and no matter how many times that stone is removed from the pile of stones on which Arthur placed it, it appears on the pile again. Nennius also tells of Arthur carrying “the image of St. Mary, of the perpetual Virgin, on his shoulder for three days and three nights and the pagans were put to flight on that day and the slaughter was by the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of St. Mary, the Virgin, His mother." Nennius also says Arthur slew 960 men by his own hand and fought twelve battles in all, (both, wonderful symbolic numbers. Scholars feel that Nennius was copying an old Celtic manuscript and translating poorly. The Welsh word for shoulder is very close to the word for shield, the difference being between a double and a single "d"; this could explain the image of the Virgin that Arthur carried on his shoulder as possibly being an embroidered emblem. .

        In 950 the Annales Cambriae, covering the years 433-954 include three relevant entries:

Year 516 The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulder 3 days and 3 nights and Britain was victorious.

Year 537 The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell, and there was death in Britain and Ireland.

Year 570 Gildas died.

        If we only had these early Histories and the later fantasies of Geoffrey of Manmouth, much doubt would surround the historicity of Arthur. But The Myvryian Archeology of Wales, published in 1807 includes some fragments far removed from the “histories” in time and in form; a school of Welsh bards appears in the British kingdom of Rheged, now Cumberland, toward the close of the Sixth Century. They and their successors know Arthur as a war leader and assume everyone else knows him too. Modern scholars believe that there are at least a few of these fragments definitely written down before Geoffrey of Monmouth and therefore not influenced by him; these come from the early bardic tradition of Wales; the Cynfeirdd are included in the great compilation, known, collectively as the Four Ancient Books: The Book of Taliessin, The Book of Aneirin, the Black Book of Carmarthen, and the Red Book of Heregest. The supposed Old Welsh nucleus with these poems is mainly concerned with the time of Urien of Rheged. The Book of Taliessin  mentions a dying chief, Uther Pendragon, who claims a "ninth part in the Prowess of Arthur". A bard sings of his many incarnations, and calls on the Druids to prophecy to Arthur of his antiquity. A similar piece refers to a “steed of Arthur. A song  in praise of a chieftain alludes to a bard who is "one of three deeply wise to bless Arthur". The Book of Aneurin including a poem called Gododdin,” referring to a certain hero, says ”he was no Arthur.” Three early poems from The Black Book of Carmarthan mention famous graves, and refer to some of Arthur's men, Kay and Bedevere, possibly Gawain. Most significant is the one about the graves: 

"Osvran's son's grave at Camlan,
After many a slaughter,
Bedwyr's grave in A11 Tryvan.
A grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,
A grave for Gwawn of the ruddy sword,
Not wise (the thought) a grave for Arthur."

        There are other obscure references to Arthur fighting with a hag, savage fighting of Kei and Bedwvr, and references to a number of mythological figures and slayings of lions and cats. The confusion is such that one can only hope for a better translation some day, or at least a better understanding of this ancient style of writing. It is not enough to translate these poems literally. We need to know the ancient key of Correspondences to accurately interpret them.

        We move from the "authentic heap" of Nennius and the obscure fragments of the Bards to the highly respected work of William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, written about 1125. In Book I, he tells of how “Ambrosius alone of the Romans, who reigned as king after Vortigen, overpowered the barbarian with the distinguished service of the warlike Arthur who for a long time held up his tottering fatherland, and kindled the broken spirits of his countymen to war." He dashed nine hundred enemies to the ground at Mt. Badon with incredible slaughter."

        In Book III he records that somewhere between 1066-to 1087 (the reign of William the Conqueror) a tomb was found in Wales of a worthy nephew of Arthur’s, named Welwen. Welwen is described as a great soldier who fought for his section of the country. “His tomb was found at the time of King William, but Arthur's tomb was never found, whence ancient dirges still fable his coming.”

        Visiting Glastonbury Abbey between 1123 and 1135, William of Malmesbury mentioned how impressed he was at the antiquity of documents he saw there. He wrote that the Church of St. Mary at Glastonbury was indeed the first church in the kingdom of Britain.

            Glastonbury, in Somerset, long known in local lore as the Isle of Avalon to which Arthur was borne after the battle of Camlannin, has been the focus of very recent scientific studies. It has been established that Glastonbury was once an island, the waters of the Bristol Channel having once covered much of the area. Archeologists tell us that in ancient times there had been lake villages of circular thatched roofed huts on timber platforms. Some time in the very early Christian period a monastery was built  there.6 Tennyson shows his familiarity with the early history of Glastonbury in these simple words of the monk, Ambrosias, to Percivale:

"From our old books I know
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,
And there the heathen Prince, Aviragus,
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;
And there he built with wattles from the marsh
A little lonely church in days of yore,
For so they say, these books of ours,6--"

        The local monks copied and circulated William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitale Glastoniensis, and then apparently added their own version of the story of the founding of the abbey in A. D. 63, by Disciples of Christ, led by Joseph of Aramathea. According to their version, Joseph had brought the Holy Grail there, or if not the Grail itself, two stoppered vessels, one containing the Blood, the other the Sweat, of Christ, and these had been buried with Joseph. The Glastonbury Thorn, which blooms every year at Christmas time, came, so the story goes, from Joseph's staff that took root as he knelt by the door to pray.

        The monks also added to William’s book, an account of an astonishing discovery of Arthur's grave at Glastonbury! History tells us that the Abbey had burnt in 1184, and the monks had tried to raise money for the rebuilding by exhibiting relics. Henry II encouraged them and contributed money and then to cap it off, told them that a Welsh bard had told him that Arthur's grave could be found sixteen feet down at Glastonbury. Henry died in 1189 and Richard I had no money for buildings, only Crusades. So the desperate monks started digging.

        Giraldus Cambrensis, very skeptical of the Arthur  legends and condemning of Geoffrey of Monmouth for all his wild stories, visited Glastonbury shortly after the discovery in 1191. He tells an astonishing story: “In our days, deep down in earth and encoffend in a hollow oak between two stone pyramids erected long ago in the consecrated graveyard, the site being revealed by strange and almost miraculous signs, the body of King Arthur was found."-- "Now in the grave there was found a cross of lead placed under a stone and not above, as is now customary, but fixed on the lower side. This cross I myself have seen; for I have felt the letters engraved thereon, which do not project nor stand out, but face turned inwards towards the stone. They run as follows:

"Hic jacet sepultus inclintus rex Arthurus cum

Winneveria uxor sua secunda in insula Avallonia."76

Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur
with Guenevere his second wife
in the Isle of Avalon

        He goes on to tell of the man's huge shank bones and enormous skull with ten wounds in it, all healed but one. The 
woman's bones were in the lower third of the coffin, still holding beautiful yellow hair. He describes a greedy monk grasping the golden tresses and seeing them turn to dust before their eyes.

       The reason given for the deep burial was that the Saxons would not discover the body; for the same reason the cross was buried and turned inward that it might conceal what the tomb contained but that in due time might reveal Arthur's burial place    There is much evidence that Glastonbury was once called Inis Avallon," the apple bearing isle;" it was also called Inis Gutrin in British, meaning "the glassy isle," wherefore the Saxons called it Glastingburn. Folk tradition says that a kinswoman of Arthur's, Morganis, a ruler of those parts, carried him there to heel his wounds after the Battle of Camlann.

        Many allusions show Tennyson absolutely steeped in the legends’ sources, references to apple trees, islands,
glassy cliffs and vanishing visions: like this in Percival's quest:

"And on I rode and when I thought my thirst
Would slay me, saw deep lawns, and then a brook,
With one sharp rapid, where the crisping white
played ever back upon the sloping wave
And took both ear and eye; and o'er the brook
Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook
Fallen, and on the lawns. I will rest here
I said, I am not worthy of the quest;
And even while I drank the brook, and ate,
The goodly apples, all these things at once
Fell in to dust, and I was left alone
And thirsting in a land of sand and thorns."

        In 1278 historians say that Edward I and Queen Eleanor visited Glastonbury to oversee the transference of the remains of Arthur and Guinivere to a black marble tomb in the center of the choir. Some suggest that Edward's determination to conquer and subdue Wales might have been motive enough to assure the Welsh that their legendary hero was indeed dead and buried and would never return.

         During the 16th century reign of Henry VIII, and his fight against Catholicism, the abbey was destroyed and fell into ruins. Some time in the 18th century the lead cross disappeared, but this was not before a 17th century historian had made a drawing of it. The script has recently been identified as not 6th century, but probably 10th century; the inscription differs a little from Giraldus' memory of it: "Here lies Arthur, the famous king, in the Island of Avalon.”

       Until twenty years ago, most of this was dismissed as legend; there was no scientific evidence of Arthur. Now excavations are going on in many corners of Britain, and slowly but surely the scientific case for the existence of a real Arthur is being put together. Sites at Tintagel, Glastonbury, and many others are producing evidence of every kind. At Tintagel, the legendary site of Arthur's birth, sixth century pottery, Merovingian, Byzantine, from many other parts of the civilized world, indicates that an important personage with gifts or other trade,  lived there. As Geoffrey Ashe, co-founder and Secretary of the Camelot Research Society, observes  "When standing at Tintagel one gets the feeling that if Arthur wasn't born there, he should have been. "A number of 6th century earthenwork fortresses have been found in the areas named and described by bards and chroniclers.

Other kinds of studies have been made apart from archeology; for instance, the name Arthur is very rare before the 6th cent. but suddenly, around the year 600, every other boy in Britain seems to have been named Arthur, indicating that the name had belonged to a famous and admired person living at that time.

         I feel fortunate in having had the opportunity to talk with Ashe when he came to Bryn Mawr three weeks ago. In his discussion of the historicity of Arthur and his knights he mentioned the greatest thrill, every archeologist's dream; a stone monument was found in the area thought to be Tristan's country, on which was written:

"Drustanus Hic lacit filius Gunomori"
Tristan lies here, the son of Cynvawr.”

        And the great news is that scientists have accepted a 6th century date for the monument!

        One of the most interesting bits of news that Ashe brought with him is one of the latest theories about the whole Camelot mystique. For centuries poets and pseudo chroniclers have envisioned the Medieval knights and castles and age of chivalry as the setting for Arthur and his band. Then, after doubts that there was any setting at all for a real Arthur, modern writers have gone the realistic route and pictured the crude and rugged barbarians of the 6th century West Country, anything but chivalrous.

        The latest theory comes form a Jean Marcal, professor of Celtic History at the Sorbonne8. He believes that, although the Golden Age of Camelot was not the Medieval idea of knights and armor that there was a Golden Age of Celtic society, that the legendary memory of a great society had much truth in it. He feels that the medieval minds that  made famous the legend were working on a tradition that was true, but did not know how to interpret that society, because of the very different political and social customs of their own day.For example, we get the impression that Arthur, although much beloved was sometimes a little overly cautious in making decisions, and seemed to take counsel overly much. Marcel believes that the political set up at the time of his projected Celtic heyday was much more democratic; then the king was much more inclined to seek advice than during the times of the powerful and dictatorial French and English kings of the later Middle Ages; not weak but constitutional.

        Again, Marcal believes that in this small but beautiful society where poetry and myth were honored, the women too had independence and dignity and were honored for their special feminine qualities in a way that the later mind could not understand; the only independence that the latter could comprehend was in an immoral, adulterous relationship with a knight errant, rather than freedom and dignity within the marital state.

The nature of the early Celtic magic and enchantment, Marcal believes, was also misunderstood. The medieval Christian mind could not understand the good enchantress and the good magician. Celtic magic, he says, was not sinister. Morgan le Fay was originally a healer, a good enchantress, He suggests that this ideal Celtic society was able to respect the gifts of Christianity without destroying what was good in ancient religion. They did not reduce the qualities of men and women to a mongrel sameness, but encouraged a distinctive, fulfilling productiveness.

        Ashe thinks Tennyson may have come closer to the true Camelot than the medieval versions did when he described the independent woman with law and order and marital fidelity.

        Why do we care if there was a real Arthur or a real Camelot? Perhaps the crude reality of the barbarian 6th century guerillas or the blissful Utopian this-world- kingdom takes away from the grandeur of the ideal mythical king. Somehow, I think if we had our druthers we would have both the historical Arthur and the mythological Arthur. I think we crave both, .for after all --what is really true is true in some ways on all levels. The Lord was real in both worlds, on both levels. That is the message of the Second Coming, the Eternal Return of the King.

        Christopher Hibbert, author of the Horizon Book, the Search for King Arthur expresses our feeling about the real importance of the search:  "The quest for Arthur of Britain never can destroy the beauty of the works that his legend has inspired nor the fascination of the legend itself. Since Arthur's nobility and valor first inspired the hearts of his followers, his story has dignified the human spirit.  The search for the man himself has become a continuing quest for what is hidden in the hearts of all men, and it may lead us one day to the truth about the Once and Future King." 9 

To: Participants in the Tennyson Lecture Series

Dear Friends:

I thought it might be a help to give a broad view of the lecture series so that you can have an idea of what Aubrey and I intend to do.

We are setting up the series in such a way that I'll give the first two lectures, Aubrey the next two, then me for one, and Aubrey for the last.

In the first lecture I intend to try to provide some sort of framework that will place Tennyson in the nineteenth century, since some understanding of this should help in approaching the Idylls. At the same time I want to refer to three poems that Tennyson began writing sometime in 1833-1834, poems that I hope will provide an insight into the way Tennyson used the material of myth to develop personal and universal themes. One of these poems is "Morte d'Arthur," the body of which poem became "The Passing of Arthur," the last poem in the completed Idylls. The other two are "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," both in your text and both examples of Tennyson's finest work. I will be referring to these last two poems, and if you have time (the poems are short) it would help if you read them before the first class. I will bring in some copies of the "Morte d'Arthur" since the early poem does not appear in your text.

Having done this, I want in the second lecture to examine the composition of the Idylls and to look at the early segments of the work with an eye to developing what I take to be the work's basic theme - the effect of the decay of moral and spiritual values upon a society that loses sight of the ideals that give it cohesiveness and meaning.

Aubrey intends then to go back to probe the development of the Arthurian legend, to note the various forms it took and see what Tennyson did with the material of the legend in the Idylls.

Our last two lectures will then proceed from wherever we are after this introduction. We wouldn't want to give the impression that we are so well organized that we have everything laid out.

As the Post indicated we will meet on the Mondays from March 27 - May 1 at 8:00 p.m., and unless we have a sudden rash of latecomers we ought to fit comfortably in Room 1 of Pendleton Hall.