Читать книгу Harvey Wallbangers and Tam O'Shanters - Martin Hannan - Страница 10

Most eponyms take their root from a real person or someone in fiction, but very few derive from a person who may have been a myth, but was certainly a legend. Did King Arthur live? Do we care? He is such a hero that we want him to have lived.

When we use the word Arthurian, it is almost always in conjunction with the word legend and, as such, King Arthur might well have been a real person around whom much imaginative folklore has been weaved.

That a ‘King of the Britons’ of this name – and we cannot even be sure that Arthur was his name – existed on the west coast of Great Britain sometime between the 4th and 7th centuries is generally accepted by most people, except a lot of pesky historians and archaeologists who insist there is no evidence for Arthur.

How dare they! The fact is we want to believe in Camelot, its king and his sword Excalibur, his wizard Merlin and his queen Guinevere, and the knights of the Round Table. In Britain, we need an explanation why the Dark Ages of conquest and battle fell upon the whole island, and we need to believe there was a Camelot which represented a last stand of goodness against the incoming barbarism – or else why should we believe that Britain is ever going to return to that idyllic state?

The fact is that the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth probably invented most of the history of Arthur in his book Historia Regum Britannia in the 12th century. Even back then, his critics accused Geoffrey of making up most of the Arthurian tales, though they waited until after he died around 1155AD, as it was not the done thing to criticise a bishop of the Church. Invention or not, Geoffrey did us all a favour, not least because he added stories of Leir and Cymbeline which provided William Shakespeare with inspiration for his plays.

The Arthur stories grew apace after Geoffrey, with Lancelot and the Holy Grail being added by the French writer Chretien de Troyes, and then in came the Arthurian daddy of them all, Sir Thomas Malory, who penned Le Morte d’Arthur in the 15th century. It all adds to the legend that we are not even sure who Malory was, but he gathered all the English and French stories into one volume which still stands as the key work of Arthurian literature. Since then there have been many more Arthurian stories, and film and television works abound, which is largely why we all understand what the eponym ‘Arthurian’ stands for – anything to do with Camelot and its King.