Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts - Rodney Castleden - Страница 40

What happened to Arthur after the Battle of Camlann is shrouded in mystery. One version of the story is that he was carried from the battlefield mortally wounded and either died elsewhere or simply disappeared. One explanation is that locally the truth of the matter was known—that Arthur had died on or near the battlefield—and this tradition was preserved and passed on through Welsh families, like the details about the few fellow warriors who survived the battle. Meanwhile, Arthur’s subjects in Cornwall had less detailed information about what had happened to the king. All they really knew was that he had not returned. In the days and weeks following the Battle of Camlann, all kinds of misinformation and rumor may have circulated.

Writing in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth was aware of the uncertainties. In his version of Arthur’s disappearance he describes him as “mortally wounded” on the battlefield, yet moved to Avalon “to have his wounds healed.” Some scholars have argued persuasively that Geoffrey was deliberately ambiguous about what had happened because he had on his desk two different versions of the king’s fate: one originating in Wales and giving Arthur as killed in battle; the other from Cornish or Breton sources and giving Arthur as surviving the battle and being transported elsewhere to recover or die.

This is persuasive and goes a long way toward explaining the post-Camlann confusion, but it may be that the contradictory stories carried a different clash of scenarios. It may have been known, to a privileged few in Wales, that Arthur had been wounded, rescued from the battlefield, and taken north to a place of safety; meanwhile, in Cornwall, the story was that Arthur was “missing presumed dead.”

Great play has been made of the absence of a grave for Arthur. The sixth or seventh-century poem Songs of the Graves gives the locations of many Dark Age heroes, for instance:

The grave of Owain ap Urien in a secluded part of the world,

Under the grass at Llan Morvad;

In Aberech, that of Rhydderch Hael. (Stanza 13)…

The wonder of the world, a grave for Arthur. (Stanza 44)

The missing grave became a major element in the mystique surrounding the vanished king. If Arthur was the great overking, chief of the kings of Britain and dux bellorum, we might expect to find an impressive monument of some kind raised over his grave, or at any rate for its location to have been remembered, but there is nothing. On the other hand, where is the grave of Aelle, the first Saxon bretwalda? Where is Vortigern’s mausoleum? Even the whereabouts of the tombs of King Alfred and King Harold are uncertain. So perhaps we should not be surprised that we have no grave for Arthur.

There is a tradition that he was buried secretly. The Life of St. Illtud credits Illtud with being the priest who conducted the secret funeral. Probably only those who were actually present—perhaps only ten people altogether—ever knew where the king was buried, and as likely as not those ten took the secret with them to their own separate graves.

One question naturally arises: why should those close to Arthur have wished to bury him in secret? Obviously his death was disastrous to the British cause. If he had succeeded only recently in re-cementing the loyalty of the kings of southern and central Wales to a common cause, the news of his death could have precipitated immediate fragmentation, laying Wales open to attack from the east; alternatively, and equally dangerously, it could have exposed Powys and the southern kingdoms to attack from Gwynedd first, rendering them powerless to resist Saxon incursion from the east. The continuing expansion of Gwynedd a century or two later seems to show that this was an ever-present danger. If news of Arthur’s death had reached the Saxons, who had been held at bay by his power for 20 years, they would have pushed westward with confidence and ease; if it had spread widely among the Britons, they would have been demoralized and given in under the renewed Saxon onslaught. In every way and for every reason it was important to conceal the death of Arthur, and those close to him may have hoped to hide the catastrophic truth long enough for a successor to be found and for him to establish his position as overking before too many people realized what had happened.

It may be that an alternative fate was concealed, but for the same reasons. If Arthur was not killed at Camlann but so badly wounded that he was going to be unfit to fight or even ride for a long time, he would have been forced to retire. It was common for Dark Age kings to retire when they became physically incapable of fighting through age or infirmity. They withdrew from public life completely by entering monasteries.

Several examples are known from these times. In around 580 Tewdrig or Theodoric, King of Glevissig (Glamorgan) abdicated in favor of his son Meurig and retired to a religious house at Tintern. He made the mistake of coming out of retirement in about 584, when his son engaged the Saxons in battle nearby, and was mortally wounded in the battle. Pabo Pillar of Britain, King of the Pennines, similarly abdicated in favor of his sons and went to live in seclusion in a remote monastery in Gwynedd, far from his own kingdom; he later died and was buried there, in the church at Llanbabo in Anglesey. A link between the Pennine kingdom and Gwynedd is suggested by another example. In the church at Llanaelhaearn on the Lleyn Peninsula is a fifth or sixth-century memorial stone inscribed with the words “Aliortus, a man from Elmet, lies here.”

There are hints in the medieval genealogies that a much earlier Dumnonian king, Coel Godebog, also retired a long way from home: he died and was buried in the far north, in York, in 300.

Did Arthur, now aged 62 and badly wounded, decide to abdicate and retire immediately after Camlann? The Legend of St. Goeznovius, a Breton saint, includes some information that is corroborated in other sources, such as the migration of British saints to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries. It may overstate Arthur’s achievement, in boasting that the Saxons were largely cleared from Britain by “the great Arthur, King of the Britons” but, in a telling phrase, it relates how Arthur’s career ended when he “was summoned from human activity.” This is equivocal, in that it holds back from saying that Arthur died, even if most of us reading the story would infer that that was meant. The expression might equally be taken to mean that Arthur withdrew from secular, worldly affairs in order to lead a purely religious life.

If Arthur’s reign ended at Camlann but he lived on in retirement, it could explain the discrepancy between the date of 537 or 539 given in the Welsh Annals for Arthur’s fall at Camlann and the date of 542 given by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Perhaps Geoffrey had access to a tradition of Arthur living on for another five years after the battle (see Places: Avalon).

The idea that Arthur did not die but somehow lived on and will one day return may seem to remove Arthur completely from history and place him safely in the world of myth and mysticism. Yet Arthur is but one of many great charismatic leaders, many of them kings, who were believed to have lived on after their “official” deaths. The last Saxon King of England, Harold Godwinson, officially died at the Battle of Hastings close to the site of the high altar of Battle Abbey and his remains were buried at the same spot. The Bayeux Tapestry is unambiguous—“Harold interfectus est”—but even in 1066 doubts were circulated about the official story. The Norman chronicler William of Poitiers reported that the Conqueror contemptuously ordered Harold’s body to be buried on the beach. More uncertainty arose because of the mutilation of the corpse, so even a burial in Battle Abbey might have been that of another battle victim. By the thirteenth century an Icelandic story was told of Harold being found alive on the battlefield by two peasants who were looting corpses the night after the battle. They took him home with them and it was suggested that he should rally the English once more, but Harold knew that many would have sworn fealty to William and he did not want to compromise them. He would retire to a hermitage at Canterbury. Three years later, when Harold died, William was told and he saw that Harold was given a royal burial. Gerald of Wales, writing in 1191, also affirmed that the Saxons clung to the belief that Harold was alive; as a hermit, deeply scarred and blinded in the left eye, he is said to have lived for a long time in a cell at Chester, where he was visited by Henry I.

Similar survival stories have been told about other historical figures: the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, Richard II, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Alexander I of Russia, Holger Danske, Sebastian of Portugal. These were real people, yet elaborate stories adding layers of mystery to their deaths are still told. The mystery elements added to Arthur’s life do not mean that he never existed at all.