Читать книгу The Lost Land of King Arthur - Walters John Cuming - Страница 4

The fact that the name Art(h)us does not occur in the Gildas manuscript has led to the inference that the king was unknown to that chronicler; and the assumption that he is alluded to as Ursus (the Bear) tends to confirm the theory of those who would affirm that he is no more than a solar myth. It must be understood that the Arthur of romance, as we now know him, was a character ever increasing in importance and prominence as the history was re-written and elaborated; at first a minor actor in the drama, he at length became the leading figure and the centre around which all the other characters were grouped. The Arthur of the historian Nennius is the original personage to whom all the famed attributes have been accorded by subsequent writers. With so much doubt and confusion, involving the identity of the person himself, it is inevitable that even more doubt and confusion should exist when we come to detailed events. Even the name of Arthur’s father is variously given, a circumstance which caused Milton to question the veracity of the whole history; and the date of his birth, of his death, the age at which he died and other smaller points, lead to nothing but endless contradiction. The number of his battles is variously given as twelve and seventy-six; he is said to have wedded not one but three Guineveres (Gwenhwyvar); his age at death varies from just over thirty years to over ninety; and the date of the last battle is 537, 542, or 630.12 King Arthur’s actual name may have been Arthur Mab-Uther; his genealogical line has been traced back to Helianis, nephew of Joseph; the year 501 is now usually accepted as the date of his birth; and St. David, son of a prince of Cardiganshire, is mentioned not only as his contemporary but as a near relative. If the Sagas were compared with the Arthurian romances numerous points of resemblance could be shown. Olaf is the Arthur of the story, Gudrun the Guinevere, and Odin is the Merlin, while the city of Drontheim serves as Caerleon. The story recounting how Arthur magically obtained his sword Excalibur finds an exact parallel in the story of Sigmund, Volsung’s son; and even the emblem of the dragon is not lacking,13 for in the story of the Volsung we learn that Sigurd’s shield bore the image of that monster, “and with even such-like image was adorned helm, and saddle, and coat-armour.” But again it must be remembered that Arthur’s kingdom is reported to have extended to Iceland itself; in fact, the bounds of his kingdom were only set by the chroniclers where their own definite geographical knowledge ended.

“We cannot bring within any limits of history,” Sir Edward Strachey has properly said, “the events which here succeed each other, when the Lords and Commons of England, after the death of King Uther at St. Albans, assembled at the greatest church of London, guided by the joint policy of the magician Merlin and the Christian bishop of Canterbury, and elected Arthur to the throne; when Arthur made Caerleon, or Camelot, or both, his headquarters in a war against Cornwall, Wales, and the North, in which he was victorious by the help of the King of France; when he met the demand for tribute by the Roman Emperor Lucius with a counterclaim to the empire for himself as the real representative of Constantine, held a parliament at York to make the necessary arrangements, crossed the sea from Sandwich to Barflete in Flanders, met the united forces of the Romans and Saracens in Burgundy, slew the emperor in a great battle, together with his allies, the Sowdan of Syria, the King of Egypt, and the King of Ethiopia, sent their bodies to the Senate and Podesta of Rome as the only tribute he would pay, and then followed over the mountains through Lombardy and Tuscany to Rome, where he was crowned emperor by the Pope, ‘sojourned there a time, established all the lands from Rome into France, and gave lands and realms unto his servants and knights,’ and so returned home to England, where he seems thenceforth to have devoted himself wholly to his duties as the head of Christian knighthood.”

This is the very monstrosity of fable, the grossness of which carries with it its own condemnation. These facts, however, are not insisted upon by Malory, though such claims for Arthur were made by the credulous and less scrupulous writers. Romance has entirely remodelled his character, and has filled in all the gaps in his life-story in that triumphant manner in which Celtic genius manifests its power. The legendary Arthur is made to realise the sublime prophecies of Merlin, and as those prophecies waxed more bold and arrogant in the course of ages the proportions of the hero were magnified to suit them. Merlin had cherished the hope of the coming of a victorious chief under whom the Celts should be united, but the slaughter at Arderydd when the rival tribes fought each other, almost destroyed all such aspirations. Nevertheless the prophet foretold the continuance of discord among the British tribes, until the chief of heroes formed a federation on returning to the world, and his prediction concluded with the haunting words: “Like the dawn he will arise from his mysterious retreat.” Mr. Stuart Glennie calls Merlin a barbarian compound of madman and poet, prophet and bard, but denies that he was a mythic personage or a poetic creation. He was, like Arthur himself, an actual pre-mediæval personage, and, as in the case of Arthur, we have no means of determining his origin, his nationality, or the locale of his wanderings. But if, as Wilson observes in one of his “Border Tales,” tradition is “the fragment which history has left or lost in its progress, and which poetry following in its wake has gathered up as treasures, breathed upon them its influence and embalmed them in the memories of men unto all generations,” we shall extract a residuum of truth from the fanciful fables of which Merlin is the subject.

Myrdin Emrys, the Welsh Merlin, is claimed as a native of Bassalleg, an obscure town in the district which lies between the river Usk and Rhymney. The chief authority for this is Nennius; but according to others the birthplace was Carmarthen, at the spot marked by Merlin’s tree, regarding which the prophecy runs that when the tree tumbles down Carmarthen will be overwhelmed with woe. What we know of Merlin in Malory’s chronicle is that he was King Arthur’s chief adviser, an enchanter who could bring about miraculous events, and to whom was delivered the royal babe upon a ninth wave of the ocean; a prophet who foretold his sovereign’s death, his own fate, and the infidelity of Guinevere; a warrior, the founder of the Round Table, and the wise man who “knew all things.” Wales and Scotland alike claim as their own this most striking of the characters in the Arthurian story. Brittany also holds to the belief that Merlin was the most famous and potent of her sons, and that his influence is still exercised over that region. Matthew Arnold, gazing at the ruins of Carnac, saw from the heights he clambered the lone coast of Brittany, stretching bright and wide, weird and still, in the sunset; and recalling the old tradition, he described how—