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Welsh Manuscripts |
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Year of Creation |
Name |
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1225 |
The Peniarth manuscripts |
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1250 |
The Black Book of Carmarthen |
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1265 |
The Book of Aneirin |
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1275 |
The Book of Taliesin |
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1300-1325 |
The White Book of Rhydderch |
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1375-1425 |
The Red Book of Hergest |
The documents thus preserved dated from the 6th to 10th centuries, a period often referred to as the dark ages.
Obviously, the room for error and bias was enormous. Myth and history sometimes became confused.
Somewhere in this ancient, overcooked stew are found floating the oldest morsels of Arthuriana.
The earliest possible reference to Arthur is in De Excidio Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), first written in AD 540 by a British monk called Gildas Bandonicus.
The text is an eye-witness account of the effect on Britain of the Fall of Rome, and it is also a long, pathetic whinge about how awful it all is since those nasty pagan Saxons came over here and ruined everything, and Gildas knows who to blame - Vortigern. This very early British warlord invited Saxon armies over in the 5th century to help repel the various other pagan nations who were invading Christian Britain in the century after the fall of Rome, but they decided to take over Britain themselves instead.
Although they are never stopped, they are so badly beaten at The Battle of Mount Badon that their expansion is checked for fifty years. Many later chronicles record Arthur as being the architect of this British victory, and yet Gildas does not mention him, instead crediting the victory to Ambrosius. If Arthur was there, why does Gildas not mention him ?
At one point he fumes over several British kings he is clearly unsatisfied with, calling them lion's whelps, spotted leopards and so on, until, in chapter 32, he gets to...
...and so on, for several pages. This man is the original "Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells".
If "Arthur" is indeed derived from the Brythonic Celtic root-word for bear - Arth (and possibly also the Latin root-word for bear "Ursus"), then it just possible that either Cuneglasse or the man he rides chariot for is Arthur himself (or at least one of many such "Arthurs" since blurred together by the mists of time, possibly including Ambrosius), and Gildas just does not want to say a good word about him.
The earliest ever reference to Arthur by name occurs in The Black Book of Carmarthen. This manuscript was written by Christian Monks in around AD 1250, in order to preserve the knowledge contained in many much older documents that were on the verge of being lost forever through decay. The bindings of the book were in a black material, hence the name.
One of the many ancient documents copied over and thus preserved was a Welsh poem called Englynion Geraint (The Stanzas of Geraint). It is believed that the original document, now gone forever, was written somewhere in the 6th century, referring to events within living memory.
The poem describes the death of a Welsh Dumnonian king called Geraint, who died fighting the Saxons at The Battle of Llongborth. One verse of the poem runs thus...
Whether this means that Arthur was there helping Geraint, or that Geraint was so brave that the poet grants him the honorary title of "Arthur", or something else completely different, is anybody's guess.
Interestingly, there is an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year AD 501 which many scholars believe refers to this exact same incident...
It is possible that Llongborth = Portsmouth, and that "a young Welshman, a very noble man" = Geraint.
Because of a possible error in the first compiling of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is also possible that all of the earlier dates are wrong by about 20 years. In this case, the Battle of Llongborth took place in AD 481.
This reference is of particular interest to Lugodoc, who lives in Portsmouth.
A definite reference to Arthur occurs in an ancient Welsh poem known as The Gododdin.
The oldest surviving copies of this poem are now kept in the Cardiff Public Library, and were written in the original ancient Welsh Celtic dialect (not Latin) around AD 1250. They are known to have been copied from an earlier manuscript, since lost, written down around AD 850. However, analysis of the poetic style has led to the general acceptance of this poem having been first composed in the oral tradition in the early 7th century.
It is believed that the poet was a bard called Aneirin, belonging to a Celtic tribe known as the Votadini from North-West Wales. This tribe originated in what is now South-Eastern Scotland (between Hadrian's and the Antonine Wall), but then migrated to North-West Wales in the late 5th century.
The poem describes a warband from the kingdom of Gododdin in the old land of the Votadini in Scotland, who travel to what is now Yorkshire in England in order to fight the advancing Anglo-Saxons, at around the end of the 6th century. They lose badly.
There is exactly one, tiny reference to Arthur. One of the warriors is deemed worthy of some praise for his battle prowess, and the poem says...
And that's all.
Clearly, the term Arthur was considered heroic, but whether it was the name of a single famous man, or a title given to great warriors, is completely uncertain.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples) was written in AD 731 by an English Christian monk known to history as The Venerable Bede.
He includes the Battle of Mount Badon, but makes no mention at all of anyone called Arthur.
But then, Bede was English, so his ancestors lost that battle, and an Anglo-Saxon historian might very well decide to airbrush a British-Celtic hero out of history.
The oldest surviving document reporting the existance of Arthur was written in AD 1120 by Christian monks, itself copied from a much earlier manuscript, now lost, written in AD 830 by a Welsh monk from Bangor called Nennius, and titled Historia Brittonum - The History of Britain.
His sources are assumed to have been many even earlier historical texts, all now lost except for those by Gildas and Bede (see above), and probably also stories passed on by word of mouth in the oral tradition. Nennius himself says only that he has "made a heap of all that I have found".
Nennius devotes only a few paragraphs to Arthur, which may be summarised as follows:
..and that's it. No sword in the stone, no evil sisters, no wife, no Launcelot, no holy grail. All that came later.
This unique historical record was first begun on the orders of King Alfred the Great in approximately AD 890, beginning with oral and written records going as far back as the year 60 BC, and then maintained and added to by generations of anonymous scribes until the end of the reign of King Stephen in 1154. The original language was Anglo-Saxon (Old English), but later entries were probably made in an early form of Middle English.
The entire chronicle runs to almost 100,000 words, and not one of them is "Arthur". It covers in detail the period Arthur is supposed to have lived through, and yet there is also no mention of Ambrosius or Badon; only Vortigern who first invited the Angles to Britain.
But then, an Anglo-Saxon chronicler might well decide to forget everything about the Angles' greatest defeat.
The next oldest document reporting the existance of Arthur was also written in AD 1120 by (possibly the same) anonymous Christian monks, this time being a copy of a Latin manuscript, now lost, written in AD 955 by more anonymous monks, and titled Annales Cambriae - The Welsh Annals.
The annals cover 533 years of Welsh history, starting in AD 447 (referred to in the text as Year 1) and finishing around AD 980. They are accepted as being reasonably factual.
In all this dry prose there are just two references to Arthur:
It does not say that Medraut (Mordred) was his son, or that they killed each other, or even whether they were on the same side or were enemies.
This story is one of the eleven collected together in the Mabinogion by Lady Charlotte Guest, at the end of the 19th century. The oldest surviving manuscript containing any of it is known as the White Book of Rhydderch, and was written in AD 1325. However, analysis of the linguistic style indicates that the original oral version was most probably composed at the end of the tenth century.
The story is not really about Arthur himself, but about a young man called Culhwch who appeals to his uncle Arthur and his warband to help him fulfill the many quests set upon him by the giant Ysbaddaden, before he can marry the giant's (presumably normal sized) daughter Olwen.
In the course of the story the following facts about Arthur are revealed...
This Welsh Arthur is a heavily mythologised, semi-magical war-chief, surrounded by many magically skilled warriors; scarcely recognisable from the Arthur sketched in the sparse histories recounted up until this time, although his dog is clearly the same one named in the folk-myth recounted by Nennius. His relationship to history is unguessable , but his place in Celtic myth is solid.
Lugodoc's own contraction of this story can be perused here.
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