In spite of what The Da Vinci Code would have you believe, there’s not much of a challenge in looking for the historical Jesus. The life of Christ is one of the best-documented lives in all antiquity.

But Arthur is a real mystery. Four detailed lives of Christ were written while witnesses to the events were still alive; the first mention of Arthur’s name comes generations after Arthur would have died.

Was there really a King Arthur? Or was he just a legend, born in a dark age that couldn’t separate myth from history?

And does it matter?

I’m going to spend a few days looking at those questions, and even trying to answer them. Of course, the answers I come up with might not be the answers anyone else would come up with. This Arthur turns out to be a slippery character.

Looking for the historical Arthur is easy enough. In fact, it’s a good general rule that anyone who seeks the Arthur of history finds him. The only problem is that we all find different Arthurs.

Faced with such a bewildering array of contradictory conclusions, a few old grumps lapse into hopeless Arthurian agnosticism. But most of the rest proudly announce their conclusions with trumpet fanfare, and then confidently await the applause of the world. I might as well join the cacophony. Like the rest of the seekers, I’ve read most of the primary sources, which you can do in one afternoon.

Before we set off on an Arthur hunt, we ought to know what we’re looking for. What will Arthur look like if we find him?

There are so many different legends about Arthur that we might despair of ever pinning him down. But most of the stories seem to assume the same skeleton outline of his life:

1. He united the previously disunited Britons.

2. He defeated the Saxon English at the famous battle of Badon.

3. He ruled in peace and security for some time after that.

4. He died in battle with Mordred.

This is the life of Arthur in the broadest possible outline - what we might think of as the unalterable core of the Arthurian tradition. We can make a hasty scribble of what Arthur might look like, the way a police sketch artist might do, and take it with us to see if we find anyone who looks like that.

But where will we look first?

The best place to look would be in the British histories of Arthur’s time. As it happens, there is exactly one history from about the time Arthur would have lived, and it does indeed mention Arthur’s famous battle of Badon. It even gives us a date for the battle, which by a lucky coincidence happened in the very year the author of the history was born. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t mention Arthur anywhere.

Is our quest doomed from the start? Is this gaping historical silence proof that there never was an Arthur?

Probably not. In the next installment, we’ll take a good look at the great work of St. Gildas the Wise, and we’ll notice one particular quirk of his style that has important implications in our search for the real Arthur. Meanwhile, if you want to get a head start, you can find links to Gildas in Latin and in English in the Scriptorium. Read his book for yourself - it’s not very long - and form your own conclusions. Then you can tell me where I’m wrong.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.