Arthur, King

British monarch in a vague medieval past, who was supposed never to have died, and whose return was prophesied.
The Arthurian Legend, one of the greatest themes of romance, is rooted in the Celtic people who inhabited Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, ancestors of the English. These Britons, after being subjects of the Roman Empire for more than three centuries, became independent around the year 410. The Anglo-Saxons from the continent seem to have entered the country first as auxiliary troops, employed by the independent Britons. More followed without authorization. Reinforced, they got out of control and gradually expanded their settlements. After an era of shifts and changes lasting several centuries, they achieved dominance over all of what is now England.
Celtic Britons remained unsubjugated in Wales and some northern areas, as well as in Brittany across the English Channel, which they had colonized. These handed down tales of the early post-Roman period when British leaders were still active, resisting the new people and winning temporary victories. The balance of probability favors the existence of a real Arthur figure among them, in the second half of the fifth century or possibly a little later. One or two of them are known to have had Roman names, showing a slight survival of imperial culture, and the name Arthur is a Welsh form of the Roman name Artorius. The Arthur of legend and romance is, of course, an immense expansion of any credible individual and may have absorbed traditions of other men, even perhaps other men called Arthur.At some unknown stage in legend-weaving, Arthur joined the select company of historical characters who have been reported alive after they were presumed to be dead. Such persons need not be popular heroes; they can be either good or bad. The list includes the Mexican peasant leader Zapata, the British military chief Lord Kitchener, and even President Kennedy; it also includes Nero and Hitler. Normally, the rumor fades out when its subject cannot possibly have survived so long. But that is not always so. A medieval German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, was believed to be asleep in a mountain cave centuries after his death. The Portuguese king Sebastian, officially killed in battle in 1578, was reputed to be alive for many years afterwards, and the credulous hoped for his return as a national savior as late as 1807, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s army overran Portugal. The undying Arthur may have begun his career as a British Sebastian.
He is first clearly documented in the early twelfth century by references to folk beliefs about him in Cornwall and Brittany. Cornwall remained predominantly Celtic long after the rest of England was English. A party of French priests, visiting the Cornish city of Bodmin in 1113, were told by one of the locals that King Arthur was alive. They laughed at him but found to their surprise that the bystanders agreed, and a fight broke out. The first known mention of the prophecy of an actual return is in 1125, when the historian William of Malmesbury says: “The tomb of Arthur is nowhere seen, whence ancient ditties fable that he is yet to come.” That expectation is on record as the “Breton hope” a few years later.
There are two principal conceptions of the secret retreat where Arthur lives on. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote a famous pseudo history bringing him in, says that after his last battle, he was “carried off to the Isle of Avalon for his wounds to be attended to.” According to some romancers, he is still in that enchanted place (not originally equated with Glastonbury in Somerset). The other principal story is that he is asleep in a cave. The cave legend is found in Wales, in western and northern England, and in Scotland. It has at least fifteen locations, including Cadbury Castle, an ancient Somerset hill-fort, which was refortified in the “Arthur” period and is thought to be the prototype of Camelot so far as anything is. John Masefield’s poem Midsummer Night is based on the Cadbury tradition. In most cases, the cave is not a real one that can be explored in the normal way. It is magically hidden and only revealed to the occasional visitor, sometimes by a mysterious stranger who may be Merlin himself. Arthur might voyage back from Avalon, or he might emerge from his cave.
In either scenario he would have been pictured first as a Celtic warrior-messiah, leading the Welsh and others against the English. During the Middle Ages, however, when Arthurian romances became popular throughout Christendom, he was transformed into a king of England as well as other lands, the lord of a past golden age, a sort of chivalric Utopia. Plantagenet sovereigns such as Edward I took him seriously as an illustrious forebear, and his prophesied return became more of a national motif. If he came back, perhaps in an hour of special need, his glory would revive.
Sir Thomas Malory, in his famous version of the legend, mentions the prophecy, though he is noncommittal himself. “Some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again.… Many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: ‘hic jacet arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.’” The Latin line, “Here lies Arthur, king that was and king that shall be,” suggested the title of T. H. White’s four-part novel The Once and Future King. Since Malory asserts that it was written on a tomb, it is not clear in what sense Arthur could be future.
Malory’s book was published in 1485. That year marks a transition, when Arthur’s return began to be symbolic rather than literal. Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and became King Henry VII. He was part Welsh, claiming a pedigree that took his ancestry far back towards Arthur, and his army flew a Red Dragon standard emblematic of Wales. Tudor publicists developed a myth that he was restoring the true “British” monarchy and bringing back harmony after centuries of usurpation and strife. Henry had his firstborn son baptized at Winchester, which Malory said was Camelot, and named him Arthur with the apparent intention that he should reign as Arthur II, sufficiently fulfilling the prophecy. Prince Arthur died young, and his brother became king as Henry VIII. He did not make so much of the notion, but he kept it alive, and John Leland, the court antiquary, hailed him in verse as “Arturius Redivivus,” or “Arthur renewed.”
The Tudor Myth rose to a new height with Elizabeth I. Edmund Spenser, in his allegorical poem The Faerie Queene, suggests that her realm was, in effect, Arthur’s ideal Britain reconstituted. In his poem he imagines Merlin delivering a long prophecy about Britain’s future, leading up to a climax with the Tudors. Even after the dynasty ended and the Stuarts came in, the propagandist theme of Arthurian revival made further appearances and was some time dying away.
Since then, while King Arthur has inspired a vast amount of literature, his return has been a topic for poetry and fantasy rather than literal hope. However, the prophecy has an enduring psychological interest. It gives mythic expression to a definable way of looking at things and a syndrome that recurs among religious and political activists. They show a tendency to conceive a movement towards reform or revolution not as a simple step forwards, but as a revival. When this happens, they evoke a long-lost glory or promise and regard it as not permanently lost. It is still potentially “there,” so to speak, as the Arthur of legend still secretly exists; it can be reinstated for a fresh start, with intervening corruption swept away, as the Arthur of legend will return in glory.
Among several historic instances, a notable one is the movement for Christian reform in the sixteenth century. Reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, agreed that the Church had grown corrupt and that radical action was required. But neither party spoke of this in terms of development or progress. Both appealed to the past. In the golden age of the apostles and early saints, Christianity was pure. The reformers aimed to abolish the corruption, restore the true gospel, recapture the pristine purity.
This kind of thinking sometimes appears compulsive. The lost-but-recoverable golden age simply has to be real, even if there is no good evidence for it. Rousseau in the eighteenth century was a major inspirer of the French Revolution, but not by preaching progress. He taught that humanity had once been free, equal, and moral in a natural state. Civilization had created tyranny and misery. The proper course was to get rid of the upholders of the evil system and create a social order that would enable natural goodness to reassert itself. Significantly, Rousseau admitted that his natural golden age might never have existed, but, he said, we need to imagine it “in order to judge well of our present state.” It is a necessary myth.
The early growth of Communism supplies an even more remarkable case history. Marx and his collaborator Engels, in spite of their claims of objectivity, yielded to the same compulsion. More than thirty years after their first Communist Manifesto appeared, they invented a long-ago and dubious era of “primitive communism” and tacked it on at the beginning of their version of history. It was a classless golden age, an age of “simple moral grandeur” that had been subverted by “vulgar covetousness, brutal lust, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth.” Thousands of years of conflict and oppression ensued, but the Revolution would—eventually—restore the ancient classless society on a higher plane. The original Communist Manifesto of 1848 had not contained anything of the kind. When a new edition came out in 1888, Engels had to add this new notion as a prelude. Even in the materialistic context, the long-ago golden age had reasserted itself, and so had the prophecy of its resurrection, a “Return of Arthur.”
See also
Merlin

Further Reading
Ashe, Geoffrey. The Book of Prophecy. London: Blandford, 1999.
———. King Arthur: The Dream of a Golden Age. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.
Lacy, Norris J., ed/ The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. New York and London: Garland, 1991.