King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
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KING ARTHUR
_and the Knights of the Round Table_
EDITED BY RUPERT S. HOLLAND
GROSSET & DUNLAP
_Publishers_ NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1919, by
George W. Jacobs & Company_
_Printed in the United States of America_
INTRODUCTION
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! What magic is in the
words! How they carry us straight to the days of chivalry, to the
witchcraft of Merlin, to the wonderful deeds of Lancelot and Perceval
and Galahad, to the Quest for the Holy Grail, to all that "glorious
company, the flower of men," as Tennyson has called the king and his
companions! Down through the ages the stories have come to us, one of
the few great romances which, like the tales of Homer, are as fresh and
vivid to-day as when men first recited them in court and camp and
cottage. Other great kings and paladins are lost in the dim shadows of
long-past centuries, but Arthur still reigns in Camelot and his knights
still ride forth to seek the Grail.
"No little thing shall be
The gentle music of the bygone years,
Long past to us with all their hopes and fears."
So wrote the poet William Morris in _The Earthly Paradise_. And surely
it is no small debt of gratitude we owe the troubadours and chroniclers
and poets who through many centuries have sung of Arthur and his
champions, each adding to the song the gifts of his own imagination, so
building from simple folk-tales one of the most magnificent and moving
stories in all literature.
This debt perhaps we owe in greatest measure to three men; to Chrétien
de Troies, a Frenchman, who in the twelfth century put many of the old
Arthurian legends into verse; to Sir Thomas Malory, who first wrote out
most of the stories in English prose, and whose book, the _Morte
Darthur_, was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, in
1485; and to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in his series of poems entitled
the _Idylls of the King_ retold the legends in new and beautiful guise
in the nineteenth century.
The history of Arthur is so shrouded in the mists of early England that
it is difficult to tell exactly who and what he was. There probably was
an actual Arthur, who lived in the island of Britain in the sixth
century, but probably he was not a king nor even a prince. It seems most
likely that he was a chieftain who led his countrymen to victory against
the invading English about the year 500. So proud were his countrymen of
his victories that they began to invent imaginary stories of his prowess
to add to the fame of their hero, just as among all peoples legends soon
spring up about the name of a great leader. As each man told the feats
of Arthur he contributed those details that appealed most to his own
fancy and each was apt to think of the hero as a man of his own time,
dressing and speaking and living as his own kings and princes did, with
the result that when we come to the twelfth century we find Geoffrey of
Monmouth, in his _History of the Kings of Britain_, describing Arthur
no longer as a half-barbarous Briton, wearing rude armor, his arms and
legs bare, but instead as a most Christian king, the flower of mediæval
chivalry, decked out in all the gorgeous trappings of a knight of the
Crusades.
As the story of Arthur grew it attracted to itself popular legends of
all kinds. Its roots were in Britain and the chief threads in its fabric
remained British-Celtic. The next most important threads were those that
were added by the Celtic chroniclers of Ireland. Then stories that were
not Celtic at all were woven into the legend, some from Germanic
sources, which the Saxons or the descendants of the Franks may have
contributed, and others that came from the Orient, which may have been
brought back from the East by men returning from the Crusades. And if it
was the Celts who gave us the most of the material for the stories of
Arthur it was the French poets who first wrote out the stories and gave
them enduring form.
It was the Frenchman, Chrétien de Troies, who lived at the courts of
Champagne and of Flanders, who put the old legends into verse for the
pleasure of the noble lords and ladies that were his patrons. He
composed six Arthurian poems. The first, which was written about 1160 or
earlier, related the story of Tristram. The next was called _Érec et
Énide_, and told some of the adventures that were later used by Tennyson
in his _Geraint and Enid_. The third was _Cligès_, a poem that has
little to do with the stories of Arthur and his knights as we have
them. Next came the _Conte de la Charrette_, or _Le Chevalier de la
Charrette_, which set forth the love of Lancelot and Guinevere. Then
followed _Yvain_, or _Le Chevalier au Lion_, and finally came
_Perceval_, or _Le Conte du Graal_, which gives the first account of the
Holy Grail.
None of these stories are to be found in the work of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who had written earlier in Latin, nor in any of the so-called
chronicles. It was Chrétien who took the old folk-tales that men had
been telling each other for centuries and put them into sprightly verse
for the entertainment of his lords and ladies. He fashioned the stories
according to the taste of his own gay courts, and so Arthur and his
Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval and the other knights became far
more like French people of the twelfth century than like Britons of the
sixth. And in introducing the Holy Grail, that sacred and mystic cup
that was supposed to hold drops of the blood of Christ and to have been
carried to England by Joseph of Arimathea, Chrétien added to the
Arthurian legends an old religious story that had had nothing to do with
Arthur originally.
From this point in its history that sturdy ancient English oak, the
original story of Arthur and his knights, an account mainly of warlike
adventures, sent forth four new branches that have now become part and
parcel of the parent legend. These four branches are the story of
Merlin, the story of Lancelot, the story of the Holy Grail, and the
story of Tristram and Iseult. Some of the writers who came after
Chrétien took one of these stories, some another, each enlarging his
theme according to his own taste, until each story was the center of a
large number of new and romantic offshoots. Practically all of them,
however, were bound together by the thread that led from the court of
the great King Arthur at Camelot.
The story of Merlin, that man of magic, is the least important of the
four branches, though Merlin is still an intensely interesting figure in
the story of Arthur that we read to-day. The story of Lancelot was to
prove very important; starting as a romance that had very little
connection with Arthur, it became with Malory and Tennyson the real
center of interest of the plot. The story of the Holy Grail proved
almost equally important. In the earliest accounts of this Perceval was
the knight chosen above all others to reach the Grail Castle, but
Perceval was too rough and worldly a knight to suit the taste of the
monks who wrote out the legends and so they created Galahad to take his
place as their own ideal of perfection. And into these adventures are
woven some of the tales of Sir Gawain, among them the delightful story
of Gawain and the Little Maid with the Narrow Sleeves. To the legend of
Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, added the story of the son
of Perceval, or Parzival, as he calls him, the story of Lohengrin, the
famous Swan-knight. Tristram and Iseult, the fourth of the branches,
though less connected with Arthur than either Lancelot or the Holy
Grail, became immensely popular with poets and remancers because of its
great love story, and is to be found told again and again in widely
varying forms all through the Middle Ages.
So we have seen that a British chieftain, winning a great battle in the
year 500, became in time celebrated throughout Europe as the greatest
king of romance. So far it was mainly the French who had made him
famous. Layamon, an English priest, had written a poem in English
concerning Arthur shortly after 1200, and told of the founding of the
Round Table, but it was to be a considerable time yet before any English
writer was to attempt what the French had already done. Chaucer told
none of the Arthurian stories, though he placed the scene of his _Wife
of Bath's Tale_ at King Arthur's court. An unknown English poet wrote
_Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight_ somewhere between 1350 and 1375. It
is not until we come to the _Morte Darthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory,
finished in 1469 or 1470, that we reach the next great step in the
history of the legends since the time of Chrétien de Troies. But in
Malory's story Arthur steps forth resplendent, the kingly figure that we
have to-day.
Little is known concerning Sir Thomas Malory. He seems to have been a
knight and country gentleman of Warwickshire, a member of Parliament in
the reign of Henry VI, and later a soldier on the side of Lancaster in
the Wars of the Roses. As a result of the victory of the party of York
he had to retire from public life when Edward IV came to the throne, and
lived quietly at his Warwickshire estate. He was familiar with life at
court and with men-at-arms and he knew how popular the stories of King
Arthur were becoming in England. So, being a man of education, he set to
work to make a collection of the legends, using as his chief sources the
French romances.
Malory showed considerable originality in carrying out his plan. He made
Arthur the central figure, taking the story of Merlin as an introduction
to the birth of Arthur, instead of as a separate legend, and ending his
account soon after the death of the king. He omitted a number of the
older legends that had little to do with Arthur, many of them good
stories, such as that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He made the
England of his Arthur something like the England he knew, and his people
became real and living instead of fanciful figures out of a far-distant
past. His descriptions are vivid and lively and his style so engaging
that his work of the fifteenth century is much read to-day. Three
characters stand out from all the rest, Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere,
and these three became in all stories and poems subsequent to Malory's
time the main figures of the legends.
Matthew Arnold attributed to Homer three great epic traits, swiftness,
simplicity, and nobility. It is these three characteristics that have
made the _Morte Darthur_ so deservedly famous.
With the printing of Malory's book by the first English printer, William
Caxton, in 1485, we come to the end of the Middle Ages in literature.
Manuscripts written out laboriously by monks and clerks were now to
give way to the printed page. The age of Elizabeth was less than a
century away, one of the golden ages of the poets. Yet few of the
Elizabethans touched on the story of Arthur. The main exception was
Edmund Spenser, who made Prince Arthur the hero of his great poem _The
Faerie Queene_, but Spenser's Arthur and his knights and ladies have
little in common with the figures in the old romances.
The succeeding centuries, great as they were in English writers of
genius, paid little attention to Arthur. Milton and Dryden made little
use of the legends. Stories of ancient chivalry lost their vogue, novels
were becoming popular and the poets chose themes closer to their own
times and point of view. Not until the nineteenth century did Arthur
come into his own again. Then the Victorian poets turned to him for