Matter of Britain

Themes and subjects

King Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain. The others are stories related to the legendary kings of Britain, as well as lesser-known topics related to the history of Great Britain and Brittany, such as the stories of Brutus of Troy, Coel Hen, Leir of Britain (King Lear), and Gogmagog.

Legendary history

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae is a central component of the Matter of Britain. Geoffrey drew on a number of ancient British texts, including the 9th-century Historia Brittonum, the earliest known source of the story of Brutus of Troy. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on to achieve greater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War. As such, this material could be used for patriotic myth-making just as Virgil linked the founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid. Geoffrey lists Coel Hen as a King of the Britons, whose daughter, Helena, marries Constantius Chlorus and gives birth to a son who becomes the Emperor Constantine the Great, thus tracing the Roman imperial line to British ancestors. It prominently included the King Arthur material, in which the post-Roman Britons led by Arthur briefly conquer much of Europe, including Rome itself, in the style of great world conquerors of antiquity.

According to John J. Davenport, the question of Britain's identity and significance in the world "was a theme of special importance for writers trying to find unity in the mixture of their land's Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman and Norse inheritance." Geoffrey's pseudo-history succeeded in providing a body of national myth for the new Norman England, portraying the Norman Conquest as a restoration of Britain of the Celtic Britons, delivered from the rule of Arthur's ancient enemies, the Anglo-Saxons. Geoffrey's work, especially the Arthur material, was further expanded on and reworked by later medieval chroniclers in his wake.

Others also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Pictish and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. William Shakespeare was interested in the legendary history of Britain. His plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such as King Lear and Cymbeline. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which too appears in Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth.

Arthurian legend

The Arthurian legend (French légende arthurienne), also known as the Arthurian myth or Arthuriana, is the best-known part of the Matter of Britain. The "historical" (but already containing fantasy elements) Arthurian content of Geoffrey and his successors (notably Wace), along with Welsh and Breton tales (notably the Mabinogion), including the now-lost oral traditions and unrecorded troubadour works, became the foundation for writers of Arthurian chivalric romances. Many, more or less fantastical, stories in verse and prose came out from France and later England (due to its close ties with France), as well as other mostly Western European countries, in the sub-genre known as the Arthurian romance that first emerged in Northern France during the second half of the 12th century.

The Arthurian tales have been changed throughout time. Various characters and stories have been added by different authors, often expanding on various members of Arthur's chivalric order, the Knights of the Round Table. The legend of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes, notably that of the Holy Grail. Another major element involves relationships in the tradition of courtly love, prominently between Lancelot and Arthur's wife Guinevere. The legend of Tristan and Iseult would also became an integral part of the Arthuriana, especially through the vast Prose Tristan. Besides the creation of original works of Arthurian romance in other countries (notably in Germany since the late 12th century), particularly the works of francophone poetry and later also prose circulated widely across medieval cultures by being translated (and often locally altered) in many countries throughout Europe.

The advanced manifestation of Arthurian romance in its cyclical prose forms began in the early 13th century with the Vulgate (Lancelot-Grail) Cycle, a long collection of often interlacing episodes spanning the entire time of Arthur and even beyond. It contains two major threads. One of these concerns Arthur's kingdom of Logres and his court of Camelot, envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of the heroes like Arthur, Gawain, and Lancelot, and their moral and spiritual failures. The other concerns the history of the Grail and the grand quest of the various knights to achieve it: some succeed (Galahad, Perceval, Bors) while others fail. These and many other key or iconic motifs and elements (e.g. the Grail, Camelot, Excalibur, Merlin, or the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere) have been first either introduced or modified and popularised by the works of two French poets, Chrétien de Troyes (often drawing on Celtic sources) and Robert de Boron. The Vulgate Cycle was followed by a revision known as the Post-Vulgate Cycle, as well as many other works based on it.

An English-language quasi-canon of the Arthurian romance tradition, based on the French prose cycles and some other works, was eventually established by Thomas Malory in his 15th-century compilation Le Morte d'Arthur that continues to be highly influential today. Once an enormously popular subject, the interest in the Arthurian legend largely waned by the end of the Middle Ages, albeit continuing in England as well as through the Italian Renaissance and the French Renaissance. By the 17th century, it would be still considerably holding out only in England and to some degree in France, before fading away there too. The 19th-century Romanticist revival brought it back to the modern era primarily in the form of Malory's telling, first in the Victorian Britain and then around the world.

Origins theories

In modern times, since both the Celtic Revival and the renewed interest in Arthuriana in the 19th century, there have been attempts by the Celticist scholars and folklorists (e.g. Albert Pauphilet, Alfred Nutt, Arthur Charles Lewis Brown, Emmanuel Cosquin, Gaston Paris, George Lyman Kittredge, John Rhŷs, et al) to link the tales of King Arthur and the Grail with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, reconstructed versions. The trend arguably peaked by the middle 20th century with Roger Sherman Loomis and Jean Marx. Various Arthurian characters have been identified with Celtic deities: for example Morgan le Fay as originating from the Welsh goddess Modron or Irish The Morrígan. Similarly, Geoffrey's Leir of Britain, who later became the Shakespearean King Lear, has been connected to the Welsh sea-god Llŷr, related to the Irish Ler. Much of Arthurian content without a doubt does have roots in ancient Celtic British material, but which had been already Christianised and otherwise transformed (if not just forgotten) by the 12th century.

Another school of Arthurian scholarship, the mythologists, concerned themselves rather with researching the nature of myth. One theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others is to read the Arthurian literature, particularly the Grail tradition, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth. Yet another school became known as the ritualists (e.g. Jessie L. Weston, William A. Nitze), their identifications coming from the speculative comparative religion. Weston's 1920 From Ritual to Romance traced Arthurian imagery through Christianity to roots in early nature worship and vegetation rites, though this interpretation is no longer fashionable. More recent unconventional schools of Arthurian scholarship include the anthropologist proponents of the Scythian/Sarmatian origins theory (notably C. Scott Littleton), and the classicists and others looking back to the works of classical antiquity (e.g. Graham Anderson, Carolyne Larrington). There is also a long-going debate regarding the possible existence of Arthur as a historical figure, with many candidates for such a hypothetical historical Arthur having been brought forth by various authors.

Medieval literature

Named authorship

Anonymous