Arthur
Now I want to turn to something from (the Roman) period that was found in
the Pyranees and is a big surprise. Just to the west of
This is the period of the warrior
Arthur. The earlier god was down in the Pyranees.
Now we come to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. in
The British lost.
The English won, but they won only in the area that the Romans had held.
They did not go into
The people from the south of
Just
to the west of Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, is a little place called
Saint-Pé-d’Ardet, where we have a monument engraved (picture on RG 126 – first
century A.D.). The date is the Gallo-Roman period, and it
reads, “Lexeia Odanni filia. Artehe vslm” (“Lexeia the
daughter of Odan, thus acquires merit through her dedicated vows to Artehe.”)
This shows that already in the period of Roman Europe, Arthur was revered
by the Celts as a god. And the name Artehe (Artus, Arthur) is
related to Artemis and Arcturus; all these are related to the bear, the oldest
worshipped deity in the world. We have bear shrines going
back to Neanderthal times in just this part of the world from perhaps 10,000
B.C. So this is a bear god; the valley, and the river here,
running by Lourdes, is called the River of the Bear (the Ourse).
This is the God Arthur. I think I can make the point
here that Lake Geneva is therefore the source of the whole idea of King Arthur’s
departure on a boat after his death to the Isle of the Golden Apples, the Isle
of Avalon. The philosopher Charles Musès, who discovered the
inscription above, also makes a very good point: these traditions, which in our
literature we associate with Britain, are in the preliterate period associated
with the Celtic sense of the La Tène culture in the middle of France.
RG 127
Arthur appears in the old chronicles of Gildas and Nennius in the sixth and eighth centuries as a dux bellorum (“leader in war”; this is the origin of the English word duke). And what the scholoars now picture with regards to Arthur is a sort of Roman trained military man who helped the kings of southern Britain in their battle against the invading Germans – that is to say, against the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes from what is now Denmark. The southern part of Britain was the field of the collisions. The chronicles tell of twelve great battles in which Arthur, dux bellorum, this Roman-trained military man (like, say, some Senegalese officer trained by the French), assisted the kings of the south; at the last battle Arthur is killed, and the German triumph is confirmed.
During this invasion there were, of course, refuges, particularly from southwest England, who went to what is now called Brittany in France. The whole Breton peninsula is populated by people who were refugees from Britain, and there grows up what is called the Hope of the Britons – the hope that Arthur, the once and future king, will return and restore to them their homeland in the south of England.
So we have the period of these invasions in the late fifth and early
sixth centuries as the historical moment underlying the legend of Arthur – that
is to say, about 450-550 A.D. Then we have a period of oral
legendry, of reciting the deeds of this great man, building up the legend of the
Hope of the Britons, namely, of Arthur as the one who will return to restore
their lost world to them. It’s a bit like the hope that
inspired the ghost dance religion at the end of the last century in America: the
hope that the ghost dancers would dance and dance and that another land would
come over the land that the white people had taken, and that only the Indians
would be able to jump up onto that land, and the buffalo would be there, and the
old world would be there again. This is a common motif in the
traditions of defeated peoples. RG 129
Merlin’s
next work was to produce the king who would now govern the happy new world, and
this is going to be Arthur. Now we get the famous tale of the
begetting of Arthur: He was to be from the house of a certain queen Igerne, and
his father was to be Uther Pendragon, who was not Igerne’s husband.
Merlin arranged that Uther Pendragon should assume the form of Igerne’s
husband, and while the husband was away, have intercourse with her, with Igerne
thinking it was her husband. Thus Arthur was begotten in
extramarital magic. RG
Guinevere becomes Arthur’s wife. The emperor of Rome sends a challenge to Arthur to submit to him. Arthur arranges an expedition to campaign against Rome, but while Arthur is away, his nephew Mordred seduces Guinevere and attempts to take over the throne. Before he’s had a chance to conquer Rome, therefore, Arthur is called back. He gives battle to Mordred, whom Arthur slays, but who wounds Arthur mortally. Arthur is carried off to Avalon. RG
Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain is our first
account of Arthur as a king. We now know from the Chronicles
that he was not a king but a dux bellorum, a war leader, who assisted the
British kings in defending the land against the incoming Anglo-Saxons and Jutes.
He died, and the land was conquered – at least what we now call