Not surprisingly, Geoffrey of Monmouth did have motives for fabricating Arthur's story. Actual history had not been kind to the Britons, who had suffered wave after wave of invasions from various peoples, including the Romans, the Saxons, and most recently the Normans. As a Welshman whose culture had a rich oral tradition and an understandable measure of pride, Geoffrey may have wanted to see his people take their place among the eminent figures of the past. This is exactly what his work achieved, providing the British people not only with a heroic king to overshadow Charlemagne but with ancient and venerable origins equal to that of Greece and Rome.
If indeed Geoffrey of Monmouth did create a glorified version of the past and call it history, it is difficult to fault him too harshly for it. Chroniclers have often had their own agendas when writing their accounts (Gildas' Ruin of Britain is primarily a tirade against a wicked world), and students in search of facts must read these works with a critical eye. And whatever else he did, Geoffrey gave us an extraordinary tale that has caught the imagination of countless creative minds.
There is also a possibility, albeit a faint one, that Geoffrey told the truth about the "certain very ancient book" he consulted for his facts. And our Welsh chronicler aside, the theory that once, somewhere, a warrior-leader of some kind lived, governed, achieved greatness and was later immortalized as the legendary Arthur has not been--and by its very nature cannot be--disproved. Yet it is important to realize that if he did exist, the "real King Arthur" and the world in which he lived would bear very little resemblance to the legend we have come to know so well.
The writers of the day--who may not have concerned themselves with the authenticity of Geoffrey's account--followed a common custom of medieval art and literature. In matters of detail such as clothing, armor, shelter and transportation, they used the trappings of their own time. If poets of the twelfth century and later had any concept of how radically different life had been six hundred years earlier, they certainly didn't bring that knowledge to bear on their literary endeavors. And why should they? Extraordinary authors wove fascinating, heartbreaking, glorious tales that their contemporaries could understand and relate to, and in so doing ensured their own immortality.
However, these epics present us with a misleading blend of anachronisms. In them, Arthur and his knights live in castles, wear plate armor, compete in tournaments, use heraldic devices, and generally conduct their lives in a way that would have been unusual, and in most cases impossible, in the sixth century. The very concept of a knight as we know it does not really apply to Europe before the eighth century at the earliest, nor to Britain until after the Norman Conquest.
Furthermore, this anachronistic depiction was not limited to one or two centuries but continued for at least five hundred years, each author setting the story in a world of his own imagination and each portraying Arthur in his own unique way. The setting revealed in Chrétien de Troyes' Lancelot, for example, has striking differences from that in Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Although later authors often set their stories in a generic or even specific "medieval time," the legendary king and his world are ever-changing to suit the vision of whoever tells the tale. Thus, understanding the Arthur of legend is not so much a historical investigation as a literary one.
This feature was originally published at the Medieval History Site in March, 1999, and was revised in June, 2004.
