 Lord, ingest that our leaf-vanderer, listeneth, and I shall you tell, by old days what a wincher's wearer among our elders that befell. In Arthur Dayus that noble king befell a wincher's fairly feller, and I shall tell of their ending that Micklewister of woe and weller. The knights of the table-round, the sangriail when they had sought, a wincher's they before them found, finished, and to end abroad. That is the Stanzeic Morte Artur, written about the year 1400. And you may not have understood every word of the introduction to the poem, but you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. One of the most common story traditions in Western culture is the matter of Britain, or the stories of King Arthur. I'd be willing to bet that before you ever read anything about King Arthur, any actual Arthurian literature, you've probably seen several movies and TV shows that are set in Camelot and have the same familiar figures that lead us to expect we know what's going to happen whenever we go to see a new iteration, a new version of an Arthurian story. And maybe it's precisely because there are so many King Arthur stories, movies, television and that sort of thing. Every new iteration seems to have to tell us that it is the original one, it is the best one, it has to compete with all the other ones that we've ever seen. And that has led to some rather embarrassing claims. The most recent version, as of this recording, was the Charlie Hunnam version directed by Guy Ritchie and among other things in their advertisements they have posters that say, do you really know the legend? Well, if you've seen the movie you see something completely new that is not, that barely resembles anything that has ever been part of the legend before, which is fine for Hollywood, but they seem to need to say, well, this is the authentic one, even though it's different than all the rest. A movie that tried even more emphatically to say it was the real version was the 2004 movie with Clive Owen playing King Arthur, not only did the poster promise that this is the untold true story that inspired the legend, but in the introduction they have a whole sort of pseudo historical account of how a guy named Lucius Artorius Castus could have lived 300 years after the historical Lucius Artorius Castus and brought all the Celtic Knights of the Round Table from Sarmatia, which is on the north coast of the Black Sea, all the way to Roman Britain. This sort of quasi-historical account might seem more impressive than, say, Transformers First Night, which has the Transformers back in medieval England. But it's really not. Lucius Artorius Castus is about as likely as Optimus Prime to have been one of the Knights of the Round Table. Now some people will say, well, nobody wants a history lesson in a movie. We don't want a scholar of literature or history writing a King Arthur movie. And actually there is one out there that was, the screenplay was co-written and the movie was co-directed by a scholar and medieval historian named Terry Jones. Now, if Terry Jones doesn't sound familiar to you, if he doesn't look familiar here, you may have seen him in the movie he directed and wrote. That was Monty Python's quest for the Holy Grail. A spoof made for fun, but still one of the ones with the most Easter eggs for people who know Arthurian literature. So does that mean that Monty Python and the quest for the Holy Grail is the real thing? Is the most accurate version? Well, no, but it gets points for not taking itself so seriously. It is an iteration and it is its own iteration, but it's not the real thing, the original story, the Ur text. Neither are any of the others, whether it's Clive Owen's pseudo-historical King Arthur or Transformers and Camelot. These are all iterations. The Arthurian mythology is multi-form. All the different versions of the story are part of that multi-form, that myth. And that's what makes Arthurian literature such a great example of the types of things we're learning in this class about how narratives work, how stories change through the narratives that convey them and transport them across time. And this is a story that people want to trace back and see how far back they can go, see what everything is based on. Was there a real historical King Arthur? But to even ask that question, we've got to ask first, what do we mean by King Arthur and what do we mean by history? So because these stories have their origin in the Celtic prehistory, let's refresh our memory from the past lecture on barbarian Europe, the Celts occupied most of continental Europe. They weren't just limited to Britain, Scotland and Ireland. They were in Iberia, modern day Spain. They were all over France, parts of modern day Germany and Switzerland and even northern Italy. In fact, Celtic cultures follow the Danube River all the way to the Black Sea. These cultures however were Latinized after starting with Julius Caesar, the Romans began to conquer Celtic regions, especially Gaul and Hispania. In later centuries, the Romans occupied Britain, pushed their way north to the southern border of Scotland where they built Hadrian's Wall. Butteca, the queen of the Iceni, tried to lead a revolt and did a lot of damage to the Romans, but ultimately she was defeated. And the Romans pursued the Celtic leadership, which were the Druids, all the way to the island of Anglesey in the northern tip of Wales in an attempt to not just crush the Celts' resistance, but to crush their sort of cultural identity. Of course, they didn't completely wipe out this cultural identity. Even once Gaul and Hispania and Celtic Iberia and even Cisalpine Gaul, which is northern Italy, but especially Britain and Wales, once they were taken over by the Romans, they didn't stop being Celtic. They sort of adapted and adopted a lot of Roman customs and technology and culture, but they combined that with a previously existing culture. So we're gonna be looking at this area, the islands of Britain and Ireland, but also Northwestern France, which the Romans called Gaul. And remember that after the defeat of Rome, Angles and Saxons started coming from Angeln and Saxony, the sort of base of the modern peninsula of Denmark and the northernmost parts of Germany. They started invading the island of Britain. It's at this time that some of the Britons, the people who lived on the island of Britain before the Anglo-Saxons, the English, the Britons started to flee, not all of them, but a few, started to flee across the English Channel to the peninsula of Brittany, marked on the map here, this westernmost peninsula of France. That's where its current name, Brittany, comes from. And these people are gonna be called the Breton, B-R-E-T-O-N, starting around the year 450 as the Angles-Saxons spread across, especially southern Britain. And this is where the sort of echoes of Arthur begin with the Celtic resistance, the sort of post-Roman resistance to the invading Angles-Saxons, especially the Battle of Baden around the year 500, which I'll come back to. But the Angles-Saxons brought with them old English, the origins of the modern day English language. Meanwhile, on the continent, shortly after this, the German Franks push west, and keep in mind the Franks, where we get the words France and French, even though French is a romance language, its origin is in Latin, the Franks themselves were a Germanic tribe. And they moved into Tagal, they took over the Latin language and they established the Frankish Empire, which is gonna be very influential on British culture. But here too, there is a Latin culture in Gaul that's being sort of combined with the Germanic-Frankish culture. But even beneath that is that still existing layer of Celtic influence. So the Gauls were Celts, who were taken over by the Romans, and then by the Franks. A few centuries later, these Franks, especially the Normans, who were an even more Germanic branch of the Frankish Empire, because they were settled by Rolo, or Rolf the Ganger, and have blood ties to the Anglo-Saxon ruling dynasty of England. And William the Conqueror crosses the English Channel and defeats King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. And the Normans bring with them the French language, sort of Germanified French language, which is overlaid on the Anglo-Saxon old English. So at this point, we have several layers of cultures, or cultures combined with other cultures. So I'm gonna be using the words French and English to describe people in the later Middle Ages after all of this happened, after 1066. But I'm going to be referring to Britons and Breton. I'm gonna try to accentuate the difference between those two words. But the Breton are the residents of Brittany. That is the westernmost tip of France. And the people who settled there, of course, had distant Golic heritage back before the Romans occupied France. But they also were settled by people fleeing from Britain, the island of Britain, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions. So there was this very Celtic group of people who came from the island of Britain to settle in Brittany, this peninsula of France. And Brittany is the peninsula of France. Britain is the island. The Breton are the people who live in Brittany. The Britons are the pre-English, Celtic, native residents of the island of Britain. And when I refer to England geographically, that is the same as Britain, at least southern Britain. But when I use the word England, I'm only gonna be using that to refer to that geographic area after the Anglo-Saxon invasions. There's also whales, which is kind of a tricky term because the word whales and the word Welsh is actually an old English word that means foreigners. So these are the native people being described as foreigners on their own land by the invading Anglo-Saxons. However, I'm gonna use that term a lot because the literature that we're looking at is being written much later after the Anglo-Saxons have been there for centuries and then they're defeated by the Norman French. So Welsh and Britain, B-R-I-T-O-N, are describing basically the same people. Make a note of that because it might get confusing otherwise. Now, another series of historical events that are gonna be important are the Crusades. Starting in around the year 1100, just a little before, we have the beginning of the first Crusade where these Christian Europeans invade the Holy Land, Palestine, modern day Israel. At first, they're trying to retake areas of the Byzantine Empire that the Seljuk Turks have taken over. But their ultimate goal is to take the city of Jerusalem and they do take the city of Jerusalem quite by accident. They sort of had the element of surprise for a very short time there. But the people who are mostly going on Crusade from Europe are Franks. They are people from modern day France. And as they return, they're bringing stories of the Holy Land and these stories are gonna be very influential on later Arthurian literature. And this new sort of idea of the world that includes Turks and Islam and knights going from Europe to Palestine, all of this is gonna make its way back into literature about Arthurian Celtic Britons at a time before the creation of Islam and long before the Crusades. These sort of anachronistic elements are gonna make their way into Arthurian literature. For example, Sir Thomas Mallory's Lamort de Artur ends by saying that four of King Arthur's knights after the fall of Arthur's kingdom, these four knights go on Crusade to fight the Turks. Well, the thing is the Turks hadn't invaded yet so that's anachronistic. It's historically impossible. And I mentioned Sir Thomas Mallory's Lamort de Artur because it's a very influential text. In fact, it's the one that has probably the most influence on all Arthurian literature after this. And it's one of the first texts ever printed, at least ever printed in England. William Caxon brings Johann Gutenberg's printing press to England in the 1400s and after printing the Bible and a few other smaller works, he prints Sir Thomas Mallory's Lamort de Artur. And before this, every text that was written had to be copied by hand so there are not a lot of libraries around. Not a lot of copies of a single work of literature are gonna be able to be made. But once the printing press is printing copies of a work of literature, the reproduction is gonna explode. It's gonna go viral in modern terms. And that's exactly what happened with Lamort de Artur. But I wanna clear up the whole language transition history here. Keep in mind on the island of Britain, first we have these Celtic languages that's like Gaelic and Welsh or what we today call Welsh, as well as some Bretonic languages that no longer exist, as well as Old Breton. That is the language that's going to be spoken in that peninsula of France called Brittany. Then the invading Anglo-Saxon spread Old English like the poem Beowulf is written in. After 1066 when the Normans invade, they're gonna be bringing Norman French. And Old English will still be spoken but the upper class, the aristocracy is gonna be speaking and reading in Norman French which means that people writing are mostly gonna be writing for the aristocracy so they're gonna switch from writing in English like in Beowulf and they're gonna start writing in French. Now that's gonna change around 1400 when Chaucer writes in Middle English, the language of the common people. The Stanzet, Mortay Artur and several other Arthurian works at this time are written in that language. And finally Thomas Mallory's Lamort Artur is gonna be written in Middle English or early modern English. But of course literature isn't the only way to tell a story. There also as there have been in the sort of prehistory of all the texts we've read in this class, there are oral storytellers, usually singers, people who go from place to place and sing a story, a ballad, an epic about heroes and other characters that are familiar to their audience but they carry the story told a certain way, remembered through song, the way we can remember a song much more easily than we can usually remember a text. And in the French speaking areas and in the sort of Celtic areas that become French speaking and English speaking areas, we could refer to these people as troubadours. These are bards in English or scalds in Old Norse or shoeps in Old English. But the troubadours, the Britonic and later French speaking singers are frequently telling stories of King Arthur as well as other very ancient stories about people who were not connected to King Arthur but who would become connected because that's kind of the way stories work. Narratives look to try to weave together not just the different elements of one story but elements of other stories that are very popular. For example, there's a Celtic hero named Tristan and we have a lot of early narratives about Tristan and his love for a woman named Isode who is married to a King Mark of Cornwall and they have an illicit affair despite that and ends up being tragic but this story was completely separate from King Arthur at first but later it sort of made its way into Arthurian literature where Tristan becomes one of Arthur's knights not because the stories originally had him in Arthur's setting but because Arthur was popular and Tristan was popular so eventually the troubadours found a way to put the two together. Now our only access today to these troubadours now some of their narratives in verse form are written down but for the most part we have prose translations. Somebody said, hey, here's this great story that I heard, let me write that down. Somebody else, here's a different iteration of that somewhere else and we can sort of reconstruct the types of stories that were being spread by these troubadours. What we do have is the literature. We have the literature written in English like Sir Thomas Mallory's La Mort d'Artour which we can pretty much read in its original language. There's Sir Gowen in the Green Night which is a very different sort of language but it is English. There's the Stanzeic and allerative Morte Artour but even though English is the language being spoken on the place where Arthur is purported to have lived on the island of Britain, these English texts, many of them depend on sources that were actually written in French. These are like the Lays of Marie de France but especially the works of a man named Cretien de Troyes. He's from a city called Troyes, even it looks like Troy. Another Frenchman named Robert de Bouron and there's what's called the Vulgate Cycle which is prose works for the most part but they're based on poetic works that were also written in French which were probably based on works written in Breton which we call Breton Lays. The Celtic language that was there before French in Brittany and these French works are based themselves on works that came ultimately from Britain. These earliest sources, the ones that come from Britain, they're either written in old Celtic languages like Welsh or more often they're written in Latin or like in the case of Geoffrey of Monmouth who's a monk and a scribe, he's writing in Latin but he claims to have a Welsh text, a text written in the Welsh language that he's translating and this is about as far back as we can go with the literature. We can go back with a couple other texts which I'll get to at the end of the lecture but notice that this brings us back to, in this timeline just to about the year 800. It's in around the year 600 with the poem The Godothen, your Icodothen that we have the first reference to Arthur by name and not much between that and the history of the Britons around 800 or the Welsh annals around 950. It's only with the old Welsh story of Keelhoek and Olwyn which is part of the Mabinozian and with the history of the Kings of Britain written by Geoffrey of Monmouth that we have fully fleshed out stories about King Arthur and his knights. But Arthur is identified as someone who fought the Saxons at a particular battle, a battle of Mount Baden and that battle dates to around the year 500. So that leaves over 500 years of time between what is supposed to have happened and narratives being written down about it. So there were troubadours telling and retelling and changing and modifying these stories through their narratives but notice how much time this leaves us between what is written and what is supposed to have happened. So rather than start at the beginning and work our way forward in which case we might be starting in really unfamiliar territory, making our way into familiar territory, I want to start with the familiar stuff and with Sir Thomas Mallory's book, La Mort d'Arture, written in 1470, published in 1485, we're going to see all of the familiar elements of Arthurian mythology and then we're going to work backwards to get to the time period when a historical Arthur would have lived and see what's left for us to find of what we think we're going to find. That's coming up in the next lecture.