The Reign of Arthur : From History to Legend

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Summary: A cogent study of the historical sources for a real Arthur
Review: Many Arthurian enthusiasts have attempted to identify the one and true original for the man who became the center of so much legend, the genuine King Arthur. Working from Welsh poems and Medieval tales, such writers have come up with a myriad of answers to the question: "Who was the real Arthur?" He was from Scotland, from Wales, from Cornwall. He was an overking, a minor king, a mere leader of a small warband. But while such studies in popular history have been churned out year by year, academic historians in recent decades have been largely dismissive of the notion of a historical original, instead contending that the figure of Arthur was wholly mythical, the legends contaminating the few ancient sources (such as Nennius and Bede) that mention him. Yet, such dismissal of a historical Arthur by many academics seems to be something of a matter of faith in iteself, with little being published on the subject.

But what do the ancient sources really say and, at least equally importantly, what can we understand about their reliability? Should we blythely accept the modern academic disdain for a genuine Arthur? These are the questions addressed by Christopher Gidlow in "The Reign of Arthur". Gidlow is an Oxford-trained professional historian with a longtime interest in Arthur. The first half of his book is a source-by-source analysis of the evidence -- Y Gododdin, Gildas, Bede, Nennius, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Annals of Wales. And consistently Gidlow concludes that the sources do support the existence of a real Arthur sometime around the end of the Fifth Century CE, a military leader -- perhaps a king or perhaps not -- who led British forces to victory at Badon over the Saxons, a real core about which the later legends were added. Carefully Gidlow explains the regional origins and limitations of the sources and what we can expect to find and not find. I found his exploration of Gildas's De Excidio Britanniae to be especially illuminating.

The second half of "The Reign of Arthur" is devoted to those later writings when the legend was almost hiding the historical original, such as in various "Lives of Saints" and most especially Geoffrey of Monmounth's work. There is less here about the historical Arthur to be revealed, but Gidlow's analyses are nonetheless instructive.

"The Reign of Arthur" should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the question of whether or not such a man ever existed. It does not seek to provide a specific identity in a specific site, as do so many of the popular history works in this field, but Gidlow's book puts the search for Arthur upon much firmer ground.