King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

Produced by Peter Vachuska, Dave Morgan, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net KING ARTHUR _and the Knights of the Round Table_ EDITED BY RUPERT S. HOLLAND GROSSET & DUNLAP _Publishers_ NEW YORK _Copyright, 1919, by George W. Jacobs & Company_ _Printed in the United States of America_ [Illustration: "This girdle, lords," said she, "is made for the most part of mine own hair, which, while I was yet in the world, I loved full well."] INTRODUCTION King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! What magic is in the words! How they carry us straight to the days of chivalry, to the witchcraft of Merlin, to the wonderful deeds of Lancelot and Perceval and Galahad, to the Quest for the Holy Grail, to all that "glorious company, the flower of men," as Tennyson has called the king and his companions! Down through the ages the stories have come to us, one of the few great romances which, like the tales of Homer, are as fresh and vivid to-day as when men first recited them in court and camp and cottage. Other great kings and paladins are lost in the dim shadows of long-past centuries, but Arthur still reigns in Camelot and his knights still ride forth to seek the Grail. "No little thing shall be The gentle music of the bygone years, Long past to us with all their hopes and fears." So wrote the poet William Morris in _The Earthly Paradise_. And surely it is no small debt of gratitude we owe the troubadours and chroniclers and poets who through many centuries have sung of Arthur and his champions, each adding to the song the gifts of his own imagination, so building from simple folk-tales one of the most magnificent and moving stories in all literature. This debt perhaps we owe in greatest measure to three men; to Chretien de Troies, a Frenchman, who in the twelfth century put many of the old Arthurian legends into verse; to Sir Thomas Malory, who first wrote out most of the stories in English prose, and whose book, the _Morte Darthur_, was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, in 1485; and to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in his series of poems entitled the _Idylls of the King_ retold the legends in new and beautiful guise in the nineteenth century. The history of Arthur is so shrouded in the mists of early England that it is difficult to tell exactly who and what he was. There probably was an actual Arthur, who lived in the island of Britain in the sixth century, but probably he was not a king nor even a prince. It seems most likely that he was a chieftain who led his countrymen to victory against the invading English about the year 500. So proud were his countrymen of his victories that they began to invent imaginary stories of his prowess to add to the fame of their hero, just as among all peoples legends soon spring up about the name of a great leader. As each man told the feats of Arthur he contributed those details that appealed most to his own fancy and each was apt to think of the hero as a man of his own time, dressing and speaking and living as his own kings and princes did, with the result that when we come to the twelfth century we find Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his _History of the Kings of Britain_, describing Arthur no longer as a half-barbarous Briton, wearing rude armor, his arms and legs bare, but instead as a most Christian king, the flower of mediaeval chivalry, decked out in all the gorgeous trappings of a knight of the Crusades. As the story of Arthur grew it attracted to itself popular legends of all kinds. Its roots were in Britain and the chief threads in its fabric remained British-Celtic. The next most important threads were those that were added by the Celtic chroniclers of Ireland. Then stories that were not Celtic at all were woven into the legend, some from Germanic sources, which the Saxons or the descendants of the Franks may have contributed, and others that came from the Orient, which may have been brought back from the East by men returning from the Crusades. And if it was the Celts who gave us the most of the material for the stories of Arthur it was the French poets who first wrote out the stories and gave them enduring form. It was the Frenchman, Chretien de Troies, who lived at the courts of Champagne and of Flanders, who put the old legends into verse for the pleasure of the noble lords and ladies that were his patrons. He composed six Arthurian poems. The first, which was written about 1160 or earlier, related the story of Tristram. The next was called _Erec et Enide_, and told some of the adventures that were later used by Tennyson in his _Geraint and Enid_. The third was _Cliges_, a poem that has little to do with the stories of Arthur and his knights as we have them. Next came the _Conte de la Charrette_, or _Le Chevalier de la Charrette_, which set forth the love of Lancelot and Guinevere. Then followed _Yvain_, or _Le Chevalier au Lion_, and finally came _Perceval_, or _Le Conte du Graal_, which gives the first account of the Holy Grail. None of these stories are to be found in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had written earlier in Latin, nor in any of the so-called chronicles. It was Chretien who took the old folk-tales that men had been telling each other for centuries and put them into sprightly verse for the entertainment of his lords and ladies. He fashioned the stories according to the taste of his own gay courts, and so Arthur and his Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval and the other knights became far more like French people of the twelfth century than like Britons of the sixth. And in introducing the Holy Grail, that sacred and mystic cup that was supposed to hold drops of the blood of Christ and to have been carried to England by Joseph of Arimathea, Chretien added to the Arthurian legends an old religious story that had had nothing to do with Arthur originally. From this point in its history that sturdy ancient English oak, the original story of Arthur and his knights, an account mainly of warlike adventures, sent forth four new branches that have now become part and parcel of the parent legend. These four branches are the story of Merlin, the story of Lancelot, the story of the Holy Grail, and the story of Tristram and Iseult. Some of the writers who came after Chretien took one of these stories, some another, each enlarging his theme according to his own taste, until each story was the center of a large number of new and romantic offshoots. Practically all of them, however, were bound together by the thread that led from the court of the great King Arthur at Camelot. The story of Merlin, that man of magic, is the least important of the four branches, though Merlin is still an intensely interesting figure in the story of Arthur that we read to-day. The story of Lancelot was to prove very important; starting as a romance that had very little connection with Arthur, it became with Malory and Tennyson the real center of interest of the plot. The story of the Holy Grail proved almost equally important. In the earliest accounts of this Perceval was the knight chosen above all others to reach the Grail Castle, but Perceval was too rough and worldly a knight to suit the taste of the monks who wrote out the legends and so they created Galahad to take his place as their own ideal of perfection. And into these adventures are woven some of the tales of Sir Gawain, among them the delightful story of Gawain and the Little Maid with the Narrow Sleeves. To the legend of Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, added the story of the son of Perceval, or Parzival, as he calls him, the story of Lohengrin, the famous Swan-knight. Tristram and Iseult, the fourth of the branches, though less connected with Arthur than either Lancelot or the Holy Grail, became immensely popular with poets and remancers because of its great love story, and is to be found told again and again in widely varying forms all through the Middle Ages. So we have seen that a British chieftain, winning a great battle in the year 500, became in time celebrated throughout Europe as the greatest king of romance. So far it was mainly the French who had made him famous. Layamon, an English priest, had written a poem in English concerning Arthur shortly after 1200, and told of the founding of the Round Table, but it was to be a considerable time yet before any English writer was to attempt what the French had already done. Chaucer told none of the Arthurian stories, though he placed the scene of his _Wife of Bath's Tale_ at King Arthur's court. An unknown English poet wrote _Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight_ somewhere between 1350 and 1375. It is not until we come to the _Morte Darthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, finished in 1469 or 1470, that we reach the next great step in the history of the legends since the time of Chretien de Troies. But in Malory's story Arthur steps forth resplendent, the kingly figure that we have to-day. Little is known concerning Sir Thomas Malory. He seems to have been a knight and country gentleman of Warwickshire, a member of Parliament in the reign of Henry VI, and later a soldier on the side of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses. As a result of the victory of the party of York he had to retire from public life when Edward IV came to the throne, and lived quietly at his Warwickshire estate. He was familiar with life at court and with men-at-arms and he knew how popular the stories of King Arthur were becoming in England. So, being a man of education, he set to work to make a collection of the legends, using as his chief sources the French romances. Malory showed considerable originality in carrying out his plan. He made Arthur the central figure, taking the story of Merlin as an introduction to the birth of Arthur, instead of as a separate legend, and ending his account soon after the death of the king. He omitted a number of the older legends that had little to do with Arthur, many of them good stories, such as that