This re-politicizing, and re-nationalizing, of Arthur meshes with other important English versions. Two massive alliterative sagas in English drew intimately and independently on Geoffrey of Monmouth, if through Wace: Lawman’s Brut from about 1200 and the anonymous late fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthur are epic celebrations that appropriate Arthur from his originary Celtic Britain to be a king of an imagined and racially united English kingdom. Lawman has the boldness, or perhaps the effrontery, to assert finally that Arthur might return after his mysterious passing “to help the English”—not what the Celtic “chief of the princes of this island” would have had in mind.
In the late medieval period Arthur had a specific political role in Britain, appearing in many chronicles, often with Merlin’s support, as an archetype of British, and often just English, kingship. He also had Europe-wide status, being enlisted as one of the three Christian worthies, ranking with Charlemagne, who was the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, and Godfrey of Bouillon, who conquered Jerusalem on the First Crusade. That grandeur led to Arthur’s being used as a mythic validator for English kings—Edward I appears to have built a real Round Table; Edward III installed Arthurian culture at court; Henry VII, claiming a Welsh right to the throne, named his eldest son Arthur, though Renaissance scholarship also nudged the name toward the classically named star Arcturus, and the Tudor affiliation to Arthurian glory has been overstated by some scholars.
World History
