Arthur the man, trying to be a good ruler in time of conflict, is central to twentieth-century versions of the myth, and his efforts and struggles dominate the thematic action as never before. Crucial to this is Merlin as the humanist educator of this modern human king. The idea of an educative Merlin had been around for some time, especially as a containment of the bearded druid-bard that non-English Romantics, from Wieland to Emerson, saw as Merlin. Yet it is learning, not magic, that empowers Arthur’s education: a key development is the long poem Merlin (1917), by the American Edwin Arlington Robinson, in which Merlin is a highly intelligent person, not a seer or magician, who leaves his beloved and equally human Vivien to watch helplessly as the world of the Arthur he has mentored falls tragically apart. Robinson was well aware of the context as the United States set itself to send men to face the brutalities of modern war. This kind of Arthurian tragedy was more fully realized through Malory’s narrative by T. H. White, writing between 1936 and 1941. In White’s prequel The Sword in the Stone (1938), Merlin trains Arthur in natural knowledge, and so he grows up to know that Might should not be Right—but fails to achieve his dream of an educated liberal order as the tragic events slowly build up in three books based on Malory and with their own nobility of tone. White, writing like Robinson in the darkness of war, confronted the problems in his final volume The Book of Merlyn, which argues fractiously about human limitations and, like White himself, places more faith in the world of nature. Antihumanist and prophetic of ecology, an avatar of Orwell’s contemporary dark fantasies, this last book was not published until 1977 and still haunts Arthurian writing as a version of the tragedy without the consolation of either Christianity or literary elegance.
Both the imaginative charm of White’s first book and the sweep of the full Malorian series of The Once and Future King (1958) stimulated many stories, often for juveniles, most retaining faith in Arthurian values. Authors like Catherine Christian, Victor Canning, and Mary Stewart continued the combination of single adventures in a saga frame, often published in series form. These reworkings can be highly original, like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is
Rising series (1965-77); they can involve fantasy and time-travel, mix in elements of Celtic magic, bring Americans to Arthurian Europe, or even relocate the story to America. So they continue the tradition of Hawthorne and Twain in reshaping European myth to have modern meaning in the United States, and often showing a greater precision in history, geography, and especially names than the more casual British writers feel the need to offer.
Arthurian film has been less rich than fiction. A Connecticut Yankee was often adapted, usually for children, with notable successes starring Will Rogers and Bing Crosby, but adult Arthurian films are relatively few, and his name in the title is even rarer: kings seem to appeal less in the United States than England, and the story is locked into an unappealingly dark ending. Some Arthurian films acquire positive endings: The Knights of the Round Table (1954) leaves Perceval to carry on in the light of the Grail; in First Knight (1995) Lancelot and Guinevere simply inherit the kingship and the future; the 1999 television series Merlin makes Arthur’s death a secondary event as the magician acquires final happiness with a rejuvenated Nimue. Tragedy was avowed in Robert Bresson’s French Lancelot du Lac (1974), but its brutal ending was one of the many Arthurian sonorities mocked in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
Another strand in Arthurian modernity has been the idea, or fantasy, of the historicity of Arthur. Though some scholars had, since Gibbon, long suspected some truth behind the ninth-century Historia Brittonum’s account of Arthur’s battles with the Saxons, it was R. G. Collingwood in 1935 who first argued forcefully that Arthur was a Roman-British leader who held up the Saxon advance for some time, and so made Britain neither fully Germanic nor fully Celtic (and also conveniently linked the British Empire back to Rome). The appeal of an un-Teutonic Britain was especially evident after the Nazi period, and fiction developed the Collingwood concept vigorously. John Masefield offers in Badon Parchments (1947) a strictly archival account, while Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset (1963) is a highly effective novel treatment of this modern English ideology in which Arthur has supplanted as a national founder the genuinely heroic, but apparently inappropriately Germanic, King Alfred.
A tide of Dark Age quasi-historicist novels, weaving romance, Celticism, and mysticism into military and sometimes sadomasochistic detail, have flowed recently from male authors like Parke Godwin, Bernard Cornwell, and Stephen Lawhead. Variation of this masculinization started with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s long and scholarly feminist rewriting in The Mists of Avalon (1981): that produced various spinoffs, and Sharan Newman and Persia Woolley have also feminized the tradition. The most recent visual versions seem to accept as now canonical a mix of history, myth, women, and children. The 2009 British television series Merlin not only makes the lead figure a wise juvenile—not a bearded ancient—but blends in medievalism, Celticity, and helpful children of both genders and several ethnicities.
Similarly, while the film King Arthur (2004) asserted Arthur and his warriors were Sarmatians from southwestern Russia (but with the traditional names), its narrative mixed the Romano-British concept, a wise woodland Merlin, and a glamorous young warrior Guinevere. As the film ends with Arthur’s marriage and rise to rule, it is able, with no sign of a Morte, to deploy his name in the title.
If many modern versions prefer the simplicities of romance to the scope and sonority of Arthurian saga, there is also the recurrent chatter of the “real King Arthur” industry. A personalized version of Arthurian historicism remains an ineluctable interest of television and print journalism, offering topography, maps, dates, and speculative statements from scholars and non-scholars in a quest for the real, historical Arthur. But King Arthur has been in the underworld before. The early Celtic saints’ lives belittle his merely secular powers; early modern English ideologues made him a mere validator of dubious incomer kings, fighting cardboard Saracens across his former land; from Milton to Wordsworth, Arthur and Merlin were lay figures of a distastefully royal and Catholic past. But like all great mythic heroes, he has the power of return, in a new form, with new meanings for new contexts, and it seems rational to expect many substantial returns for Arthur. He remains the king of an enormously rich literary tradition that is itself in truth the reality of this dynamic, changing, and deeply revealing myth.
World History
