What King Arthur Reveals About Ourselves

i'll warn you the last two times i've talked about merlin on a podcast i've had such bad palpitations i've had to stop that's astonishing why do you think i think it's him merlin gets you going put it like that i know yes very excited very you put it like that if anything you had palpitations uh okay without i think it's an intellectual relationship hey ryan reynolds here from mint mobile now i don't know if you've heard but mint's premium wireless is 15 a month but i'd like to offer one other perk we have no stores that means no small talk crazy weather we're having no it's not it's just weather it is an introvert's dream give it a try at mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of 45 for three month plan 15 per month equivalent required new customer offer first three months only then full price plan options available taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com observe the north american dad 50s great polo collection he enters his vehicle information on carvana an offer appears in minutes remarkable he squints reads it again smiles and says dang that's a good offer the highest form of approval no haggling no hassle no one called him boss he's still on the couch astonishing you sell your car today on carvana.com pickup fees may apply hello you're listening to this is history in conversation um with me dan jones and i'm very pleased and honored to have as my guest today the brilliant historian amy jeffs amy's new book is a book called arthur and as that name suggests it's about the legendary king who we know so well from medieval chronicles from poetry from wall paintings from statues from all sorts of other visual media so amy welcome to the show this is not the first time you've been on this history so thank you for having me well i'm thrilled you came back it's uh it says something i don't know quite what it says but you're back and we've got you for the next hour or so the first thing i want to talk about is why arthur king arthur the the king of legend has endured for so long and many people i suppose would associate it with the late middle ages can you just tell us a little bit about where in the in the medieval period arthur actually comes from well we have traces of arthurian legend going right back to at least the 8th century possibly the thing that has caused the story to endure is this idea of the the possible return um which for people who were invested in his return aka the britons it was worth keeping the story alive to have that dream uh endure but for people that weren't invested in his return like the plantagenet kings for instance instance it was important to kill him so um okay so two two poles of approach to arthur the storytelling is typically i suppose the medieval storytelling about arthur that people will know best is mallory right from the end of the 15th century um mallory doesn't invent arthur right tell us a little bit about the corpus of storytelling and the story of the story of the story well firstly who is mallory and then what is the corpus of storytelling that he's drawing on to to build his his cycle of arthurian stories well not a great deal is known about thomas mallory it's thought he might have been writing from prison um he put he creates what's known as a summer a big um he collects together a lot of um pre-existing sources about arthur and builds a primary sources french romances so um the vulgate and post-vulgate cycles that came into being in the 13th century and introduce many of the themes that we think of as kind of peak arthuriana and because thomas mallory's writing in the late middle ages it's got that kind of that late medieval that sleeping beauty aesthetic you know that the disney film you can picture the kind of high um headdresses on the women and the armor of the knights that's that's how um mallory's feels and so i think it's a great way to kind of put it in a way that it's a great way to kind of so mallory's is mallory's got this very particular aesthetic and that aesthetic strongly informs the victorian retellings of the arthurian legend um i suppose it's got quite a well courtly but a kind of french courtly aesthetic it those victorian retellings also then inform the 20th century ones that is the strongest kind of aesthetic impetus um narrative influence on most of the retellings we know today in the book that have made arthur famous today but you don't really care about mallory and your arthur i mean you say almost as much at the beginning of your brilliant book arthur which is to say you know you can't you can't be a medieval historian art historian um and and not have arthur somewhere in your mind world but actually what i love it about and love about your book is that right from the get-go you say almost forget all that let's go earlier and let's look at the the very weird and you've mentioned the vulgate and the post-vulgate can you tell us a little bit about what they are what are the earlier traditions of arthurian storytelling yeah i mean it's it's one of these things where where your expertise lies your kind of love lies i think and i i have no problem with mallory and the later arthurian traditions but the way that i first met arthur properly was working on the brute legend on a on the hormone de brute by was which was in a 14th century english illuminated manuscript that i wrote about for my phd and it in that arthur is situated within a dynasty of legendary british kings um he comes in uh when the saxons have really got their roots down along the east coast of britain and his so really the narrative is all about him driving out the saxons and then setting his sights on empire and it's a very political very historical narrative so it first appears in the second uh quarter of the 12th century with jeffrey of monmouth history of the kings of britain as it gets adapted and translated into middle english and anglo-norman and other and welsh you get slightly more kind of romance elements coming in elements of the supernatural well even more supernatural than in jeffrey of monmouth and that was the world of arthur i was really excited about and when i started digging into that and this kind of 12th century romanesque world as opposed to this high medieval world i um started also looking at sources like the mabinogion the welsh mabinogion a collection of stories in middle welsh uh survives mostly in later medieval manuscripts um they are astonishing stories really uh imaginatively uh magnificent actually what they're where you go in those tales um and they are thought to tell stories themselves date to a much earlier period tentatively dated to the 9th to 11th centuries i was very excited about how these sources were so specific about place and some of them even from slightly later periods like uh the adventures of arthur at tarn wadling which is a 14th century uh middle english text you know that's all set on the banks of a now extinct kettle hole lake in cumbria uh that had until it was drained by the victorians um being associated in local folklore with making kind of groaning noises and it may be that this is due to the release of deeply trapped gases um and it may also be that when they freeze the ice shifts you know in winter and makes groaning sounds so tarn wadling which features in in that story in the adventures of arthur at tarn wadling um was known by locals into the 19th century as lakey bray which means lakey bray which means lakey bray which means lakey bray lakey bray lakey bray it's kind of cute uh is isn't it um and apparently well it is thought it has been suggested that this is um anglo-norman lake lake the lake that cries and so it's very interesting that there's also a medieval text in which a kind of spectral apparition rises from the lake and accosts queen guinevere in that story the arthurian one guinevere is trying to catch up with arthur's hunt they've run off uh and she ends up meeting her mother's soul rises from tarn wadling from this lake and is in the throes of purgatorial suffering has a kind of toad chewing the base of its brain it's really grim and she tells guinevere to cast aside her vanity and her pride to pray for her mother's soul to pray for the poor and it's been observed that this text is like a one of those late medieval cadaver tombs with the corpse offering and the beautiful beautifully dressed a living individual lying on top as if in sleep this is like a literary version of that so this was a a world that was aesthetically arresting to me and very specific about landscape i loved it and that's a and that's what you find in these early sources and these sort of outliers you've already mentioned a large number of literary traditions and large number of places and i want to get something out of the way as it were before we delve into the the sort of the granular texture of the storytelling and the weird and wonderful stories which you've already started to allude to. Often people come to looking at Arthur with a sort of journalistic set of questions in their mind, who, what, when, where. Clearly, just from what you've said, we've heard about Wales, about Brittany, about England, about Cornwall, to slightly break that off, England, if you like, about northern England, about different traditions of poetry, about different traditions of chronicle. All set in different bits of the Middle Ages. Is there any point in asking these questions, like, who was the real Arthur? Where did he live? What was the round table? And so on and so forth. Or are we missing the point entirely? Is this just a purely literary tradition? Does it ultimately derive, in your opinion, from a real person in one real place? I don't think so. So, Ronald Hutton, the very well-known historian. the historian of the transition from non-Christian to Christian cultures in Britain. He's a titan in the world of Arthur. He says that there is an Arthur-shaped hole in the period in question when Arthur is purported to have lived. And that absence, I think he says, I don't want to put words in his mouth, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And so we can. I wonder whether there might have been someone there, but he might not have looked anything like the Arthur that the later legends create. At the same time, the likelihood that that putative Arthur looked anything like the Arthur that emerges over the subsequent thousand years is highly unlikely because those stories are so clearly shaped by the preoccupations of the time that they were written, and the preoccupations of their audiences and their patrons. So, personally, I like the stories, and I like the feelings they create, and I like the insights they give us into the periods from which they sprang. And so I don't see. I don't personally get a huge amount of satisfaction from pursuing only the question of whether or not Arthur lived. I'd much rather treat him as a legendary figure and a. literary phenomenon, and an artistic one. What are the sort of commonalities of King Arthur himself in the different tradition, you know, the pre-Malory traditions? Who is he and what's he like? Well, he seems to be some kind of chief or king. He's super strong. His warriors are super strong. Super strong in a superhuman sense, or.? Yeah, yeah, especially in the early Welsh, the Breton, the Latin, Saints' Lives, those kinds of, those early ones. He's more like a Hercules. Um, figure, a monster slayer. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, he becomes more of a king and more political. And in my book, I want him to undergo a transformation. He becomes more human as the book progresses. The more human his political ambitions become, the more political his ambitions become, the less he's able to kind of fight the scratching cat of the Menai Straits, you know, and those things are somehow incompatible. The medieval aristocracy had many virtues, but dressing subtly wasn't one of them. Some outfits look less like lord of the manor and more escaped upholstery, which is one reason I like quince. They make the opposite. Timeless pieces in premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere and merino wool. I've been wearing one of their soft cashmere sweaters lately, and these 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. Find your next four favourites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was This Is History. It's the best way to support the show. When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break in, stop it from ever happening. Plan starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/spotify. 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com/licenses for alarm license information. As kingship develops in the Middle Ages from a sort of a chieftain, great man, you know, man on the hill sort of warlord archetype to a more institutionalized political king, crown, you know, late medieval kingship, do we see the legends of Arthur track with that development in their commentary? Yeah, I suppose that because he is placed in history very emphatically with a full life by Geoffrey of Monmouth. From that point on, he's more consistent with a medieval king. That being said, we know that he was other versions of his character were enduring at the same time. Geoffrey of Monmouth himself writes his life of Merlin. This amazing story of Merlin that from roughly the same time as the history of the kings of Britain in which Merlin, the character Merlin almost completely contradicts the character of Merlin in the history of the kings of Britain. He's so he's outlived Arthur by many decades. He's living up in the forests of Caledonia and he's much more of the kind of wild man, prophet, madman seeking sanity, you know, bemoaning the the mistakes constantly being made by by earthly kings. And he. That one writer seems to have been able to live with two versions of the character of Merlin. It also suggests it backs up the fact that at the same time as you've got Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthur as a historical king, you have Welsh sources presumably enduring that inform the Mabinogion, which which present him as a much more wild and kind of unruly character, like in how Colwch won Olwen, where Arthur is able to lead his hunt to Ireland, back to Wales. I think that's a really interesting point. And I think that's a really interesting point. No, Batman's, I'm going with. Where you've got various. Bats, yes, OK. There are various different actors portraying him in cinema and television and comic books and so on. I mean, do we have versions of this in our world today, I suppose, is the small point. Yeah, I'll take your word for it. Batman was maybe a route we shouldn't have gone down. Let's get back to Merlin, who you mentioned. And I want to say a little bit about, or I want you to say a little bit about, because I don't know anything about him, really. I'll warn you, the last two times I've talked about Merlin on a podcast, I've had such bad palpitations, I've had to stop. That's astonishing. Why do you think? I think it's him. Merlin gets you going. Put it like that. I know, yes, very, very. You put it like that, if anything, you had palpitations. OK, without. I think it's an intellectual relationship I have. Without me having to summon producer Al and test his first aid. But it's always struck me as a curious character to be so popular in the Middle Ages, but maybe not, because he seems to sit completely outside a Christian tradition, in the sense that this is an embodiment of magic and of everything that is sort of without the boundaries of institutionalised medieval Christianity. Tell me all about Merlin, with that query of mine somewhere in your mind. Yeah, well, Merlin's such a. He's such a complicated character because he also. There are different versions of him coexisting. How he appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the son of an incubus and a nun. For those who don't know what an incubus is. It's the spirit of the air. The spirit of the air. And she's very much had a relationship with the incubus. She describes it, she says, a figure of a man appeared in my cell, the doors were locked, the window was shut. And he lay with me and I thought, oh, I'm not sure about this. But then I wanted him to come back. And then he came back time and time again, but I couldn't see him anyway. One way or another, I conceived a child. Tell you what, I'm having palpitations now. Carry on. Well, but that gets augmented in the life of Merlin, attributed to Robert de Boron in the early 13th century, in that the incubus becomes a full-on demon and the conception becomes a full-on rape, but also. So a spiritual as well as a physical one. He kills off all of this woman's family or drives them to. suicidal madness so that he can make her angry so that he can access her soul and also and then impregnate her as well so merlin's kind of like heaven in one ear because he's got a holy mother and a demonic father like heaven in one ear hell in the other in these kind of slightly later sources so in jeffrey sets up this idea of of merlin's mother having been a nun um in robert de baron um she becomes a nun over the course of the narrative um and it's much more explicit in every sense of the word that she is impregnated by not just a spirit of the air but a demon uh he is on a on a revenge mission um trying to undo christ's work on earth by uh creating a human who will be on the side of the devil um but she is um she is on a revenge mission um trying to undo christ's work on earth by uh creating a human who will be on the side of the devil um but she is so um she is so pious so fastidious in going to confession every day through her pregnancy and then joining a convent as soon as the baby's born and and he actually um testifies on her behalf the baby at her trial for being pregnant out of wedlock um she then enters a convent and through her sort of holy influence manages to kind of neutralize the diabolical element of in present in her son so that he has two spirits of both heaven and hell in his mind giving him knowledge of past present and future and kind of putting him in this morally ambivalent space and he's deeply troubled by it as he would be yeah certainly i have a question about the sort of the physicalities of arthur what one is to do with his his gear basically uh the round table the sword and the stone i mean these iconic sort of eight middle ages pop up in in various forms you know windsor round table winchester round table i think there's more than one sword in the stone in your book um and uh so i wonder if we can talk a little bit about the artifacts and then maybe a little a little about the the legends associated with landscape as well but let's start with round tables and swords and stones yeah there's a really good um uh backstory to the round table and lyam on lachamon's um brute which is a kind of middle english adaptation of jeffrey monmouth's history of the kings of britain and he talks about how arthur quite early on in his reign holds a great feast for christmas and they don't have the round table at this point and and so all of the men just sit down wherever and a food fight breaks out over over status and hierarchy and things and they start throwing their bread rolls and then they start throwing their sort of like but like frisbeeing their silver bowls of wine you know they're chucking everything wow definitely their bread rolls involved yep arthur leaves the room and he comes back with a troop and uh they seize the man who started the fight and slit his throat uh really oh and the food fight does escalate that's it it turns into a brawl as well so then they're all they're injuring each other as well so anyway he goes and he slits the guy's throat who started the fight and uh and then he says he chooses another man and he says tie a rope around this man's neck drag him outside the city put him in a bog where his body will lie forever then go and execute all of his male relatives and cut the noses off all his female relatives so that his line will entirely die out it's so brutal and horrible it's got this bog body in it as well which is fascinating which you know wass is writing in the late 12th century but um then it says and a carpenter made a really big round table that could be constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed wherever arthur was holding his sword the people might sit down and there'd be no arguments around hierarchy anymore but it does leave you wondering whether it's the round table that stops them having food fights and arguing over hierarchy or the fact that arthur destroyed the man who started the fight and his entire family and any hope of legacy elton braces really isn't it yeah it's so brutal as well what an extraordinary story yeah it's quite unlike the picture of arthur we have of this kind of chivalric and distant king if i can say something about this sort of risk and another trite modern cinematic uh reference i won't understand it but crack on i'll do my best you must have heard of quentin tarantino yeah oh yes have you seen any of his films a lot of i'm thinking of kill bill one specifically here where uh the bride goes after the crazy 88 and really her her beef is with uh or an issue but um the crazy 88 is standing in her way and so she uh slays pretty much all of them with her i think she has a harturio hanzo sword by this point my never mind the specifics of kill bill one um this is sort of graphic overkill for entertainment and are we are we looking at a similar thing within this uh this origin story of a round table in which yeah it would be kind of cool if the knights had a bread fight and arthur was like geez this is such a waste of food why do we have a round table it's much kind of warrior and cooler if he goes uh right nose is off uh line extinct forever and you over there you're getting the fucking bog i'll tell you that for free um that that's uh that's a nice story um i did have something to say about that though can i just say quickly that lachamon i think is particularly entertaining and he talks about arthur's um hand you know fingers being like sharp steel blades and his eyes to having throwing sparks and his his breast will be meat for bards for centuries to come you know he's delighting in yeah in that uh that choreographed violence that you know that aestheticized violence that you're describing so this is this is sort of retelling the story of kill bill one tale in violence for uh for lols and such and there are two swords in stones in your book aren't there well there are three three including if if you include the bronze age dirk in a peat bog which you might not because it's not really stone is it but tell us about the sword and stone um well i won't go into the nitty-gritty of the stories exactly because it's a quite an important thread running through the book and and hopefully quite an exciting revelation at the end for people um but uh i really enjoyed exploring this particular motif because of the way in which it's it sits for us like one of those those things we want to find one of those smoking gun discoveries that could change everything like discovering the lost city of atlantis i have somebody actually discovered excalibur or you know um or the real the real sight of the sword in the stone how amazing that would be but and there are there are kind of some explanations to be found about the sword in the stone about the development of this of this um legend and it's and it is really exciting and interesting but at the same time i think it's a really good case study in in mystery and the role of mystery in humanities research and and how the kind of holding on to those dreams of discovery fairly lightly for the sake of immersing yourself in in the in the questions in the exploration um rewards lie it's i think fundamental to an argument within this book about the the humanities as an exercise as a wild exercise in irresolution and not just the humanities but also the arts and life so the sword in the stone is everything done everything it's everything shag here what's it like to buy a car from carvana 100 online and get it delivered to your door let me tell you your car is here mr shag thank you mr carvana guy can't wait to take it for a spin only the best for you mr shag hey have you always been so big tall and handsome not always i was six ten once seven days delivered or returned mr shag not that i would you never do no i never do so buy your car today on carvana delivery fees may apply see our seven day return policy at carvana.com i've got one one last question for you uh which which sort of moves us from the from artifacts to landscapes and landscapes you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation i know it's really important to you and have been in all of your all the brilliant work that you've done over over the years and which i've enjoyed talking to you about with you about so much um to take one example from the top of my head um in the 16th century uh john leland goes sent off by henry viii to sort of go around england making itineraries of what's in monasteries and stuff and and later he comes in and he's like oh i'm going to go to the monastery and i'm going to write about arthur and his kind of search for arthur origins i don't want to delve into whether there's a real arthur or not we've already tackled that but he comes to cadbury castle in in south cadbury in somerset and it's like that's the place and it's a iron age hill fort but he sort of takes a look and goes yep that's that's where camelot was that was sort of arthur's great city okay this is just one example among very very very many of people pointing to landscapes or identifying this is it this is the lake this is the hill this is camelot this is where it was and that they range from mount etna i know you mentioned that in your book all the way through to um the wilds of the of of caledonia um what is that i wonder if you can get down into that that elemental part of the arthurian tradition why is it so rooted in landscape why does so many people look at so many features and and not just say yep nice hill decent lake but like that's the hill that's the lake that's where this kind of this this great hero be he's supernatural or political a freedom fighter or whatever he may be that's where it all went down yeah i don't know whether it's so much i mean obviously some of those early sources are very explicit about landscape but i also think it's it's a case that the stories are very rootable in landscape rather than rooted and that there are places have accrued the name of of arthur or become associated with arthur time and again over the centuries and you mentioned mount etna i love that example um because in in a 13th century encyclopedia by a man with the excellent name of gervais of tilbury um he describes that he was a lawyer and a clerk and he traveled all over europe and he even spent some time working in sicily for the norman kings there and he says that he's found a natural naturalized arthurian story there that the bishop of catania uh lost his horse and his groom chased after it and chased it into a cave in mount etna and came out on another worldly plane where he found a great building and king arthur languishing on a bed um you know trying to heal from his wounds and he's given that he gives the groom treasure to take back to catania uh which is then on display in the bishop's palace and presumably that that story arrived in sicily with the normans um taken from their their connections to northwestern europe but it also gives a i suppose it shows the ways in which if there's a a landmark close to us or a topographical feature that is significant to us because it's local to us and we give it a story and say that is the you know give it the definite article then it helps us feel that connection to landscape and that sense of belonging that we so yearn for and that we so yearn for and that we so and are so challenged by and so because that's what these stories are they're kind of notional bungees to the landscape uh that's why i think i'm so fascinated by them and how they can how we can uh how we can work with them now and how they worked in the past especially it's just such a pleasure hearing you tell these stories and we've only barely scratched the surface of all the amazing stories that you tell in in your book in and one of the things i loved about it so much is the way that you you seamlessly move from these beautiful retellings and re and imaginings of the the stories themselves into this sort of the the the perfect analysis that you've demonstrated talking to us today and we haven't even talked about the amazing illustrations i mean you're such a wonderful artist and this book is is it's a beautiful item it's full of gorgeous illustrations as well so uh so listeners viewers you can get arthur a new life by amy jeffs in bookstores and libraries from thursday september the 10th in the uk now for my royal favorites and this is history plus subscribers stick around because amy and i are going to talk about amy's favorite weird and wonderful moments of the middle ages that's on our bonus episode which you can hear on patreon and other places as well next week's edition of this is history in conversation is with the award-winning film director amy jeffs and actor paul greengrass so please join us for that paul will be discussing his latest film the uprising which is all about the peasant revolt of 1381 we will catch you then it is um hyperbolically violent isn't it that's the phrase i was looking for um well it's uh um yeah i don't know why it's tickled me it's okay um uh oh throw me now like a bread roll at a feast let's not do that introducing pandora's holiday collection this season celebrate the ones you know by heart with a gift that says it all from engravable pieces to festive charms to lab-grown diamonds pandora's jewelry is made for the ones who inspire you who've been there through it all give a piece that says exactly what words can't pandora more than a gift shop new styles in-store or online at pandora.net