KING ARTHUR, wrote Peter Ackroyd in his translation of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte d’Arthur, lived ‘in the old wild days of the world’. So long ago, in fact, that the written record is almost certainly untrustworthy.
In the dog days of the fifth century, a warrior called Arthur fought off Saxon and Jute invaders. Was this man the king or leader, also named Arthur, whose fame emerged first from Welsh legend, then in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s retelling of the 1130s in The History of the Kings of Britain and subsequently in Malory’s narrative? We may never know. All that is certain is that Arthur —‘the once and future king’, a royal child guarded in utmost secrecy by the magician Merlin, who grew up to exemplify goodness, honesty and decency—conquered the imagination of these islands’ dwellers many centuries ago.
For Victorian artists, Arthur’s historical reality was
