The Politics of Myth

By Stephen Knight

In The Politics of Myth, Stephen Knight studies nine figures still vividly alive, all of them appearing in twenty-first century film and television. Analysing how they relate to the major themes of Power, Resistance and Knowledge, he shows how fact and fiction mix to help us explore and understand the complexities of our world.
Surprising mythic shifts occur across time. Robin Hood can be a tough anti-authoritarian, a genial aristocrat, a Saxon patriot; Queen Elizabeth I has been seen as a Protestant heroine, a love-lorn lady, even a grumpy manipulator. From Merlin's multiple manifestations and Sherlock Holmes's smoking habits to the ongoing arguments about Ned Kelly, this book explores the richness and the range of figures of myth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522868449

Stephen Knight

Stephen Knight was a journalist and the author of ‘Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution’ and ‘The Killing of Justice Godfrey’. He also wrote a novel, ‘Requiem at Rogano’. Stephen Knight was the writing name of Swami Puja Debal, a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He died in 1985.

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mythic.

Part One

POWER

King Arthur

Arthur and Authority

King Arthur is the major mythic figure of heroic and royal authority in the post-classical Western world. When in The Hero Lord Raglan scored major figures in terms of their heroic traits, the major achievers were classical or biblical, like Theseus or Moses, both on 21 out of 22. Of later figures only Arthur scored highly with 19, being deficient in divine drama—his father is not a god, nor related to this mother, and there is no clear attempt to murder him as a baby—otherwise all the major heroic archetypes are present. He has the mysterious birth, with apparently two fathers—Uther Pendragon lusted after the beautiful Igraine and Merlin enabled him to impersonate her husband to conceive the future king. He also has the strangely offstage childhood, then springs into action when he seizes his kingdom, establishes a new order and rules well for years; he is betrayed by someone very close to him, his incestuous son Mordred, and then dies in battle—but it is not clear where he is buried and there are recurrent rumours of his return.

Medieval King Arthur

Many of the figures considered in this book have elements of this hero pattern, including the women, but none will have Arthur’s total, nor so strong and coherent a combination. He is for medieval and modern European culture the figure who represents both the positive and negative aspects of ultimate mythic power. Arthur is always authority: the near play on words might be one of his many attractions. While he represents power and splendour in a range of different social and historical contexts, crucially his story also realises the vulnerability of that desired structure—Arthur’s rule is always going to pass away, and it is valued and celebrated as a lost ideal.

The recurrent variations to the contemporary meaning of this myth across periods and contexts are redirections of the meaning of authority and the nature of the threats it faces, with Arthur varying from a splendid but essentially honorific king of a country like medieval France, to a political monarch of the seventeenth-century kind, then becoming a more modern figurehead standing for moral and ethical leadership—and all those valued versions of power are put under ultimate pressure, as the hero myth demands. But the mythic structure can itself change to shape new political meanings for the myth. In modern times the notion of a young Arthur develops to realise the importance of education in the construction of authority. The gender focus also changes with modern feminism; the myth may, as in some recent forms like the 2004 film, hover between optimism and naivety, not presenting a tragic outcome but being simply satisfied to end with Arthur coming to power and taking up his kingdom, his wife and his assembly of knights.

The nature of Arthur’s authority need not be royal, English or military—it can be morally personalised, become internationalised or even, as in TH White, essentially pacifist. In some periods, like the eighteenth century, it can have limited power, as the value of the medieval was substantially reduced, but the king returns to power in the nineteenth century, in a distinctly different form, largely through Alfred Tennyson’s influence. Yet variations of that major kind are in the myth from its very beginning, and the first recorded appearances of Arthur, from some twelve hundred years ago, are strikingly variant, and also very different from what has come to be the assumed shape and meaning of his myth.

Welsh Warlord

The earliest traces of Arthur link him with Britain in the immediate post-Roman period, but the belief that Arthur led the British Celts—or Welsh as they would become known—against the invading Anglo-Saxons is not a dominant early idea: in fact it is modern in its full context and meaning (see p. 34). The near-contemporary account of that fighting given by the British monk Gildas in his sixth-century De Excidio Britanniae (‘About the Destruction of Britain’) makes Ambrosius Aurelianus the British leader, who soon after the year 500 defeats the Saxons and so holds up their advance for some fifty years at the battle of Mons Badonicus, which probably took place near Bath.

These events are first linked to Arthur in a text apparently not compiled until the ninth century, Annales Cambriae (‘The Annals of Wales’), which speak of Arthur beating the Saxons in about 518 and dying at the battle of Camlann twenty-one years later. This brief image of a British war leader against the invading Saxons is substantially elaborated by the early ninth-century historian (formerly, but apparently incorrectly, called Nennius¹) who wrote the Historia Brittonum. He lists twelve battles against the Saxons in which Arthur, seen as a Christian British leader, triumphs: Mons Badonicus is the climax, and there is no reference to Arthur’s death.

However much the idea of ‘a real King Arthur’ appeals to modern people, these references are not simple glimpses into past truth: they are themselves already the product of a specific contextual and political meaning of the myth. NJ Higham comments that the Historia Brittonum was in part ‘a defensive review, from a British perspective, of the moral, political and military meaning of the Anglo-Saxon settlement’, and both it and the Annales Cambriae were produced by Welsh monks, writing in the Latin Benedictine tradition of classical history.² For them Arthur is more a Christian than a national leader—he is said in the Annales to have fought with the cross on his shoulders (presumably an image of it: in the Historia, he carries the image of St Mary). In these texts heroic grandeur and anxiety about its loss are conceived of as national and historical in nature. After Arthur, the British lack a leader and the Saxons can triumph, as they indeed did, except in Wales and Scotland.

Modern historicism has made this political, even patriotic, Arthur very interesting today, but a very different Arthur is found in the Welsh language in the pre-conquest period, one who is not primarily a great king or a military leader and has no contact with the Anglo-Saxons. His deeds belong in a pagan and magical world much closer to that of early Irish heroic saga than his later medieval majesty. In general Arthur has little patriotic meaning to the Welsh—their national hero is the real medieval warrior-leader Owain Glyndwr.

In some early Welsh heroic poetry Arthur has military status—one hero is said to be a great warrior ‘though he were not Arthur’, and another poem refers to Arthur as ‘commander in battle’.³ That does not contradict the historians’ patriotic leader, and both poems are about fighting the Saxons, but those are only passing references. The richest poetic material involves Arthur in a world of folklore and myth, much of it still mysterious because, unlike the great riches of early Irish Celtic culture, so little was written down in Welsh. But ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ (‘The Spoils of Annwfn’) describes Arthur’s heroic seizure of the cauldron of the otherworld.⁴ His grandeur lies in his success and the gods and demigods who are in his party; the threat is the cost of this mythic heroism—only seven returned alive in Arthur’s ship Prydwen (‘Beautiful’). Other costly battles are celebrated in a lengthy but incomplete poem named, from its first words, ‘Pa Gwr yw y Porthawr’ (‘What Man is Gatekeeper?’), in which many Arthurian exploits and heroes are mentioned. Cai is huge and hypernatural, and can keep his comrades warm and dry through his body heat; Manawydan, the Welsh sea-god, is with Arthur; the assembled heroes fight witches, giant cats and dog-headed men—and no Saxons are mentioned at all.

Arthur flourishes as a folkloric heroic chieftain in the early Welsh prose text Culhwch and Olwen, which scholars think was written down by about 1000ad, though the earliest surviving manuscript is three centuries later. Here Arthur leads a warband of gods and many Welsh heroes, real and folkloric. Basically it is a simple story about Culhwch, Arthur’s nephew, finding a bride, but that plot is elaborated with the riches of early Celtic culture—wit, verbal play, wide reference and a colourful narrative ranging from symbolic myth to robust comedy.

There is also the grandeur of Arthur’s role as a world-conquering leader. Unlike the Latin account of the political nationalist hero, his is not a morte: finally Arthur helps Culhwch win his bride, and the family will continue. But a wide range of threats are faced by Arthurian culture: a powerful giant denies his beautiful, fertile daughter to Culhwch; dangerous supernatural enemies climax in the Black Witch from the Uplands of Hell, whom only Arthur can kill; and there is the consistent suggestion that human culture can reverse itself for good or ill. Culhwch’s name means ‘pigsty’, and he was born in one, but grew into honour; opposite was the path of another prince so evil he was physically changed into the terrible Twrch Twryth, Chief Boar of the island of Britain. When even Arthur fails to kill him, he escapes to Cornwall and then swims out to sea.

The threat of a wild world to human culture is recurrent, as it genuinely was in early society; the story draws on Celtic myth and folklore to assert that the hostility of nature and of enemies can be managed, if perilously, through continued cooperative effort, good fortune and the favour of the gods, as well as true leadership, exemplified in Arthur. The story’s comic vigour has bothered scholars—some thought it a parody, and even the sympathetic Brynley Roberts sees aspects of ‘modern cartoon’ and ‘broad burlesque’ in its ‘crudity of tone’.⁵ But this misses the power of comedy in Celtic culture as a form of lively celebration—the Irish sagas are again a parallel. As a whole, Culhwch and Olwen stands as a memorial to the qualities and the values symbolised by Arthur’s world, and it was probably assembled as such, like the mythic pan-Wales narratives of The Mabinogion, in response to Norman incursions.

Arthur’s myth was well-known in Wales and its close relation Brittany. His popular heroic stories evidently spread in oral mode and were translated into French, some by the early twelfth century referring to Arthur as a hero who had not died, but would return to help his people.⁶ These popular stories were disseminated in French through the Celtic-speaking Bretons and, after the conquest, would provide the basis of major romances about topics like the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde, Guinevere’s abduction and rescue, and the heroic adventures of Yvain and Gauvain. But that massive borrowing and reworking was also influenced and validated in France by a major and crucial redevelopment of the Arthur story in the early twelfth century.

Medieval Monarch

Geoffrey of Monmouth was one of a number of British Celts who served the Normans as intellectuals and administrators—the nobly born churchman Gerald of Wales and the very popular storyteller and historian Walter Map are slightly later examples. Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae (‘The History of the Kings of Britain’), first appearing in the mid-1130s, was dedicated to major figures in the Norman hierarchy. Very successful—about two hundred Latin manuscripts survive, an amazing number for a secular text—and written in fluent, rhetorical Latin prose, this is essentially an origin legend for Celtic Britain, from its alleged founding by the Trojan Brutus (not Julius Caesar’s assassin) after the destruction of his city, an invented parallel with Aeneas, to the takeover by the Saxons in the seventh century. As a paean to lost British Celtic grandeur, the story remained powerful in Wales in both Latin and Welsh, but its real success was in the rest of Europe, simply because Geoffrey made Arthur, who occupies about a sixth of the book, the model of a modern Norman ruler. In political terms he suggested the Normans inherited Celtic Britain’s past glory and through that he offered a justification for their brusque displacement of the Anglo-Saxons.

Geoffrey is the first to tell the still-accepted narrative of Arthur’s birth and career that meshes strongly with the international hero myth. He comes to the throne young, establishes himself decisively, rules with wisdom and power, and defeats the ruler of France and the emperor of Rome; he establishes a new world of courage and splendour, with clear elements of both chivalry and courtesy to women; and he is eventually betrayed when his son Mordred seizes both the throne and Guinevere, perhaps with her agreement—the text merely says she ‘broke her marriage vows’.⁷

Arthur, like William the Conqueror, is a ferocious warrior in battle and a great organiser, as well as a relentless acquirer of new lands. Newly risen to kingship, the Normans, not long ago Vikings, found in Geoffrey’s Arthur a royal model to counter their inherent opponent French Charlemagne. But as well as expounding the twelfth-century idea of royal power, the Historia recurrently identified the central political threat of the Norman world—that a ruler’s family will betray him, given a chance. The kind of hostility and treachery actually exchanged by William I’s three sons is demonstrated throughout the narrative, and this is what brings British rule to an end soon after Arthur’s time.

Geoffrey’s text lifts the Arthur story to a new breadth and power. But he goes further: the origin from Troy and the parallel with the Aeneid indicate the claims, even the arrogance, of this new Western European world. As Christopher Baswell has shown, in twelfth-century Europe writers in French would borrow stories from the classical world—they called it translatio studii (‘transfer of knowledge’).⁸ This has the conscious purpose of paralleling the massive shift of power in the post-Roman period, when Italy and Greece seemed weak, and the strength of northern European countries were growing, especially France, Rhineland Germany and, increasingly, Norman Britain. This translatio imperii (‘transfer of power’) is here focused on Arthur: his splendid court is at Caerleon, a town in south-east Wales with surviving Roman buildings (the name means ‘fort of the legion’). At the same time this myth is reshaped to express new medieval splendour and authority but, crucially, new anxieties and the sense that all this new power might just pass away. But as well as classical structure and modern anxiety, the newly dominant Normans, in another transfer of story and power, appropriated the riches of the story that belonged to the people they colonised in both Brittany and Wales—much as writers like Rudyard Kipling would do in India many centuries later.

As well as knowing Celtic stories in oral form, including those of Arthur, the European cultures also received them in written French. First Geoffrey Gaimar translated a version, later lost of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and then by about 1150 the Channel Islander Robert Wace created the very well-known Roman de Brut (‘The Story of Britain’). This transmitted Geoffrey’s story of Arthur and omitted most of the British politics of Merlin’s prophecies, but added one major moment. For the first time Arthur showed his right to rule by drawing the sword from the stone, a highly memorable incident that anthropologists regard as enshrining a male myth about a man who can withdraw from the vagina the phallus still erect.

European writers would respond richly to the possibilities of Arthur as reimagined medieval monarch. The French author who established Arthurian romance, Chrétien de Troyes, combined classical traditions and Celtic story in his first romance Erec et Enide (c. 1170), where the Arthurian court is a base for the aspirations of single knights. The story is transferred from a Welsh tribal ruler in a world of demigods and wonderful animals to the new domain of feudal power. Here great lords held huge estates through the vows of fidelity they made to the king, and then managed them and provided soldiers for their overlords by allotting smaller tracts of land to minor lords and knights who swore loyalty to them in turn. This system had a basically personal structure driven by intense pressure on a liege’s loyalty to his liege lord—which could at times be threatened by personal interests, notably ones controlled by feeling, such as love for a woman whom the lord felt he owned, or hatred, often in the form of seeking vengeance. Noble loyalties could turn to passionate hostilities, as in the story of Lancelot’s separation from Arthur through his love for Guinevere, but there were also deep-seated structural threats. The idea of knightly honour depended in part on success in conflict, either real war or the symbolic version, jousting—much of romance is a series of battles between two men for honour, and this process could become socially destructive. The conflict-masking system of behaviour known as chivalry can readily be seen as a false consciousness that sought to conceal the dangers that actually stalked this world of military cavalry.

Other sociopolitical realities feed into the narratives and their meaning. It is noticeable that the King Arthur of the romances is much less active and decisive, in both battle and human interaction, than he was in Geoffrey of Monmouth or the preceding Welsh material. In this new weakness he represents the modern King of France, having immense prestige and honour, tracing his position back to the mighty Charlemagne, but in fact possessing relatively limited lands and income. The enormous estates belonged to lords like the Count of Champagne and the Count of Flanders, who both patronised Chrétien’s work (in the first case through his Countess). The great knights like Gauvain or Lancelot are versions of these lords and also models for Arthur’s knights—and sometimes the story is told of a mere knight’s access to such lordly grandeur. Yvain, a poor but very noble (indeed originally royal) knight out on adventure, fights a knight, pursues him to his castle to kill him, then falls in love with his mourning lady, marries her and takes over her massive estate. This might seem like fantasy, but Georges Duby has shown that a change of French inheritance practice around 1100 left younger sons without property.⁹ All now went to the eldest child, and there were indeed older daughters without brothers who could inherit, and so be a very attractive marital prospect.

Such female gender power can seem a threat to the male. Having married his lady and her land, Yvain then ignores her and goes off jousting with Gauvain, so she withdraws her favour and her power. He has to fight long and alone—apart from a friendly lion, evidently symbolising knightly ferocity—before he is reconciled with his lady, and along the way he has both fought with and become friends with Gauvain, realising the structural male personal conflict of military feudalism.

Chrétien turned to a different problem of love and power in Le Chevalier de la Charrette, or the Lancelot, bringing forward a knight greater even than Gauvain, Lancelot, who seems most probably a French, or Breton-French, invention.¹⁰ The story of Tristan, the great Cornish knight who loved his king’s wife Isolde, was well known—Marie de France had used it for a lai—and Chrétien appears to have adapted the story to Arthur’s court by bringing in the new hero Lancelot as a paragon simultaneously of knighthood and love, cavalry and courtesy. His love of Guinevere does not overtly challenge his loyalty to Arthur, as he rescues her, and when he finally defeats and kills her abductor Meleagant at Arthur’s court this appears to be a restoration of royal order. But there remains a covert threat though the text’s intense realisation of their love, and also one to Lancelot as Guinevere’s demands reduce his knightly standing—she insists he prove his love for her by losing a fight and being humiliated. He accepts that, and she commands him back to full knightly vigour and glory.

This gender politics has its own material base: Chrétien’s major patron was Marie, Countess de Champagne, and the views and feelings of powerful women who both effectively ran the courts and might, like Yvain’s lady, carry huge properties into marriage with them, are transmitted along with the insurgent power of love. All the major heroes—Yvain, Tristram and Lancelot—at some stage run mad in the forest like wild men when their potent ladies have removed from them their love, approval and support. The men will find their way back to favour, but the major stories do not eventually end well—Tristram dies the famous love-death, and Lancelot is finally sent away by the repentant queen to a lonely warrior’s end.

The threats of human love mesh strongly with the Christian view of sin, but there is also a separate religious critique of secular grandeur—namely that it should not be valued because it is only worldly in its focus. This firmly Christian view of values and threats generates a whole new realm of Arthurian story, focused on the Holy Grail. The remarkable Chrétien is once more the initiator in La Queste del Saint Graal, or Perceval, from the 1180s, an unfinished poem, possibly because of his death, where the naive hero learns—very slowly—to observe Christian New Testament values of true charity rather than chivalry alone. This story would eventually figure Galahad, the perfect Christian knight as the grail-achiever, after starting with the fallible Percival as hero, with Merlin as a guide.

As well as the Galahad grail stories, secular romance flowered richly, and the prime example is the collection called the Vulgate, meaning the version for the ‘vulgus’, the crowd. This is a multi-volume set of manuscripts which work into a loose totality the massively-developed stories of Arthur, Lancelot, Tristram, the grail (usually the Galahad version) and the final sequence, the ‘Morte d’Arthur’. There are many elaborate sidetracks. They include the adventures of Gauvain who, after the triumphant arrival of Lancelot in the myth, is always a second-best knight, unreliable both with women, whom he might lust after, and with knights, where he can be inappropriately vengeful or even break his word.

There are varied stories about Guinevere and Merlin, to be discussed in later chapters as separate mythic figures, and others like the volatile Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister, and originally in French a clever and helpful person, a friend to Merlin and rival to Guinevere for the admiration of young knights, but soon—under clerical pressure presumably—becoming represented as a dangerous witch-like woman who casts spells for pleasure. She is usually the mother, by her half-brother Arthur, of the evil son Mordred (the French spelling implies ‘mort’, death), who will bring down the whole world of Arthurian civilisation. To avoid the threatening intimacy of incest with a witch, she is sometimes doubled into another half-sister called Morgause, who bears Mordred by Arthur or, in further euphemisation, his father can be Morgause’s husband, the always dangerous King Lot of Lothian.

Rambling on through many chivalric encounters with evil knights, women both loving and dangerous, enchanters and ogres, and always imaging a feudal world both displayed in splendour and exposed as vulnerable to personal divisions and infidelities, the Vulgate gave rise to many separate romances across Europe, not only in Spain and Italy in the other romance languages, but in the north as well. In parallel are two fine serious poems in German—Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, c. 1200, and the slightly later Parsifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Scandinavian versions thrived from the thirteenth century, and one of the last languages to receive Arthur and his myth was, ironically, considering his future, English. The glory of the British king, with his Welsh connections largely forgotten, was celebrated in two poems in traditional English alliterative metre. From around 1200 comes Layamon’s Brut and nearly two hundred years later is the alliterative Morte Arthure, both drawing on the French narrative version of the Arthur section of Geoffrey of Monmouth. They made Arthur a bold warrior king, not much given to chivalry, and they focus on battle, not love affairs. In addition to this, most English romance was in a fairly simple style and in topics restricted to family problems and sub-chivalric self-proving, but it could rise to heights as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the late fourteenth century, combining rich poetic language with a subtle theme. Gawain, not here doubted at all, fulfils a strange quest to receive a blow from the Green Knight whom he has already beheaded at Arthur’s court. At the knight’s elaborate, even magical, castle Gawain discovers inner ethical qualities may be of greater importance than his continued chivalric honour. A brilliant secularisation of the dissenting themes of the grail story, the poem essentially questions feudality in the light of personal conscience, a late-medieval sign of that potent early modern concern, and clear evidence that the Arthur myth can be renovated in theme and form as social and evaluative structures change.

A less sharply focused example of the myth responding to a new world is in the apparently conservative and deliberately backward-looking work of Sir Thomas Malory. Malory essentially abbreviated in English and made broadly consistent the Vulgate range of stories, adding to them the early part of the alliterative Morte: its account of Arthur’s assault on Rome must have appealed to a fifteenth-century English soldier like Malory. But he also accepted the earlier Christian critique. His opening section uses the quite religious Post-Vulgate version, showing sin common in Arthur’s England, and dispensing early with the merely secular wisdom offered by the Vulgate Merlin. Later, Malory developed this serious note by retelling a Galahad grail with a focus on Lancelot’s discovery that he failed in this quest because he loved the queen. Malory went further and, dealing with internal self-judgement, as did the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, showed in the notably original book he constructed between the grail quest and his Morte, usually called ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’, how the lovers, but especially Lancelot, struggled with the awareness that their love was both sinful and socially disruptive. Lancelot,