ARTHUR, king of a tribe of ancient Britons, is supposed to have flourished in the 6th century. He is usually represented as a Christian prince who struggles bravely to main tain the liberty and faith of his country against the pagan Saxons, but there is no evi dence for the statement that he fought against the Saxon Cerdic. Neither the Welsh bards nor Nennius assert this; in fact, it would seem to be merely an inference drawn from the supposition that the scene of A.'s exploits was the w. and s.w. of England. But Mr. Skene (The Four Ancient Books of Wales, vol.i., pp. 50-60) seeks to prove from an examination of Nennius (Historia Britonurn, cap. 50), that the localities of the twelve great battles which A. fought are in Strathclyde, and therefore that he belongs to the region now called Scotland rather than to England. If there is any reality in his history at all, this is probably the correct view of it, but the influence of Geoffrey of Mon mouth's fictions, and of the French romances, succeeded in fixing the Cumbrian prince in the more important part of the island. It is a curious fact that no mention whatever is made of A. by the venerable Bede, the oldest of our historians, or by the annalists of the Saxon Chronicle; and Mr. Skene's explanation, that these authorities only "record the struggle between the Britons and the Saxons s. of the Humber;" is hardly satis factory.
Iu the lays of the Welsh bards, supposed to be as early as the 6th and 7th c. (although no manuscript is extant of older date than the 12th c.), A. and his brave com panions are celebrated, but modestly and without miracle. It is in Nennius that the legendary additions begin to develop themselves, though Mr. Skene does "not hesitate to receive the Arthur of Nennius as the historic Arthur." Then follow at a distance of three or four centuries the so-called Armoric collections of Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, from whom Geoffrey of Momnouth (q.v.) professes to translate, and in which the marvelous and supernatural. elements largely prevail. Here for the first time the magician Merlin comes into association with A. According to Geoffrey, A.'s father, tither, conceiving a passion for Igerna, wife of Gorlois, duke of Cornwall, is changed by Merlin into the likeness of Gorlois, and A. was the result. After his father's death, A. becomes paramount leader of the British, and makes victorious expeditions to Scot land, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, and even to France, where he defeats a great Roman army. During his absence, his nephew, Modred, revolts, and seduces prince A.'s wife, Guaulmmara. A. returning, falls in a battle with his nephew; and is carried to the isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds. Geoffrey's work apparently gave birth to a mul titude of fictions which came to be considered as quasi-historical traditions. From these, exaggerated by each succeeding age, and recast by each narrator, sprung the famous metrical romances of the 12th and 13th centuries, first in French and afterwards in English, from which modern notions of A. are derived. In these his habitual residence is at Caerleon, on the Usk, in Wales, where, with his beautiful wife Guinevere, he lives in splendid state, surrounded by hundreds of knights and beautiful ladies, who serve as patterns of valor, breeding, and grace to all the world. Twelve knights, the bravest of
the throng, form the center of this retinue, and sit with the at a round table, the "knights of the round table." From the court of king A., knights go forth to all coun tries in search of adventures—to protect women, chastise oppressors, liberate the enchanted, enchain giants and malicious dwarfs, is their knightly mission. A Welsh collection of stories called the ifabinogion, of the 14th and 15th centuries, and translated into English by lady Charlotte Guest in 1849, gives an idea of the Arthurian legends. Some of the stories "have the character of chivalric romances" and are therefore prob ably of French origin; while others "bear the impress of a far higher antiquity, both as regards the manners they depict, and the style of language in which they are com posed." These latter rarely mention A., but the former belong, as Mr. Skene puts it, to the "full-blown Arthurian romance." Early in the 12th c., the Arthurian metrical romance became known in Germany, and there assumed a more animated and artistic form in the Parziral of Wolfram of Eschenbach, iristan and Isolt of Gottfried of Stras burg, Erec and licein of Hartmann, and illigalois of Wimt. The most renowned of the heroes of the Arthurian school are Peredur (Parzival or Perceval), Tristan or Tristram, Iwein, Erec, Gawein, Wigalois, Wigamur, Gauriel, and Lancelot. From France, the Arthurian romance spread also to Spain, Provence, Italy, and the Netherlands, and was again retransplanted into England. One of the publications that issued from the press of Caxton (1485), was a collection of stories by Sir Thomas Malory, either compiled by him in English, from various of the later French prose romances, or translated directly from an already existing French compendium. Copland reprinted the work in 1557, and in 1634 the last of the black-letter editions appeared. A reprint of Caxton's Kynge Arthur, with an introduction and notes, by Robert Southey, was issued in 1817 (The Byrth, Lyfe, and Actes of Eyng Arthur, etc., 2 vols. 4to). The best edition is that by Thomas Wright (Loud. 3 vols., 1866) from the text of 1634. The name of king A. was given during the middle ages to many places knd monuments supposed to have been in some way associ ated with his exploits, such as " Arthur's seat " near Edinburgh, " Arthur's oven" on the Carron near Falkirk, etc. What was called the sepulchre of his queen was shown at Meigle, in Strathmore, in the 16th century. The interest of the legends about king A. and his knights has been revived by the publication of Tennyson's idylls of the King (1859 et seq.). See Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons„kppendix; Ritson's King Arthur; De la Villemarqu6, Conks Populaires des Anciens Bretons (2 vols., Paris, 1842); Grlisse. Dia Grosse tiSizgenbreise des illittelalters (Leip. 1842); Skene's Four Ancient Books of Woks (Edin. 1868); Glennie's Arthurian Localities (1869).