King Arthur: Myth-Making and History
... Because mythology weaves in and out of human history, myths sometimes can be linked to some "provable" concrete fact related to a person known to have lived (e.g., Jesus of Nazareth; Ehrman, 2012;King Arthur;Higham, 2005), a physical place known to exist (e.g., City of Troy/Ilion; Wood, 1998), or a natural event known to have occurred (e.g., The Flood; Dundes, 1988). This link to something physical is often construed as proof that the myth may be a literal fact. ...
Myths weave in and out of historical context, even as dreams do relative to daily life, functioning in the modern world much as they did in earlier times, operating at both the personal and cultural levels. This essay discusses three special difficulties in appreciating the power of myth and understanding its reasons for being: (a) the nearly universal tendency to situate myth as the opposite of fact and truth, (b) the problem of identifying prevailing myths in culture and private life, and (c) the challenge of acknowledging myth as more than a personal intellectual construct or a cultural construction. Transpersonal theory offers a way forward in addressing these difficulties by placing personal and cultural myths and their relationship to historic–scientific fact in a greater context that endows them with greater meaning and reason for being than ordinarily appreciated by orthodox, mainstream Western psychology. Let us explore this premise detail.
This paper will explore the accuracy and intent of the term dux bellorum, leader of war, as used in the Historia Brittonum with regards to Arthur. A discussion of Post-Roman archaeology, supplemented with contemporary historical documents, will establish that no Roman commands, such as the dux Britanniarum or comes Britanniarum, survived into the “Arthurian” period of the late fifth or early sixth centuries. A broader search of historical records will indicate that a linguistic cognate of dux bellorum was twice conferred on Celtic kings when leading a coalition of tribes in times of mutual threat according to the historical record; one was known to the author of the Historia Brittonum. A review of Historia Brittonum scholarship will show it came to its present form in c. 829 Gwynedd, ruled at the time by Merfyn Frych. The contemporary historical context was that the British kingdoms had been pressured for decades by the English and were specifically invaded by Wessex at around this time. This will be followed by a discussion of several biases in the history including a focus on Gwynedd’s dynasties and Merfyn in particular and British success against the English when united and failure when they were divided. Arthur was the best example of the latter agenda and because of this the most likely example of what Merfyn hoped to create. A summary of Merfyn’s political career in this context can be used to explain Arthur’s entire description in the work.
In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture.
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