King Arthur by Andrew Wyeth
This is one of several papers written for the Temenos Academy in London with which I have been involved since its foundation. It was read before an audience on October 24th 994, which on this occasion included King Charles. (then still Prince Charles) who is the Academy’s patron. The theme of the search for wonder in everyday life has been an important one for me - and it was inevitable, given my passion for all things Arthurian that I should write about its presence in the legends of Arthur and his knights. I would like to remember here the kindness and generosity of the late Kathleen Raine for many hours of discussion on this and other matters, for her always-generous support of my work, and for allowing me to be part of the vision of Temenos.
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The sense of wonder can be invoked in us in a number of ways; through visiting a scene in nature, through viewing a great painting; through experiencing a major work of art, such as a play or a novel; or through coming in contact with a particular human being. It may also be brought about through the realisation that we are only a small part of a much greater whole. A wonder is also the thing seen, an object of desire if you will, a mighty and fruitful mystery such as the Holy Grail or an act of selfless love. It is both the object itself and the feeling it evokes.
This is what Marina Warner, in her anthology called Wonder Tales (Chatto, 1994) is referring to when she writes that:
'Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder and pleasure and of fear. It names the marvel, the prodigy, the surprise as well as the responses they excite, of fascination and enquiry; it conveys the active motion towards experience and the passive stance of enrapturement' (p3)
From this we can see that the words wonder and marvel are virtually interchangeable, and I think that by looking at some of the instances of wonder and marvel which appear in the Arthurian tradition we shall see not only that this is indeed the case, but that most, if not all, the precepts mentioned above are also true.
However, first it is necessary to say something about the Arthurian tradition itself. It is not possible to state, with any final certainly, whether or not there ever lived a person called Arthur. If he did, he was most certainly not a king, did not wear shining armour, and in all probability was not accompanied by a band of noble knights who sat together at a round table.
The most likely truth is that Arthur was 2nd century Roman officer named Lucius Artorius Castus, who lead a body of Sarmatian warriors against the Saxons and Picts in the areas surrounding Hadrian’s Wall. His memory inspired another figure, also named Arthur, who lived in the 6th century and helped bind together the factious Celtic tribespeople of Britain into a force strong enough to repulse further invasions on the part of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes for a sufficient period for them to become settlers rather than invaders - and thus to found the beginnings of the English race.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Arthur became a central figure in what we might call the mythological, inner history of this land. Earlier memories of a Celtic deity, Arth, of possibly several other heroes who bore this name, coalesced into the figure we know today. And, because most of the stories were written down in the Middle Ages, from the 11th century to the end of the 15th, the characters, dress, morals and motivation, are of that time.
This is why we have a medieval king with his medieval knights portrayed by everyone from Chretien de Troyes in the 11th century to Tennyson in the 19th, and in many of the poems, plays and fictions written in our own time. In each case it can be said - so I would maintain - that Arthur and the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table are themselves a cipher of wonder, and that we would be just as correct in calling the stories which constellated around the figure of the king, 'wonder-tales' as the more commonly used term of 'romances'.
At the beginning of the great Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we learn of King Arthur that
'He had sworn by his sovereignty he would start no meal
On the festival so fair, before he was given
Some strange tale about some most mysterious thing,
Some mighty marvel that merited belief
Of the Old Ones, or of Arms, or of other adventures...
(GGK lls. 92-95)
This is a theme taken up again and again in the Arthurian romances. In Malory's 'Book of Sir Gareth' he says:
'so ever the king had a custom that at the feast of Pentecost especially before other feasts in the year, he would not go that day to meat until that he had heard or seen some great marvel. And because of that custom all manner of strange adventures came before Arthur, at that feast before all other feasts.' (Works, p239).