Chapter CLIII: Section I: The Round Table

It is a very remarkable fact, that the grand cycle of our national romance and poetry, has been made to centre round the hero of a people whom we have subdued, and were holding in our power with difficulty, at the very time that minstrels were singing the adventures of the leader who had for the longest time kept our forces in check.

Many a patriot has fought as boldly as Arthur, many a nation has held out as bravely as the remains of the Britons; but as the “battle is not to the strong,” so renown is not to the most able; and it was to a very peculiar concatenation of circumstances that the Britons owed it that their struggles in Somerset, Cornwall, and Strathclyde should have been magnified into victories over Rome and half Europe, and themselves metamorphosed from wild Cymry, with a little Roman polish and discipline, into ideal models of chivalry.

That they did fight there can be no doubt. If the dismal groans of the Britons were ever sent at all, it was but a small number who groaned. As to the Anglo-Saxons, they had been coming even before the Romans, and Carausius and his fleet held them in check for awhile; but there can be no doubt that they came in much greater numbers, and with more intent to settle, than in former times, in the decay of the empire. Moreover, the resistance evidently became more resolute and valid, as the tide flowed westward over the diagonally arranged strata of the island; the alluvial lands to the east have no traditions of battles, but at the chalk downs, the rounded hills have names and dim legends of fights and of camps, and cities begin to claim to be the scene of Arthur’s court.

Westward again, with the sandstone hill and smiling valley, the tales multiply spots where the court was held in perplexing multitude; river upon river puts forth its old Keltic name of Cam, the crooked, and calls itself the place of the last decisive fight. And when the moorland and mountain are actually reached, and the heather stretches wide over the granite moor, with the igneous peak of stone crowning the lofty crag, there the Briton is still free, and points to his rocky summits as his hero’s home.

To those fastnesses were the Cymry finally limited, if they would enjoy their native government; and though many remained as serfs, and some as clergy, in the open country, the national spirit was confined to those who dwelt in the strongholds of the West. There did their bards sing and tell tales, and compose _Triads_ on the past glories of their race, with a natural tendency to magnify the exploits of their most able defender. At the same time, the Armoricans on the other side of the water, some of whom had, probably, according to their tradition, migrated from Britain, told their own legends, and sung their songs on the chief who had maintained the cause of their countrymen.

When the Normans settled in Neustria, their lively fancy caught up all that was imaginative among those around them. It is from their arrival that the first dawn of French literature dates, and it seems to have been they who first listened to the Breton lays, and brought them forward in the French tongue. At the central court of France, the Norman trouvère met the Provençal troubadour, and their repertory of tales was exchanged, the one giving his native Norse myths, tinctured with Keltic heroic tales, the other the Greco-Roman and Arabic stories that had travelled to him. And there, both sets of stories were steeped in that mysterious atmosphere of chivalry, which could dream of no court that was not based on the model of feudal France, no warrior without a horse and an esquire, a cone-shaped helmet, and kite-shaped shield.

That true knights were all equal, was a maxim held, though hardly carried out, in the eleventh century, and the floating notion of a table, where all were on an equality, was ready to fix itself on the golden age of chivalry. And when the Normans themselves became the owners of Britain, and brought with them a fair sprinkling of Bretons, no wonder they decided that the heroes, who, at least, were not Saxon, should be their own property. Siegfried and Brynhild had fallen into oblivion, and the British chiefs did veritably flourish on their native soil. Geoffrey of Monmouth pretended to hunt up their history in Wales and Brittany; Marie of France more faithfully reproduced her native lays in Norman-French; and as fresh tales were discovered or invented, metrical romances spread them far and wide, and began all to place their scene at the court of Arthur. Most noted among these, was the story of the San-grail, the cup of healing and lance of wounding, that may have been a shadow of a mighty truth, but which became myth in many countries, until, in the hands of the Cymry, they assumed to be the veritable original Cup of Blessing of the Last Supper, and the lance of the soldier at the Cross.

A relic-adoring age willingly believed, that to find these treasures was the great task of the knights it had invented. Thenceforth, English imagination beheld the glorious past as a feudal court, where all the good Knights of the Round Table, now an order of chivalry, had bound themselves to seek the holy relics, that could only be revealed to the perfectly pure and worthy. Mallory’s beautiful book preserves the main line of the allegory, though it is full of episodes, and it is the veritable prose epic of the Round Table.

France and Lombardy likewise believed in the Round Table, but not with the same national faith. As was natural, their poems centered about the great Frank emperor, and what they wrote or told of the British knights rather dealt in the less creditable adventures of individuals, than in the ennobling religious drift of the main story.

However, it is these Round Table names that are the most widely known and used of all the Keltic nomenclature, with a reputation almost entirely romantic, and very seldom saintly. Among the Arthurian names there is not one that is Teutonic; all are either genuine Cymric, or else such modifications of Latin nomina as citizenship was sure to leave to the Britons.