The Winter King

There is no definitive proof that King Arthur ever existed. As Cornwell notes in his Author’s Note at the end of the book, the first definitive mention of Arthur comes roughly 200 years after the period when he was supposed to have lived, with folktales comprising the only thing resembling a primary source. Whether Arthur was real, imagined, or somewhere in between, he emerged as the definitive British hero in the literature of the Middle Ages. Many of the story’s most famous elements, such as the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin, Guinevere, and the quest for the Holy Grail, came from a variety of different authors over the course of centuries. Arthur is dated to the period when pagan Britain was slowly becoming Christian, and the legend itself came to incorporate pagan elements such as magic with Christian notions of chivalry and courtly love. Near the end of the medieval period (circa 1470), Thomas Malory composed Le Morte d’Arthur, a comprehensive account that ties together the various strands of previous accounts and remains the best-known single volume of Arthurian legend.

Malory’s account, however, marked a climax of interest in Arthur, which dimmed for several centuries. Interest would revive during the 19th century, when the rise of the Romantic movement, which focused on emotion and nature over rationalism and technological progress, would look back to Arthurian legend as a foundational example of a purer world swept away by the onrush of civilization. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poem The Idylls of the King (published from 1859 to 1885) marked the return of Arthurian legend to the popular imagination. Tennyson would also prompt a response from Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is a scathing satire of how romance obscures the brutish realities of medieval life. Tennyson and Twain’s dual influence has extended into the modern era with romantic works such as T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958) and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982), the latter of which shifts the perspective to the women around Arthur. The classic 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail continues the satirical tradition of Twain, regularly framing the idealistic knights against a squalid backdrop. Cornwell’s contribution falls somewhere in the middle. The book is hardly a romance, with its convincing depiction of Dark Ages Britain as a land of endemic violence and suffering, and its attempt to render Arthur as a plausible historical figure from a certain time and place. At the same time, Cornwell acknowledges that his only sources pertaining to Arthur are mythic, and just as Derfel the chronicler will shape the story for the sake of his audience, Cornwell acknowledges the mythic elements that have elevated the story above its precise historical context. At a time when Britain is being torn between paganism and Christianity, Saxon and Celt, civilization and barbarism, there is ample room for interplay between fact and legend.