Welsh Journals

ARTHUR, THE KING IN THE WEST. By R. W. Dunning. Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1988. Pp. 164. £ 12.95. Before even starting to read this book, it is only necessary to pick it up to be at once attracted by its format and appearance. It is unusually elegantly printed on high- quality paper and sumptuously illustrated. It contains a number of eye-catching colour plates and black and white photographs, admirable line-drawings, clear maps, and many smaller illustrations, ingeniously placed at the top right- and left-hand comers of each page of print. Minute care and forethought have gone into the design and lay- out, resulting in an eminently successful and appealing end-product. Author and publisher, no doubt aware of the intense and widespread public interest in the subject, by no means confined to Britain and especially keen in the United States, have understandably set out to capitalize on it. They deserve to succeed, not only because the volume is so pleasing to the eye, but also because Dr. Dunning has been at pains to write in captivating but not unscholarly vein about the supreme British hero and especially about his place in the history and legend of the West Country. Arthur remains a controversial figure in the eyes of scholars. There are some who would deny his very existence outside the realms of myth and legend. Even for those who contend that there may well have been an historical Arthur, however shadowy, there remains the exacting task of sieving the grains of reliable fact from the masses of traditional and apocryphal tales, a process which can lead to markedly different conclusions. Within the last year, for instance, a reputable historian has come up with the hypothesis that Arthur is based on the Riothamus who may have been killed in France without ever having been present at Arthur's reputedly most famous victory of Mount Badon. But tradition points to the West Country as the likely location for Arthur's main base. That appears to have been reinforced by recent excavations, especially those of Philip Rahtz. Archaeology lends possible support by suggesting the existence in the west of a powerful and well-organized post-Roman kingdom, capable of maintaining an army large by the standards of the time, operating from well-fortified bases, especially the one at South Cadbury. But while providing evidence of the conditions appropriate for the emergence of a warrior-leader, archaeology cannot put a name to him. Arthur is first named in written sources which are fragmentary and extremely difficult to interpret satisfactorily, yet may contain a core of truth. Most of them are Welsh or Norman/Celtic in origin: Nennius, the Welsh Triads, the Mabinogi, saints' lives, and, above all, the vastly influential Geoffrey of Monmouth, who gave Arthur a firmly Cornish provenance. The core of Dr. Dunning's book, however, is concerned with the links between Arthur and Glastonbury; for it has to be said that this is nearly as much of a study of Glastonbury's part in the legend as of Arthur's! The richest abbey in Saxon England, Glastonbury had lost many of its possessions by the twelfth century and was sorely in need of rehabilitation. Its venerable traditions were given an invigorating transfusion of new life when the Welsh writer, Caradog of Llancarfan, linked Arthur with the place. Even so, the revival did not come in full until, following a disastrous