Here Lies Arthur

Arthur Reeve, along with the likes of T. S. Eliot, has just won the British librarians' annual Carnegie Medal. This is for an unforgettably good historical tale for young people called HERE LIES ARTHUR. At one of its many levels the reader holds in hand a novel about historical method. In what sense about historical method? ***

The verifiable, attested history of King Arthur is close to nil. By contrast, the legend of Arthur, the once and future king of Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson, thrives and grows in thousands of crowded libraries in scores of countries. Far less of the romance of the Knights of the Table Round is rooted in history than, say, the Trojan War epics by Homer and Vergil. One new writer simply takes up one or more earlier written accounts of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Kay, Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot du Lac. And then he simply adds freshly imagined materials. Fantasy is piled on fantasy, not new facts on old facts.***

Thanks, however, to archeology, numismatics and related modern sciences we know more about Roman and early post Roman history of the British Isles than you might think. We know for instance that today's Bath was Roman Britain's Aquae Sulis. Novelist Philip Reeve combines his imagination with his knowledge of both British history and the Arthurian legend and makes a little known leader of a small impoverished war band choose Aquae Sulis/Bath for his royal capital. This and many other smart moves, political, dynastic, even architectural, the nominally Christian Arthur undertakes on the advice of his frankly pagan adviser, the magician Myrddin whom today we call Merlin. Myrddin wants to restore to Britain the unity, peace and prosperity the land had enjoyed for centuries until the Roman legions were withdrawn in 410 A. D. And he sees in Arthur material he can shape into a just, humane, wise King of all the Britons. ***

HERE LIES ARTHUR is narrated by a female named Gwyna, ten years old when she begins her tale. Her village has just been sacked and looted by Arthur. She has swum miles down river to safety where she was plucked up by non-combatant Myrddin. Admiring Gwyna's ability to hold her breath for many minutes, Myrddin uses her in a scheme to convince potential pagan allies of Arthur that the old gods favor him. He gives her a beautiful but otherwise ordinary sword named Caliburn (today's Excalibur). She swims under water to a waiting Arthur and gives it to him in her instant new role of "the lady of the lake." ***

And so it goes. By tale's end Gwyna has lived for years disguised, on and off, as a boy. An eye-witness to Arthur's death in combat, she passes herself off as Myrddin's son and personally spins 90% of the Arthurian legend, including the notion that he did not die but sleeps on a blessed western isle waiting to be summoned by Britons in their hour of greatest peril. ***

An iron age Machiavelli or Karl Rove is our Myrddin. He has no illusions about Arthur, a naturally indolent, greedy, murderous, wife-beating bully boy. After he and Gwyna meet a noble boy being raised as a girl by his widowed mother to keep him from being killed in battle, Myrddin says: "The only way she'll keep that boy out of the wars is if we put an end to wars. Raise up one strong man who'll stop this petty squabbling. Bring peace back, and in that peace boys will be able to grow to manhood without learning how to butcher one another, and men of wisdom will turn their minds to greater matters, such as snails entombed in sea stones" (Ch. 14). ***

Sir Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel, has probably already read HERE LIES ARTHUR and is looking forward to welcoming Philip Reeve to writers' heaven. -OOO-