Finding Arthur Read Online Free Page A

the stories of Arthur had to flourish as part of the oral tradition or not at all. Fortunately for Western literature and indeed for history, the written word was restricted to a few compliant clerics, but the oral tradition was like the Internet—accessible to the masses and almost impossible to control.
    Christian clerics, almost by definition deskbound men, created heroes in their own self-image (and in their own self-interest). They liked their heroes to be saints, not warlike men like Arthur. They also omitted almost all references to sex, pagan religions, and the druids, so Merlin was absent too. This gave the stories of Arthur a certain advantage. While the Lives of saints were bolstered by magical miracles, they were still deadly dull compared to the thrilling tales of Arthur and his men, which made the latter increasingly popular in the oral tradition. Anyone who doubts this should compare the action-packed, epic, heroic poem Y Gododdin with any of the vast number of sloth-slow hagiographies that have survived. Given a choice, the people of the late first millennium CE favored stories of Arthur over the Christian propaganda that the Church shoveled at them ad nauseam , although, of course, they were not always given a choice. This struggle between the popularity of Arthur and the propaganda of the Church resulted in stories in which Arthur was the villain.
    In Lifric of Llancarfan’s late eleventh century Life of Saint Cadoc , Arthur and his friends Cai and Bedevere are playing dice when they seea young man and a young woman (who will become Cadoc’s parents) being chased by armed men. Instead of going to their assistance immediately, as the Arthur of later legends would have done, Lifric’s Arthur becomes “violently inflamed with desire” for the young woman and has to be talked out of raping her.
    Later, when Cadoc is Abbot of Llancarfan he gives sanctuary to men who had killed three of Arthur’s soldiers and refuses to hand them over. All Arthur is able to win as compensation is a herd of cattle, but even then he is beaten by Lifric’s saintly hero, the clever Cadoc, because the cattle soon turn into bundles of ferns. People who were prepared to believe that cattle could turn into ferns would surely also have believed that Arthur was active in Wales if Lifric told them this was so.
    The Life of St. Padarn tells of a tyrannical Arthur who ruthlessly demands Padarn’s tunic. When Padarn refuses to hand it over, Arthur becomes enraged and curses and swears. This wicked Arthur then stomps away, only to creep back later and steal the tunic. Before he can make his getaway, however, Padarn causes the ground to open up and swallow him. Arthur has to apologize before Padarn will set him free. This is a rather sad little story. Arthur is portrayed as a tyrant, but what great crime is he said to have committed? Stealing a tunic. This shows the mindset of the clerics who wrote these accounts. They thought of Arthur as the enemy of their church, the fount from which for them all blessings flowed —why else would Arthur be portrayed as the villain?—and so they maligned him as a tyrant who … stole a tunic. Monks, who lived together in close proximity, may have thought the theft of a tunic a dreadful thing, but it is hardly a momentous offence outside cloisters. The world in which these monks lived may have been limited in the extreme, but when it came to punishments their imaginations knew no bounds—at the end of the story we have nothing less than the earth opening up and swallowing the wicked Arthur.
    According to the Life of Gildas by Caradoc of Llancarfan, Arthur murdered Gildas’s brother, the warrior Hueil. Of course, as saints could not be bested in Christian books; in the end Arthur surrendered to Gildas and “in grief and tears, accepted penance … and led an amended course, as far as he could, until the close of his life.” (This was the sameGildas who omitted the name of the historical Arthur from