GUY HALSALL, Worlds of Arthur:
Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Pp. xx, 357. 17 black-and-white photographs, 24 line drawings, bibliography,
index. ISBN: 978-0-19-965817-6. $34.95
So sternly will others
criticize Worlds of Arthur that there is no need to reach for literary
thunderbolts. It gives the impression that Oxford University Press accepted it
to make money. With ‘Arthur’ in its title, it is the very thing to sell at
airport bookstalls. But as a work of scholarship it is a failure, guaranteed to
confuse and mislead travellers as they accumulate air-miles. Let us set out
what Professor Halsall tells us and then go on to ‘Facts and Fictions’,
especially the fictions.
Worlds of Arthur
has twelve chapters in four sections. The first section, ‘Old Worlds’, places
the traditional narratives of Gildas, Bede, and the like against the
archaeology of post-Roman Britain. The second, ‘Present Worlds’, has three
chapters. These deal successively with modern evaluations of Historia
Brittonum, the Welsh annals, and other early sources for Arthur; then the
debated question of continuity or collapse for British society in the fifth
century; and finally the ways in which archaeology can here aid us. The third,
‘Mad Worlds’, briefly examines and dismisses a series of crazy modern
speculations on Arthur. The last, ‘New Worlds?’, really leaves Arthur
altogether. It offers discussion on such matters as Anglo-Saxon migration to
Britain and the murky business of fifth- and sixth-century politics there. Whatever
the merits of this, Anglo-Saxon archaeology is one thing, the British leader
Arthur is another. But books on Arthur sell, as those on Germanic pots and
post-holes do not sell. Hence the problem. We are being imposed upon, for much
of Worlds of Arthur has nothing to do with Arthur. Let the buyer beware.
Not only should readers
complain that Worlds of Arthur comes with a false label. Professor
Halsall, an archaeologist-historian at the University of York, lacks the
knowledge of Celtic history and philology to write competently on his chosen
subject. The brighter side of this is that a listing of errors in Worlds of
Arthur shows how swiftly our knowledge of fifth-century Britain is
progressing.
In discussion of
north-west Wales in the ninth century, we are thus told (p. 4) that ‘around the
same time’ and ‘maybe in the same part of the world’ a bard ‘composed an elegy
about the massacre’ of a British warband at Catraeth or Catterick,
Yorkshire. This is absurd. The poet Aneirin lived in the seventh century in
North Britain, not the ninth in Wales. Having been dead for two centuries, he
could not have read Historia Brittonum of about 830, although Professor
Halsall (p. 5), raising him from the grave, goes on to suggest he did.
On Vortigern, we hear
(p. 15, also p. 191) how ‘this might not have been his name at all, but his
title, “over-king”‘. Professor Halsall has not read Kenneth Jackson, ‘Gildas
and the Names of the British Princes’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies,
iii (1982), 30-40, which concludes that the notion of Vortigern‘s being
‘a title, not the usurper’s personal name, is too far-fetched to be taken
seriously’.
The massacre by
Northumbrians of a Scottish army at Degsastan in 603 has nothing to do
with Dawston Burn in Liddesdale, Scotland, despite claims (pp. 23, 160) that it
has. It was fought twenty-five miles north-west of Dawston, near Drumelzier,
where the stan or stone (five foot high) stands to this day on the banks
of the Tweed. That the Northumbrian victory at Chester in 613 or 615 divided
‘the Britons of Wales from those of Cumbria and the Scottish lowlands’ (p. 23)
is a strange verdict, when Sir Frank Stenton years ago saw ‘no adequate reason
for attributing the division of the British kingdoms to defeat at Chester’, and
Peter Hunter Blair commented witheringly on the ‘treasury of clichés’ of those
who saw the attack as driving a wedge between Briton and Briton. But Stenton
and Hunter Blair were careful scholars. Professor Halsall is not.
We are assured that it
‘is impossible to know where’ (p. 53) the sixth-century historian Gildas wrote,
which ignores arguments of Professor Richard Sharpe for a location near (not
in) Cirencester, east of the river Severn (actually mentioned by Gildas).
Reaching for capitals, as if perceiving the ebbing of out confidence, the
author says of Arthur’s combats (p. 67) that, with the exception of Linnuis
(in Lincolnshire) and the Caledonian Wood, ‘THE LOCATIONS OF ALL OF THESE
BATTLES ARE UNKNOWN AND UNKNOWABLE’. Let us set our face like flint against
this insult to our intelligence. The battles will certainly be unlocatable if
we cling to the corrupt forms of Historia Brittonum. But a textual
critic will observe on (say) the Hill of Agned that it is meaningless as
it stands, and so surely a misreading of Agued ‘death; straits’, which
may or may not be Pennango, near Hawick in southern Scotland. Or again, Tribruit
in Old Welsh means ‘many-coloured’ and refers to a river-beach thought by a later
Welsh poet to be near Edinburgh. It may thus be Dreva, on the Tweed near
Peebles, Scotland. The case for these has long been in print, although not
noticed by Professor Halsall.
His attention instead
turns unerringly to the theatrical and inaccurate. In 973, Edgar of Wessex is
described (p. 74) as forcing ‘a number of his subject kings, including Welsh
princes, to row him on a boat on the river Dee’ at Chester. This Hollywoodizes
the chroniclers, who say nothing of force. The sole Welsh ruler mentioned by
them was Iago of Gwynedd; others so taken will have been Hoël of Nantes and
Judichaël of Rennes, who were neither Welsh nor princes but Bretons and counts.
The Christian martyrs Julian and Aaron suffered not at York (p. 188) but
Caerleon, in south-east Wales, as noted by Sir John Lloyd over a century ago.
It is strange to hear that ‘all Romano-British written material’ is ‘in Latin’
(p. 241) when we have texts in British (not ‘Brythonic as it is
sometimes called’), edited by Peter Schrijver of Utrecht.
In short, the comments
of Worlds of Arthur on anything Celtic are worthless. Its subtitle
refers in a patronizing way to ‘Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages’, which is
remarkable, in the light of the fictions everywhere purveyed by it. As for those
Dark Ages, one wonders if they have a meaning unsuspected by their author. The
book was written by a full professor at an English university and is published
by Oxford University Press. Yet its descent from the standards of (for example)
Sir Frank Stenton, Kenneth Jackson, or Peter Hunter Blair is catastrophic. As
we behold with dismay this volume, we may ask if those Dark Ages are here and
now, with the academy in Britain and beyond collapsing into an age of ignorance
and barbarism.
ANDREW
BREEZE
University of Navarre, Pamplona
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