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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are saddling our noble steeds and galloping back to the Middle Ages in search of the legendary King Arthur. And to help us on our quest, we have two chivalrous companions at arms.
Hi, thank you so much. What a joy to be here.
And in Comedy Corner, making a triumphant return to the show, he's a comedian, an actor, a podcaster. You'll have seen him in Taskmaster, Man Down, and again in Taskmaster as Rosematter Fayot's assistant on the wonderful Junior Taskmaster, which is lovely. Plus, you'll have heard his dulcet tones on many podcasts, including my absolute fave comedy podcast, Three Bean Salad. Check it out. But you'll know him best from our previous episodes, including our festive special about Charles Dickens himself. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome back, Mike.
Thank you very much for having me back. I'm very excited. I'm particularly excited about the topic. Interesting. I mean, you're a total legend, but King Arthur, total legend. What do you know? I think it's the sort of thing you carry through your life if you've grown up in Britain. Oh yeah, I know about that. But do I know about it? I don't know. That's partly why I'm so excited to be here. I think it's a huge subject. There's quite a lot you can know without knowing the details. Yeah, and is it just because I'm familiar with it? Is it just because of some sort of Osborne book as a...
Because I played a King Arthur battle as a ten-year-old. It's so familiar, but I doubt there's any detail. I'm very excited about getting into it. Hard. We'll find out if there's any detail. So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at getting what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And...
I think, like Mike, you definitely would have heard of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin. Most people will have seen an Arthurian screen adaptation, I think. That's your Disney Sword in the Stone, your boisterous King Arthur with Keira Knightley and Clive Owen, your John Borman's weird and wonderful Excalibur. You've got The Kid Who Would Be King.
The sing-along camelot. You've got the BBC series Merlin, there's Dev Patel in the swoon-worthy Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, quite weird but good. Obviously the best Arthurian movie ever is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film I love so much I wrote my master's thesis about it. I am on home turf today. Amazing. Finally, something I know about. And that's not mentioning all the operas, plays, poems, video games, paintings and books about King Arthur.
But where do these stories come from? Was the medieval Arthur the same as our Arthur today? And just how big was a round table anyway? Let's find out. Right, Dr Mary, Hollywood's vision of Arthur, Arthuriana, I think is what we call it, the collective world of King Arthur. Hollywood makes it all sort of shiny armour, knights riding around, ladies in pointy hats, dangerous forests.
It's very 14th century. Is that where we start our quest for King Arthur? No, absolutely not. And actually the first mentions that we really get of a possible Arthur figure are a lot earlier than this. And they suggest Arthur is a lot earlier than this.
They place him in kind of post-Roman Britain, okay? So just after Emperor Honorius has withdrawn troops in 410, there's that couple of hundred years that we often hear called the Dark Ages. Yeah, I know. I feel the same. This is when some of the earliest texts place Arthur's rule as having happened, which makes sense because the province of Britannia is being invaded and raided by a series of different groups. You have the Picts and the Scots from the north,
And you've also got Angles, Saxons, Jutes coming in, those Germanic groups who would form the first kingdoms in England. Britain needs a hero. And so there are lots of bits of poetry written about heroes. And this is where we see the first mention of Arthur. So the earliest texts we have about him seem to suggest he might have been a military leader of some sort in post-Roman Britain. We're talking sort of 450 to 550 CE. So about a thousand years earlier than your pointy hats.
Okay. And they're written at the time or they're written later? Key question. They're a bit later, but they're sort of set at the time, aren't they? Yeah, they are quite a bit later. The earliest references to Arthur are very enigmatic and fragmentary, which just add to his appeal, really.
There is a very early Welsh poem, now I say Welsh, but we think it was written in the very, very north, kind of south of Scotland, north of England, called A Goddawdain. The really important mention, the first detailed mention we get of Arthur comes quite a bit later in around 830. And it's in this text called The History of the Britons. And it's an attempted history of
that traces the origins of Britain right back to this hero called Brutus. The Trojan dude. Yeah. The Trojan dude, yes. All I know about him is that he left Troy, had a few adventures and then came here and in a classic sort of conqueror style killed some indigenous giants or something. This is mine, by the way. Yes.
Exactly that. And yet you see him in the Middle Ages being called the founder of Britain and there seems to be a kind of oversight of these giants who were originally there. Those were all sweet giants. Yeah. So the next text we have to talk about would be a Welsh classic. My pronunciation is going to be dreadful, but Mabinogion? That's great, yeah, Mabinogion. And actually that's a collection of texts, Mabinogion,
Within this collection of tales, there are some interesting Arthurian examples. The Mabinogion, it doesn't appear until quite late in manuscript form. We're talking sort of 14th, 15th century manuscripts.
But we think the texts contained within them were actually probably first written down as a collection much earlier in the 11th or 12th century. And here's the kicker, they probably have oral origins, some of them that are even earlier than that. But one of my favourites and one of the earliest is a tale called Culloch a Colwen. So basically Arthur has a cousin called Culloch or Killoch, who's a young man and he's fallen in love, potentially through a curse, but never mind, with a young woman called Olwen and her father is a
terrible giant called Isbav Arden, chief of all giants. In order to win Olwen's hand, Killoch is given a series of tasks, impossible tasks, 40 of them he has to complete. He can't do this on his own. So he goes off to King Arthur's court and enlists the help of Arthur and his kind of almost superhuman knight. All I'm hearing here, Mary, is he invented Taskmaster.
That's what I'm hearing. Mike, 40 tasks, off you go. That's a series of Taskmaster. Here's a bunch of guys around a round table who might be up for a challenge. The Mabinogion I'm vaguely familiar with, it's incredibly weird. Yeah. People sort of seem to change form quite regularly. It feels quite...
I don't know. I assume it's something like someone's got to kill a boar, right? Normally they sing someone's got to kill a magical boar. Yes. How did you know that? That's brilliant. I think that's just kicked into my memory. It's just dragged up from the back. He is King Arthur. It's coming out to him. It's him. It's you. Yeah. No, that's the climax point, really, of the whole. So these 40 tasks are very varied. And the climax is this hunt...
for this boar called Turchtruuth. And the interesting thing is a large number of the tasks relate in some way to preparing for this great boar hunt that happens at the kind of climax of the story.
And the reason why they need to hunt Tuyhtruith is that this giant scary boar has between his ears on his hairy little head... He's got a male grooming set. Yes, he does. You do know this story. Is that what you were thinking when you were thinking it's quite out there? Maybe, yeah, yeah. So there's this sort of Miyagi-style kind of...
training, secret training going on. And then, yeah, he wants to trim his beard and get his dream curls going for wedding day. He wants all the bells and no frizz. That's it. Exactly. Yeah. There are familiar names. So we have Bedwyr or Bedwyr, Gwalchmai, which doesn't sound very familiar, but it's the Welsh name for going. Right. And Arthur's wife here is Gwenhwyvar, which sounds very familiar. That's good, isn't it? So we're definitely edging towards...
Guinevere, we're getting towards Gawain. So it's starting to feel Arthurian. Beginning to feel familiar, yeah. But it's not quite there yet. And there's lots of weird names in Arthur's court as well. Yeah, and I mean, according to the tale of, how do you pronounce it? Killough? Killough. According to the tale of Killough and Oren, we've got King Arthur and a host of 260 warriors. Oh, blimey. Quite a lot of people he's gathered around his table. They've got some special talents. Yeah.
Some of them are quite weird special talents, Mary. I mean... Yes. We've got Sight, Son of Seer. Sight, Son of Seer, who has amazing eyesight. Okay, that's good. Which sounds useful, but then you also have Penpingyan, who walks on his head to save his feet. LAUGHTER
Amazing. Less useful. Can you describe how he does that? I assume he's just walking around upside down on his hands all the time. But surely that's a superpower. Not a very helpful one. I don't think his nightly peak years are going to last him long, to be honest. He's more of the show pony end of things. You don't want to trust him in a fight, do you? He's prattling about in his handstands, showing off to local peasants. We've got Ear, son of Hera. He's got fantastic hearing. Yes.
Mike, what talent do you think Lip, son of Placid, possesses?
Yeah. Is he a polyglot? Is he a man of many tongues? That's a very, very good guess. Yeah? Nowhere near. Too useful. I mean... Magical kisses? I guess. Can he kiss it all better? That would be... What a wonderful thing. For the Indian knights. Oh, that would be so good. Like a kind of rogue figure. No, his skill is... Well, I'll read you the quote. On days when he was sad, he would let his bottom lip drop down to his navel. Oh.
And on the other day, it would be a hood over his head. Yeah, so the party trick he does with his bottom lip is it goes down to the navel. But I should clarify, actually, the top lip goes up over the head, like a hood. How do you see?
Wow. I don't see how that's particularly useful. So he's used to measure the emotional temperature of the squad. Maybe that's it. Is that like a sort of morale barometer? Yeah. It's quite useful for leaders. Yeah, how is morale today? Well, Lip is currently wearing his lip like a hat. The knights will just say that they're fine, but are you really fine? Let's have a look at what Lip's doing. And after this charmingly weird mabinogion, we get our first English horse, Mary. And it's not entirely English because Geoffrey of Monmouth
He's a bit Welsh. He's kind of extremely famous in the Arthurian tradition because around 1136, 1137, he produces this book called The Historia Regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain. I think you probably have heard of this one. Yeah, yeah. This is the one that starts with Brutus and ends with the Saxons coming and giving everyone a wallop.
And you might notice an overlap there with the Historia Brittonum and that is a major source for Geoffrey. But he's a lot more elaborate on Arthur's life than what has come before. So much so that people think, did he make all of this up? I would imagine that if you've grown up in Monmouthshire and if he did indeed have Welsh family, he would have been familiar with oral stories that we know were circulating about Arthur. But I think a lot of the detail is his own biographical elaborations, if you like.
And it is so, so popular. So there's, I think, something like 215 copies that survive from the Middle Ages. Yeah, that's incredible. So it's really... He's the Grisham of his day. Yeah, he's the John Grisham of the 13th century. 12th century. It's just like a huge, huge change in terms of the record of the history of Britain. We would call him a chronicler. We would call him a historian. But he's hugely important for the literature aspects of what becomes Arthuriana today.
So do you want to talk us through that? Yeah, massively. So because we don't have much of a biography of Arthur before, what Geoffrey adds in terms of details is incredibly important for the romances. And we find out about Arthur's conception, which is not a very nice story. He's the son of a king called Uther Pendragon.
his mother was married to someone else and then Merlin helps Uther to trick her by disguising him as her husband and it's all not very consensual. Yeah. What else is familiar here? He has a wife called Guamara who's essentially, again, Guinevere. He's betrayed by his nephew Mordred which becomes a very crucial part of Arthur's story. Yeah.
He has a relative called Morgan Le Fay. Who's not a baddie. No, she's not. Because I think most people will hear the name and go, Morgan Le Fay, baddie. I know. Sorceress, evil queen, witch lady. She's really done dirty by later authors, but not here, no. Because she's the one behind the...
Green Knight, isn't she? Oh, yes. She is mentioned in the Green Knight story. And by that point, she's not very nice by that point. Because she wants to frighten Guinevere to death, which is horrible. And Merlin is the other important addition here. Yeah. Is that where he first appears? There's an earlier figure in the Welsh tradition called Myrddin. Right.
And he's a poet and he's a prophet as well. And that then kickstarts what we might charmingly cheekily call fan fiction. It's not necessarily fan fiction, but it's a sudden surge of other writers going...
oh, I can rumble this, I can add to this. And it starts straight away, doesn't it? So what Greg's referring to here is the romance tradition that starts in Europe, which is very hard to summarise because it just explodes so quickly. Geoffrey's text is translated, so it's originally in Latin, a handy lingua franca for the period, and it's translated very, very quickly into French by a Channel Islander called Wass.
into English, translations of it all across Europe and into Welsh as well, actually. So yeah, from the 12th century, we start to see Arthurian literature being composed. The lion's share of Arthurian romance, really most innovative Arthurian romance that we see at the earliest date is in French.
Some of these authors in particular, I'm thinking here of Marie de France, who I'll talk about in a second, also Chrétien of Troy, Chrétien de Troyes. They really are interested in these big questions about how a knight balances his chivalric, his martial obligations with, you know, being courtly and refined and being a lover.
He's a lover and a fighter, ladies. And Arthur in these texts becomes a, we call him a raffanéant, a do-nothing king. He's a lot less important than his knights and all of their affairs and adventures and things like that. And Lancelot is actually, he isn't even in the Arthurian tradition prior to romance. Well, let's do a mini quiz for you actually, Mike. So Chrétien de Troyes is probably the most important writer of this period, writing in sort of the 1170s, 1190s. Adds
quite a lot of iconic elements to the Arthurian canon. So which of these five iconic elements was not Chrétien's invention? So I'm going to give you five. One of them is not from Chrétien. One, Camelot. Two, Lancelot. Three, Lancelot's tragic romance with Guinevere. Four, The Round Table. Five, The Quest for the Holy Grail, which was not Chrétien's invention? I'm going to say The Quest for the Holy Grail.
It's a good guess, but it's the round table. Is it really? Yeah, the round table. That was his first. Critia didn't come up with that. Critia came up with the others. So who invented the round table? The round table is first mentioned in, do you remember earlier I mentioned Wasp, the Channel Islander, who translates Geoffrey and adapts.
It makes it more interesting. Yes. And one of the additional details that he includes is that a circular table is produced that can seat knights all the way around it with no hierarchy. So it's to get rid of squabbling about seniority. In the grail...
This has developed a bit, so there's always a seat that's left vacant called the siege perilous or the dangerous chair, the dangerous seat. Yeah, siège means chair in French. Yeah. And the idea being that it's deadly to sit in. The only person who can sit in it has to be the most pure knight going and that's the only one who can achieve the quest for the grail.
What do you think of when you think of a Holy Grail? Beyond the Monty Python film. Well, OK. What do you think of in terms of what it looks like, what it is? Well, I'm a follower of Indiana Jones. Good, good. So it's going to be a basic cup, you know, perhaps wooden, that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. And I think the legend was that if it could be restored to Britain, that that would heal the nation. I think that is also involved in this kind of...
Joseph of Arimathea. Yes. Did he come to Britain? If so, did he bring Jesus as his apprentice? Did he buy a cup from a gift shop in Glastonbury while he was here? Did he take it back? And then is it like nicking a Hoegaarden glass from a pub? Was it not actually his glass and he was supposed to return it to the barber? He didn't. He didn't know any better. He's not from this, in other words. Do you know what I mean? Is that... Chrétien says. Chrétien says that it is a flat serving dish for presenting the Eucharist wafer. I know.
I need to ask also, we've mentioned the round table. Yeah. How many knights are sitting around the round table? I always imagined it was like a baker's dozen. You're thinking 13? I was thinking King Arthur and then a dozen knights. You're bang on for one of the sources. Yeah.
But we also get, I mean, various numbers, right? Yeah, so it ranges from 12 nights up to a lot more than that. In Lachemont's Brut, he says that a carpenter builds this fold-out portable table that can be carried around, that can seat
as many as 1,600 knights. 1,600 knights. And this thing is portable, we're saying. So the round table can seat 13 or 1,600. Or somewhere in between. Or somewhere in between. It really depends. So each Arthurian text was changing core elements, Mary. We're seeing here writers coming in, adding bits, tweaking bits, taking a name, running with it, you know,
We also need to mention Marie de France. She's a really important figure because, first of all, there aren't many female Arthurian authors, to be honest, at this early date that we know of. And Marie de France translates this group of stories that she says are Breton lays, which were kind of sung to a harp in Brittany. There's one called L'Enval about a knight who is overlooked by Arthur and Guinevere and just not treated very well. And he ends up being rescued by a fairy lover who he has...
a very good time with in a meadow in a tent somewhere and she rides in to rescue him and he leaps on the back of her horse and rides off just as he's about to be given this terrible trial at Arthur's Court. Lovely stuff. Great, isn't it? So she's great. I love Married France and they're a good length as well. You can just kind of dip in and out. She was writing in the late 1100s. Yes. And what was the first thing
And what's interesting after that is we get what's called the Vulgate cycle. Yes. Slight pivot in the direction of the themes. Yeah, a little bit. It's also really the first time that we start to see a lot of these disparate stories being brought together into a kind of very epic way.
coherent whole but um yeah the volgate cycle we're not sure exactly who wrote it but we think it may have been written by someone possibly a secular author who had spent time in cistercian circles and they were all about kind of mystical things which explains why they were monks yes which explains why the grail is such an important part of that part when is this when's this early 1200s okay so we start to see a slight pivot away from the kind of
The Adventures of Knights, and it's becoming a little bit more about Christian purity and the idea of the ideal knight. Have you heard of Le Morte d'Arthur as a book by Thomas Mallory? Have you read it? No, I haven't read it. I have heard of it. It's sort of Rapscallion...
Figure, isn't he? Yeah. Sort of, it's a prison book. You know your stuff, don't you, Mike? I have to confess, I think it's one of those things that I've intended to read for a long time. Sure. I've never, do you know what I mean? It's on the list behind all the Grishams. I may have even owned it at some point, you know, and it's been put on the bookshelf in front of the Grisham.
But then you reach for aggression. Yeah, you're spot on. OK, you haven't read it, but you know that he's a bit of a character. I mean, Mary, this is very much the Marvel Cinematic Universe of the 15th century. Here is someone trying to grapple with an enormous, sprawling collection of stories where people are rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, and he's gone, oh, we need to standardise this. We need to bring this all into one coherent narrative, a beginning, middle and end, about King Arthur, and he dies at the end.
We call it Le Morte d'Arthur, which sounds pretty sexy. Yes. And it was a major spoiler. Yeah, yeah, actually, that's true. Yeah, you're right, actually. It does massively give the game away. The original title in English was different. It was The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table, which I think is more, it leaves you to guess what the ending's going to be.
Yeah, Le Morte d'Arte, you're right, it's a real... Sure, but it's less easy to put in... It's not such a sort of front-of-the-bookshop type title. So it's written in 1469, 1470, so we're talking quite late at this point in the Middle Ages, quite a bit later than the other romances we've been talking about. So it's just before the Tudor era, it's right at the end of the Middle Ages. Wars of the Roses, yeah. And 1485, it's actually printed, and it's printed by this...
printer called William Caxton, and Caxton retitles it Le Morte d'Arthur, presumably because it sounds kind of classy. Yeah. Mallory is a politician, he's a sort of sheriff, but he does some bad stuff, he ends up in prison. So tell us, who was he? Well, we had three candidates. We weren't sure which Thomas Mallory Knight who was imprisoned it was. As it turns out, there were three candidates, but the one who looks most likely...
He was from Warwickshire. And yeah, he had a very colourful career, shall we say. He was a sheriff. He was a justice of the peace. Five times he was an MP. But he was also accused of some pretty terrible crimes and spent time in prison for them. And these range from cattle rustling and things like that to robbing a local abbey. All the way up to attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, theft, rape and extortion. So all in all, not...
known as being a particularly nice guy. He's as old as time, right? The guy's seeking office. Got to get in office again just in case the law catches up with him. It's the Donald Trump strategy, isn't it? It's effective. And yet he's accused of all these terrible things. And actually we think that he may have written Le Morte d'Arthur, which I don't know if you've ever seen a copy, but it is massive. It's huge. It's one of those books that people say that they've read sometimes when they haven't read all of it because it's so, so long.
And we think that he wrote it during a period of imprisonment, possibly Newgate prison or possibly Tower of London. Maybe somewhere where he would have had access to manuscripts that contained enough of his source material that he could use them. So the Mort d'Arthur is a sort of compendium of stories. We break it down into eight tales. So it takes you right from Arthur's conception through his rise to the throne. You've got the sword and the stone story in there about him pulling the sword from the stone and becoming king.
He goes over to Europe and conquers the Roman Empire after a nasty challenge from a Roman emperor.
We're introduced to all of his round table nights, as in some of the other romances. He's got 150, hasn't he? 150 of them. Yeah, a good round number. Quite a lot. Lancelot is more important than in other English romances in Mallory because of his French sources. And this is where you get the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, that great love triangle. Mallory's kind of squeamish about the sex stuff. So they don't have sex. Probably for the mass market, right? Yeah. Well, and...
possibly a slightly more prudish audience, I don't know, until quite late in the text. And then after everything goes wrong for Arthur and he's betrayed by Mordred and the knights fall into kind of infighting and factions, partly because of what happens with Lancelot and Guinevere, it all goes very wrong. Arthur is mortally wounded and is taken off to Avalon. This is one of those texts where we are told some people think he doesn't live anymore and this is where we first hear Arthur called the once and future king. Yeah.
And then there's a funny postscript with Lancelot and Guinevere where they become a monk and a nun, respectively. So this is the kind of classic text that students read, well, try and read, and then very quickly give up. So it's a romance, but it's not that romantic as everyone dies at the end. The nuance windows!
So it's time now for the nuance window. This is where Mike and I sit quietly at the round table for two minutes with our many, many, many other nights. And we give Dr. Mary two minutes to tell us something we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready. Without much further ado, the nuance window, please.
Okay, so we haven't spoken much today about the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, and that's because a lot of people think of this as an Arthurian nadir. No one is interested in Arthur, no one is writing about Arthur. And actually, this is the time when you see some of the weirdest and funniest texts being written about Arthur. I'm going to give two examples today, but there are tons of others. Two of my favourites. The first is a little pamphlet published by a famous balladeer called Martin Parker, A Famous History of King Arthur.
1660, so just on the cusp of monarchic restoration. And it seems fairly normal until you delve into his massive list of Arthur's knights, which alongside Garwain Lancelot includes names like Sir Doggery, Sir Bored, Sir Frisky and Sir Bigot.
And I love this because people talk about Parker and this particular text as examples of royalist propaganda. And it just goes to show how even the more sober Arthurian genres at this time are becoming playful. There's some tongue-in-cheek stuff going on here. It's not attempting to be history anymore. And because of that, things get a lot more diverse and interesting.
Because we mentioned Hull earlier, did you know that there is a Merlinic prophecy, a prophecy supposedly attributed to Merlin about Kingston upon Hull and its invasion by parliamentary forces? Lots of people don't and I don't know why you would.
But I find it really funny that Merlin, who is a royal advisor, is co-opted as a prognosticator, as a prophet for parliamentarianism, you know, around the Civil War period. I just find that completely wonderful. And a great testament to how, even in this Nadir, things can continue to be reinvented. Amazing. Thank you so much. There you go to King Arthur. He's the once and future king because actually he keeps coming back. Yeah.
But with a new... Yeah, whatever's needed at the time. Right. So there we go. How do you feel about King Arthur now, Mike? I thoroughly enjoy it. I love that. It's been an absolute feast. You knew way more than you let on. You said early on that you had rough outlines. I wasn't sure. I'd loved it as a kid, I think, in particular. And there's so many brilliant movies and things that will remind you of Excalibur in particular. I'm going to have to go back and watch that.
Excalibur is a great one. First night, not so good. We seem to share the knowledge between us, which I love. Everyone has something a bit different. Exactly, exactly. There you go. All right. Well, thank you so much. Listener, if you crave more Wozniak in your life, of course you do. Check out our episodes on Stone Age Cattle Hoyuk.
Do you remember that? Or of course Dickens at Christmas, a very festive episode. And for more lovely legends, we've got an episode on Atlantis, which was not real, but very interesting. And remember, if you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. But I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the brilliant Dr Mary Bateman from the University of Bristol. Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much. This has been great.
It's been lovely. And in Comedy Corner, we have the marvellous, king himself, Mike Wozniak, the once and future Arthur. Thank you, Mike. It's lovely. I've loved it. Thank you so much. Fabulous. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we ride off on another historical quest. But for now, I'm off to go and trim my beard. First, I just need to find a wild boar. Bye!
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