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[bibliogramma]

Arthur, the Bear of Britain, Edward Frankland

One of the earlier modern recountings of the Arthurian material, and one of the first to take a purely historical approach by attempting to set the core story in a naturalistic, historically accurate post-Roman Britain, Arthur, the Bear of Britain was first published in 1944. Frankland says of his novel, in the author’s afterword:

"The outline of my story has been designed from any scraps of material which seem to be of historical value. Here and there, like Geoffrey, I have had recourse to pure, but I think not unreasonable, invention. I have preserved the central romance of Arthur, Medraut, and Guinevere (more correctly Gwenhwyvar), not only on account of its tragic splendour, but because intuitively one feels that it springs from a germ of truth rather than fiction."

The novel is organised in an episodic fashion, with each chapter headed by a reference to one of the traditional 12 battles fought by Arthur, or to another specific incident or situation in the Arthurian corpus, taken from some of the earliest sources available – Nennius, Gildas, the early Welsh and Scottish references to legends of Arthur.

The cast of characters and their interpersonal relationships are not always those that have been fixed into the modern version of the legend. There is the eternal trio, here constituted as Arthur, Medraut and Gwenhwyvar, with Medraut as the son of Arthur’s treacherous half-brother Modron, Arthur’s true companion for some time, who is slowly turned away though his desire for power and his uncle’s wife, and Gwenhwyvar as a rather selfish woman who wants her husband to stay at home and build her a comfortable castle rather than running all over Britain and southern Scotland using up his time, his strength and his resources fighting the Saxons wherever they may be. There are the traditional companions Kai and Bedwyr, and a host of Bitish and Cymic lords and princes who simply will not come together long enough in truce, if not in peace, for Arthur to do more than hold back the Saxons for a time.

I found it interesting but not especially enjoyable reading – Frankland’s style makes use of a great deal of (pages and pages, in fact) of inner ruminations and virtual monologues in which the characters discuss, somewhat repetitively, their inner thoughts and motivations. Medraut and Gwenhwyvar ponder, both separately and together, over whether or not they will betray Arthur for two-thirds of the book before they get around to doing it. Arthur is brought by circumstances to declare over and over again that he does not want power for himself, he does not wish to fight against other Britons, he wants only to keep the Britons free of Saxon overlords. As well, the episodic structure of the book makes it somewhat difficult to keep the story line flowing, but there are some very nice touches in the way key elements of the legend, such as the idea of the Round Table, are worked naturalistically and almost casually into the narrative.

What is important and memorable about this novel, beyond its insistence on an accurate portrayal of the casual brutality and violence of the historical period Arthur’s life must be placed against, is the portrait of Arthur himself. As Raymond Thompson says in his introduction to the current edition:

This is the world that Frankland creates for us…. First published in England in 1944, it reflects, perhaps, the savagery of a new dark age in which total war threatened the destruction of all that was held dear. The nobility and sacrifice of Arthur yr Amherawdyr, Arthur the emperor, also known as Artos the Bear, stand out in this world in a contrast made all the more striking by the enveloping darkness. When his nephew Medraut advises him to seek power after his great victory at Badon, Arthur, who had earlier vowed to fight against the invaders instead of other Britons, insists upon adhering to his principles: “A man may take it upon him to do as you counsel me to do and good may come of it; but for good or for ill I am not that man,” he responds. He pays the price for his decision on the battlefield of Camlann where, as she washed the blood from the face of his corpse, Garwen laments, “Of all the heroes that come up out of the race of Britons, this man sought least for himself and was most basely betrayed.”

At the end of the book, Frankland diverges from the legends of the three queens who bear Arthur's body away, but retains the essence and meaning of this, in his handling of the burial of Arthur. The two survivors of Camlann, Bedwyr the companion and Garwen the lover, take Arthur's body from the field of battle so that no one can know for certain, after, if he fell or lived on, and place his body within an ancient barrow, thought to be an entrance to the places of the folk under the hills, where he lies alone beneath the land he lived and died to defend. I found myself, as I read this, thinking of Jo Walton's Arthurian-themed books The King's Peace and The King's Name, because of the striking image - one that I've really only found so clearly in this work and in hers, of Arthur returning to be one with the heart and soul and spirit of the land, rather than being carried away into another place to wait for his time to come again.