— Wace, Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, and the rest — for the most part repeat the same account, with minor modifications. Thus Wace (who wrote in 1155) first mentions the Round Table, an element which he surely did not invent, but must have derived from current Celtic traditions.
It was not in the chronicles, however, that the material about Arthur found its fullest and best expression. The fame of his court was most widely celebrated in the romances of chivalry. Of this class of literature one of the earliest and greatest representatives was the French poet, Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote in the latter half of the Twelfth Century. He had many followers in France, and the French romances were widely translated and imitated in the other European languages. The relation between the romances and the chronicles is not entirely clear, but the latter cannot be looked upon as the source of any considerable part of the material in the former. In the romances, less attention is paid to Arthur and his conquests, and far more to the lives and exploits of his several knights; so that the King, while remaining the central figure of all the poems, is the hero of hardly any. Gawain, Ywain, Lancelot, and Perceval are celebrated in turn, until they, too, give place to new knights, the favorites of new poets. Most of the earlier romances (like those of Chrestien) were metrical; but the stories soon began to be worked over in prose, and finally great prose cycles were written, in which the scattered episodes were woven together with as much consistency as could be obtained. The great example in English of this stage of development is the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, which has been the source of Arthurian lore most consulted by English readers and writers since the Fifteenth Century.
The origin of the material in the romances and the manner of its transmission has long been the subject of voluminous discussion. Some scholars have maintained that there is nothing distinctively Celtic in the cycle beyond the names, the geographical setting, and an occasional incident. Others, holding the stories to have been in large part the property of the Celtic races, have discussed whether they were transmitted to the French poets in England or on the Continent, whether through the Armoricans or through the Welsh. Each of these theories of transmission has at present its adherents among scholars; but in the course of recent investigations the Celtic character and origin of the great body of the material has been steadily made clearer. The ‘matter of Britain’ has not been misnamed. Unfortunately, the remains of early Welsh literature are scanty, and little or nothing can be learned from them of the direct sources of the Arthurian stories. But the national hero tales of the Irish have been preserved in large quantities from very early times, and a comparison of this saga-material with the medieval romances has developed many striking parallelisms which cannot be explained except by some theory of common origin. The pursuit of this line of investigation has yielded most important results in the last few years.
The story of Arthur and his Round Table has been less treated in modern than in early English literature. Still, it has engaged the attention of great poets. Spenser introduced Arthur into the Faerie Queene, but preserved very little of the substance of the old romances. Milton and Dryden both planned Arthurian epics, and then gave them up for other subjects. The romantic revival of the Nineteenth Century brought the ‘matter of Britain,’ along with other mediæval subjects, once more to the front. A number of episodes from the cycle were treated by the lesser poets of the period, and Tennyson produced in the Idylls of the King what is now without doubt the best-known version of these ancient tales.
Bibliography. On the mythology: J. Rhys, The Hibbert Lectures (London, 1886); Studies in the Arthurian Legend (Oxford, 1891); H. Zimmer, Nennius Vindicatus (Berlin, 1893). On the transmission of the material of the romances: Gaston Paris, Histoire littéraire de la France, Vol. XXX. (Paris, 1888); and Zimmer, Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (Göttingen, 1890); also a series of articles by Paris, and others in Romania, Vols. X. (Paris, 1881) and following. The works of Chrestien are being edited by W. Förster, and selections from his romances have been admirably translated into English by W. W. Newell in King Arthur and the Table Round (Boston, 1897). On the romances consult also: Paris, Les romans de la Table-Ronde (Paris, 1868-77), and Ward, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1883); for the early Welsh poetry, Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868); and for the bearing of Irish literature on the Arthurian question, A. C. L. Brown, Ywain: a Study in the Origins of Arthurian Romance (Boston, 1902); for a discussion of later Arthurian literature, MacCallum, Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Arthurian Story from the Sixteenth Century (Glasgow, 1894). See Avalon; Marinogion; Perceval; and Tristram.
ARTHUR (1187-1203). Duke of Brittany,
grandson of Henry II. of England and nephew
of Richard I., Cœur-de-Lion, who, in 1190,
declared him heir to the English throne. He was
proclaimed king by the nobles of Anjou,
Touraine, and Maine, on Richard's death in 1199,
although the English barons decided in favor of
John, Richard's younger brother. He was
knighted by Philip II. of France, and invested
with Brittany and the French possessions
appertaining to the English crown. In the same
year, John landed in Normandy. In support of
Arthur, Philip took the field against him. Soon,
however, Philip's unscrupulous conduct gave
offense to the Angevin friends of Arthur, and
in 1200 a peace was concluded between John
and Philip. In 1202 war again broke out.
Poitou rose in insurrection against England,
and Arthur, who had marched to besiege the
castle of Mirabeau, was taken prisoner. He was
removed in 1203 to Rouen, where he mysteriously
disappeared — drowned in the Seine, some
said, by John's own hands. The story of Arthur
appears in Holinshed. Shakespeare, in King
John, used Holinshed as a basis, but supplemented
the old chronicle with imaginative
details of his own. See John.
ARTHUR, Chester Alan (1830-86). The twenty-first President of the United States. He was born at Fairfield, Vt., October 5, 1830, of
