Arthur Among the Welsh

Before he is Europe's king, Arthur is Wales's magnet: a figure to whom floating tradition attaches. Culhwch ac Olwen (c. 1100, the earliest Arthurian prose tale anywhere) shows the method plainly — its court list sweeps hundreds of names, heroes and absurdities alike, into Arthur's hall, and its plot sets the impossible tasks (anoethau) that climax in the hunt of the great boar Twrch Trwyth across Ireland and Wales. This Arthur owns marvellous possessions, commands monsters and saints, and operates in a landscape where every hill has a story. He is a folklore engine, not yet a tragic king.

Two poems complete the picture. Pa gur yv y porthaur? ("What man is the gatekeeper?") has Arthur talk his way into a fortress by reciting his companions' deeds — our oldest window on the war-band that will become the Round Table, Cai and Bedwyr already at its head. And Preiddeu Annwn ("The Spoils of Annwn"), an allusive, boasting, deliberately difficult poem in the Book of Taliesin, sends Arthur and three shiploads of men into the Otherworld fortress to seize the cauldron of the Chief of Annwn — warmed by the breath of nine maidens, refusing to boil a coward's food — from which raid "except seven, none returned." An expedition, a fortress out of time, a numinous vessel, catastrophic cost: the family resemblance to the Grail quest is unmistakable, and the family relationship is Unit 24's quarrel.

Padel's question from Unit 2 should be in your hands throughout: this material does not read like decayed history. It reads like a mythology in vigorous working order, about to be annexed by a historian.