King Arthur: David Franzoni has a Lot to Answer For

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David Franzoni, Freedom!, King Arthur, Medieval Europe, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Scotland

After three posts that mostly dealt with the general historical background to King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), it’s time to actually look at the plot, and now I’ll bring my case for indicting David Franzoni for crimes against geography and assault with a pseudohistorical weapon.

The Northern Frontier

The film takes place in northern Britain, along Hadrian’s Wall. Arthur and his men seem to be stationed at one of the forts dotted along Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the legal extent of Roman Britain. Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous example of a Roman limes, a boundary wall used to separate the Romans from people they did not directly rule. There are at least ten of these structures known, including two that run along the Danube, one in Arabia, and one in Libya. Contrary to popular imagination, however, a limes was not really a towering defensive position like the Great Wall of China; the surviving remains of Hadrian’s Wall are actually quite low to the ground and it would not have been hard for a stealthy band of northern Britons to scale it unseen. The purpose of Hadrian’s Wall was more likely to act as a boundary check-point, controlling the movement of goods and peoples across the boundary and to demonstrate to non-Roman peoples the superiority of Roman engineering (and therefore by extension, military) skills. It would have slowed down a formal invasion and allowed Roman soldiers to send an alarm to one of the more heavily fortified forts along the wall, where substantial garrisons were situated.

Hadrian’s Wall. Note how low to the ground the remains are

Substantial scenes take place at one of the forts. The fort is never explicitly identified in the film, but in Lancelot’s closing voice-over, he identifies the final fight there as being the battle of Badon Hill (a point I had overlooked in my previous post about Germanus—my apologies), so I’m going to call this fort Badon, even though that makes absolutely no sense. Placing Badon on Hadrian’s Wall makes about as much sense as saying that the battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey, since most of the sites that have been proposed for Badon are well to the south. Some people have suggested that the second battle mentioned by Gildas, the battle of Camlann, took place at Camboglanna, one of the forts on Hadrian’s Wall, but I’ve yet to see any serious argument that Badon was on or near the Wall.

Inside the Badon fort

At the start of the film, the antagonists are the indigenous natives of northern Briton. Historically these people have been referred to as the Picts. But the film instead calls them the ‘Woads’, reportedly because during the script read-through, someone suggested ‘Woads’ sounded cooler. Sigh.

We know the Woads are badasses because right at the start of the film they ambush the carriage bringing Bishop Germanus to Badon and get themselves entirely killed (except for one lucky guy that Arthur decides to spare for no clear reason). So let’s think about this. The Woads live north of the Wall, a heavily protected military frontier. Badon is just south of the Wall. Germanus is traveling up to Badon from the south. Do you notice a problem here? How did the Woads get over the Wall to launch an attack so far to the south? This is typical of the film’s approach to geographical issues, which is that they basically don’t matter at all. (Also, fun fact—carriages won’t be invented for another 1000 years, so they may as well have put Germanus in a humvee.  But see Update.)

After he gets to Badon, Germanus tells Arthur that his men have to go up north of the wall and rescue Marius and his son Alecto (who should be Allectus, but we’ve already established in this blog that movies never get Roman names right. Alecto is the name of a Greek goddess), who happens to be the pope’s favorite godson somehow. Marius is an important Roman who just happens to live north of the Wall, a very long way north as it turns out. Again, let’s think about the geography. The Roman Empire is to the south of the Wall, the hated enemy Woads to the north. Why is Marius, an important Roman, living well to the north of the Wall, in enemy territory? If the Woads dislike the Romans so much, why haven’t they massacred the defenseless Marius? Apparently the Wall and its military fortresses were just randomly plopped somewhere on the British landscape with no regard for who lives where, and Marius accidentally wound up on the bad side and some of the Woads wound up on the good side.

 

And Then There’s the Saxons

To complicate things, the villainous Saxons have landed an invasion force three days north of the Wall and are marching south to conquer Britain. Now, historically, the Saxons began their invasion well south of the Wall, pretty much the opposite end of the whole island actually, but failing to make historical sense is pretty much a given for this film, so by this point I had mostly gotten numb to that problem. But this makes absolutely no geographical sense either. If the Saxons are invading by boat, why land themselves such a long ways to the north and then march south to a major fortification which they will have to conquer before they can then march further south to conquer Britain, when ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS LAND THEIR INVASION FORCE SOUTH OF THE WALL?

The entire plot of this film falls apart if the leader of the bad guys (or anyone in the audience) just bothers to look at a goddam map. This is like making a film where Canada decides to invade the United States via Mexico. You see how absurd that is? Canadians are too polite to invade anyone. But David Franzoni won’t let little things like geography or manners stop his plot.

Invading Saxons

The villainous Saxons are led by the even more villainous Saxon leader Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård). We know the Saxons are villainous because they rape women. We know Cerdic is even more villainous because raping woman is too nice for him. He wants his men to kill everyone instead because he doesn’t want them to produce weak children. So he kills his man for being nice enough to rape someone. (Why is it that Hollywood bad guys have to demonstrate their badguyness by killing the bad guys who work for them? Sure, it establishes a hierarchy of badguyness with the main villain at the top, but it seems to me that it would also be a motivation for his men to run away or try to kill him.) Cerdic’s son, Cynric (Til Schweiger) challenges him, and Cerdic once again demonstrates his badguyness by telling Cynric that the next time he challenges his old man, he better have a sword in his hand. Unfortunately, what this really establishes for the audience is that Cynric, who logically ought to be number two on the badguyness hierarchy, is really just a wuss.

Nothing says ‘villainous Saxon’ like furry shoulder pads.

But it does create a situation where the Woads turn out to not be such bad guys at all. They’re actually good guys who just happen to like launching sneak attacks over a heavily fortified frontier to massacre innocent traveling bishops.

The Woads’ lack of genuine badguyness is discovered when Arthur and his men get to Marius’ villa up north. Marius turns out to be an asshole. We know he’s an asshole because he doesn’t want to leave, despite the Saxon army heading his way, and because he’s confiscating all his peasants’ grain and letting them starve. Arthur tells the peasants they’re all free, because Arthur is a good guy and freedom is a good thing. The basic purpose here is to recycle the cliché of the good guy being ordered to rescue someone useless and stupid because that makes the meaningless death of most of the good guys more poignant somehow. The movie’s basically a shitty remake of Escape from New York with Arthur as a more freedom-loving Snake Plissken.

Arthur notices that a couple of Christian priests are bricking up a building, so naturally he insists on forcing his way in, despite the priests claiming this is a holy place. What he discovers instead is that the priests have been torturing Woads there, including a cute moppet whose primary purpose is to remind Arthur of his own unhappy childhood, and Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Arthur’s archnemesis the Woad leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane). As usual, this makes no sense. Why are Christian priests torturing people and claiming that the torture chamber is a holy place? Given that the film has already established a contrast between the good British Christianity of Arthur and Pelagius and the bad Roman Christianity of Germanus, making these British Christians horrible people just undermines the dichotomy Franzoni was trying to establish and leaves Arthur as the only Christian who believes anything nice, because freedom and not torturing people are nice.

King Arthur, or SCA event? King Arthur, because if it were an SCA event, the outfits would be more authentic.

The geography, by the way, has gotten worse. Arthur discovers that the Saxons are to the south of them (still north of the Wall, but south of them). They landed three days’ north of the Wall (so apparently Marius’ villa is REALLY far north in Scotland), and have apparently just been hanging out for three days, since Arthur has gotten further north than them without them getting anywhere near the Wall. And because the Saxons are to the south, Arthur is going to have to lead Marius’ people and the rescued Woads over the mountains to the east. The major mountain range in Scotland is the Grampians, which separates the Scottish Highlands from central and southern Scotland. So evidently Marius’ villa is west of Inverness or Loch Ness, and the Saxons, who are coming from the east (having left the region around the mouth of the Rhine river), have sailed northwards around Britain and landed on the western side of Scotland, maybe around Oban or Fort William. They can’t have landed on the east side, because going eastward over the Grampians would still put Arthur’s group north of the Saxons. So apparently Cerdic lands around Fort William, camps out for several days while planning to attack a defenseless villa, marches northeastward up the Great Glen toward the villa despite having the intention of conquering southern Britain, and then discovers that Arthur has gotten Marius out of there. So he then chases Arthur over the Grampians, with the result that Arthur gets south of the Saxons and gets back to Badon before the Saxons do.

It’s not just that the plot would fall apart if the Saxons looked at a map; the plot would fall part if David Franzoni looked at a map. Why the hell is Marius living so far into enemy territory, and why did the Saxons invade western Scotland? Why go north to go south? Because Franzoni isn’t going to let a little thing like geography get in the way of telling a not-very-good story.

After Arthur leads the defenseless peasants over the mountains and fights a battle on a frozen river (because it’s winter in Scotland, but not at Badon), Guinevere helps broker an alliance between Arthur and Merlin to fight their common enemy the Saxons. What Merlin gets out of this isn’t clear, because Arthur has a grand total of 5 men under his command, so he’s basically suckering Merlin into giving him a Woadish army when all the Woads have to do is keep out the way of the Saxons as they head south to plunder Roman Britain. The Woads, after all, are brilliant woodsmen whom even Arthur can’t catch. And instead of fighting among the forests of Scotland, which offer perfect cover for the hit-and-run guerilla tactics the Woads are so good at, and instead of using Badon as a strong defensible position that would multiply the power of his greatly outnumbered forces, Arthur decides the smart thing to do is opt for an open field battle next to the Wall. Why does anyone think this man is a skilled military leader? A ten year old with a pile of snowballs and a mound of snow to hide behind demonstrates more tactical sense than Arthur shows through most of this film.

Woadish trebuchets, cuz why not?

And so the film climaxes in the Battle of What’s In Your Wallet, in which hordes of villainous Saxon barbarians charge across a smoke-filled field to fight a few brilliant horsemen who spend most of their time fighting on foot while Woadish archers, including a leather bikini clad Guinevere, fire arrows at them without ever hitting any of the good guys. I suppose in that situation being insanely outnumbered is actually sort of helpful, because the odds of hitting a good guy are small. Oh, and the Woads also have trebuchets, while the Saxons have crossbows. I’ve seen Lego battles with a greater concern for historical accuracy.

You can’t be a Woad without wearing some woad.

Then Arthur wins and Merlin marries him to Guinevere and the happy couple live happily ever after, and the Arthurian legends live happily ever after, and history lives happily ever after. Everyone winds up happy. But not geography. Geography can go fuck itself.

Update: In response to a question from a reader, I did a little more research into Roman transportation. I had been under the impression that while the Romans used a variety two- and four-wheeled wagons, they did not have a covered, four-wheeled person transport with a suspension system–what i would consider a carriage. However, it turns out that an archaeologist working in Bulgaria in the 1960s did uncover the remains of what he reconstructed to be exactly such a vehicle. This is literally the only known example of such a vehicle, but it did exist, and the vehicle used in King Arthur looks not unlike a reconstruction of it in a Cologne museum. So I have to give the film credit for getting that detail basically right, although whether such a vehicle was still in use in the 5th century and on the edge of the Empire is probably debatable.

The Cologne reconstruction

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King Arthur: Who the Heck is Germanus?

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Clive Owen, David Franzoni, Germans of Auxerre, Ivano Marescotti, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Medieval Europe, Pelagianism, Pelagius, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, St. Augustine

The first time I watched King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), one of the more hopeful elements was the decision to include Germanus of Auxerre in it. Germanus was a real person, and his appearance early in the film led me to think that perhaps the film was going to do something fresh and interesting by tying the Arthurian legends into a genuine historical event that most people haven never heard of. “Maybe this film has something interesting to offer,” I thought to myself. Boy, was I wrong.

Germanus of Auxerre

Germanus, also known as St. Germaine and Garmon Sant, was a Gaulish (proto-French, to simplify) bishop of Auxerre in the early 5^th century. One of the most important events that we know about during his life was a visit he paid to Sub-Roman Britain sometimes around 429 or 430 AD.

A statue of St. Germanus in Paris

In 410, the Roman Emperor Honorius withdrew the last Roman troops from Britain, and in response, the local authorities essentially seceded from the Roman Empire, expelling the Roman civil authorities. For the next half-century, the Britons sought to maintain a degree of Roman civilization even as the economic, military, and civic underpinnings of the civilization were breaking down. This period is generally known as the Sub-Roman period, and traditionally it lasts down to 449 AD, when the Saxons began to overrun lowland Britain (although historians may occasionally disagree about the end date for this period, arguing that it lasts down to 597).

The motive for Germanus’ visit was the emergence of a theological movement that eventually came to be branded as a heresy, Pelagianism. The founder of this movement was a monk known as Pelagius; he’s usually thought to be a Briton, although by the time of the Pelagian Controversy, he was living in Rome, where he was a respected theologian. Very little of Pelagius’ thought has actually survived; early Christian authors had little interest in preserving the writings and doctrines of people they deemed heretics. In fact, it’s not even clear that Pelagius actually taught Pelagianism; it may well be that his supporters developed his thought beyond what he taught. Regardless, Pelagianism maintained that humanity is a capable of avoiding sin because we have free will, and that includes the choice to sin or not sin. Humans were capable of doing good deeds on their own, and in fact God required them to do so. Otherwise, how could God justly punish sin? If a person is incapable of not sinning, it seems perverse of God to expect them to not sin. Pelagius seems to have objected to people using human sinfulness as a justification for failing to live morally.

A 17th century drawing of Pelagius

Unfortunately for Pelagius and his followers, the most influential churchmen of their generation included St. Augustine and St. Jerome, both of whom were among the giants of the early Latin theologians and both of whom opposed them. Augustine, arguably the most influential Western theologian after St. Paul, articulated the doctrine of Original Sin, which holds that all humanity fell when Adam and Eve sinned. Because humanity is permanently tainted by the inherited stain of their sin, it is impossible for humans to do good works or avoid sinning without God’s grace and assistance. The doctrine of Original Sin was in complete opposition to Pelagianism, and in 411, the Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism as heretical and affirmed Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, which subsequently became a fundamental teaching in the Catholic and many Protestant Churches (such as Lutheranism). Pelagius himself died naturally in 418, but Pelagianism continued to circulate.

St Augustine

It was to confront the reported spread of Pelagianism in Britain that Germanus and another bishop, Lupus of Troyes, traveled to Britain in 429 or 430. Some sources claim that he made a second visit sometime over the next 15 years, although some scholars have argued this is a confused report of his trip in 429 and that he only made a single visit. This visit has loomed large in scholarship on the Sub-Roman period for the simple reason that it’s virtually the only major event we have clear documentation for in the sources. As I mentioned in my first post on King Arthur, the Sub-Roman period is part of the British Dark Age, because we have so little information about the period. Between 410 and 600, we have precisely one written document that scholars uniformly agree was authentically written in Britain in this period (although the two letters of St. Patrick may have been written either in Britain or Ireland). That one invaluable document is Gildas’ letter that mentions the battle of Mt. Badon.

The story of Germanus’ visit is recorded in the Life of St. Germanus, written by Constantius of Lyon, a Gaul. He tells us that Germanus went to Britian and debated a group of Pelagian bishops and disproved their beliefs, with all the witnesses being persuaded to abandon the heresy. While there, Germanus took time to cure a blind girl, have a dream about St. Alban, break his foot, miraculously divert a fire, and defeat an invasion of Saxons and Picts by getting lots of people to shout “Alleluia!” so loudly that the echoes made the invaders think they were facing a much larger force than they actually were. I guess the Saxons and Picts back then were kind of dim. What he didn’t do, so far as Constantius tells us, is meet anyone named Artorius.

Germanus in King Arthur

After an intro sequence featuring Artorius as a young boy, the film starts in 467, with the arrival of Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti). Bad guys attack the wagon he’s traveling in, and Arthur (Clive Owen) and his men kill the bad guys, but not before they’ve killed the bishop and most of his retinue.

But surprise! The dead guy in the wagon isn’t actually the bishop. Instead Bishop Germanus has cleverly disguised himself as the captain of the bishop’s guards. Because no one would try to kill the leader of the bishop’s bodyguard when they were trying to kill the bishop. That’s the sort of logic this film operates on.

Germanus pretending to be the captain of the guards

Although Arthur and his men and supposed to receive their magical discharge papers after escorting the bishop to the Roman fort, Germanus decides to jerk them around by insisting they undergo that great cinematic cliché, the One Last Mission, because somehow he’s in charge because the pope has taken control of the Roman Empire because…well, just go with it.

Arthur, as it turns out, is a follower of Pelagius. The film gets Pelagianism entirely wrong, because it seems to think of it as some sort of political movement revolving around every historical action figure’s favorite value, “freedom”. (Evidently, William Wallace was a Pelagian.) As Arthur insists, his people “were free from your first breath!”, conveniently forgetting that he and his knights were born into servitude, as the prologue has shown us. There is no discussion of the issue of Original Sin or the theology of Free Will at all. And Arthur is upset to eventually learn from Germanus that Pelagius was recently executed.

Germanus being a dick to Artorius

So the film makes the intriguing choice to introduce an important historical figure and a major theological debate, and then makes the mind-numbing decision to do nothing even remotely intelligent or even interesting with these details. Ok, I get that 5^th century theological debates are a hard sell to a modern action film audience, SO DON’T MENTION THEM.

The Dating of the Film

Simply put, the film’s chronology is a complete mess. The historical Lucius Artorius Castus was in Britain sometime between 175 and 235 AD, so well over 200 years before the time of the film. But that problem gets fixed easily, by making this Arthur a descendant of the original one.So that piece of chronology isn’t a problem (relatively speaking). Instead, everything else about this film’s dating is just wrong.

The events are set in 467 AD, when the Roman Empire is beginning to collapse. But Roman Britain hadn’t been part of the Empire for more than a half-century, since it seceded in 410. Bishop Germanus’ visit was around 429; granted, he may have made a later second visit, but that happened by the 440s at the latest, because Germanus died in 448. The film opens with a visit from a dead man to a part of the Roman Empire that’s hasn’t been a part of the Empire for longer than he’s been dead.

But there was still an emperor in the West in 467, because the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, wasn’t deposed until 476. So the idea that the pope is running the Empire because there’s no emperor is just silly.

Arthur (right) wearing what the film imagines Roman armor would look like.

And, as I noted in my first post on this film, the “historical” Arthur (if there was such a man) didn’t fight his battle of Mt. Badon for probably another 20-30 years, around 495 AD, give or take a decade. There is simply no way to massage the dates in the film to get them into even a remotely coherent order. And why the hell did David Franzoni settle on 467 as the date for the film? Did he mean to write 476 and just transposed two digits and no one else involved in the filming caught the typo? That makes about as much sense as anything else having to do with this film.

Why set the film in the waning years of the Roman Empire, why set “Artorius” in his proper century, if you’re not actually going to fight the battle of Mt. Badon? Why not just go with Malcor’s claim that Arthur belongs in the late 2^nd to early 3^rd century (when there’s actually an emperor to give him orders) unless your intention is to fit him into Dark Age Britain? If you want to set him in Dark Age Britain, why not get the dating at least partially right? Why get literally every chronological detail wrong?

This wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t made the film’s supposed historical accuracy a major selling point of the publicity campaign. They went to the trouble of recruiting a genuine scholar (granted, a folklorist with a rather half-baked theory, rather than a historian, but still…), but apparently Dr. Malcor didn’t bother to point out to them that the dates in the script are just so much word salad. Either that or she did point it out and they felt it didn’t matter, which seems equally likely, given that this is a Jerry Bruckheimer picture.

The film’s jumbled chronology is sort of like a Dan Brown novel, filled with clever clues to form a message that only the historically literate can parse out. But the message they form is “screw you, suckers! This makes no sense!”

Update: A reader tells me that in the closing narration, there is a mention that the final battle is Mt. Badon. I apparently missed that. But it makes absolutely no sense, since Badon seems to be modern Bath, which is nowhere near Hadrian’s Wall, where the battle is definitely taking place. This is sort of like claiming that the Battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey.

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King Arthur: The Sarmatian Theory

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Bad Prologue Texts, C Scott Littleton, Clive Owen, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Lucius Artorius Castus, Roman Britain

King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni) opens with a prologue text, narrated, we eventually learn, by one of Arthur’s knights.

“By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land, more peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field and when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day. For the second part of the bargain they struck indebted not only themselves but also their sons and their sons and so on, to serve the empire as knights. I was such a son. Our post was Britain, or at least the southern half. For the land was divided by a 73-mile wall, built three centuries before us to protect the Empire from the native fighters of the North. So as our forefathers had done, we made our way in the cortege of the Roman commander in Britain, ancestrally named for the first Artorius, or Arthur.”

This opening signals that the film is drawing off the so-called Sarmatian Theory about King Arthur. This theory has two parts, one focused on Lucius Artorius Castus and the other involving an ancient people called the Sarmatians.

Lucius Artorius Castus

Artorius is primarily known from two large fragments of a late 2^nd or early 3^rd century sarcophagus that were used in building a wall of a church in Croatia at some point prior to the late 19^th century. (This is less strange than it sounds; pre-modern peoples frequently re-used stonework like this.) The two surviving fragments commemorate Lucius Artorius Castus by describing his military career. According to the inscription, Artorius served in Syria, Judea, the region around modern Budapest and Romania, Italy, either in Armorica (modern Brittany) or more probably Armenia, and most importantly (for this theory) in northern England, before eventually being named governor of modern Croatia. The inscription does not explicitly say he served in Britain; rather it says that he served as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix, a legion that during the period in question was stationed at Eboracum (modern York). The exact dating of his career is unclear; dates range from the mid-2^nd century (with his governorship occurring sometime between 167 and 185) to the period between 215 to 232 AD.

One of the fragment’s of Artorius’ sarcophagus. The first line reads “L Artori…”

In 1924, a medieval scholar named Kemp Malone pointed out that a man with the name of Artorius serving in northern England could in theory have inspired the character of King Arthur. As we saw in my last post, if Arthur was a historical person at all, he probably acted as a general in at least one major battle in southwestern England around 495 AD. Artorius, however, is at least 250 years too early to be that man, and as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix would not actually have participated in battles, since a Legion’s Prefect was an administrative officer and usually an older man rather than a leader of troops.

So What About the Sarmatians?

The Sarmatians were a confederation of Iranian peoples who initially occupied Sarmatia, the region north of the Black Sea, but who gradually migrated westward during the Roman period. They were primarily known as cavalry warriors. In 175 AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius stationed 5,500 Sarmatians in Britain. This unit may have remained there for generations; a 5^th century Roman document mentions a ‘Sarmatian formation’ serving in northern Britain, although by that point it may well have been manned by men with no ethnic connection to the Sarmatians who founded the unit.

In 1975, Helmut Nickel floated a theory that perhaps Artorius led a unit of Sarmatians and somehow formed the basis for the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In 1994, two scholars of folklore, C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, proposed an entirely hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, apparently independently of Nickel’s ideas. They proposed that Artorius had fought against the Sarmatians during his time in eastern Europe and that because he had experience with Sarmatians, the emperor assigned him to command a unit of Sarmatians that fought a campaign around Hadrian’s Wall against a group of invading Caledonians. His unit being destroyed, he then returned to Eboracum and was subsequently sent with a cavalry unit to Armorica.

Dr. Linda Malcor

The primary evidence Littleton and Malcor offer in support of this hypothesis is that certain elements of the late medieval Arthurian legend have parallels in legends that derive from the Caucasus region, not far to the east of Sarmatia. These ‘Nart Sagas’ are of uncertain dating, being only recorded in the 19th century AD, although elements of them seem to go a long way back into the Ancient period. The most interesting parallels include

• A Nart warrior’s sword must be thrown into the sea when he dies. One particular character asks a friend to undertake this task for him, but the friend twice lies about doing it before finally throwing it into the sea. This same scenario occurs in Thomas Malory’s 15^th century description of the death of Arthur at the battle of Camelot, in which Bedivere is ordered to throw Excalibur into a lake.
• Two Nart heroes collect the beards of their foes to make into cloaks. Different versions of the Arthurian legends describe him fighting an enemy who does the same thing.
• The Cup of the Narts appears at feasts and grants each person what they most like to eat. It can only be touched by a warrior without a flaw. The Holy Grail does this when it appears at Camelot. It is finally attained by the pure Sir Galahad.
• A magical woman dressed in white and associated with water appears both in the Nart Sagas and in Arthurian legend (where she is called the Lady of the Lake).
• The Sarmatians are closely related to the Alans. Various names containing ‘alan’ occur in various Arthurian stories, including Alain le Gros, Elaine, and most importantly Lancelot, which according to Littleton and Malcor could be a corruption of Alanas a Lot (“Alan of Lot River’).
• The Sarmatians were noted cavalry warriors, and so too were Arthur’s knights.

So here essentially is the Sarmatian Theory. Artorius led a group of Sarmatians in northern Britain briefly. At some point after his death, he was fused with various Sarmatian heroes and acquired a collection of stories and characters around him that ultimately evolved into the character of King Arthur. And that’s basically what King Arthur claims is the historical truth behind Arthur.

So Does the Sarmatian Theory Actually Work?

No. It’s riddled with problems. The biggest problem is that Littleton and Malcor offer literally no evidence connecting Artorius to the Sarmatians sent to Britain. It’s unlikely that Artorius commanded Sarmatian troops in battle, since by the time he was stationed with the Sixth Legion Victrix he was old enough to not be leading troops in battle, and they would have been with a different unit anyway.

Dr. C. Scott Littleton

In addition to not offering any actual evidence to connect Artorius and the Sarmatians, they also don’t explain why Artorius should have become the focus of an enduring legend. In their hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, the Sarmatians are eventually destroyed, so if he did lead them, he wasn’t a successful general. Nor did he die in Britain. He died years later in Croatia. Nor do they explain why his legend would have been passed down for centuries from Romanized Sarmatians to Romanized Celts to Anglo-Saxons and eventually to Norman English, other than a general tendency of people to repeat old stories.

Additionally, this theory ignores the story about Arthur leading troops at the battle of Mt. Badon. Why would a long-dead unsuccessful commander from the 3^rd century become attached to a battle fought two centuries later in an entirely different region of Britain?

Another huge problem is that the various motifs Littleton and Malcor cite are comparatively late additions to the Arthurian legends. Arthurian stories were circulating in Wales at least by the 8th or 9th century, and they remained Welsh story-matter until the mid-12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth incorporated Arthur into his History of the Kings of Britain, thus bringing Arthur to the attention of the Anglo-Norman nobility. Since the Anglo-Normans were Frenchmen who had conquered England in 1066, this meant that the ‘Matter of Britain’ crossed over to France and began to circulate there, and French stories about these characters eventually crossed back to England and embedded themselves definitively in the corpus of Arthurian stories.

Most of the details that Littleton and Malcor cite as supposed evidence of Sarmatian influence don’t occur in the Welsh stories or in Geoffrey’s History. Instead, they trace back to late 12th century French stories or later English works. The Grail first appears in the late 12^th century in a work by the French author Chretien de Troyes, where it is a serving platter, not a cup at all. “Elaine” is a French variant on “Helen”, and it traces back to ancient Greece (Helen of Troy, y’all). Lancelot first appears in another of Chretien de Troyes’s French works. The stories about Excalibur being thrown into a lake at the end of Arthur’s life and the various characters called the Lady of the Lake are 13th and 14th century additions. The first appearance of the beard-collecting foe is Geoffrey’s Historia, where he’s a giant. The Sarmatian Theory claims that these details are part of the core Arthurian story, but doesn’t explain why the earliest stories about Arthur don’t make any mention of these details, nor does it do a very good job of explaining how they eventually got folded back into the Arthurian legends after being absent for the better part of a thousand years. It makes far more sense to see these elements as having been independently created in the 12^th through 15^th centuries, as scholars traditionally think.

Early Welsh warfare emphasized fighting on foot far more than fighting on horseback, since Wales is quite hilly terrain, which would make things like cavalry charges extremely difficult. And the Welsh Arthur seems to be fighting more on foot than on horseback. It’s only when the cavalry-using Anglo-Normans conquered England that Arthur and his ‘knights’ begin using horses. But the Sarmatian Theory holds that all the emphasis on cavalry warriors is an echo of Sarmatian cavalry warfare a millennium earlier rather than a reflection of the cavalry warfare employed by the culture in which the stories were being written down and favored by the men who were the patron of those authors. This is sort of like saying that the popularity of Cop Films in American culture is due to medieval stories of law enforcement; after all, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a famous late medieval character, so he was obviously the inspiration for 20th century Buddy Cop pictures.

Finally, the Nart Sagas were only written down in the 19th century. Exactly how old they are is unprovable. While some parts of them do seem to draw on ancient Iranian material, there’s no way to be certain that the stories were actually composed during the Roman period; 19th century nationalists were definitely not above fabricating supposedly old texts to support their claims of cultural identity. One could, in fact, argue that any similarities between the Nart Sagas and Arthurian legend are because whoever composed them borrowed from Arthurian literature. And the Nart stories aren’t actually Sarmatian or from Sarmatia; they’re from Ossetia, on the eastern side of the Black Sea.

As for ‘Lancelot’ originating from ‘Alanas a Lot River’…excuse me, I can’t actually type that with a straight face. Malcor and Littleton demolish a fringe theory that ‘Lancelot’ is a Welsh name, but ignore the far more common theory that it is a French diminutive of  ‘Lanzo’. Their evidence that it might actually be from ‘Alanus’ is, and I AM NOT JOKING, an email from somebody who suggested it to them.

So the Sarmatian Theory suffers from a complete lack of genuine evidence; it’s entirely speculation. It fails to explain why this obscure career military officers would have become the focal point of a group of legends borrowed from an ethnically unrelated people and why those stories would have managed to survive for a thousand years. It takes fairly obvious facts (like the idea that Chretien de Troyes invented both Lancelot and the Holy Grail) and replaces them with far more complex scenarios in violation of Occam’s Razor, and it relies on an undatable collection of stories being almost 2000 years older than their first actual documentation and being used by a people only indirectly connected to those stories.

The Sarmatian Theory in the Film

In Fuqua’s King Arthur, the main characters are descendants of the original 3^rd century Sarmatians (although no effort is made to make them look ethnically different from the Romans and Romanized Celts around them). The opening narration says that after their defeat, the Sarmatians agreed to bind their descendants to perpetual military service to the Roman Empire, so that they are sort of hereditary military serfs, of a type that actually never existed in Roman society. But, in true Hollywood fashion, these last Sarmatians are due to get their discharge papers, ending their centuries of servitude, until the asshole bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) tells them that they have to go (say it with me now) on One Last Mission to rescue some Roman citizens inexplicably living north of Hadrian’s Wall. This is sort of like a Cop Film where the cop is on his last day of service, only he’s actually a vampire who’s been serving on the force since the American Revolution; you just know he’s going to get staked by the villain early in the film so his buddy can avenge him. (Spoiler: don’t expect all of Arthur’s men to make it to the closing credits.)

Arthur (Clive Owen, looking very Clive Oweny) is not the original Artorius Castus. Rather, he is the descendant of the original Artorius Castus “ancestrally named for the first Artorius or Arthur”. Like every other time Hollywood tries to use Roman names, this film doesn’t understand Roman naming conventions, because it thinks that ‘Artorius’ is a given name and ‘Castus’ is a family name, when in reality ‘Artorius Castus’ is a pair of inherited family names and Owen’s character’s given name is never mentioned. But it’s the 5^th century and the whole damn Empire is breaking down, so it’s ok that people are forgetting how to name their children. If I had to spend my time frantically trying to rescue Roman citizens living in other countries while my entire government was falling into the hands of douchebag clergymen, I’d probably forget my given name too.

Arthur and his men have become world-famous, or at least world-famous in Britain, because Guinevere (Kiera Knightley), living to the north of Hadrian’s Wall and not even being part of Roman society, has heard stories of Arthur and his men. So these Sarmatian troops are real bad-asses, even though they never actually fight from horseback the way that Sarmatians are supposed to.

So the film has nicely solved one of the Sarmatian Theory’s problems. The famous Artorius Castus is not the 3^rd century Roman but his 5^th century Sarmatian descendant, and it’s the distorted events of his life that we remember today. It’s a sign that your scholarly theory isn’t very strong when a Hollywood film can actually improve on it.

But that’s pretty much the only thing this film manages to do right. The rest of the film, as we’ll see next time, is just a mess.

Want to Know More?

King Arthuris available on Amazon.

If you really want to dig into the Sarmatian Theory, you’ll find it in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (Arthurian Characters and Themes). I don’t recommend it, unless you’re especially interested in alternative theories about the Matter of Britain.

King Arthur: Is He Historical?

Tags

British Dark Age, King Arthur, Leslie Alcock, Medieval England, Medieval Europe

Filmmakers telling stories about King Arthur have a basic choice to make; do they set their film in the period between 1200 and 1500, which is when the literature about King Arthur was flourishing (knights in shiny armor, tables without corners, Grail-shaped beacons, etc), or do they set their film at the end of Roman Britain, which is the historical context for the legends of King Arthur? Do they emphasize the knights running around looking for the Holy Grail and having adulterous and tragic love affairs, or do they focus on Arthur leading the fight against the hordes of Saxon invaders as Roman Britain collapses defenseless against its enemies? King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua) follows the latter track, claiming that they were offering a look at the real historical Arthur.

For example, this trailer opens by noting that “for centuries, historians believed that the tale of King Arthur and his knights was only a legend. But the myth was based on a real hero who lived 1600 years ago”, thus asserting that, in contrast to other films the viewer may have seen about Arthur, this one will be historically accurate. The film recruited Dr. Linda Malcor, a specialist in Arthurian folklore to be its historical consultant and to support its claims of historicity; during an interview in 2004, she said “The story created by (screenwriter David) Franzoni is fiction, but, as with all good historical fiction, it draws heavily on historical facts.” She went on to say that “some creative license was taken with some of the details, but that happens in all story-telling…” So the publicity campaign for the film strongly emphasized claims that King Arthur was a provably historical figure and this film is his story.

In order to assess the film’s claims, we’re going to have to jump into one of the murkiest of historical mires, the so-called British Dark Age of the late 5^th and 6^th centuries. Contrary to popular usage, a ‘dark age’ is a period of history for which there are few if any surviving written documents. Since history is the study of the written documents of the past, if there are no documents, doing history becomes almost impossible.

The Sub-Roman Period

Britain enters the light of history roughly when the Roman Empire conquered lowland Britain in the first century AD. Starting perhaps a century before that, we begin to have a trickle of historical documents making reference to the island and its inhabitants, and for the next four centuries, Roman Britain produced enough written and archaeological evidence for historians to write a history of the region, although it’s a very patch history with big gaps. Under Roman control, Britain developed its first cities, participated in the vast trade and cultural network we call the Roman Empire, and enjoyed at least some of the benefits of Roman organization and government.

In 410 AD, however, the Roman Emperor Honorius, facing a military crisis in Italy, ordered the withdrawal of all the Roman troops stationed in Britain. The British wrote to him begging for the return of the armies to help protect Britain from the military threat posed by the neighboring Irish, Picts, and Saxons, but Honorius told them they had to look to their own defenses. In reaction, the British authorities withdrew their allegiance to Honorius and essentially declared independence. For the next century, the Romanized Britons (who were of mixed Celtic and Roman descent) struggled to maintain a semblance of Roman culture while protecting themselves against a slowly rising tide of enemies. By the middle of the century, the Saxons had begun to land in eastern Britain and conquer it, and Roman culture substantially died out. The cities contracted down to virtual non-existence; most historians would say that urban life essentially ended in this period. Christianity appears to have died out in lowland Britain, although there are a few tantalizing hints it might have survived in a few places. The complex Roman educational system clearly collapsed, resulting in a dearth of written sources for scholars to work with.

Eventually, however, the Britons were able to stem the flood, at least for a while. In the mid-6th century a Welsh monk named Gildas wrote an extremely moralizing letter to the native leaders of Britain, blaming their moral failings for the country’s problems. According to this letter, which is one of our only genuine British sources for this period, about the time Gildas was born British leaders won a decisive victory against the Saxons at a place called Mt Badon, and as a result, the British had enjoyed peace and prosperity from that time to the time Gildas was writing the letter. Unfortunately, Gildas doesn’t tell us when the battle was fought. He does tell us that he was born the same year, and that he was writing 44 years later, but the exact date of his letter is uncertain. Most historians place his letter sometime in the 540s, (although some would put it earlier than that), which means that the battle of Mt Badon must have been fought sometime in the 490s. At the earliest, it was fought about 470 AD, but few scholars would put it that early.

A modern statue of Gildas

The battle of Mt Badon was fought somewhere in southwestern Britain, probably along the edge of the British-controlled zone, and based on linguistic evidence some scholars have identified the site as the old Roman city of Bath. Thus, we are reasonably certain that British forces, fighting perhaps in the region of Bath, won a major victory over the Saxons some time between perhaps 470 and 495, as a result of which the Saxons were kept out of western Britain for several generations. What Gildas doesn’t tell us, perhaps because he assumes that his audience knows, is the name of the man who led the British forces at Badon.

And That’s Where Arthur Comes In

But those who lived in Wales in the 9th century thought they knew. Sometime in that century, a Welsh monastery compiled a document known as the Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales), essentially a chronicle of Welsh history beginning in 447. In the fashion of early medieval chronicles, the Annales is a very simple work of history. It lists each year and typically offers a terse mention of something important that happened that year. It attributes the battle of Mt Badon to 518 AD, and says “The battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders, and the Britons were victors”. And for 539 AD it says “The strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell. And there was plague in Britain and Ireland”.

The Annales Cambriae. The first entry on the right column mentions the battle of Mt. Badon

Here we have a genuine historical source that tells us that the man who won the battle of Mt Badon is Arthur, and it adds that this Arthur died at the battle of Camlann, along with someone named Medraut. ‘Camlann’ looks suspiciously similar to ‘Camelot’, Arthur’s supposed capital, and ‘Medraut’ looks an awful lot like ‘Modred’, who according to later stories was Arthur’s nephew or illegitimate son (or both, because Arthur was freaky that way) who slew him. So on the surface, we have confirmation that the core of the Arthurian legends was real.

However, there are a number of problems with this information. Firstly, this document comes from about 400 years after the events it describes, and many scholars have argued that it is too late to be a reliable source for early 6th century Britain, since 400 years offers a lot of time for myths and falsehoods to creep in. (Keep in mind that 400 years separates contemporary America from the Jamestown settlement. That’s A LOT of time.) However, we know that the Annales were compiled from earlier documents, and a few scholars have argued that these entries may be based on now-lost documents early enough to be historically reliable. Unfortunately, there’s no way to be sure.

Also, the date 518 seems rather too late to fit the battle of Badon, since that would mean that Gildas was writing his letter in the 560s, which experts have generally said is too late. The fact that the compiler of the Annales probably got the date wrong for the battle of Mt. Badon doesn’t mean that the facts he reports about the battle are also wrong, but it does tell us that we can’t just accept the entry at face value.

Then there’s the whole question of Arthur carrying the cross for 3 days. Arthur skeptics have argued that it’s the kind of fabulous detail which makes the whole entry suspect. But it’s also been pointed out that the Welsh word scuid (‘shoulder’), is very close to the Welsh word for ‘shield’, which is scuit. So someone copying the entry into the Annales could easily have written the one for other, in which case the document would originally have said that Arthur had a cross on his shield. Perhaps Arthur made religion a rallying point in his battles with the Saxons. Maybe he was seeking to emulate the great Christian Emperor Constantine, who ordered his soldiers to paint crosses on their shields. And Constantine was from Roman Britain, so it would make sense that a later Christian general might try to emulate him.

And it’s also been pointed out that every other character mentioned in the Annales is a reliably historical figure, making the historicity of Arthur and Modred a little more likely. Whoever compiled the Annales clearly thought Arthur was a genuine historical figure.

There is one other 9^th century work, produced just after 800 and so a little earlier than the Annales, which mentions Arthur. This is a work called the Historia Brittonum, or History of the Britons, attributed to a monk named Nennius. According to Nennius, Arthur fought 12 battles against the Saxons, at locations around Britain. Nennius seems to be getting his information from an earlier, now lost, poem about Arthur, which shows that he was using earlier sources, but poetry is more liable to fantastic details than prose. According to Nennius, “The eighth battle was in Fort Guinnon, in which Arthur carried the image of St Mary, ever virgin, on his shoulders and the pagans were turned to flight that day and a great slaughter was upon them through the virtue of our Our Lord Jesus Christ and through the virtue of St Mary the Virgin his mother.” “The twelfth battle was on Mt Badon, in which 960 men fell in one day from one charge by Arthur, and no one overthrew them except himself alone.” So here again we have Arthur the victor at Badon, but this time the detail about carrying the cross on his shoulders has become carrying an image of the virgin, and in a different battle. And at Badon, Arthur is said to have single-handedly killed 960 men.

An 11th century manuscript of Nennius’s work

The material in Nennius is problematic for a variety of reasons. Not all the manuscripts attribute the work to this monk Nennius, which has led some scholars to dismiss the entire work as fiction. Nennius also records other fantastic stories, which might in turn discredit the material on Arthur, and Arthur’s body count seems improbably high. Also, the battles are rather improbably sited all over Britain, presenting Arthur as a sort of national hero. Scholars have almost universally declined to consider Nennius’ stories reliable evidence for the 5^th century. But the Historia comes earlier than the Annales, and raises the possibility that it might have influenced the Welsh chronicle.

There is also the question of Arthur’s name. Some scholars have argued that Arthur comes from the Welsh phrase ‘Uth vawr’, meaning ‘great bear’, and have argued that Arthur is actually a deity who has become humanized in Welsh legends, something which can be said of a few other characters as well. But there is no evidence for this phrase in early Welsh literature, and there is an easier explanation for the name. It is simply a Welshization of the Roman name ‘Artorius’, and we know that there was at least one man of that name living in Britain in the late 2^nd early 3^rd century. And it has been pointed out that while the custom of using Roman names died out in Briton in the 6^th century, in Wales there is a sudden appearance of several men named Arthur. Were they all named after an important figure earlier in the century?

The memorial stone for Lucius Artorius Castus

So was Arthur a real historical figure? The analysis I’ve given you is not my own work; rather it’s based on arguments published in the 1970s by the British archaeologist Leslie Alcock. Of all the scholarship I’ve read on this subject, Alcock offers, in my opinion, the strongest arguments for the historicity of Arthur. And based on all the evidence he marshals, I have to say that I’m not convinced by it. Alcock’s argument rests on a chain of ifs. If the Arthur entries in the Annales were based on an earlier document and if that earlier document was historically reliable, and if that document was written in Welsh rather than Latin and if a copyist somewhere along the line mis-copied a ‘d’ for a ‘t’, then we might have historical proof that someone named Arthur led the British forces at Gildas’ battle of Mt. Badon. That’s a lot of ifs. And even Alcock wasn’t convinced; by the end of his career he had become an ‘Arthur agnostic’.

Dr. Leslie Alcock

When my students ask me if I think Arthur was a historical figure or not, my standard answer is that the battle of Mt Badon is almost definitely a real event, and someone must have led the British forces there, and we have one document of dubious accuracy that calls that leader Arthur, so we might as well call that leader Arthur too. But that’s a very long way from saying that ‘King Arthur’ was a historical figure. Among other things, neither the Annales nor Nennius describe Arthur as a king, only as a military leader.

So when Dr. Malcor said in that interview that ”some creative license was taken with some of the details” in King Arthur, she neglected to mention that one of the details she’s talking about is the detail about Arthur not being a provably real person. That’s our first clue that this film isn’t exactly going to adhere to scrupulous standards of historical scholarship. But that’s the least of the film’s sins, as we’ll see next time.

Want to Know More?

Leslie Alcock lays out the argument that I’ve summarized here in Arthur’s Britain (Classic History) As I said, it’s the strongest argument I’ve read, and I would dearly love it to be persuasive, but I can’t bring myself to say he’s right. But the book offers a wealth of information on 5th and 6th century Britain, and it’s a good read, although it’s more than 40 years old and therefore doesn’t discuss more recent archaeological discoveries.

If you want a completely different take on Arthur’s historicity, the respected historian Geoffrey Ashe has argued in The Discovery of King Arthurthat the trail of the real Arthur is to be found in King Arthur’s Continental military campaign mentioned in some of the later medieval romances. I don’t buy it, but it’s worth a look.