When it comes to national stereotypes, the modern mind remains thoroughly medieval. The Death of King Arthur, which Simon Armitage has translated from Middle English, contains two insults that sound down the centuries. An enraged Frenchman says, ‘These Britons were always blusterers and braggarts. Lo, how he swaggers in his shining suit/ As if to brutalise us all with the bright sword he brandishes. But his bark is all boast, that boy who stands there.’ To which King Arthur later retorts: ‘Our Frenchmen are enfeebled, I should have guessed this would follow,/ For these folk are foreigners in these far-flung fields and long for the food and fare of their liking.’ Football hooligans against cheese-eating surrender monkeys: it’s an ancient enmity.
Armitage found humour throughout this largely unknown poem. “There are comic moments in some of the battle scenes. One of the enemy combatants rides on minus his torso, still on his horse. And some of the injuries are clearly embellished.” Like Monty Python and the Holy Grail? “Exactly. ‘It’s just a flesh wound.’”
Armitage’s Arthur has not yet won the plaudits garnered by his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Arthur certainly lacks the lyricism of Gawain, but the narrative resonates more clearly. The poem begins with Arthur holding Christmas court at Carlisle, when an emissary of the Roman Emperor, the European superpower of the day, arrives to demand tribute of England and its territories. Arthur chooses resistance over submission.
Britain’s awkward relationship with the continent is just one parallel with the present. Armitage says, “I didn’t realise, until I started translating it, that so many parallels come across. There is one scene where the British kill the king of Libya, who had been on a really murderous spree. And there is the whole business of England’s very complicated relationship with the rest of the British Isles, which is something that has come up again recently. Also, there is the religious conflict, which seems to lurk at the back of this poem, with an early form of Protestantism being pursued against Rome.”
Arthur was written by an anonymous scribe around the year 1400 — at the height of the Hundred Years War. England was also riven by internal political strife at that time, and anti-clericalism against the Roman Church was rising too. The Arthurian myth was revived during this period of national uncertainty, which interests Armitage. He has spoken before about “reclaiming Arthur” from the High French romances, which had emasculated the English king by fixating on Lancelot and Guinevere’s shenanigans. Armitage places Arthur squarely on the throne, a military leader and political giant — the similarities with popular perceptions of Edward III, the Black Prince, Henry IV and Henry V are clear.
Armitage’s political emphasis has led the poet Sean O’Brien to argue that Arthur is a departure from his usual territory of kitchen-sink psychology. This is of course true; but Arthur, the mythical potentate, displays some very human emotions. Armitage says, “I think the most moving part of the book is Arthur’s grieving for Sir Gawain, which in some sense completely overshadows the grieving for his own death. It’s almost as if Arthur has given up at that point, but there are two pages of wailing and tears and conduct unbefitting. He loses his best man, his best friend and the circle is broken, and there is nowhere to go apart from just plough on into his own demise.”
The Knights of the Round Table are a dominant, often erring presence in the poem. I ask how far they are complicit in Arthur’s downfall. “That’s a really fascinating aspect of this. Again, it’s not overplayed in the text, but it’s definitely there. There are some huge personalities within the Round Table and there is a sense that every time they go out on a skirmish or to reconnoitre a situation, they end up bringing trouble back to the camp.” King Arthur is an “Alex Ferguson type character” trying to manage unmanageable egos. He administers the ‘hairdryer treatment’ on several occasions, chastising those who imperil his crown, but still loses it.
The original text is full of drama, Armitage says, so there was no need to embellish. His aim in translating Arthur was to “reclaim the poetry” from scholarship. “Often what gets translated is history, dictionary definitions and a notion of literature…but I don’t think these [texts] really work if you take the poetry out of them. So that’s been my main intent really, to find the acoustic noises within them and reassemble them using those patterns.”
Armitage has triumphed. The measure of his success is that the themes of Arthur sound so clearly in modern ears. The verse requires attention; but, once you are attuned to the alliterative structure, it’s as swift as the swish of a sword.
The Death of King Arthur is available from Faber.
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