Abstract
When Malory’s Merlin prophesies that the young Arthur will “… be longe kynge of all Englond and have under his obeyssaunce Walys, Yrland, and Scotland, and moo reames than I will now reherce,” he is reinforcing Malory’s adherence to a long-standing English tradition: Arthur, originally a Celtic king and a Briton (admittedly a loaded and ambiguous term), is now a king of “Englond” who dominates England’s Celtic neighbors.1 Many scholars of Malory’s text are relatively content to leave the matter there: whatever Malory says can either be traced to some other and earlier text, or if it cannot be so traced, the absent text can be assumed. It is true that Malory is a repository of earlier traditions, but he also has a mind of his own. While this chapter will focus on Malory’s view of the Welsh (and, by association, the Cornish), Malory’s method can be seen at work in his depiction of Camelot’s Scottish faction; Malory emphasizes the Scottish nature of Gawain’s followers in his final two books, an emphasis probably meant to echo earlier depictions of the dangerous Scot: the rebel king Lot, nearly the ruler of Britain, and the treacherous and ambitious Scots of the Tristram. 2 Malory’s Welsh are more difficult to track, in part because the Scots are emphasized in exactly those sections of the Morte Darthur that seem the most creatively independent of earlier tradition, where Malory makes the largest number of idiosyncratic changes. An outline of Malory’s view of the Welsh can nevertheless be discerned, although one must begin with that loaded term used earlier: the “Briton.”
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Notes
(Page 11, lines 43–44). All quotations from Malory are by page and line numbers from the one volume Malory: Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
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David Walker, The Normans in Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 56–57; Roger Turvey, The Welsh Princes: 1063–1283 (London and New York: Longman Press, 2002), 44; Pryce, “British or Welsh?” 777.
Griffiths, “The Island of England,” 194. See J. Ll. Williams and I. Williams, Gwaith Guto’r Glyn (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961).
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Charles Moorman believed the feud was one of Malory’s three principal themes in The Book of Kyng Arthur (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 28; see also Beverley Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 206.
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Fanni Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 20–21. Pellinor is Percivale’s father in the Suite du Merlin, one of Malory’s sources, but the Vulgate Lancelot-Grail names this figure Pellehan.
Maldwyn Mills, Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arther (London: Dent, 1992).
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© 2008 Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones
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Rushton, C.J. (2008). Malory’s Divided Wales. In: Kennedy, R., Meecham-Jones, S. (eds) Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614932_10
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