I’ve said it before, in talking about the brilliance of Firelord, Parke Godwin’s novel of Arthur, that I can trace my choice of professional study, at some deep level, to a love of Arthur and his knights. Sure, Arthur is kind of a nebbish in a lot of the tales—which makes me all the more amazed at what Godwin did with him—but there’s just a lot of great stuff in the vast mythic complex that surrounds him.
King Arthur, as I tell my students, is like a little snowball rolled off the top of a tall, snowy peak. It gathers snow to it as it rolls, getting bigger and bigger until it’s really hard to find any trace of the original little clump of stuff that started it off.
Which is one way of explaining why anyone who tells you they know who the real King Arthur was… is full of bull dung.
We have some vague notions, it’s true—he’s likely rooted in regional Brythonic resistance to the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries—but we don’t have anything resembling a solid case. This rather inconvenient truth has hardly stopped a great many folks on various conspiratorial fringes from claiming otherwise, though. Like those ancient alien hunters, they’ve got the secret that those pointy-headed ivory-tower academics (::waves::) don’t want you to know.
A number of these folks are behind 2004’s King Arthur, directed by Antoine Fuqua and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer—the man who never met something he couldn’t make explode on film: “Okay, yeah, baby, I can see it: King Arthur! Yeah. Knights. Horses. Sexy, baby. Loving it. Swords! And then there’ll be explosions, right?”
Sigh.
Yes, Jerry. You’ll get your goddamn explosions. Because somehow, in defiance of both sense and sensibility, the Picts in this film inexplicably know how to make explosives in the fifth century…
…which pretty effectively sums up a whole lot about the movie’s historical accuracy: it ain’t good.
And that’s, you know, really odd, because the title scroll is keen to assure audiences that this Arthur—unlike all the other Arthurs, apparently—is on historical footing:
Historians agree that the classical 15th century tale of King Arthur and his Knights rose from a real hero who lived a thousand years earlier in a period often called the Dark Ages.
Recently discovered archaeological evidence sheds light on his true identity.
Riiiiiight.
So, again, anyone who says they know the “true identity” of Arthur is selling some wicked snake oil. Also, “the Dark Ages.” Ugh.
Things don’t improve when the film gets underway and we learn that it’s AD 452 and the Sarmatian cavalry, defeated by Rome, is now incorporated into the Roman army: Sarmatian sons are indebted to serve Rome as, ahem, “Knights.” We watch one of these lads being called up to join the Romans. His name? Lancelot. His battle cry? “Rūs!”
::takes deep breaths::
Fifth-century Sarmatians. Knights. Lancelot. Rūs.
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I could write a book on how screwed up this is, and the main plot hasn’t even started.
Credit where it is due, the Sarmatians were a real people, a conglomeration of a number of East Iranian peoples settled around the Black Sea. We don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to know about them, though there’s a lot of consistency between ancient accounts and archaeological findings regarding the fact that women were held in high regard among them as both leaders and fighters… enough that connections between them and the myths of the Amazons are possible.
That’s cool stuff. But that’s not the story here.
No, no. Here the Sarmatians are totally, pointedly bro-centric, and their cry of pride is to shout “Rūs!”
Rūs, which is the name of a people from whom the word Russian derives, is a term with two primary (and very distinct) theories about its origins. One theory is that the word comes from the Old Norse word for “rower” and dates back to the arrival of the Northmen from Scandinavia who took control of the region (making Russia a kind of Scandinavian colony). The other theory is that the word is Slavic, threading back to a particular Sarmatian tribe called the Roxolani, who lived around the mouth of the Danube. Having these fifth-century bros shouting “Rūs!” means this movie is definitely espousing the latter, Slavic-not-Norse theory. That also happens to be the one that nationalist Russians like these days.
So okay, comrade movie, let’s accept that your Sarmatians are specifically Roxolani. Fair enough, I suppose, but they still wouldn’t shout “Rūs!”
You see, the name Roxolani comes from (dead language alert!) Scythian, and it appears to mean something like “Alani of the light”: Alani is the people part of the equation, so if these folks were shouting anything it ought to be “Alans!” And even if you wanted them to be shouting about brightness—for, I dunno, subtle pro-Russian sentimentality—it’d be “Ruxh” and not “Rūs”.
Speaking of languages, Lancelot is a French name—a straight-up, could-only-be-more-French-if-it-was-Francois kind of French name. And as a character he doesn’t even exist in Arthurian stories until the 12th century writer Chrétien de Troyes invents him.
Which of course makes me wonder why the living hell these pro-Russian East Iranians are giving their kids 12th-century French names in the 5th century.
::screaming into the void::
Anyway, the Roxolani in this movie are super good horsemen—which is actually possibly true—who function as knights—which is super not true—and the Romans have taken them to England to fight on their behalf—and, hey, that’s sorta true, too!
I feel like we’re sorta getting somewhere good now. The Sarmatians did indeed become Roman auxiliaris in the early Empire, and it’s true that there was a group of them in England. In Ribchester, in fact! Isn’t that cool? We know exactly where these guys were! You’re really turning things around, comrade movie! This is…
Wait. Wait. Why does this movie have these guys living at Hadrian’s Wall? That’s like 70 miles from Ribchester.
Goddamnit.
And then (then!) the movie jumps forward 15 years and introduces us to a sleepy-eyed Roman commander named Arthur (Clive Owen), who is the leader of the Knights of the Round Table. This makes literally no sense (see problems with Lancelot, listed above). At the same time, I will admit that it’s an excuse for a great cast. Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) is all grown up. There’s also Galahad (Hugh Dancy), Bors (Ray Winstone), Gawain (Joel Edgerton), Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen), and Dagonet (Ray Stevenson—who is and will always be my Titus Pullo).
Look, this movie is just silly. Profoundly silly. It has gestures at history—it might be the only Arthurian movie to have the Pelagianism as a subplot—but it consistently sets those gestures on fire just as surely as it sets fire to a bunch of arrows at one point.
Because of course it has flaming arrows.
As an example, the villain in this movie is Cerdic, the leader of a bloodthirsty Saxon invasion. Stellan Skarsgård has a lot of fun playing him in the most over-the-top manner he can manage, and it’s fair to say that, like Alan Rickman in Kevin Hood, he pretty much steals the movie from its bland leading man. And, yeah, the Saxons were indeed invading the island at the time. And the little snowball of what became Arthur might well date from this period. Good, good, and good.
Except this movie has the Saxons landing in modern Scotland and then marching south toward Hadrian’s Wall.
That’s off by 400 miles, give or take, since Cerdic and the Saxons came ashore in Hampshire, on the southern coast of Britain. They never went to Hadrian’s Wall, as they founded Wessex (which derives from “West-Saxons”). Also, this movie is set around 485ish, but Cerdic didn’t arrive until 495 and didn’t die until 534.
Speaking of dates, the Roman withdrawal from Britain is absolutely central to the plot: Arthur and his bro-knights need to rescue a wealthy Roman from his villa north of the wall. That there were no such villas is one problem. That the withdrawal happened 75 years earlier is another.
Oh, and the bishop ordering them to the task on behalf of the Pope (who didn’t yet hold the kind of powers they give him in this movie) is Germanius—whose two visits to Britain were in 429 and 447.
What else … Merlin is a Pictish politician and spiritualist. Guinevere (Keira Knightley) is a Pict, too, only she’s a dying slave to the Romans who is rescued by Arthur … with whom she then exchanges Meaningful Looks(TM) before revealing that she’s (medieval movie cliche alert!) amazing at using a bow apparently on account of her being born on the island of Britain. It’s something in the water, I think. The Picts also use trebuchets that are wildly inaccurate. Oh, and the Saxons have crossbows with—wait for it—“armor-piercing” bolts.
Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. OW.
Comrade movie, you can’t be all things. Want to be a historical look at the Anglo-Saxon invasions? Cool. Let’s do it. But you can’t also try to name-check like every damn character and moment in the expansive King Arthur mythology. I love both these things, you see, and they Do Not mix.
And—damnit, Jerry—keep your explosions out of my history.
So is there anything redeeming about this film in historical terms? No. Not even a little bit. (If I get started on the arms, armaments, and costume choices in this film we’ll be here all week.)
It’s sadly not very entertaining, either: despite the decent cast and a big budget, the acting paints by numbers, the pacing is painful, and the direction isn’t good. This is a shame, because despite all the historical nonsense the writing has some good lines, especially among Bors and the other knights. Oh, and I loved this exchange:
Lancelot: You look frightened. There’s a large number of lonely men out there.
Guinevere: Don’t worry, I won’t let them rape you.
There’s also a decent set-piece that’s a battle on ice in which Ray Stevenson takes a leading role. But part of that might just be because it doesn’t matter how many times the people in this movie want to call him Dagonet… he’s Titus friggin’ Pullo.
What do y’all think? Did anyone find anything else redeeming about this film?
Michael Livingston is a Professor of Medieval Culture at The Citadel who has written extensively both on medieval history and on modern medievalism. His historical fantasy trilogy set in Ancient Rome, The Shards of Heaven, The Gates of Hell, and The Realms of God, is available from Tor Books.
Nothing redeemable in this film. Even Kiera’s skimpy leather (which was totally unrealistic) couldn’t make it watchable.
And two swords worn on the back? Seriously? How the hell do you put them back in their scabbards without stabbing yourself?
I dunno- that’s a pretty impressive support bra Guinevere is wearing.
I suppose one could generously assume that having the Saxons assault the wall from the north was a confusion/melding of the Pictish invasion of 395 (or was it 359, I can never get that right) that may or may not have been coordinated with the Saxons raiding Kent. Jack Whyte makes use of that at the beginning of his Arthurian cycle. But that’s probably expecting too much of this movie.
@1: And two swords worn on the back? Seriously? How the hell do you put them back in their scabbards without stabbing yourself?
Very carefully and one at a time. Just like with a single over-the-shoulder scabbarded blade. I guess Deadpool doesn’t have to be so careful because of his superhealing.
Titus Pullo…er Dagonet…was totally wasted in this movie. Therefore I hate it for that reason alone (though there are endless other reasons to hate it).
Mary Stewart’s Merlin-centric trilogy is where all my King Arthur-love comes from, though MZB’s Mists of Avalon really fleshed out the roles of the women involved – those are the two versions that set the bar for me. So I was excited to watch a more historical take on the story. I’m still excited to see one – because this movie was just a garbage fire (set by flaming arrows and explosions!). If someone could go back in time, please keep First Knight from ever being made. I can’t even bring myself to attempt the most recent Guy Ritchie version.
When I need my King Arthur fix, I go back to Excalibur. It’s exactly what a King Arthur movie should be – a fantasy – with gorgeous clothes and sets, a weird and creepy Merlin, Helen Mirrin! Sir Pat Stew! Liam Neeson!, and ridiculously shiny armor. The Mists of Avalon miniseries wasn’t too bad either, though that version of the story is pretty dreary with mostly miserable people making terrible decisions and ruining each other.
Ray Stevens was MOA as Titus Pullo!
I’ve not seen the movie, but those gorgeous horses and some of the actors look worth a look with the sound cut off to avoid the nonsense. I have a rule of thumb for Hollywood movies and TV shows. If the words “real” or “true” are used as a descriptor of anything that isn’t a serious documentary, then that movie/show is so far away from real or true that it’s laughable. That rule is proven true, once again, with this movie.
One another point, can someone really pull a sword out of a scabbard on the back in one long pull? I tried to do it as an experiment during a discussion of Wonder Woman’s sword in the dress. I used a yard stick at various depths while wearing a tee shirt and couldn’t do it. At best, a foot ruler was my only success. Admittedly, I’m a petite woman which means my body ratio isn’t the same as an average person, but still…
i always wondered if the saxon war cry is real or just an invention.
Same here Mike. I can trace my love of British history, especially Dark Ages Britain, to my consumption of Arthurian tales. Parke Godwin’s work is criminally underrated. Firelord and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset are my favorites.
I regard “romance” names in this context as a translation convention, no different from calling Kurush and Darayavaush Cyrus and Darius. I used inauthentic names in my own proto-Arthurian work on the same basis.
The film’s still terrible.
I’m just waiting for the sequel where Clive Owen’s “historically accurate” Arthur teams up with Russell Crowe’s “historically accurate” Robin Hood.
I enjoyed the movie when it first came out in theaters, but then again I was 17 when it did. Also around this time, I started reading the Dream of Eagles series/The Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte which posits a similar, albeit much more well-researched and grounded in historical fact, storyline where we eventually get to Merlin and Arthur (about 4 books in or so…)
Honestly even the climax battle was totally undone by the scenery. In the background is the main gate which is a huge plot point earlier in the film. But it magically is open and closed every time it is in the background of a shot. We ended up playing “spot he gate” he rather than, y’know watching the film.
Actual titles from the OST: “Do You Think I’m Saxon?” and “Woad to Ruin.” I freakin loved this movie when it came out, BECAUSE of its absurdity. :D
I watched this movie. I was excited for this movie. I remember nothing about this movie, other than that Kiera Knightley is an extraordinarily beautiful and talented woman. And I knew that before this movie.
Marcus Pitcaithly,
Except Darius and Cyrus were (however you spell their names), real figures in real history. While granting that any Arthur story must be mostly speculation, there is no way to argue that Lancelot or Galahad belong in a movie that is claiming to reconstruct the Arthur story as it might really have happened. Mordred, Bedivere, Kay, Mordred and Gawain all appear very early in Arthurian literature, and changing their spellings to their modern spellings make sense as well as including them in the story since there is a small (all be it tiny) chance they may have lived.
This is a very special movie, it makes both Medievalists and Classicists cry. You don’t get better than that it the fractured history stakes.
I’m trying desperately to remember who the heck ‘Dagonet’ was, a supporting Character in the Tristan story? Lancelot and Galahad are twelfth c. romance writer creations. Gawain and Tristan actually figure in the earliest Arthurian stories, in Welsh. Tristan, for which read ‘Drustan’ may have had an actual historic inspiration. Guenevere figures in the earliest Welsh sources too, but not as an ass kicking archer/warrior princess.
A Lucius Artorius Castus was a Roman officer in late second – early third century Britain. He was a Centurion and apparently commanded foot soldiers not cavalry. He was also not Sarmatian, his gen name ‘Artorius’ may be of Etruscan origin or derive from an extinct Apulian dialect. Lucius seems to have had a very successful career and may have founded a family. One could not unreasonably make ‘Arthur’ a descendant but said Arthur would not be Sarmatian. In fact the so-called Sarmatian connection seems to be limited to similarities between Arthur’s story and that of a Sarmatian hero. Borrowing a storyline however need have nothing to do with ‘Arthur’s’ origins.
All of this proves, I believe, why a good author and paper is still the best way to treat many subjects. They can take their own unique perspective on the story, and can be up front about whether they are writing a pulpy approach to the topic, or trying for something a little more true to the classic version of the myth or to the actual history that might be behind the myth. There have been a number of really good Arthur based novels in the last 50-60 years, everything from Rosemary Sutcliff to Mary Stewart, to Parke Godwin and others.
The score is pretty good, part of Hans Zimmer’s pulsing, proto-Inception sub-oeuvre.
I remember very little about this movie except that it was very underwhelming. I think you need to embrace the ridiculous and review the Guy Richie film next. It can’t be worse than this, can it???
Also, you should totally do a review on the Spartacus TV series. I’m very curious as to your thoughts on it.
On the Guy Ritchie film being worse than this one: Yes, it is.
I went to see this film with a bunch of medieval re-enactors, some of us in full kit.
We heckled all the way through.
Another problem with the plot was the location of Mount Badon – which Clive Owen finds just by Hadrian’s Wall, when it was more likely to have been somewhere near Bath in the South of England.
It was a case of “Come back, Arthur of the Britons, all is forgiven!” (Oliver Tobias, in a series aimed at kids which had a tiny budget)..
The movies I’d like to see reviewed next (or at some point in the future): Neil Marshall’s Doomsday and Centurion.
@16/princessroxanna – Dagonet was King Arthur’s jester (!) according to http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/theme/dagonet. So, interesting choice to make him a “real knight,” I guess…
I remember next to nothing about this movie except I found it pretty dull. Like others above, I have not tried the Guy Ritchie film, either. And, like others above, I admire MZB’s Mists of Avalon (though to be fair, @4/serralinda, in many versions of the Matter of Britain, including TH White’s, a lot of miserable people make a lot of bad decisions… It’s kind of a wonder this story has persisted and has been as popular as it is)
Excalibur is still the best movie on Arthur. I agree about Pullo too; I just rewatched both seasons of Rome and I Claudius back to back.
Ray Stevenson is Titus Pullo. For YEARS after that series ended if I ever saw him in anything else, it was always PULLO!
Um, it’s Hugh Dancy, not Darcy.
@26 – Fixed, thanks.
I know this is movie time, but have you given The Last Kingdom a watch yet? No Arthur, but to my non professional eyes it’s a fairly good Saxon invasion tale. Of course it’s based on Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories books, so it has a firm base at least.
All we know is he’s called The Stig there was some warrior in a battle around then, but that he was no Arthur. Anyone claiming more than that and they should damn well admit they were just making it up. I mean, Arthur as a stay behind Roman officer, sure why not. It is as supported by the evidence as any other claim, including Arthur the Spaceman from some comic I cannot remember the name of, which is to say not at all.
Still, Titus Pullo! I don’t know how they could have both the Rays in one movie and still have it be as listless as this. Ray Winston and Ray Stevenson in one movie, they should have made one of them Arthur and the other Mordred (I assume Mordred was meant to be the guy who got shot out of the tree near the end?) and then we’d have had a movie!!
I opted out of seeing this movie the moment I saw that they were using “Lancelot” for the name of a supposed Roman/Sarmatian. I knew my major in French literature (emphasis on medieval) would come back and save my sanity some day. Glad to know I was right. :-)
This King Arthur is a bad movie, but not because of its historical inaccuracies. Most of the inaccuracies mentioned in this review are quibbles. It was a drama, not a documentary, and you would have to condemn the historical plays of William Shakespeare on the basis of the false standard being advanced here. It was a bad movie because of its bland script, poor direction, uninspired performances, and lackluster action. The fact that Cerdic really died in 534 had nothing to do with it.
Was there anything redeeming about it? The notion that the ideals of the Knights of the Round Table were inspired by Pelagius was a neat idea. It belonged in a better movie.
This movie isn’t the only modern attempt at a “historical” Arthur (i.e. 5th/6th century setting, rather than knights in shining armor) to drag in the Sarmatians. It’s usually done as a way to give Arthur and his men stirrups. It’s vaguely around the time stirrups reached Western Europe and the Sarmatians are sometimes viewed as a possible vector, plus there were some stationed at the Wall. Stirrups then give the hero something of an advantage over other cavalry and you’ve got an excuse for why they were such terrific warriors.
Dagonet starts out as a real but foolish knight in the earliest stories. Somewhere in there, it gets flipped around and he’s a fool who becomes a knight.
I certainly condemn his Macbeth for being a complete load of antihistorical old bollocks, to the point that a cartoon managed a more historically accurate version. I condemn it because it has managed to be literally the only part of Scottish history that ever gets taught in schools and that is in the sodding English and/or Drama lessons. More Scottish kids know more about English monarchs than Scottish ones. Bloody William… Shakespeare.
I really liked the movie . It had all the elements I love in epic fantasy sci fi. It was Joseph Campbell’s the hero’s journey personified. There was even more than one hero to follow…….what’s not to love?
@33 I celebrate MacBeth as one of the greatest plays ever written. If you’re looking for history in drama, you’re looking in the wrong place.
As for the neglect of Scottish history in schools, that is unfortunate. . . but also in no way the fault of MacBeth or William Shakespeare.
It baffles me (almost as much as the ‘history’ of this movie) that someone spent this much time and effort to debunk a 15 year old Bruckheimer joint! The internet and nerds everywhere thank you, good sir.
@@@@@ 23, Thank you. I remembered the ‘fool’ part but I thought he was connected with Tristan and Isolde.
@@@@@ 29, That’s the Y Gododdin an elegy for the fallen Celtic warriors who lost to the Angles c. 600.
‘He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur
Among the powerful ones in battle
In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade’
Arthur also suddenly became a popular name in 600s strongly implying that somebody of that name made his mark in the 500s. ‘Arthur’ is often credited with the victory at Badon (wherever that was) that temporarily halted the Saxon conquest.
Sorry to be so late to the party. This movie has the distinction of having just about all my favourite men. I just watched the Thor movies again and saw great stuff from Eric, and great but painfully short stuff from Titus aka Blackbeard (he may have made an excellent Titus, but you gotta love that man with some serious hair!) And pre Hannibal Mads – correctly described by the Guardian film critic as a force of nature!
So get together all these great actors who also happen to be as hunky as hell …. and then waste them like this! Plus give away most of the screentime to an anorexic bimbo in fetish leather gear and body paint …. just who in the hell decided this movie was anything but slow water dripping torture, let alone anything vaguely entertaining.
And the history … we whould have known from the start that anything with so many brilliant horse riding knights would be full of horse sh*t!
Have you got something against poor Jerry Bruckheimer? Next you’ll be saying Jack Sparrow wasn’t real…
The Anglo Saxons made multiple raids and invasions into Britain, from the 2nd century onward. The Romans had a Count of the Saxon Shore, which was the south coast and a bit of the east.. The Anglo Saxons penetrated well into the center of present Scotland. They didn’t hold most of their Scottish conquests long, but Edinburgh and Lothian were part of England for several hundred years. At the same time, the area west of the Pennines (north western England) was part of a Celtic realm called Strathclyde, later part of Scotland. The present border, more or less, dates from the late 11th century.
Reasonable guesses about the seed that grew into the later legend include Rodomachus, died about 475, and someone listed in maybe genuine annals as Arthur,that might date from 415 or so to429. Others folded into the story include Constantine, Magnus Maximus and Charlemagne.
You should do the other Romans and Picts north of the wall film, Centurion. Neil Marshall film with Michael Fassbender about the disappearance of the Ninth Legion.
Re Macbeth: It should be remembered that it was written as a piece of pro-Stuart propaganda after James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England. The Stuarts claimed descent from Fleance and the witches were a nod to Jamie’s interest in witchcraft and demonology. My only problem with the play is that it handles the passage of time very poorly. Eleven years feel like they’re compressed into eleven days or maybe eleven weeks.
Personally, my favorite Arthur movie is “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.
When I was in my early teens I read Mallory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur”, I forget which translation, and thus have the classic view of the Arthurian Mythos.
Yeah the movie was dumb but I was able to forgive all of that because of one factoid that they slipped in. Pelagius. I hadn’t come across the name before and the constant references back to him (at least in the director’s cut, never saw the theatrical release) made me interested enough to do some research. That $5 I spent at Half Price Books for this movie has ended up causing me to spend over $100 on books on Pelagius’ writings alone, not to mention the rabbit hole of Christian heresy I’ve become obsessed with of late. Always good when a movie can do something like that. Also PULLO! Even though he was criminally under used (as all the good actors in this movie were) it’s always good seeing him with a sword.
I know I saw this when it came out. I remember very little of it. I just went “Oh I like him, I don’t remember him being in this film” several times while reading this article. At least it’s not as actively loathsome as the Charlie Hunam King Arthur movie from last year? Still mad at that movie.
It almost seems obligatory now for you to do The Last Legion, with Colin Firth. It’s another horrible “real” Arthurian origin story.
I always get very excited when someone releases a new entry in this genre, and then I always get very disappointed when I actually see the thing. How hard it is to get something like this right? I’m not sure that I have ever yet seen something that gets military costume actually correct, which is a massive shame since the historically accurate panoply is so aesthetically pleasing (and has lots of room for fancy individualized kit without coming up with horribly impractical and horribly ahistorical arms).
@42
MacBeth was also a “current events” piece of another sort, replete with references to the then-recently-thwarted Gunpowder Plot. I recommend the excellent Witches And Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Garry Willis to anyone interested in the historical context of the play.
I was excited by this movie. It had my favourite actors in it, people that can actually act, and British (well, European) to boot. Then it was reported that they intended to make it ‘historically accurate’ – took that with a pinch of salt, but thought what the hey.
Then it started with Rome importing a bunch of soldiers from the Middle-East. I thought “this could work. They have tactics and ways of fighting that the Saxon’s aren’t used to, teach these to the locals, and so effectively delay the Saxon expansion for a generation as they adapt… wait, you’re trying to tell me all these pasty white European fellas are from the Middle-East?!” <sigh>
what really broke it for me is these crack Roman cavalry troops dismounting and fighting as individuals, each with their own unique combat style, against an enemy that has greater numbers and fights as coordinated units. And somehow they win…
Arthur is like Robin Hood, or a female Nazgûl – there’s enough circumstantial evidence to suggest their existence is possible, but there’s never going to be definitive proof one way or another.
My favourite hypothesis about why Arthur is both airbrushed out of history and why he appears as such a Nibbish in the stories of him being King is that people conveniently dropped anything that didn’t fit with their image of him, and since that was a lot of who he was, we’re left with a pale shadow.
I see him as a kind of analogue of Pat Garrett. Some of the tale of both of their early lives paint them as cattle-thieves and womanisers. When the Cattle-Barons needed someone to give the Star to, Pat Garrett had antagonised all of the equally, so they compromised on him rather than pick a candidate favoured by one of their number. I suspect when the rulers of Britain needed a war-leader to coordinate their defence against the Saxons, they picked someone they equally detested but has proven talent. If he continued to be a hard-drinking womaniser that would do anything to get laid (see why the Venerable Bede allegedly didn’t write about him) and was as belligerent as his foster-brother Kay is depicted as being, is it any wonder we only have folk tales to suggest he existed?
I can’t find the comment where it was said, but I think someone wondered about the fascination with Arthurian legends and remaking them when it’s full of people making poor decisions that contribute to their demise. I’m guessing it’s the same reason there’s such a fascination with Greek legends. Maybe it’s simply that people like to know other people make mistakes throughout history. Or maybe it’s because people are comforted by the reassurance that their mistakes won’t lead to the fall of a kingdom… :)
I’ve tried to watch this film so many times but always get to the bit where the Saxons rock up on English shores and forbid their men to do any raping so as not to ruin their bloodlines! Absolutely ridiculous but a good way to announce that the following carnage will be strictly PG.
@48, Sarmatians werent middle eastern but Steppe warriors. Whether they were pasty white or not is a contested point. Latest thinking is they were racially diverse comprising tribes originating in east Asia as well as ‘caucasian’ tribes. Mounted horsemen are nothing if not mobil.
Is there anything stupider than cavalry dismounting to fight afoot? The whole point is adding the horses weight and momentum to the initial impact.
@52: Is there anything stupider than cavalry dismounting to fight afoot?
Until stirrups, that’s pretty much what cavalry did. They were able to move around the battlefield quickly, but tended to have lighter armor, which is why Greeks and Romans didn’t think much of them. Equites and hippeis weren’t as high ranking as those who could afford full heavy armor, though they did still have enough wealth to be able to maintain a horse.Stirrups made it easier to stay in the saddle and to put more power behind a sword or spear. They completely changed the nature of warfare. For the time period this supposedly is, it’s not really wrong to think of them more as mobile infantry.
@52, you’d think so but Dragoons were a thing for a long time even though they already had cavalry. I guess when you don’t have modern troop transports and need soldiers in the area quickly you do what you can. Though I think the Hussites had a better idea with their war wagons.
I forget who, but someone once commented that the sole purpose of cavalry in battle was to add style to what otherwise would be just a vulgar brawl.
@52
Actually mounted infantry were pretty common throughout history and are exactly as they sound – a group of infantry who travel to battle on horseback, then dismount to fight in formation. The horses were for mobility, not combat.
Modern armies have the same with Mechanised Infantry, who ride to battle inside APCs and then dismount to fight and escort the tanks.
All dismounting in this movie is of course stupid.
Mounted infantry are not cavalry the latter has it’s own tactics. Not that mounted infantry isn’t useful, but you definitely need more than five men! When faced with a saxon shieldwall a mounted charge by five men holding together and striking en mass could be very effective. Five fancy martial artists distinctly less so.
@53 I don’t think it’s accurate to say that’s pretty much all cavalry did. I’m think they still did a lot of fighting from horseback, even if they couldn’t manage a charge heavy enough to break heavy infantry from the front. Alexander’s Companions were decisive in a lot of his battles and they charged into battle.
This movie is a guilty pleasure, but as a fan of history it also makes my head hurt.
@52,
Cavalry would dismount to fight when it had to defend, but after repeating firearms became common, the need for cavalry to dismount to fight became more common.
@53,
Another example is the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire’s cataphracts, who would charge (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract; I know it’s Wikipedia, and not entirely trustworthy)
——
More generically, two of the major roles for cavalry were reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance and pursuing broken infantry to keep them from reforming. Well-trained infantry, in defensive formation — “square” — was very hard to break by cavalry. Of course, cavalry was significantly weakened by effective infantry tactics and weapons. Probably the death knell was the Minie ball, which enabled rapid-fire, muzzle-loading rifles, where previous rifles were so slow-loading that they were little threat to a charging cavalry unit.
Gillian Bradshaw wrote the best-ever novel about the Sarmatians, Island of Ghosts, which is indeed about the Sarmatian cavalry coming to Britain.
She also wrote one of my favourite Arthurian trilogies, Down The Long Wind, which like Mary Stewart’s trilogy takes Arthur and Merlin and Mordred and Bedwyr and Guinevere and makes sense of it all in terms of their humanity.
But to my mind the best-ever writer of “this was the real Arthur” was Rosemary Sutcliff, whose Sword at Sunset is both very “fall of Romanised Britain”, and “invasion of the Saxons”, with properly-researched arms and armour and war strategies.
Something that this review doesn’t mention is that this “based on a true story” movie has the same premise (soldiers sent to rescue a group of civilians and lead them out of hostile territory) as Tears of the Sun, also directed by Fuqua, which came out only a year earlier and was set in modern-day Nigeria.
@53:
Before stirrups, cavalry most definitely fought on horse back. Their roles ranged from pursuit (chase down slower infantry after a battle is over to kill or capture as many as possible and make future battles easier for you), to skirmishing (archers and javelineers using their horses to outpace traditional anti-skirmishing countermeasures), to shock (lancers are the stereotype, but shock cavalry could simply be sword- or mace-armed, it was more about their role in the battle than their gear), and even to line-of-battle (particularly heavily armored cavalry that could stand up to enemy infantry in a head-on fight, though this was rare).
Saddle design was far more important for making cavalry viable than the stirrup was. A good saddle could allow your lancers to hit the enemy harder, to wear heavier armor, and to stay in the fight longer once they dropped spears and drew swords. If anything, stirrups helped horse archers more than most other types of cavalry, since they would allow the rider to keep his body relatively stable while the horse was at speed, allowing for better accuracy.
Of course, it is true that cavalry would dismount to fight, even dedicated cavalry, but usually it was a matter of context. Terrain could make horses a liability rather than an advantage, and some tactical roles required being on foot. There were sometimes cultural reservations against that, which could negatively impacted the outcome of battle when horsemen were too “elite” to dismount even when it cost them their lives.
@10 Wasn’t that Ivanhoe? (ducks)
@33 “I certainly condemn his Macbeth for being a complete load of antihistorical old bollocks, to the point that a cartoon managed a more historically accurate version. “
Oh, Gargoyles never got enough love, and it’s “Everything from English (and everyone else’s) mythology”
@10, 64-
T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone had Merlin sending a young Kay and Arthur out to have an adventure with Robin Wood, (not Hood, not Hood at all). But then, it also shifted the Arthur story up to the Norman invasion
@64/Royce E Day – ah Gargoyles, I loved that show. Johnathan Frakes made a surprisingly convincing evil mastermind. It’s a shame his other attempts at playing a villain turned out so… pantomime.
@65/Andrew Parker – what I find interesting about TH White’s re-imagining is how it essentially keeps the opposition the same. Norman being a corruption of Norsemen. William and his kindred were basically relocated Viking’s…
my favourite concept for re-imagining is Arthur reincarnated as a black gang member is some unspecified American city’s Projects. He inherited twin, custom-made Caliburn .45 pistols from his father Uther, Launcelot was a female childhood friend, and “Merl” was this crazy old white guy that kept turning up to try to advert history repeating itself, only to be ignored. Can’t remember the author, darn it. It was a trilogy and kind of lost focus on towards the end, but I enjoyed the first part.
@52/princessroxana – they may have been Caucasian, but they wouldn’t have been ethnically indistinguishable from native British. In my own family tree, my father’s side a Londoners, possibly of German origin (if you go back a couple of hundred years). My mother’s side is welsh and Irish (and those Irish were apparently chucked out of Scotland for being troublemakers in the 19th century). The point being they’re both Caucasian, but are visibly different ethnicities within “white”.
Going back to Arthurian times, that means the Picts should look different to the Gauls, the Italians should look different to the natives, and the imported troops should look different to all of the others. Instead they all just look the same.
And it’s not as if the mythical Round Table didn’t have its nods to diversity – Percival and his sister are often depicted as being “not white”, usually middle-eastern, to go with their origins in a far away land. Then there’s the Moor sir Moriaen – though he doesn’t appear until the 13th century…
Oh, and the Saxons have crossbows with—wait for it—“armor-piercing” bolts.
Crossbows are a lot older than everyone tends to think. The earliest ones in Europe are from the fourth or fifth century BC. Ancient Greek and Roman armies used them. And their bolts would certainly have gone through armour at close range – at least through mail and leather, which is what people seem to be wearing in those photos. As Sir Terry points out, chain mail, from the point of view of a man holding a crossbow, can best be described as a collection of loosely-connected holes.
And it’s not as if the mythical Round Table didn’t have its nods to diversity – Percival and his sister are often depicted as being “not white”, usually middle-eastern, to go with their origins in a far away land.
As was Sir Palamedes.
In fact a big part of the Round Table is equality and diversity. That’s why it’s round, after all. And you have the Lothian knights (Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth) and French knights like Lancelot, Welsh knights like King Pellinore of Anglesey, Sir Sagramore of Hungary, Morholt of Ireland and so on.
@67 — Was that Maurice Broaddus’ Knights of Breton Court books?
@70/ajay- yeah, and yet we get everyone looking and sounding kinda the same, even though they’re supposed to be from places hundreds or thousands of miles apart. It’s the kind of thinking that got us “Gods of Egypt” (everyone’s white and speaks with an English accent – except of the evil god, who’s Scottish); Troy (everyone’s white and speaks with an English accent – who’d have though Odysseus was an Ancient Yorkshireman?!); and Alexander (the Ancient Macedonians were white and spoke with a Scottish accent, apparently); and that’s just the worst offenders that spring to mind. <sigh>.
Being honest, I could have let the whole dismounting thing slide. I’m aware of the saddle/stirrup arguments (I think they’ve been discussed in depth in the commentary on the Equestrian series on Tor.com). It’s more the movie didn’t convince me it was effective.
Take El Cid. Billed as a historical epic, I’m guessing it’s not that accurate, but it makes me believe it might show the man behind the myth. Upon rescuing his King, the king exclaims: “there were fourteen knights guarding me, and yet you ride alone.” Heston (as El Cid) replies “I never ride alone, Sire. God rides with me.”
Heston really sells the line, showing the resolve and faith of El Cid. It’s scenes like that that make his Wayne’s World cameo well-earned. But what really made the scene was the fight choreography beforehand, showing how El Cid could ambush fourteen knights alone, using the terrain and their confusion to his advantage, makes it believable.
“Judge Rory Bean” starts with a title card that reads “Judge Rory Bean probably never existed. If he didn’t, he damn well should have!” The opening scene then shows a choreographed fight where we believe that just maybe a man who’s just survived a botched hanging really could turn the tables and take out a building full of bandits that just robbed then tried to murder him. And how someone surveying what they’d just achieved I think it’s a sign from God they should devote themselves to bringing the law to the lawless.
A film about the “real” Arthur, I could see a cadre of 150 (the number of Knights at the Round Table) rapid response, fast moving professional, well-equipped soldiers to reinforce a hastily-raised militia of local farmers, led by someone with a good grasp of tactics and strategy, defeat a raid at one end of the country, then hop on their horses, ride to another part of the country, link up with a different local militia, defeat another raid, and so on. Thus stemming the peicemeal invasion Arthur is credited with delaying (at least until he died).
For the purposes of the film, it doesn’t matter if they fought mounted or on foot. In a movie about warriors, in the battle scenes the fight choreography needs to convince me what I’m seeing is believable. A hand full of warriors fighting as individuals, without coordination, against what should be a disciplined horde just broke my suspension of disbelief.
Compare to “300”: despite the films flaws (what is with making Ancient Greeks Scottish?!), the film shows the “heroes” acting both as individuals and (more importantly) as a unit, and Leonidas having a grasp of both tactics and strategy. The fight choreography was stylised, but not to the point of breaking the film.
So, yeah, that’s where the film broke for me. <sigh>.
@71/hoopmanjh – yeah, I must have misremembered some of the details. Kudos on finding it.
I think it was trying to draw parallels between how the Celts were under pressure from external sources, but what really cost them their chance at a golden age was infighting, and how black Americans caught in the Projects have similar kinds of external pressures (constant fear of raids, of people being taken away, of having your culture repressed), but how they could resist that if they could only stand together. Instead all too human passions and weaknesses cost them the golden future their leader offers.
I like the idea, but I’m not sure if it was the writing or just how bleak the real-world Projects (and thus the background) was that left me not entirely happy with the trilogy. <shrugs >. YMMV.
Troy (everyone’s white and speaks with an English accent – who’d have though Odysseus was an Ancient Yorkshireman?!); and Alexander (the Ancient Macedonians were white and spoke with a Scottish accent, apparently)
These are some weird criticisms. The actors were using their own accents. Would you have preferred that they try to speak English in a Greek accent? Or try to speak Homeric Greek?
And if you’re arguing that it’s weird to depict Macedonians as white; Macedonia is in Europe! You know, where the white people come from?
I learn more about real history reading your dissing of movies than I ever leatrned in school. I never had a good grasp of timelines, apparently I have a lot in common with Hollywood.
It never made sense to me that Americans seem to consider Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people (and Hispanics) as non-white. It just shows what nonsense it is to classify people into races.
@78/ Birgit,
I have heard that Italians differentiate between Northern Italians (paler) and Southern Italians (darker).
Early Americans strongly differentiated between those of either Irish, English, German, Italian, etc. ancestry.
I guess people who have no internal sense of who they are have to resort to finding some group to be a member of in order to acquire a secondhand sense of self.
Race may not reflect actual internal differences, but in the absence of differences in skin color, people would just find some other external characteristic (like ear lobe size or type perhaps) to sort themselves by.
Coming in late on this one … regarding the real Arthur behind the legends I was quite compelled by The Keys to Avalon, by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd. It is a bit speculative and far over the top sometimes, making a hen out of a feather, but I found their main thesis, that the original Arthur was a Welsh warlord from the sixth century, operating in and from a small kingdom in northern Wales, quite persuasive.
The basis for their argumentation is that the oldest documentation about King Arthur by Geoffrey of Monmouth was based on an older Welsh Book of Kings, rather than the other way around as has been commonly assumed.
As the book is rather old (2000 I think) and my knowledge of the British medieval history is rather piecemeal, I would be interested to hear if any later works has reinforced or dismissed this hypothesis.
@@@@@73/WillMayBeWise
It is fair to assume that southern Europeans became darker at skin during the days of the Roman empire due to the big influx of slaves (and perhaps normal immigrants as well) from Africa and the Near East.
@78, Not all Americans. The whole thing is nonsense anyway. My brother has the dark Mediterranean coloring inherited from our maternal grandfather and I’m pasty white like our father’s North German ancestors.
@33. I would love to see a movie dramatization of the real MacBeth rather than yet another version of Shakespeare. And one that gives him and his wife their real names. MacBethad mac Findlaich and Gruoch.
@37. Yes, that quote is from Y Gododdin. Apparently the first written document mentioning Arthur. Although in Old Welsh (P- Celtic), it originates from Edinburgh and the Lothians. The Gododdin were the inhabitants of that part of Scotland and were most likely the descendants of the Votadini encountered by the Romans.
@40. Not quite accurate. The Angles did defeat the Gododdin, thus the above mentioned poem, but the Lothians were incorporated into the Angle kingdom of Northumbria, not England which didn’t exist at that time. It’s worth remembering that the Angles and the Saxons weren’t one people/tribe and were just as likely to fight each other as they were to fight the Britons/Celts. Sometimes they made alliances with the natives against other Angles and Saxons. The entire Anglo-Saxon invasion theory has been thrown into doubt and seems to be more of a culture and language shift rather than the invasion, genocide and displacement of the Britons that was originally thought.
@61. Oh yes. Bradshaws’ Down the Long Wind. Fantastic trilogy. Massively underrated. Glad someone else enjoyed it.
@83 — If you haven’t already, you might want to check out Dorothy Dunnett’s book King Hereafter.
@80. I’ve heard that theory before but there is a bit of a difference between “Welsh” Arthur and the one we’re familiar with. Apparently that Arthur had journeys into the Otherworld and was just as likely to fight witches and other supernatural creatures as he was other human armies.
I have heard a theory that Arthur and the rest of the characters are the remnants of the Brythonic pantheon with lots of stuff added on. One popular theory is that King Loth of Lothian is Lugus. (Irish Lugh, Welsh Lleu) and that over time, he was humanised to fit in better with Christian beliefs. Certainly Lothian’s original name was Lleuddiniawn meaning Land of the fortress of Lleu. Loth as king of Orkney may have come with conflating Loth and the real life jarl Ljot of Orkney.
@85. Yeah, a lot of godlike features on the Welsh Arthur. That could come either from a “humanisation” of an old god, or from adding godlike features to a famous human king. The book argues for the second possibility. That over the centuries supernatural and fairy tale elements were added to a historical chronicle of events in Wales, and that Geoffrey adapted those tales to a British context to suite his political agenda.
An interesting aspect of the Welsh version is that Arthur isn’t the big hero. He is rather a warlord that usurped the power from the true King.
65: The Wart and Kay’s adventure with Robin Wood is not the end of The Sword In The Stone – the end of T. H. White’s first book in the Arthurian pentology is the Wart taking the sword out of the stone.
Robin Hood and King Arthur, though both ancient stories of Britain, don’t really belong together. Robin Hood is a dream of outlaws fighting for justice against unjust laws: King Arthur is a dream of a just king fighting for freedom. I love The Sword in the Stone, but it’s neither the best nor the most insightful of T. H. White’s Arthurian books.
Robin Hood and King Arthur, though both ancient stories of Britain, don’t really belong together. Robin Hood is a dream of outlaws fighting for justice against unjust laws: King Arthur is a dream of a just king fighting for freedom.
Well, good thing they don’t appear together in The Sword in the Stone. Robin Wood meets the Wart; he isn’t King Arthur yet. And this is not a nitpick, this is an important distinction.
The whole point (produces soapbox, climbs on top) the whole point of The Once and Future King is to explore the nature of the just king. Until the very end of The Sword in the Stone, the king is Uther Pendragon, and the narrator makes clear, throughout The Sword in the Stone and into The Queen of Air and Darkness, that Uther is not a just king. He rapes Arthur’s mother. He allows the barons and local warlords to rule their territories unjustly, through the principle of Fort Mayne.
Meeting Robin Wood is part of the Wart’s education; it’s set up by Merlin, just as much as being turned into an ant or a wild goose was. He’s learning what a good leader looks like, he’s learning how to lead troops in combat, and he’s learning not to look down on the Saxon peasantry; and he’s having it brought home that these men and women, though outlaws, are not bad people, but the victims of bad or careless laws.
Yes, Robin Hood doesn’t belong in a story about King Arthur; but he absolutely belongs in a story about how King Arthur came to be king.
@76/ajay – there’s this acting technique called “using different accents”. Take Goldeneye. The protagonist is played by an Irishman, and the antagonist is played by a Yorkshireman. Both characters share a background as English public schoolboys, so they both use accents that sound like they attended English public school.
What I object to in the directors choice to have the actors use their own accents (since many of the actors have done roles which prove they can use different accents) is the lack of context. You want Odysseus to sound like he’s from Yorkshire? Fine, but all his men from Ithaca better have the same accent. And the Athenians should sound like they come from Lancashire. And the Persians should sound Dutch. Or possibly London.
Your Ancient Macedonians sound like they’re from Edinburgh? Your Spartans should sound like they’re from Glasgow or Newcastle.
Context is King. If a character has the same background as others, they shouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb by having a different accent. If you’ve decided a particular country has a particular accent, it shouldn’t be radically different from the neighbouring accents.
Now consider First Knight. Putting aside it’s many flaws, and the fact I’d throw money at a film that stars Richard Gere putting on a French accent the entire running time. Lancelot is an outsider, and the film uses Gere to show this. He is clearly culturally separate from the rest of the cast. We unconsciously pick up on this from body language and mannerisms, but Gere using his own (American) accent really contrasts with all the British accents. <shrugs> It’s also a film that doesn’t claim to be “true”, so I judge it less harshly than others.
You think Ancient Greece was full of white people? Meh, maybe. It was certainly the birthplace of European civilisation. The word “Europe” is Greek in origin. “White” isn’t exactly guaranteed. Look at a map. Modern Greece is on Europe’s border country with both the Near East and Africa. The histories we have of Ancient Greece hardly mention the rest of Europe; they mostly deal with Persia (modern Iran and Iraq) as the regional power throwing its weight around. From that alone it’s more likely the AG’s looked more Arabic than white. Then there’s the way Ancient Greek is considered a descendent language from Sanskrit, suggesting the Greek civilisation originated in India. Which doesn’t mean they weren’t white, but seems to make it unlikely.
@81/robm – maybe. But you had South Africans being reclassified as “coloured” from “White” (with the associated drop in privilege) because the neighbours thought they looked too dark to be white, so they could force their victims to move out of the neighbourhood. This despite the victims being able to prove their parents were white. Which just kind of highlights how race is a social construct. Add to that the stories of Ancient Greece suggest social and economic exchange (including slaves) with Persia and Africa, and how other civilisations that engaged in wholesale slavery don’t seem to show the same genetic drift (for instance the Viking’s brought back slaves from Africa via Constantinople, yet the Nordic Area is still considered one of the most ethnically white regions of the world). I’m inclined to take the hypothesis that the darker skin of the Mediterranean is due to ethnic homogenisation with a large pinch of salt.
@86/robm – for me, the difference in how the Welsh myths treat Arthur is a strong indicator that he was real. Nobody real is universally adored.
@88 / ajay – well said! <applauds>
@89/WillMayBeWise: As far as I know, Ancient Greek isn’t a descendant of Sanskrit. They’re both descendants of Proto-Indo-European, but they belong to different branches.
@89, My problem with First Knight was sheer disbelief any woman would prefer Rixhard Gere to Sean Connery. No accounting for taste but it strained my suspension of disbelief as did an Isolde who preferred a pretty boy to Rufus Sewell.
There is no mystery about what Ancient Greeks looked like. In addition to plenteous statues we have literary descriptions.
@93/JanaJanson – sorry, bad choice of words. I wasn’t suggesting a direct descendant, more like Sanskrit is a great aunt or uncle. You’re suggesting the relationship is more along the lines of an older cousin?
@94/princessroxana – as I said, a flim not without its flaws. As well as the way it used accents, I also liked the way it showed Arthur actually managing a battle, issuing orders and using a tactics a bit more complex than “follow me, lads! CHAAARRRRGGGEEE!” Not something you often see in a faux-medieval movie.
Re: Greek Statues looking like Ancient Greeks. They don’t show skin colour (although recent archaeological technology could show us what the original paint jobs looked like, so we might get “best guess” recreations), but more than that, it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who’s seen a man naked that they aren’t anatomically accurate. As all the surviving statues are broadly similar, we can assume they represent an idealised cultural vision that doesn’t accurately reflect reality. I’d argue modern-day catwalk models fill the same cultural niche, yet they aren’t by any stretch representative of the average person. And that’s before they start being photoshopped. So I’d suggest we know how some Ancient Greeks wanted to look, not what they actually looked like.
Red and blond hair is described as are grey eyes and fair skin was admired in women. Of course that doesn’t mean everybody was fair skinned blonds or redheads with grey eyes, just that that they existed and such features were admired. Ancient Greeks probably looked like modern Greeks. I believe the DNA evidence favors continuity of population.
@95/WillMayBeWise: Well, Sanskrit is much older, so aunt/uncle sounds good. The thing is, this doesn’t tell us anything about Greek ethnicity. Most European languages are Indo-European, including the Germanic languages (English, German, Icelandic, Norwegian,…), and Greek is closer related to them than to Sanskrit (Centum and satem languages).
@86 and 91. There is a Scottish version where Arthur is an usurper and Mordred was the rightful king. The Irish don’t have Arthur stories as such but he was regarded as a thief. I can’t remember now what he stole but something in the back of my head says it was a cauldron. So not everyone saw him as a hero.
My personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Arthur wasn’t real but I am interested in the origins of the story.
For a start, Arthur is a Brythonic character. Anywhere P- Celtic was spoken has Arthurian traditions. It’s not a Gaelic tradition, nor Pictish. Certainly not Angle or Saxon. So that’s southern Scotland, pre Angle and Saxon England, Wales and Cornwall. Another area that has Arthurian traditions is Brittany, another P-Celtic speaking area.
Then on top of that, you can add folk memory of real life people getting added in, political agendas, religious beliefs and so on, changing the story, up dating it as Chretien de Troyes did.
It does sometimes feel that if you could just strip it all back, you could almost come to some conclusion as to the origins. Tantalisingly close but maybe not close enough.
@97/princessroxana – they do. But they only mention it as something to note, meaning those features, as well as being prized, are unusual. Otherwise skin tone and hair colour isn’t mentioned, suggesting darker skin tones and hair colours were the default. <shrugs>. If there is continuity in the DNA, that suggests an olive or bronze skin tone that’s absent from the films.
@98/JanaJansen – fair point. But it does tell us about cultural spread. But if we trace it back to an area characterised by darker skin tones, that suggests the source language was spoken by people with darker skin tones, which in turn suggests the closer the language is to the source language, the closer the ethnicity will be?
though this is just a hypothesis. I have no evidence to back this up.
@99/Dogsbody Tentacles – that all kind of makes sense.
My Welsh and Irish great-grandfathers apparently has a bit of friendly banter. A common “discussion” revolves around “the Irish were the ones that ran away when the Romans arrived”, countered with “the Welsh only stayed to fight the Romans because they weren’t smart enough to build boats or swim.” If the British travelling bards kept banging on about how brilliant Arthur is /was, it makes sense that some counter-propaganda would be created. Plus Arthur’s younger days (as I’ve previously said) depict him as a bit of a rogue. So there might even have been a grain of truth (if Arthur was real).
the Scottish stuff makes sense to. In some versions Mordred is Arthur’s illegitimate son, but born while his mother (Arthur’s sister?) is married to a King (Lot?) of the Orkneys. So you’ve got one version where the Southerners are bad-mouthing Mordred. As far as Mordred’s people know, Mordred’s legitimate and Mordred’s got a legitimate claim on whatever Arthur’s “crown” consists of through Uther being his grandfather. So no wonder there’s stories about Arthur being the usurper, especially as Arthur’s claim to be Uther’s son is dubious. I’m not certain pulling a sword from a stone as a paternity test would stand up in a court of law…
as someone else pointed out, the name Arthur comes out of nowhere and then suddenly you have a spike of boys named that all over most of Britain. Yes, it could just be a set of popular stories, but it doesn’t seem to have one source. Local pride would seem to preclude a lot of Authors playing off someone else’s invention without someone basis in reality. And, as you say, the accumulation of stories made of whole cloth or confusing real historical figures (and just corruption from being an oral tradition) obscures any “truth”. <sigh>.
@100, to this day brown hair and eyes and olive skins are common features of European populations. But so are fairer colorings.
“White” has been redefined regularly throughout history; an early 19th Century American had a different definition of “white” than did a mid-20th Century one. For example, in 1840, Irish Catholics would probably not be considered “white”; in 1895, they’d be “white,” but Eastern Europeans — especially Eastern European Jews — and Mediterranean peoples, such as Italians and Greeks, would not be. In the late 20th Century, they’d largely be moved into the “white” category.
In the Middle Ages, the real distinction would be more religious than racial. A black Christian from Ethiopia would be far more likely to be accepted than would a blond Muslim from the Caucasus. This started to change during the “Age of Exploration,” after the trade in slaves from peoples around the Black Sea was cut off by a mix of the expansion of Christianity to Slavic lands and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
The Islamic slave trade wasn’t cut off, far from it. Circassian slaves remained a popular commodity into the twentieth century.
And to add to princessroxana @@@@@ 105, by the “Age of Exploration” all the Slavic nations had been Christian for about 6 centuries if not more in case of the Western Slavs.
@103/princessroxana – you’re missing my point. Olive skin complexion is not a common feature in Britain. Some areas have a lot of genetic turnover. Those areas get fewer as you move north, and have more regions where there’s a great deal of continuity of population, the only deviation you’re likely to see from pasty pale white is much darker-skinned recent arrivals. By “recent” I mean the family arrived in the last couple of centuries. My Uncle (by marriage) can trace his family back through the church records of 3 neighbouring parishes to before the Norman conquest…
It *is* a common feature in the area the “Knights” are supposed to originate in. Even if (somehow) all of the knights are as pasty pale as the natives, they should still be different. Simply from growing up in a different society they’ll have different mannerisms and body-language. Put someone from a Northumberland parish (one of the those with a “continuity of population) in the same room as a similar one from a Cornish parish, and I’ll likely be able to tell which is which. Or a “white” Texan in a room with a “white” upstate New Yorker, and again I’ll likely be able to pick out who’s what.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. The film sets these “knights” up as exotic, using something the Roman Empire frequently did – ship auxiliaries from hundreds or thousands of miles away to garrison the natives. The Romans had this policy so if the natives revolted, the auxiliaries where unlikely to have links with the locals that would mean they’d side with the natives when told to suppress the rebellion. The knights should be (so the film tells us) distinct, and they aren’t.
@104/swampyankee – I think you’re being overly optimistic and perhaps glossing over why these groups are considered “non-white”, and therefore demonising them, in attempt to make them seem less “human”. It’s not as if these minority groups chose to be persecuted.
@107, I think I understand. It’s not so much skin color as some indication of ethnic difference in feature or accent or just in manner. Good point.
@108,
Obviously, ethnic groups don’t choose to be persecuted; it’s the people with the economic and political power that decide who is to be persecuted. It’s that religious differences were more important than ethnic or racial ones to the powerful in the Middle Ages.
And two swords worn on the back? Seriously? How the hell do you put them back in their scabbards without stabbing yourself?
Jumping right back to the start of the thread: you carry a sword on your back when it’s too long to carry comfortably at your waist. But you don’t then expect to be able to do a quick-draw from the back. It’s very difficult to do without risking your own ear, and often too long to do at all – when your arms are at full stretch above your head, the tip of the sword still hasn’t cleared the scabbard.
If you have a long sword, you’ll unsling it at your leisure before the fighting starts; either by unslinging it, scabbard and all, from your back, or by hauling it out hand over hand (long swords weren’t sharp all the way down the blade; the first foot or so of blade after the guard was blunt, to allow you to grip it and parry with better leverage).
But then if you think you’ll need to draw your sword quickly, you don’t carry a long sword. You carry an arming sword or something.
Long swords are for battles, where quick draws are not required. For self-defence in a non-battle environment, people carried shorter swords.
Jumping in really, really late. As much I enjoyed the film, the script was weak. The only thing that redeemed it for me was Mads Mikkelsen and his character, thought I do like the rest of the actors. Just a pity their talent was wasted
Whenever Stellan Skarsgard and Til Schweiger are on screen scowling evilly and murdering their own minions, this film became awesome. At pretty much all other times it… kind of looked pretty but not much else.
Well, this film sounds like a total disaster.
@73 – WillMayBeWise
And then you have the opposite, which I often mention in threads on this site: five Hispanic characters in a US TV show or movie, supposed to be from the same place, even close family, but speak Spanish with completely different accents. Or don’t even speak native-level Spanish when they’re supposed to.
I freaking love this movie, always have. I am more into Roman history and lore than medieval. I know it’s not accurate, but in the broad strokes I love the way it updates the Arthur tale, which honestly had become a bit stale in movies anyway. (Holy Grail made it camp). Amazing cast, battle scenes are awesome. I am in love with Hadrians Wall, so, love the setting. Love Clive Owen (he makes a splendidly solemn, mysterious Arthur), Keira and Ray S. How can you not like this movie? Its gorgeous, music is amazing, love Arthur as a Roman, Pelagius twist…If you cant sit back and just enjoy the heck out of this sexy swordplay romp you are zero fun.