The Historical Arthur and the ‘Gawain’ Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions by Andrew Breeze (review)

Reviewed by: The Historical Arthur and the 'Gawain' Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions by Andrew Breeze P. J. C. Field The Historical Arthur and the 'Gawain' Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions. By Andrew Breeze. (Studies in Medieval Literature) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2023. x+153 pp. £73 (ebk £35). ISBN 978–1–66692–954–6 (ebk 978–1–66692–955–3). These dashing essays on early literature in its historical background typically offer lucid, detailed, up-to-date surveys of scholarship on disputed questions, followed by Andrew Breeze's compressed resolutions. This can give the resolution great weight and save new enquirers a bibliographical search, but since the substantive arguments are not set out in full, important elements in them may get lost. In End Page 402 the first essay, for instance, on the historicity of 'King' Arthur, Romano-British historians today reject almost all the evidence on which narrative histories of Dark Age Britain used to be based. Breeze rightly objects that that makes it impossible to explain how the Annales Cambriae has what appears to be an externally corroborated annal about Arthur's death, but he does not mention its other annal about Arthur, as victor at the Battle of Badon, which (Breeze's argument implies) gets the names of the victor and the battlefield wrong, and the date too. There are possible ways of reconciling the two annals, but readers who do not know the evidence will not know there is a problem. In contrast, Breeze develops a remarkable insight on the date of Badon, the most important British victory in the long war with the Anglo-Saxons, which would on its own justify the publication of this book. He also shows with exactly the right quotation that pagan religion was dead throughout post-Roman Britain when Gildas wrote. Gildas's Old Testament God hated idolatry above all: pagan worship would have pushed sacrilegious fratricide off the top spot in Gildas's charge-sheet of his compatriots' misdemeanours. The second essay suggests that the much-disputed dux bellorum, 'leader in battles', as applied to Arthur, is a translation of Welsh penteulu, 'chief of the warband'. The context, however, has the dux bellorum commanding the combined warbands of a confederation, and armies are averse to ambiguous names: they cause disasters such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. If a historical Arthur was, as is quite likely, an outstanding penteulu given overall command in a national emergency, his new job would have been given a different name. The other essays are on late medieval English literature, on Gawain and the Green Knight and texts related to it. The first, on the authorship of GGK, puts a persuasive but (as Breeze admits) inconclusive case for the Cheshire knight John Stanley (d. 1414). Breeze thinks the poem's attitudes and opinions are Stanley's, but does not explore whether, if the poet was a close member of Stanley's family or retinue, he or she might not have been able to assume those attitudes and opinions as part of a narrative persona. This essay would have been stronger if the evidence associating GGK with Stanley and his milieu had been kept separate from the weaker evidence for his authorship. The GGK poet, for instance, knew the Chester to Holyhead road personally and had unflattering opinions about the inhabitants of the Wirral, both of which tie in with Stanley's life in ways not spelt out in this essay; and the Stanleys had Arthurian literary connections as late as the seventeenth century: see The Arthurian Texts in the Percy Folio Manuscript, ed. by John Withrington (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023), p. 5. Surprisingly in a book with this title, Breeze does not mention that the poet knew Old French Arthurian romance well enough to surpass Chrétien de Troyes in the use of the double plot and the French prose romances in the deferred identification of the protagonist (here the antagonist), which tells aficionados that Bercilak's wife is the False Guinevere from the French Prose Lancelot. There follows an attempt to date GGK on the basis of an unlikely pun on the surname of...