From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, and: King Arthur: The True Story by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (review)

Abstract

theme parks and North Cornwall District Council's leaflets follow a very clear description of where the Tintagel material is and how anyone can get to see it. There is a great deal of humour in the book - chapter titles, for example, include 'Deconstruction of a monastery' and 'Other, and future, Tintagels.' This last chapter concludes with questions: one is left thinking that the future discoveries will be as engaging as the tales of old. PATRICIA REYNOLDS Keeper of Social History, Buckinghamshire County Museum C SCOTT LITTLETON and LINDA A. MALCOR , From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment ofthe Legends ofKing Arthur, the Knights ofthe Round Table, and the Holy Grail. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1795. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994. Pp. xxxiii, 401 ; 18 plates, 19 maps, and 11 genealogical tables in Appendix 2. isbn: 0-8153-1496-5. $66. GRAHAM PHILLIPS and MARTIN KEATMAN , King Arthur.The True Story. London: Arrow Edition, 1993; dist. in the U.S. by Trafalgar Square Publishing, North Pomfret, Vermont. Paper. Pp. 213; 14 plates, 6 appendix illustrations, 7 maps and tables, isbn: 0-09-929681-0. $9.95. Although Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman purport to tell the true story of King Arthur, their findings are only partially compatible with the radical reassessment of Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor. That is, both sets of authors would appear to agree that the man we know as Arthur had his origins in the North, but whereas Phillips and Keatman are largely content to leave it at that, Littleton and Malcor insist that most of what we think we know of him comes not from fifth- and sixth-century Britain, but, rather, from the folklore of northeastern Iran that first took shape in the centuries -indeed in the millennia - preceding the common era. In a sense, these differences arise primarily from divergent disciplinary preferences. Because Phillips and Keatman see themselves largely as historians, they approach the Arthurian corpus determined to sift from it only those shards and fragments that retain some measure of historical truth within the context of a late Roman Britain under increasing attack by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As a result, the nature of Arthurian literature itself - its shape, symbols, and recurring motifs - has little interest for them since it is, in effect, what has to be neutralized or eliminated before one can see 'history as it really happened.' By way of contrast, it is more the Arthurian myth that concerns Littleton and Malcor. They want to know not the realities surrounding Britain's most famous king but the folkloric sources lying behind his story's uniquely haunting appeal. Their source material may frequently overlap that used by Phillips and Keatman, but because their aims are quite different, so, too, are the answers they advance. Thus, to illustrate, the historical Arthur has interest for them only insofar as they can demonstrate that his existence gave new and British dimensions to the Nart sagas of the Caucasus, tales that tell of the deeds and death of Batraz, leader of the Ossetian people, one of the many tribes that are more generally known as Scythians. In the Littleton-Malcor view, these stories or variants of them first came to Roman Britain with Sarmatian heavily armed cavalry sent by Marcus Aurelius, troops composed largely of Iazyges, a tribe both culturally and geographically proximate to the Ossetians. Indeed, it may even be of significance, they claim, that their first commander, the prefect of the VI Legion Victrix, was called Lucius Artorius Castus, a man who may have inadvertantly been the source for Arthur's very name. Nor does their story end there, for if the Iazyges entered Britain as Roman Auxiliaries, their cousins the Alans swept into southern Gaul and Spain as part ofthat tribal innundation that would undo Rome. And it is to the Alans, Littleton and Malcor assert, that we owe the 'custom of thrusting swords into the earth as symbols of a warrior-diety,' a practice they see as the true source for the sword in the stone. If, moreover, we owe the prototype of the Holy Grail to a magical cup or cauldron in the Nart...