Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages by Guy Halsall (review)

So sternly will others criticize Worlds of Arthur that there is no need to reach for literary thunderbolts. With ‘Arthur’ in its title, it is the very thing to sell at airport bookstalls. But as a work of scholarship it will confuse and mislead travellers as they accumulate air-miles. Let us set out what Halsall tells us and then go on to ‘Facts and Fictions,’ especially the fictions.

Worlds of Arthur has twelve chapters in four sections. The first section, ‘Old Worlds,’ places the traditional narratives of Gildas, Bede, and the like against the archaeology of post-Roman Britain. The second, ‘Present Worlds,’ has three chapters. These deal successively with modern evaluations of Historia Brittonum, the Welsh annals, and other early sources for Arthur; then the debated question of continuity or collapse for British society in the fifth century; and finally the ways in which archaeology can here aid us. The third, ‘Mad Worlds,’ briefly examines and dismisses a series of crazy modern speculations on Arthur. The last, ‘New Worlds?,’ really leaves Arthur altogether. It offers discussion on such matters as Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain and the murky business of fifth- and sixth-century politics there. Whatever the merits of this, Anglo-Saxon archaeology is one thing, the British leader Arthur is another. But books on Arthur sell, as those on Germanic pots and post-holes do not sell. Hence the problem. We are being imposed upon, for much of Worlds of Arthur has nothing to do with Arthur. Let the buyer beware.

Not only should readers complain that Worlds of Arthur comes with a false label. Halsall, an archaeologist-historian at the University of York, lacks the knowledge of Celtic history and philology to write competently on his chosen subject. The brighter side of this is that a listing of errors in Worlds of Arthur shows how swiftly our knowledge of fifth-century Britain is progressing. In discussion of north-west Wales in the ninth century, we are thus told that ‘around the same time’ and ‘maybe in the same part of the world’ a bard ‘composed an elegy about the massacre’ (4) of a British warband at Catraeth or Catterick, Yorkshire. This is absurd. The poet Aneirin lived in the seventh century in North Britain, not the ninth in Wales. Having been dead for two centuries, he could not have read Historia Brittonum of about 830, although Halsall, raising him from the grave, goes on to suggest he did (5).

On Vortigern, we hear how ‘this might not have been his name at all, but his title, “over-king”’ (15). Halsall has not read Kenneth Jackson, ‘Gildas and the Names of the British Princes,’ [Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 3 (1982): 30–40] which concludes that the notion of Vortigern’s being ‘a title, not the usurper’s personal name, is too far-fetched to be taken seriously’ (40).

The massacre by Northumbrians of a Scottish army at Degsastan in 603 has nothing to do with Dawston Burn in Liddesdale, Scotland, despite Halsall’s claims that it has (23, 160). It was fought twenty-five miles north-west of Dawston, near Drumelzier, where the stan or stone (five foot high) stands to this day on the banks of the Tweed. That the Northumbrian victory at Chester in 613 or 615 divided ‘the Britons of Wales from those of Cumbria and the Scottish lowlands’ (23) is a strange verdict, when Sir Frank Stenton years ago saw ‘no adequate reason for attributing the division of the British kingdoms to defeat at Chester’ [Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1971), 78] and Peter Hunter Blair commented witheringly on the ‘treasury of clichés’ [Northumbria in the Age of Bede (London, 1976), 50] of those who saw the attack as driving a wedge between Briton and Briton.

We are assured that it ‘is impossible to know where’ (53) the sixth-century historian Gildas wrote, which...