On the Trail of King Arthur: A Journey into Dark Age Scotland by Robin Crichton (review)

The title of this volume promises a suspenseful quest. Even more, Robin Crichton claims to revise, singlehandedly, all existing scholarship on the figure of ‘Arthur’ by the ‘academic establishment’ (14), creating his own methodology based on field work with a tribe of North American Indians and what Scottish Enlightenment thinkers called ‘conjectural history’ (16). The result, however, is a relatively uninspiring remix of information gleaned from the work produced by the very members of the ‘academic establishment’ Crichton rebukes. He first surveys the historical, cultural, political, economic, and archeological contexts of early medieval Britain. Then, based on the notion, ‘so abhorrent to academics, that there is no smoke without fire,’ he concludes that: Arthur existed; he came from a noble Northern family and was attached to the crack cavalry of the Macau; his enemies were the Angles, Saxons, and Picts; he was a Christian who crusaded to reinforce the new faith; he fought at the Battle of Badon; Merlin, ‘the last of the Druids,’ existed, but two generations later than Arthur. Only archaeology may be in a position, so Crichton holds, to discover the ‘truth’ and ‘clear the obscurity of the Dark Ages’ in the future (140).

Not surprisingly, then, archaeological conjectures are at the heart of Crichton’s argument as he proceeds to assign ‘likely locations’ (58) to Arthur’s twelve battles, following Nennius and the Annales Cambriae as his organizational signposts. Numerous beautiful photographs, taken by Crichton himself, illustrate most of the sites, lending an air of evidentiary authenticity to his conclusions. Throughout the book, dozens of maps (some created for the volume, some out of the public domain), a timeline, an appendix on Britain during the Roman occupation, and a Gazetteer, which proposes a twelve day trip along the ‘Arthur Trail,’ strive to create additional probability for the author’s views. Other inserts, especially the numerous samples of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, are simply page fillers gleaned from the public domain rather than functional elements. One of them, albeit in different size and format, is used on the front cover, on page 14, and on page 104.

There is no doubt that the elements of what we know about ‘Arthur’ deserve to be reevaluated and retold for new generations of readers. Except for the original photographs, however, this volume provides few features an interested reader could not also find in some of the better crowd-sourced entries in Wikipedia or in Brittannia.com. A hybrid between guidebook, idiosyncratic summary of existing scholarship, and general cultural information, On the Trail of King Arthur resembles some of the early modern attempts at sketching the elusive figure. Traveling to the various archaeological sites in the realm, for example, John Leland once set out to prove Arthur’s historicity in his Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae (1544). He, too, conjectured the features of the elusive figure, amassing material evidence to counter Polydore Vergil’s humanistic critique, in Anglica Historia (1534), of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain as a reliable source for information about ‘Arthur.’ Leland, too, rejected the ‘academic establishment’ of his time (Polydore) out of a patriotic desire to maintain a monumental historical lineage for Henry VIII, ‘circumspectly to find out,’ as he called it, ‘Prince Arthures Originall, euen from the very egge’ (Richard Robinson’s 1582 translation in Richard Edward Mead, ed., The Famous History of Chinon of England, by Christopher Middleton; to which is added The Assertion of King Arthur translated by Richard Robinson from Leland’s Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii together with the Latin original, EETS, O.S., 165 [London: Oxford University Press, 1925], 78). In the absence of reliable written sources, Leland, too, focused on archaeological remains to furnish a foundation for his claims. Crichton’s motto for the book, Churchill’s battle cry about how Arthur-like Western knights should continue their forefather’s...