The Return of the King

Will King Arthur one day come back to save us? The eternal, untranslatable, vaguely post-modern mystery of Arthur's long-awaited second coming

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones. This painting is 20 feet wide and took him 17 years, even longer than it took me to write The Bright Sword

When I was 14 my parents took me to see Waiting for Godot at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. By a weird coincidence two of the actors in it were about to attain pop culture immortality as 1980s sitcom stars —Vladimir was played by a pre-Perfect Strangers Mark Linn-Baker, and Pozzo was a pre-Wings Tony Shalhoub.

I can’t now reconstruct what made my parents think it was a good idea to send me, a callow pimply adolescent, to Beckett’s avant garde threnody of hopelessness—but the thing is, it was a good idea. Seeing Waiting for Godot was one of my big literary awakening moments—the very first time I felt a piece of grown-up literature speak to me directly and personally. Per Dickinson, I felt like the top of my head had been taken off.

One of the things that attracted me to Arthur’s story, and in particular the post-Arthurian part of it, was how Godot-like that world is. It’s a dark and empty world, haunted by the possibility that Arthur, like Godot, will come back and fix everything.

Or he won’t. Nobody knows for sure. He’s lying in state on Avalon, the Fortunate Isle, the Isle of Apples, suspended between life and death, not unlike the Fisher King, though in Arthur’s case there’s no Grail Knight coming to heal him. In fact in many versions he’s left in the care of his half-sister Morgan le Fay, whose attitude toward him in the past has ranged from ambivalent to murderous. Nurse Ratched vibes.

There’s something very modern about the ambiguity of it all, but the roots of this story turn out to be quite old. Gervase of Tilbury, in his Recreations for an Emperor, circa 1210, tells the story of a man exploring a cave on Mount Etna in Sicily who stumbles on Arthur, still alive, biding his time and mulling his return. (Why Sicily? The weather? The food?) Around 1370 the Majorcan writer Guillem of Torroella writes a narrative poem called La Faula which finds Arthur still alive on an island, being nursed by Morgan le Fay (or MLF—as I now think of her, having typed her name approximately a million times while writing The Bright Sword). Arthur is depressed about the decline of chivalry in Britain, but getting stronger from annual sessions with the Grail. One day, one day, he’ll be ready to go back.

Probably the most famous framing of the idea of Arthur’s return comes in the Morte d’Arthur. It’s one of those moments when Malory drops his usual relatively plodding prose style and bursts into full-throated eloquence:

Yet some men yet say in many parts of England that king Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu in another place. And men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse,

Hic iacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus.

Here lies Arthur, the once and future king. It’s a deft and moving little dance—maybe yes, but maybe no, but then maybe yes again. And what an extraordinary thing to say about someone: here in this world, he changed his life. I have often wondered what Malory could possibly have meant by that.

A panel from the weirdly brilliant comic book Camelot 3000—first published in 1982—where Arthur comes back in the far future to save the earth from space lizards

My favorite version of the legend is also the oldest one I know of, even older than Gervase of Tilbury. It appears in “The Stanzas of the Graves,” which is a Welsh poem from the ominously named Black Book of Carmarthen (it’s called that because it was found in Carmarthen, and its cover is black). Like many such poems it’s un-datable, but it’s definitely extremely old — it could have been written as far back as the 9^th or 10^th century.

“The Stanzas of the Graves” is a list of great fallen heroes and where to find their tombs. It includes both Sir Bedivere and Sir Gawain, whose grave “is in Peryddon/ Where the ninth wave flows.” Like “Y Gododdin,” the “Stanzas” has only a single wonderfully oblique line about Arthur:

anoeth bid bet y Arthur

Nobody knows what that means.

Or not exactly. That word “anoeth” gives translators fits. It’s something to do with wonder or difficulty or power or all three. A few sample translations:

Impossible to find in this world is the grave of Arthur

A mystery to the world, the grave of Arthur.

A grave for Arthur would be ridiculous

The world’s wonder/difficulty, a grave for Arthur

A wonder of the world is the grave of Arthur

Concealed to Doomsday, the grave of Arthur

It’s just about the most Arthurian thing ever—an ambiguity within an ambiguity, a mystery within a mystery. I loved this line so much that I made it the epigraph for The Bright Sword. Since nobody has an exact translation of it, I just chose the one that felt most apt to me.

Here it is:

A hidden thing is the grave of Arthur.