On Arthurian Legend

During lunch Dr. Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. "It's really wonderful," he said, how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory's. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters? There's Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background - on the other side of Arthur, so to speak - there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan 'set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses.' Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn't it look very like a picture of Britian as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?"

"How do you mean, Dr. Dimble?" said Jane.

"Well, wouldn't there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin - something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the Druidical religion."

"And what would Arthur himself have been?" said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words "rather like Spanish."

"That's just the point," said Dr. Dimble. "One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There'd be jealousy from his own British famliy, and the Romanised section - the Launcelots and the Lionels - would look down ond the Britons. That'd be why Kay is always represents as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to Druidism."

"And where would Merlin be?"

"Yes. . . . He's the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He's not evil; yet he's a magician. He's obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. He's 'the devil's son'; but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who father Merlin needn't have been bad after all. You remember, 'There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of the are good, and some work evil'."

"It is rather puzzling. I hadn't thought of it before."

"I often wonder," said Dr. Dimble, "whether Merlin doesn't represent the last trace of somthing the later tradition has quite fogtten about - something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests of sorcerors."

"What a horrid idea," said Mrs. Dimble, who had noticed that Jane seemed to be preoccupied. "Anyways, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all and he's safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as every one of us knows."

"Buried but not dead, according to the story," corrected Dr. Dimble.

--C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Well, I love Lewis, and I love myths and legends. Probably my favourite English/British Isles legend is Robin Hood, but Arthur is a close second. Mostly, I don't know as much about him as I do Robin Hood. But Lewis has some interesting ideas about the legend of Arthur, and the nature of Merlin, especially. And I liked the Dimbles. Very much.