Few heroes owe less to reality than Arthur.  Neither Gildas nor Aneurin, his contemporaries, speak of him; Bede did not even know his name; Taliessin and Liwarc’h Hen gave him only a secondary place.  In Nennius, on the other hand, who lived about 850, the legend has fully unfolded.  Arthur is already the exterminator of the Saxons; he has never experienced defeat; he is the suzerain of an army of kings.  Finally, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the epic creation culminates.  Arthur reigns over the whole earth; he conquers Ireland, Norway, Gascony, and France.  At Caerleon he holds a tournament at which all the monarchs of the world are present; there he puts upon his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the sovereign lord of the universe.  So incredible is it that a petty king of the sixth century, scarcely remarked by his contemporaries, should have taken in posterity such colossal proportions, that several critics have supposed that the legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who bore that name have nothing in common, the one with the other, and that the son of Uther Pendragon is a wholly ideal hero, a survivor of the old Cymric mythology.  As a matter of fact, in the symbols of Neo-Druidism—­that is to say, of that secret doctrine, the outcome of Druidism, which prolonged its existence even to the Middle Ages under the form of Freemasonry—­we again find Arthur transformed into a divine personage, and playing a purely mythological part.  It must at least be allowed that, if behind the fable some reality lies hidden, history offers us no means of attaining it.  It cannot be doubted that the discovery of Arthur’s tomb in the Isle of Avalon in 1189 was an invention of Norman policy, just as in 1283, the very year in which Edward I. was engaged in crushing out the last vestiges of Welsh independence, Arthur’s crown was very conveniently found, and forthwith united to the other crown jewels of England.

We naturally expect Arthur, now become the representative of Welsh nationality, to sustain in the Mabinogion a character analogous to this role, and therein, as in Nennius, to serve the hatred of the vanquished against the Saxons.  But such is not the case.  Arthur, in the Mabinogion, exhibits no characteristics of patriotic resistance; his part is limited to uniting heroes around him, to maintaining the retainers of his palace, and to enforcing the laws of his order of chivalry.  He is too strong for any one to dream of attacking him.  He is the Charlemagne of the Carlovingian romances, the Agamemnon of Homer,—­one of those neutral personalities that serve but to give unity to the poem.  The idea of warfare against the alien, hatred towards the Saxon, does not appear in a single instance.  The heroes of the Mabinogion have no fatherland; each fights to show his personal excellence, and satisfy his taste for adventure, but not to defend a national cause.  Britain is the universe; no one suspects that beyond the Cymry there may be other nations and other races.