Dr Mary Bateman

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168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr Mary Bateman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast
Hi, thank you so much. What a joy to be here.
No, absolutely not. And actually, the first mentions that we really get of a possible Arthur figure are a lot earlier than this, and they suggest Arthur is a lot earlier than this. They place him in kind of post-Roman Britain. Okay, so just after Emperor Honorius has withdrawn troops in 410, there's that couple of hundred years that we often hear called the Dark Ages. Boom!
Yeah, I know, I feel the same. This is when some of the earliest texts place Arthur's rule as having happened, which makes sense because the province of Britannia is being invaded and raided by a series of different groups. You have the Picts and the Scots from the north, and you've also got Angles, Saxons, Jutes coming in, those Germanic groups who would form the first kingdoms in England.
Britain needs a hero and so there are lots of bits of poetry written about heroes and this is where we see the first mention of Arthur. So the earliest texts we have about him seem to suggest he might have been a military leader of some sort in post-Roman Britain. We're talking sort of 450 to 550 CE, so about a thousand years earlier than your pointy hats.
okay yeah what where and they're written at the time or they're written later key question they're a bit later yeah they're sort of set at the time aren't they yeah they are quite a bit later yeah so the the earliest references um to arthur are very enigmatic and fragmentary which just add to his appeal really there is a very early welsh poem now i say welsh but we think it was written in the very very north kind of south of scotland north of england
called A Godothan. It's part of a bigger text by a poet called Aneiron. It's a series of laments about fallen soldiers who've been involved in great battles. And in A Godothan, which is about this battle that we think happened somewhere near Catterick in modern day Yorkshire,
there are lots of men who fall, and one of them has a very Arthur-y sounding name, but he's not Arthur, and we're told he's not Arthur, because the poet says that his name was Gwathur, but he was no Arthur. Oh. Which is really interesting, because it suggests that Arthur is well-known enough that he can just be used offhand like that as a point of comparison.
Yeah, he's commemorating him.
But no Arthur. It's a bit of a backhanded... It's a bit mean, isn't it?
And the thing about this poem is we don't know how old it really is, because as with a lot of these early Welsh texts that we'll talk about today, they're not written down until quite a long time, we think, after they were originally being circulated and composed orally. And to make matters more confusing, there's two versions of a good Arthur as well, and one of them does not mention Arthur.
So that makes it even more enigmatic.
Just to return to these early texts, the really important mention, the first detailed mention we get of Arthur comes quite a bit later in around 830. And it's in this text called The History of the Britons. For a long time, we thought the author was this guy called Nennius. Now we're not sure. Oh, really? Yeah, we're not sure anymore.
Me too. Well, people call him Pseudo-Nennius.
And it's an attempted history that traces the origins of Britain right back to this hero called Brutus.
The Trojan dude, yes.
Yeah. Exactly that. And yet you see him in the Middle Ages being called the founder of Britain and there seems to be a kind of oversight of these giants who were originally there.
Yeah. There is a prequel that comes up later about some giant sisters who lived there before.
Yeah. I think Totnes is the place where Brutus's right-hand man chucked one of the giants over the edge of the cliff.
No. Crucially, he describes these 12 battles that Arthur has led people in, but he's not described as a king. He's described as a dux bellorum, which means a leader of battles in Latin.
Well, I mean, the big problem for all of the Arthur truthers is that there is really only, because it is Dark Ages, scare quotes, there is really only one piece of writing, piece of writing about what's going on in Britain... that is roughly contemporaneous with Arthur. And it's written by a British monk called Gildas, who, again, we don't know much about.
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