How Arthur Made the West

Why the ARC conference needs a new hero

N. C. Wyeth’s illustration for The Boy’s King Arthur (1922)

“Christianity made us,” right wing activist Tommy Robinson declared in a recent interview since his release from prison, in which he called himself a Christian and said that England is experiencing a “Christian revival.”¹ Not, though, a revival of actual Christian belief: Tommy Robinson says that doesn’t really matter and he seems to be about as Christian as Laurence Fox, instead this is yet another right wing figure adopting the now cliched conservative idea that the West is Christianity, cultural or otherwise, and to save it from immigration and economic decline we need to all start being Christians again.

As I have written about recently, in its more popular forms among the seat fillers in Jordan Peterson’s ARC conference this idea has much root in the misappropriation of the arguments of Tom Holland, represented by people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has argued that we need Christianity to save the West from woke and Russia (I’ve never figured out how the fact that Russia is also Christian factors into this complaint). The nuances of Holland’s arguments are lost in favour of the slightly stupid claim that Christianity somehow built Western free capitalism and gave us the (incongruously un-Christian) post-war order we all take for granted.

So I am going to argue that instead of mixing Christianity with claims about capitalism and whinings about net zero or transgenderism, the conservatives at the next ARC conference would have a much better case for another saviour of the West, one who arguably actually has shaped history with immense significance, whose stories contain profundity and complexity and are worthy of reverence, stories which Kings and presidents have emulated, and perhaps most significantly whose legend promises a heroic and salvific return: King Arthur.

Disappointingly, King Arthur may not have existed. Some historians still argue he did, although it is not widely accepted and I am not entirely convinced, for what it’s worth. In a way though it doesn’t matter, if he did exist he was a sixth century warlord of little significance and the romances that we know him from are so much later he can hardly be described as inspiring them. Perhaps asking if Arthur is historical is as silly as asking if Achilles or Demeter and Persephone were historical. They exist in what Mircea Eliade calls the Illud Tempus, the time of myth that somehow always exists and in which many throughout history seek to partake. As such they do exist because they are archetypes, ideals. Whether he was a King who won a few battles against the Saxons or one of the most spectacular euhemerisms of history, it doesn’t really matter if Arthur was or wasn’t real.

After all, much of history is full of strange cosplays of the past, either historical or mythic. Alexander the Great modelled himself on Achilles, Julius Caesar on Alexander, the Spanish Conquistadors on Caesar. By doing so, history itself is always mythologising not just the past but its own present, and for many periods of Western history the archetype that has been looked to is not Achilles or Alexander but a legendary and obscure King from the no man’s land age between the Roman departure from Britain and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, Arthur.

Two significant works helped create the legend of King Arthur. First, in the early twelfth century a cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a mythic ‘history’ of the British isles known as the Historia Regum Britanniae, that tells Britain’s history from the first heroes who sailed from the remnants of the Trojan War and fought the giants who inhabited it, through Kings and heroes that would find their way into British legend. In Geoffrey’s account, Arthur is an empire building warlord King who wins some significant battles against the Saxons. Present in the story already is Merlin, a figure who emerges from several other Welsh legends and the story of his Father Uther Pendragon. A few names that would come to be key parts of the narrative are already present, including Gawain, Kay, Bedivere, Guinevere and significantly to later stories Mordred who is Arthur’s nephew and who betrays him while Arthur is fighting in Gaul, and upon Arthur’s return both are killed in battle after which Arthur is taken to the mysterious Isle of Avalon. Not present yet is Lancelot who will be a key figure in the spine of the King Arthur stories, and also importantly there is no mention of any Holy Grail.

The second and perhaps most significant figure in the creation of the Arthurian legends is a French Troubadour known only as Chrétien de Troyes, literally the ‘Christian from Troyes,’ who later in the twelfth century wrote a series of romances based, he claims, on sources that were given to him, although it seems to mostly be his own creation. Chrétien de Troyes gives us stories that for the first time include the key figure of Lancelot and his fateful romance with Guinevere, and significantly Perceval and the first mention of the Holy Grail, a strange platter or dish that forms part of Chrétien’s mysterious narrative Perceval.

Perceval is cut short, it is assumed by either the death of the author or his patron in the French court, leaving the story tantalising unfinished before Perceval discovers what the Grail or the other strange images that surround it actually are. This resulted in a stream of attempts to finish the narrative which evolved throughout the thirteenth century, finally being shaped by an anonymous author in a French text called The Quest for the Holy Grail. In this text the grail has gone from being a mysterious platter to being a strange symbol for something like the beatific vision, blending crusade imagery and the finding of Jerusalem with the charged symbol of the mass, the mystery and reverence of which was at its peak during this time. The quest for the grail is not something Perceval finds but a challenge set by Arthur himself, and Perceval is just one of the knights who eventually attains the grail, one less significant than the hero Galahad, the son of Lancelot who himself cannot attain the grail because of his sinful affair with Guinevere.

This text is what constitutes the basis of the grail narrative in the most important collator of the Arthurian narrative and the one who gathers it into what most people today know at the recieved story, Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d’Arthur around the time of the War of the Roses in the late fifteenth century. By this time the printing press was emerging and Le Morte d’Arthur was published by London printer William Caxton in 1485 and widely read. To many today Malory may be known second hand through the books of T.H. White, whose Once and Future King series essentially retells Le Morte d’Arthur with a few of White’s own embellishments. The 1963 Disney King Arthur film The Sword in the Stone was based on White’s novel and author of the Harry Potter books J.K. Rowling cited White as an influence, calling his Arthur “Harry’s spiritual ancestor.”

Today though Arthur is probably known more in distant cliches than in any currently popular retelling, although he finds his way into many popular works of the modern West. Both Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings and Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films are King Arthur figures directly influenced by the stories, orphaned heroes waiting to obtain their magic swords and rescue a Kingdom.

But historically Arthur is not just a story. We are inclined today to see such stories simply as entertainment, but Arthur has been not just a hero but a figure that has been emulated throughout history. Arthur, Camelot and the round table really have shaped Britain, and really have been part of a mythology that Kings have sought to participate in. In 1278 Edward I performatively exhumed the claimed ‘bones of Arthur’ at Glastonbury Abbey to quell the Welsh claims of his return and identify his rule with the legendary King and as such was the first English King to invert the Welsh myth of Arthur as a figure fighting the British by his invasion of Wales. The detour on his final journey across the borders of Scotland as part of a similar less successful invasion may be because he wished to die in a place possibly associated with the Isle of Avalon.² Edward constructed a model of the Round Table that still survives today in Winchester Castle (image below) and his Grandson Edward III, one of the key figures in the first half of the Hundred Years War, took to Arthur as his Grandfather did and founded an order of chivalry that emulated Arthur’s knights of the round table. Henry VII named his first son Arthur and claimed descent from the legendary King, Henry VIII was also devoted to Arthur and had Edward I’s round table redecorated, including a Tudor rose and depicting himself as King Arthur. And all of this even rings into the modern age, the J.F.K. administration was referred to as Camelot, also the title of a Broadway show during JFK’s administration which he apparently listened to the music of as he fell asleep, Jackie Kennedy reported them both being particularly fond of the lyrics “Let it not be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

Edward I’s round table at Winchester Castle, photo credit: August Schwerdfeger (wikicommons)

If conservatives want a mythology to gloss their view of the decline of the West, King Arthur suits far better than the appropriation of Christianity. For most of these ARC conference figures, the attempt to use Christianity as a justification for whatever is good about our society that we are now losing requires a set of conflations that naturally fail to land, perhaps personally illustrated by Jordan Peterson’s confused relationship to actual belief. Using the teachings of a founder who told us to sell all we have and give it to the poor is hardly a source of mythos for the raging against the dying of the West and hardly a justification for its truth claims.

More importantly, the King Arthur mythology has a history of being both appropriated by various Kings as a justification for the consolidation of power, suiting what is essentially the conservatives aim, but more importantly simultaneously contains in it all of the tragedy and contradictions that any political or regal goal seeks to attain. Arthur is a hero, but also a tragic failure, and Lancelot one of the greatest flawed heroes ever created. The story and its heroes represent in their brilliance the tension that exists between temporality and transcendence, power and religious, personal heroism and devotional sainthood. They contain in them a lesson the ARC conservatives need to learn.

Part of the problem with the conservative appropriation of Christianity is that is leaves these contradictions unacknowledged. How can a religion that told us to reject the world be sold as a basis for everything we love about the Western world and its riches? How can a figure who told us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s be used for the conflation of religion and politics? How can the radical morality asked of personal Christian faith and exhibited throughout history by its saints be conflated with the compromises of political life?

The Arthur stories demand we wrestle with these questions, and even as they have been appropriated they have been employed as symbols of precisely these struggles ultimately drawn by the tensions between Christian piety and Knighthood created by Crusading in the era of these myth’s creation. Most brilliantly perhaps T.H. White used the stories to turn over his struggle with ideals of pacifism in the Second World War: in his books Arthur establishes the Round Table as a way of creating peace in a troubled land, then creates the Grail Quest to employ the energy of his knights who are wandering the land misbehaving and committing violence out of a lack of avenue for their energies. In all this Arthur becomes a frustrated and impotent figure, achieving a brief peace that ultimately unravels. Even the Grail Quest is a failure, the knights that actually find the Grail vanish in ecstacy, the rest return one by one leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.

White, relaying Malory, also draws out the tortured figure of Lancelot and his personal tensions between serving Arthur as a King and friend, his ideals of religious devotion in which he desires to be the purest and greatest knight, capable of performing miracles and ultimately obtaining the Grail, and his love for Guinevere who in spite of its sinfulness he is truly romanticly devoted to. Like Arthur, Lancelot is a flawed hero whose mistakes ultimately cause Arthur’s Kingdom to implode. He is forbidden the achievement of the Grail, finding it in a moonlit castle only to be burned at the doorway and left unconscious. In a sublime passage after his return from the quest he finds the other knights have been returning one by one complaining about Galahad, Lancelot’s son who has surpassed him as the perfect knight and will ultimately find the Grail, as being rude and haughty, and here White brings in Lancelot’s pained tension between his desire for the world and his longing for religious transcendence:

“You must remember that I have been away in strange and desert places, sometimes quite alone, sometimes in a boat with nobody but God and the whistling sea. Do you know, since I have been back with people, I have felt I was going mad? Not from the sea, but from the people. All my gains are slipping away, with the people round me. A lot of the things which you and Jenny say, even, seem to me to be needless: strange noises: empty. You know what I mean, ‘How are you?’ — ‘Do sit down.’ — ‘What nice weather we are having!’ What does it matter? People talk far too much. Where I have been, and where Galahad is, it is a waste of time to have ‘manners.’ Manners are only needed between people, to keep their empty affairs in working order. Manners makyth man, you know, not God. So you can understand how Galahad may have seemed inhuman, and mannerless, and so on, to the people who were buzzing and clacking about him. He was far away in his spirit, living on desert islands, in silence, with eternity.”³

In spite of his trouble with returning as a failure, Lancelot does stay in Camelot and continues his affair with Guinevere. In perhaps the most moving scene of the cycle, brought out brilliantly in T.H. White’s telling, a wounded knight is brought into the Kingdom seeking the best and purest knight in the world to heal him. In a great gathering all the knights, including king Arthur himself, try to heal the wounded knight and fail. Lancelot steps up last, the crowd expecting him to heal him, Lancelot bashfully refuses and is pushed to step up, plagued by the knowledge that he is not the pure knight everyone wishes or believes him to be, or that he wishes to be, and that he will be revealed. Mordred and Agravaine who have long suspected his affair and are seeking to expose him rub their hands in glee. Lancelot kneels before him with a prayer, and is amazingly granted a miracle by God. The knight’s wounds snap shut. The pavillion erupts into cheering and as Malory writes, Lancelot kneels down “And ever he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten”.

Eventually Mordred and Agravaine become tired of waiting for Lancelot to slip up. They demand King Arthur, who slightly ambiguously in the stories seems to be aware the entire time of Lancelot and Guinevere but loves them both too much to admit it, allows them to catch him in the act. Arthur has no choice and leaves Guinevere alone for a night. Mordred, Agravaine and a group of knights break in and catch Lancelot in her room. Cornered, Lancelot kills Agravaine, many of the knights and wounds Mordred, and flees, agreeing first to return to rescue Guinevere.

Guinevere is sentenced to be burned, many expect Lancelot to appear and so some of the knights agree not to do battle with him, including Sir Gareth who loves Lancelot and does not arm himself. Lancelot storms in and rescues Guinevere, but in the fog of the battle he kills several of his fellow knights, including, tragically, the unarmed and innocent Sir Gareth and his brother Sir Gaheris. Arthur is forced to pursue Lancelot to war into France, leaving Mordred in charge of the Kingdom. While Arthur and a Gawain furious at the killing of his innocent brothers surround Lancelot’s castle, Mordred usurps Arthur, takes over the Kingdom and Arthur is forced to return to a decisive battle in which he is killed, along with Mordred.

Lancelot and Guinevere will both eventually die independently having both taken up religious lives, and so have kind of happy endings, although the entire story is tragic and Arthur’s kingdom is lost. Perhaps then no story would better suit the ideals of anyone claiming that there is or could be a key to the salvation of societies or the peace of the West. What these stories reveal is how small failings of the most well intended people can unravel even the most lofty of ideals, and how those lofty ideals are always in a painful tension with the mud and dirt of reality. They both justify a romantic idealism and critique it at the same time, contain the highest of religious visions and show the struggle of making it real in the complexities of the world. Ultimately, the stories are honest about the fact that all empires and kingdoms end, and that all ideals set sail in history only for moments, and at their best are only glimpses of the ultimate vision proposed by the religion which the writers of the Arthurian stories have believed, glimpses of what is far away, on desert islands, in silence, with eternity.

Nonetheless, if those who wish to save the West from its demise were to declare themselves to be seeking a new Camelot, they would certainly not be out of line with history. By embodying the stories, countless kings have also embodied the contradictions, and lived out its glory and its tragedy. I’d go to an ARC conference where everyone went on about King Arthur, whether they acknowledged its profound tensions or not, for that would precisely be the point. By adopting a myth, they can’t help but live it. Appropriating Christianity ultimately becomes a kind of depressing circus, but appropriating Arthur in a way is part of the very contradiction of the stories. Arthur has lived on because he is a profoundly human myth, a story that only hints at the greater religious story from which it draws life. I don’t think Arthur is done speaking to the wrack of human history, as Malory claims it says on his grave: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus: Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King.

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1. Tommy Robinson on the PBD podcast, 2025: “What built Britain? Christianity…you don’t have to believe in Christianity, you don’t have to believe in Jesus, that’s what built us.”

2. See Helen Carr, The Sceptred Isle, Penguin 2025

3. T.H. White, The Ill Made Knight, 1940