Lewis is operating here in a particular tradition of historicizing the Arthurian legend. Given the fictional context, I’m not sure the extent to which Lewis is personally endorsing such a view. But his Prof. Dimble is clearly drawing on some scholarly trends that were popular for much of the twentieth century, and would have been current in 1945 when That Hideous Strength appeared. These trends were not invented out of nothing—they do respond to certain features in the source texts, even if those features are now usually interpreted differently. That said, no serious scholar of Arthurian legend (or post-Roman Britain) today would endorse much, if any, of what Dimble says in this passage.

(The ‘serious’ is an important caveat, because there is an ever-growing heap of popular history books that claim to have “discovered” a historical prototype for Arthur, and/or Merlin, and/or other figures from the mythos; and, in doing so, revealed a thorough paradigm for the history, society, and culture of post-Roman Britain. Virtually none of these should be taken seriously. “How can you tell if a book about the historical Arthur is nonsense?” would be a fun post for another day.)

There were indeed social and cultural divisions in the post-Roman period during which Lewis and others set the Arthurian mythos. I’ll leave it to historians with a more granular knowledge of that era to discuss our current understanding of those cleavages in more depth. But while there was likely a spectrum of Romanization and Latinicity in the island’s population, perhaps loosely corresponding to lowland/south & east vs highland/north & west, our key documentary source from the post-Roman era—Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”; here is an old translation from an old edition), probably from the mid-6th century—has essentially nothing to say about such differences. Nor does Gildas pose a dichotomy between Roman and British, as Lewis’s Dimble does; on the contrary, he calls the Latin language “ours”, and refers to his countrymen as “citizens” (cives). His only reference to paganism is to ancient shrines crumbling away in ruined cities. Even when excoriating the sins of Magloconus (Maelgwn), king of Northern Wales where the druids once had their strongholds, Gildas has nothing to say about pagan religion. The druids do not seem to have much outlasted the Roman conquest in southern Britain, at least in any institutional sense (Scotland and especially Ireland are a little more complicated on that front). Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Britain, an excellent resource on the subject, surmises that “paganism had already lost its dominance [in post-Roman Britain] by the early fifth century, and was gone by the early sixth.” (By then, of course, a significant portion of the British population were practicing some kind of Germanic paganism; but that’s not what Lewis is referring to here.) So the dichotomies Lewis sketches here are not really accurate to the period under discussion.

Furthermore, the mapping of specific Arthurian characters onto this dichotomy is unsound, for the simple reason that the Arthurian mythos is a hodgepodge of influences and characters with different backgrounds, very few of which have clear links to fifth or sixth century history. Even so, Lewis seems to divide characters between his two camps based more in his perception of those characters in later myth (particularly Mallory’s late 15th century version) than in anything having to do with their origins. He calls Kay part of the “native strain,” but most etymologies for this character’s name point back to Latin “Caius.” Guinevere and Lancelot, in turn, are two very different characters with very different histories. Guinevere’s name is from the Welsh “Gwenhwyfar,” meaning “white/fair/holy spirit/phantom.” This, as you might imagine, has occasioned a great deal of excited speculation about the character’s otherworldly associations. The “-hwyfar” element is indeed old and obscure, so the name is unlikely to be a pure invention of the high Middle Ages. But the oldest references Arthur having a wife called Guennuvar or Gwenhwyfar—in the Latin Vita Gildae and the Welsh Culhwch ac Olwen, neither of which can be securely dated before the 12th century CE—offer no hints about her background. Both present her as essentially a passive asset to Arthur’s crown, and liable to be carried off by rapacious abductors. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (completed by 1139), she is indeed “a woman of noble Roman ancestry” (Neil Wright’s translation). But like most of Geoffrey’s tome, there isn’t much in the “pre-Galfridian” (pre-Geoffrey) sources to back this up.

Lancelot, by contrast, seems to have been invented by Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th century. He appears as a minor character in several of Chrétien’s romances, before making a proper name for himself in Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la Charette. This is Chrétien’s reworking of the Guinevere abduction story that appears in Vita Gildae. But whereas the older text has the queen rescued by the intercession of the holy man Gildas, Chrétien makes her savior the knightly Lancelot. Lancelot was never really re-adopted by Welsh tradition, as a number of Arthurian heroes from continental romance were; and attempts to identify him with various figures in (for instance) Culhwch ac Olwen have very little merit.

And Merlin, to take a final example, is a character that Geoffrey of Monmouth created by combining two quite different figures: Ambrosius Aurelianus, a probably-historical general mentioned by Gildas (who explicitly calls him a member of the “Roman race”) and associated with Wales and western England; and Myrddin Wyllt, a legendary poet-prophet associated with the Anglo-Scottish border. Myrddin’s name may be a back-formation from Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen). The -fyrddin element was originally Moridunum, “sea-fort,” but was re-analyzed as a personal name. (This theory is credited to A. O. H. Jarman, though it’s found wide acceptance since). Geoffrey called the character Merlinus, perhaps because “Merdinus” would have suggested merde, “shit,” to his Norman readership. Simply calling Merlin “British,” as Dimble does, is thus an immense oversimplification.

(cont.)