Now that I’ve finished writing about Uther, I have been reading other people’s versions.
The story in its early medieval versions operates on the ugly edges of desire, where obsession lurks and destroys both the object of desire and the person doing the desiring. If ever there was as story to illustrate the idea that identity is fluid, and if desire is desire for the desire of the other and we are willing to transform ourselves to become the object of that desire, this is it.
In ‘Midsummer Night And Other Tales In Verse’ (1928) John Masefield (1878-1967) provides an example of the problem caused by rewriting a story to make it acceptable for ‘modern’ sensibilities. Interestingly, he tells the story twice.
In ‘The Begetting of Arthur’, the longer of the two versions, there is no magic, no Merlin there is no transformation, there is no deception of the woman, and the lovers are married before they consummate their relationship (ain’t euphemisms lovely?).
In this version, Uther is trying to unite Britain. He goes to Cornwall to try and talk the King, Melchyon, into joining him. Melchyon is ‘aged savage mean and grim’ and baron Breuse the Heartless ‘of all men the worst’ lives with him. The king dismisses Uther. As he’s about to leave, he meets Ygern, the King’s daughter, and they fall instantly in love. Uther turns around and goes back to ask the king for her hand. Her father refuses his request, thinking Uther’s simply trying to ‘win my power through a bride’. As Uther and his two companions ride away, Ygern’s sister catches up with them, and tells him that Ygern is to be married that night to Breuse the Heartless.
To save her, Uther concocts a plan to sneak back to Tintagel, wearing a disguise of ‘crown and scarlet and a sheep-wool beard.’knowing the Porter is old and will be half asleep. He gets in, finds a waiting Ygerne, they immediately escape to the old Hermit (Bran the Blest) who immediately marries them.
They flee Cornwall, riding day and night, until out of Merchyon’s land, before consummating their marriage in a suitably romantic outdoor spot ‘in this orchard of the fairy queen’ but Merchyon and Breuse catch up with them and murder Uther while he’s sleeping. Ygern is taken back to Tintagel to await the birth of her son.
Give Masefield his dues, it enjoyable, he was an a skilful narrative poet. It reads like a literary version of a ballad. It’s reminiscent of The Eve of Saint Agnes as the lovers creep out of the castle and make their escape, except it’s more dramatic than Keats’ poem.
But the story itself, stripped of magic and made decent for the moral reader, is as dead as Uther’s fake woollen beard. He is heroic and moral and utterly forgettable.
In the same collection, Masefield tells another version of the same story. ‘The Old Tale of the Begetting’. He introduced the poem: The men of old who told the tale for us/Declare that Uther begat Arthur thus’.
It’s much shorter, 10 rhyming couplets with a final stanza of three lines, against seven pages of ‘The Begetting of Arthur’. This is the familiar version, with Merlin and magic, deception of the woman, and it ends with Uther crowing and Ygrain distraught ;
Uther drinks and boasts at his board,
Ygrain sings for her dead lord:
‘Would I were pierced though with a sword’.
It’s possible Masefield was trying to mimic a ballad in ‘popular form’, and thought this sounded like the story if it had been told by someone uneducated or at least ‘non-literary’. But whatever the intention, it isn’t a version of the story that can be taken seriously. Remember, this is the man who wrote ‘Cargoes’.
His rhyming couplets and diction undermine any seriousness the story might have had.
‘Uther saw Ygrain the Bright/His heart went pit-pat at the sight’.
or
‘He said to Merlin, ‘Make her mine/Or you’ll be hog’s meat for my swine’.
An uncharacteristically awkward syntax also spoils the story.
‘As he climbed into the Queen’s bed/Ygrain’s Duke on the moors fell dead’.
‘The Begetting of Arthur’, if you don’t know the usual version of the story, makes sense, but as a version of the story, it’s like watching an earnest, well-made film that somehow misses the point. ‘The Old tale of the Begetting’ puts the usual version at a distance, and manages to simultaneously tell the story and mock it.
Cleaning up a medieval story so it’s acceptable usually means killing whatever made the story hold its readers’ attention for centuries.
