Sennis (ed.): Cathars in Question

Antonio Sennis (ed.), Cathars in Question, (Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages vol.4, York Medieval Press 2016), vii, 332pp.

Reviewed by Elaine Graham-Leigh (www.redpuffin.co.uk)

The question of whether or not Western Europe from the mid-twelfth century onwards saw the development of organised dualist heresy is a contentious one. In R I Moore’s words, it has ‘proved not to be susceptible of resolution by the ordinary procedures of historical method alone.’ (p.273) This collection of essays records an attempt to shed some light on the issue, at the Catharism conference at University College London in 2013, subtitled ‘Balkan Heresy or Construct of a Persecuting Society?’

The subtitle is a fair summary of the battle lines on the Cathar question. In what might be termed the traditionalist corner is the view that Catharism, a dualist heresy departing from orthodox Christianity in believing in two Gods, the evil god of this world and the good god of heaven, arrived in western Europe from the Bogomils in Bulgaria and the Balkans in around 1140. It took root in Italy, the Rhineland and southern France, with sects forming their own ecclesiastical hierarchies, with bishops, deacons and dioceses, functioning as something akin to an alternative Church, until they were destroyed by the Inquisition.

In the sceptic corner, Catharism as an ‘ism’ is the creation first of hierarchically-minded inquisitors and second of similarly bureaucratically-biased historians. There is no evidence for organised dualism anywhere in western Europe in the twelfth century. The evidence for its existence by the mid-thirteenth century in Italy is better, but the significance of this evidence for the wider understanding of heresy is debatable. In Languedoc in particular, the heretics simply represented a local version of Christian spirituality, and only started to organise themselves (or to claim organisational structures) under attack by Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade from the early thirteenth century. Even late in the thirteenth century, heresy here was as much about dissent from the Church as it was about doctrinal difference. So far from being an organised alternative Church, heretics in Languedoc did not call themselves Cathars and were not referred to as such by the inquisitors. When they were called anything beyond ‘followers of the heretical depravity’, they were termed simply ‘good men’ or ‘good women’.

As Moore points out in his essay here, the two sides in this debate have ‘a surprising degree of agreement on such facts as are capable of being established.’ (p.257) The differences are in how these facts should be interpreted. On one level, this concerns our understanding of the fragmentary evidence for twelfth-century dualism, such as the contentious record of the Cathar Council of Saint-Félix. This was supposedly a meeting of organised dualists held in Languedoc in 1167, presided over by a certain Niquinta, identified as Nicetas, a Byzantine Greek and representative of the Bogomils. According to the surviving account, the Council consecrated three Cathar bishops and organised the boundaries of their dioceses, and so, if it can be relied upon, it is important evidence for organised dualism. The account is not, however, without its problems.

The account of the Council is contained in a charter dated 1232, which survives only in a copy in a seventeenth-century history of the Dukes of Narbonne by Guillaume Besse. Historians of medieval Languedoc are particularly reliant on seventeenth-century copies since many of the original charters were destroyed in the French Revolution. Many of these copies are reasonably reliable, beyond the odd copying error that could happen to anyone, but the Saint-Félix account has long been controversial, to the extent that a colloque was held in 2000 to consider its authenticity or otherwise. The colloque concluded that the document was unlikely to be a seventeenth-century forgery, although Monique Zerner, the organiser, remains sceptical as a result of her discovery of what look like earlier attempts by Besse at forging it. This does not preclude the possibility of it being a thirteenth-century forgery. It is certainly true that there are issues with the document which make its acceptance as an unimpeachable source a little tricky. One of the participants in the framing 1232 charter, for example, is named as Peire Isarn, called a bishop of the heretics in an Inquisition record from 1223. This Peire Isarn, however, was burnt for heresy in 1226. Bernard Hamilton, defending the document, argues that it is simply wrongly dated, with a copying error giving 1232 for its real date of 1223, but this smacks a little of special pleading. While this would be a simple transposition error in Arabic numerals, it is not such an obvious mistake when working in Roman. (p.141)

For the traditionalists, the Cathar Council shows how the heretics were imitating Church hierarchy and structure even in the twelfth century; for the sceptics, it is more likely to represent an attempt to claim an organisation and an antiquity which did not in fact exist. In that sense, it can be seen as an early example of what the sceptics see as a methodological error in the traditional approach, in that it creates a picture of heresy in the twelfth century through the prism of conditions in the thirteenth. If it is assumed that the clear presence of organised dualists in Italy by about 1250 means that there must also have been such organised dualism in Languedoc in the twelfth century, then evidence like the description of the Cathar Council of Saint-Félix becomes both more plausible and the tip of a heretical iceberg, existing just as it did a century later but only revealed in fragments. If, as the sceptics do, we take the view that the thirteenth-century evidence should not be read back on to the twelfth, then the twelfth-century scraps of evidence take on a different complexion.

It may be a rule that a methodological disagreement among historians is more likely to be vituperative than a dispute about facts. Moore comments that the conference’s aim was to reassess Catharism ‘through a debate in a non-confrontational spirit’ (p.257), but the tone of some of the articles here suggests that this was not entirely achieved. Here, for example, is sceptic Mark Pegg on historians who defend Catharism as a reality:

What distinguishes historians who persist in accepting (and defending) the reality of Catharism is…"how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal". This blinkered competence, where the achievements of older scholars are solemnly replicated, and all new research is wilfully ignored, consistently misunderstood, or vehemently rejected (and, every so often, a curious mix of all three), encourages either a studious treading of intellectual waters, hoping against hope that the tide is not turning, or a learned backstroke to around 1970, although, depending on the current, it is, more often than not, 1870. (p.21)

Not to be outdone, traditionalist John Arnold comments that Pegg’s conception of a locally-rooted spirituality represented by the good men had him sliding towards an Occitan nationalism ‘some of which is staunchly socialist, but other strands of which have roots in the Vichy regime.’ (p.75) David D’Avray, meanwhile, sums up Moore’s The War on Heresy in an elegantly silky put-down:

The key passages occur near the end of the book, by which time it would be easy for a reader to have decided what its central argument was and to miss Moore's conscientious record of evidence that complicates the overall picture, especially since the central thrust of the argument is foreground and the complexities are fitted in smoothly and quite unobtrusively, as in an Economist article. (p.177)

Both sides also at times imply that those on the other are guilty of incompetence at best, as for example in Peter Biller’s comments on mistranslations to omit Cathar titles in Moore’s The War on Heresy, (p.303) and Pegg’s that traditionalists like Caterina Bruschi and John Arnold interpret Inquisition sources as if oblivious to chronology. (p.36) Antonio Sennis, as referee, abstains from the more colourful language but does not manage to be quite even-handed, coming down in favour, for example, of key traditionalist pieces of evidence like the Saint-Félix document. That the last word is given to arch-traditionalist Peter Biller may also be a suggestion of in which direction the editorial sympathies lay.

Such academic bad temper may make the collection entertaining reading for those of us whose works, mercifully, are not referred to by either side. There are however differences of real importance here. The implications of the sceptical view go beyond the question of how evidence from the thirteenth century can, or cannot, be used to illuminate the twelfth, to throw into question our entire use of Inquisition records as reliable evidence for the nature and extent of organised heresy.

The traditional view treats the Inquisition records which form the bulk of the evidence for heresy as largely truthful accounts of what was said to the inquisitors. The inquisitors may have been interpreting and expressing the testimonies in language and concepts familiar to them, but in essence, they were recording what they found. For the sceptics, on the other hand, the Inquisition records show what the inquisitors expected to hear from those they interrogated; expectations which shaped both how they recorded testimonies and what the heresy suspects told them. This is not say that the Inquisition records are not useful as historical sources, but they cannot be treated as one step away from interview transcripts. This understanding of the nature of the Inquisition records poses distinct challenges for how they can be used to reconstruct what may have lain behind individual testimonies. It also calls into question assumptions that the traditional view has made about the big picture of heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The traditional view of inquisitors as honest recorders of the heresy they found assumes first that this heresy had an objective existence outside the prejudices and expectations of the inquisitors. If the Inquisition had not existed, the heresy would still have been there; and presumably with greater numbers of believers, since part of the traditional view is usually the conclusion that the Inquisition was fundamentally successful. The areas on which the inquisitors came to concentrate, and from which the greatest numbers of heresy convictions came, can therefore be taken to be those with the greatest prevalence of objectively-existing heresy. Thus, for example, Malcolm Lambert comments in his The Cathars about Carcassonne’s revolt against the Inquisition in the late thirteenth century: ‘Authority stood firm; the evidence is sufficient to show that the accusations were not generally based on prejudice and that despite irregularities the old religion still had a residual hold, even among its high officials and leading citizens.’ (Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Blackwell, Oxford 1998), p.227)

It is indeed true that Carcassonne saw many more heresy accusations than some other neighbouring towns, like Narbonne, which had markedly few. The implication of the sceptical view of the Inquisition evidence however is that this does not indicate that there were simply fewer heretics in Narbonne than in Carcassonne. It suggests that there were so many accusations of heresy in Carcassonne because the Inquisition was there, and comparatively little heresy in Narbonne because here the inquisitors did not have free rein. The inquisitors were not diligently rooting out heresy which would have been flourishing without them so much as creating it through repression.

The question of whether and how authorities should deal with what they perceive to be dangerously deviant thought is a decidedly contemporary one, and one which is clearly an ethical issue for a number of the authors here. This is perhaps another reason why the debate has become more than usually fraught. John Arnold does not see the traditional/sceptic division as a left/right political issue, speculating that the Anglophone scholars at least ‘would all see themselves as left-leaning to at least some degree.’ (p.73) Within that, however, he sees the sceptic position as seeing the people of Languedoc and northern Italy too much as passive victims of repression: ‘to make ‘heresy’ only the product of orthodox power is to impute to that power an overwhelming hegemony that is in danger of making the people subjected to it disappear.’ (p.76) To view them as organised heretics, on the other hand, is to see them as active agents, capable of fighting back. For her part, Claire Taylor sees sceptical denial of the religious motivations of heretics as the key moral problem: ‘This matters at an ethical level, because by being cleverly iconoclastic and populist in suggesting that those using 'Cathar' have made 2+2=5, Pegg and now Moore have 2+2=3. The missing element is a dissident religious doctrine, for which historians using a fuller range of sources believe thousands of people were prepared to suffer extreme persecution and an agonising death.’ (p.244)

The sceptics’ case also has a political side, although not perhaps stated as explicitly in this volume. The traditionalist view of Catharism presents it as an outside-context problem for the Church. Heretics and their ideas infected parts of medieval Europe from the East, and had to be dealt with. While it would be hard to find any modern historian actively supporting the Inquisition, it is notable particularly in traditionalist accounts how sympathetically the inquisitors are often portrayed. We may not approve of their methods, but there often seems to be a tacit understanding that faced with the objective existence of an existential threat in Catharism, they had to do something. If, however, this foreign, organised dualism had no real existence independent of attempts to eradicate it, then the question we are asking becomes why it was necessary to construct unorganised dissent as an existential threat, and what that leads us to understand about the nature of medieval power. 

A sceptical view of heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certainly does not have to deny agency to those persecuted by the Inquisition, or to see them as passive victims because it does not see them as Cathars. As Théry-Astruc points out in this volume, all sorts of dissent, including opposition to the Inquisition, were routinely classified as heresy, as was opposition to the Albigensian Crusade, even late in the thirteenth century. (A Toulousan accused of inciting a riot in 1269 by shouting out that ‘we are as oppressed as the Jews of Jew Street’ defended himself with the claim that his father and brother had fought alongside the crusaders.) There was plenty of resistance so to classify. By the late thirteenth century, Carcassonne and Albi were in near-constant rebellion against the Inquisition, culminating in 1303 when the people of Carcassonne expelled the inquisitors and broke open the Inquisition prison. Many of the participants in this long-running resistance were condemned as heretics, but we have no real evidence that they were members of an organised heretical sect, or that they believed any unorthodox doctrine. They were simply opposed to the Inquisition, and prepared to use their agency to rebel against it.

Accounts of heresy in Languedoc and Italy from the twelfth to the twenty-first century have tended to reify it; to turn it into an ‘ism’ with a defined hierarchy and set of beliefs. Without the edifice that is Catharism, we are faced with a more nuanced picture of the interplay of repression and resistance. This is perhaps more challenging than the comfortable orthodoxy, but it has also the potential to be more rewarding. One effect of understanding Catharism as a foreign body infecting Languedoc in particular has been to divide how we see Languedoc from how we view spirituality and dissent elsewhere in Europe. If other areas were not infected by Catharism, how could they be usefully comparable? It may well be, however, that figures like the good men of Languedoc were not unknown elsewhere in Europe, it was just that in those other parts of Europe, they did not have to be treated as heretics. The sceptical view opens up the possibility of considering the reasons for that difference. Our understanding of medieval Europe would be all the better for it.

Elaine Graham-Leigh
Independent scholar
Elaine Graham-Leigh is the author of The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade (Boydell and Brewer, 2005).

Ritchie (dir.), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2)

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, directed by Guy Ritchie, © Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2017.

Reviewed by Usha Vishnuvajjala (ukv630@gmail.com)

Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) has done poorly at the box office and received lukewarm reviews from film critics; however, a number of medieval and especially Arthurian scholars have found it to be interesting, entertaining, and less objectionable than they might have expected. Its unexpected plot, drawn very loosely from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regun Britanniae, and its often bizarre pastiche of character traits, settings, subplots, and conflicts that seem to reference everything from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films to Batman Begins to The Empire Strikes Back make for a somewhat overwhelming experience. Throw in a number of actors in minor parts who have appeared in other Arthurian and medievalist films and TV shows, a soundtrack laden with ominous deep-bass thrumming, an alarming number of nameless and featureless female characters whose only purpose seems to be as human sacrifices or plot devices, and a bland villain whose obsessive and murderous quest for power seems to come from largely unexplained supernatural forces, and we get a film that is difficult to categorize. Its brand of humor and its attempts to be forward-thinking with respect to gender also fall short.

Of course, the fact that the film is a confusing mishmash of sources and genres with politics that are difficult to parse is a way in which it resembles what seems to be the main literary source for its opening plot, Geoffrey’s Historia (although Vortigern is mentioned in plenty of earlier sources that claim to be historical). Geoffrey’s version of Vortigern becomes king by overthrowing King Constans, whom he serves as an earl and an advisor.  Although Constans is Arthur’s uncle (brother of Uther) in the Historia, Vortigern is not. After losing the crown to his own son Vortimer and gaining it back after Vortimer is poisoned and killed by Vortigern’s wife, Geoffrey’s Vortigern follows the orders of magicians and has a massive fortress built in Wales, which turns out to be unstable because of two dragons that live underneath it.

The plot of Ritchie’s film is instigated by Vortigern, here Uther’s younger brother, becoming power-hungry after holding Uther’s crown during a battle and then killing his own wife in order to obtain power from the three sirens that live in the river under Camelot so that he can kill Uther and Uther’s wife and seize power for himself. The young Arthur, who Uther was trying to spirit away to safety, drifts down the river in a boat and is rescued, Moses-like, by women washing clothes in the river in Londinium (which looks like Rome, complete with Coliseum and what appear to be seven hills). He is raised in a brothel, and during a rapid flash-forward is shown to grow into a boxer or brawler and petty thief who also profits from the workings of the brothel by functioning as a sort of manager and enforcer (I stop just short of calling him a pimp, although the term might not be incorrect in this case), who is secretly amassing a fortune of gold coins which he keeps hidden in chests. Meanwhile, now-King Vortigern, fearing that Arthur still lives, requires every man of a certain age to come to Camelot to attempt to pull Excalibur from a stone, so that he can kill the one who successfully does, ensuring his own reign and potentially seeking to pass on the crown to his own daughter. Vortigern is also building a great tower, which is unstable and supported by supernatural forces; it is revealed at the film’s end to contain a giant serprent, which Vortigern cannot control. Throughout this first section of the movie, the silly dialogue and physical humor of the Londinium scenes is intercut with the brutal, murderous, too-serious-to-take-seriously scenes at Camelot, which is built into a mountainside and most closely resembles a Himalayan Buddhist monastery with Vortigern’s impossibly tall and modern (magic) tower added.

This early section of the film also attempts to paint a culturally and linguistically diverse London with gender politics that the film seems to view as progressive. The city is full of people who look different from each other and speak different languages; Arthur quips to one of his lackeys, who complains that a non-British associate doesn’t “speak English good,” that he speaks it better than the lackey (there is no attempt to differentiate between Britons and Anglo-Saxons in this film; the Briton are “English” and speak English). Tom Wu plays a character in Arthur’s circle who is referred to as “Chinese George” to distinguish him from the other George. This almost banal reference to ethnic difference is echoed later in the film when Arthur says to Bedivere, played by Djimon Hounsou as a sort of wise senior advisor, that he doesn’t want to hear what Bedivere has to say about Arthur’s past unless Bedivere is Arthur’s real father, which Arthur thinks is unlikely. I don’t wish to minimize the importance of casting actors of color in “canonical” Arthurian roles, or of referring to their race in these banal ways, which has the effect of both recognizing difference and rejecting the possibility that it is a problem. These are important developments. But they still appear alongside the depiction of women as little more than wives and prostitutes, almost all of whom are nameless and end up dead, and alongside a sarcastic and often violent masculinity, which is not really tempered by the fact that Arthur calls other men things like “sweetheart” and “honey tits,” however much the film’s writers might want it to be. It is also not tempered by the fact that Arthur’s overconfidence is at times revealed by the woman known as “The Mage,” who appears as a sort of Merlin figure to train Arthur for the mental and spiritual tasks he will face in order to reclaim the throne (these scenes resemble the training scenes from The Empire Strikes Back more than a little bit). There are few women in the film who have names or agency (“The Mage,” however important she is, is known only by her affiliation – she is one of the people known as “The Mage” and has no name or title beyond that).

Beyond all of that, though, lies the question of what this film gains by being Arthurian. It would be a perfectly (or at least equally) coherent film if it was about a young Roman, English, or British prince who was disinherited by his evil and power-hungry uncle. The Arthurian references are surprisingly minimal: beyond the names Arthur, Uther, Vortigern, Camelot, Excalibur, Bedivere, and Perceval, and the brief mentions of characters named Mordred and Merlin at the beginning of the film, the film has little to do with Arthurian texts, medieval or modern. What it does seem to do, though, is draw on the cultural and political capital of “King Arthur” in order to give the film’s plot stakes that it wouldn’t have on its own. As Arthur travels upriver to Camelot, pulls the sword out of the stone, escapes the public execution Vortigern arranges for him, and travels Britain with his small band of Robin Hood-style outlaws, learning to conquer his own memories and demons so that he can wield the magical sword that shows him things he does not want to remember, I repeatedly wondered why we were supposed to care whether this swaggering boxer and pickpocket who profits from the economic hardship of women lived or died. The answer to that question does not come from the film; the answer seems to be “because he is King Arthur.” Although most great—or even interesting—Arthurian texts, both medieval and modern, reinterpret a kernel of a story for their own times, incorporating an assortment of sources and adding new material as they seem fit, what they must also do is introduce or build their own stakes, whether they are political, moral, or aesthetic. Whether one finds their stakes compelling, modern Arthurian works by Mark Twain, T.H. White, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Boorman, Tay Garnett, Antoine Fuqua, and others all build stakes for their own plots, ultimately adding to the trove of Arthurian texts rather than merely using that trove’s existence to justify creating a work in which little is at stake. In that sense, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword fails to be a compelling addition to the large canon of Arthurian films.

Usda Vishnuvajjala, American University

Ritchie (dir.), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (1)

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, directed by Guy Ritchie, © Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2017.

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)

Charlie Hunnam as Arthur (left) and Jude Law as Vortigern

The critics and the trades have not been kind: The Wall Street Journal opined that the film was “Morte on Arrival” (12 May 2017: A12), and Variety even criticized the outfits which the members of the cast wore to the Hollywood premiere (16 May 2017: 37).  Ritchie’s film, like all examples of cinema Arthuriana (be they indebted to the legend of the once and future king tangentially so or more) is inevitably caught between a rock and a hard place.  They must confront what Norris J. Lacy has called an audience’s expectations which are tied to the “tyranny of tradition” (Arthurian Interpretations 4.1 [1989]), despite the apparent latitude provided by Helen Cooper’s dictum in the three-part Films for Humanities series Tracing the Arthurian Legend that each age invents the Arthur it needs.  To attempt to retell all of Malory—cinema’s favorite putative source for all things Arthurian—on the screen is impossible, yet cinematic references to, and nods in the direction of, versions of the tale(s) that Malory told are ubiquitous, as just the Indiana Jones, Shrek, Despicable Me, Kingsman, Mad Max, and Transformers franchises prove—and, indeed, Ritchie intended his film to launch his own Arthurian franchise.

In addition to this tangential ubiquity of the Arthuriad on the screen (and on television—HBO’s The Affair, for instance), we have generally had one full-fledged, big budget attempt a decade to retell the legend on film—each age invents the Arthur it needs.  John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) originally had its many admirers both inside and outside the academy, but it has not held up well.  Indeed, when I showed it to a combined upper-level undergraduate-graduate class last semester, many of my students laughed throughout the film. Jerry Zucker’s First Knight (1995) has never recovered from its initial designation as the Arthurian film people love to hate.  Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) dredged up the theory of Arthur’s Sarmatian origins and presented a maddeningly conflicted portrait of Guinevere who is transformed from an initial full-throttled gender-liberated Boudicca-like figure to a more than annoyingly conventional bride dressed in white gown and veil.  And, now, in 2017, we have Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

To his credit, Ritchie does not attempt to retell all of Malory, or of some other more or less complete version of the Arthuriad.  His sources are very different—than Malory and from themselves.  His principal debts would appear to be both medieval and modern: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the television version of Game of Thrones—a work that may yet prove the most enduring source for post-medievalism, but that argument needs to be explored more fully elsewhere.  Ritchie is also indebted, in no particular order, to the story of the infant Moses floating among the reeds on the Nile, the account of Hannibal and his elephants, the legend of Robin Hood, the cases of Sherlock Holmes, the martial training typically undertaken by Kung Fu masters and gladiators, the Harry Potter series in print and on screen, Macbeth’s “weird sisters,” Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Viking raids on England, some of his own previous films, and even the Trumpian tendency to miscalculate the size of crowds, though here Vortigern underestimates (rather than overestimates) the size of the adoring masses who show up to see him (try to) execute Arthur.  They are not, as Vortigern avers, in the hundreds, but in the millions.  There are also in the film all kinds of winks and nods and in jokes, along with a brief appearance by David Beckham as a bad-ass black-armor clad knight named “Trigger”—presumably without any intended reference to the horse once ridden by the King of the Cowboys.

From the Arthuriad, Ritchie has been selective in what he has borrowed.  His film includes Mordred as a rebel Mage who is killed off early in the film, Uther and Igraine without even a mention of the “unusual” coupling that produced Arthur, Vortigern and his tower, a sword originally firmly embedded in a stone and later returned by the Lady of the Lake after it has been cast upon the waters by an Arthur reluctant to embrace his destiny, an almost completed round table, and an assortment of knights, some whose names are familiar enough (Percival and Bedivere) and some whose names are not (George and “Goose Fat” Bill)—all enhanced with non-stop CGI effects and an at-times deafening soundtrack.

As the film opens, Uther is intent upon putting an end to a war between his people and the Mage, little knowing that his younger brother, Vortigern, has been plotting with Mordred, the Mage’s leader, to seize the throne from his brother.  Uther defeats Mordred, whose armies arrive atop and within huge elephants, and peace would seem to be at hand but for Vortigern’s schemes.  In seizing the throne, he is aided by three cephalopodan “weird sisters” worthy of the Scottish play, who demand he sacrifice his wife—and eventually his daughter—to achieve the victories he wants, in a devil’s bargain that outdoes that made by Agamemnon.  Vortigern—Jude Law on steroids who spends most of the film delightfully chewing up the scenery and seemingly having a better time being in the film than most critics had in watching it—is the nastiest of villains.  Law is a Ritchie veteran, having played Watson in the director’s deconstruction—some would argue destruction—of the story Sherlock Homes, and the huge snarling dogs that guard his throne are worthy of the Baskervilles.  Vortigern kills Uther and Igraine, and the boy Arthur escapes Vortigern, floating in a small boat Moses-like down the Thames to Londinium, a metropolis whose on-screen population seems as culturally diverse as that of its present day namesake.  Once in Londinium, Arthur is rescued not by Pharaoh’s daughter but by some kind- hearted prostitutes, who rear him, until he can in turn provide them protection from their at times less than genteel clientele, who include the odd Viking, it turns out, under the protection of Vortigern.

More than somewhat of a light-weight to play Arthur, Charlie Hunnam is nonetheless a Ritchie type—indeed he seems straight out of the director’s 1998 breakout film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels in scenes replete with the director’s stock stop action camera work and he-said-he-said patter. Like the characters in Two Smoking Barrels, Arthur and his crew here are good-natured con men and petty criminals enforcing their own code of justice among the poor and oppressed against a totally corrupt civil authority—think Robin Hood light.  Vortigern, cursed by the promise that whosoever draws the sword from the stone will be rightful king, demands every able bodied man in his kingdom attempt to do so—he is also, for good measure, buying off the Vikings by promising them 5000 boys a year in tribute. Medieval versions of the Arthuriad have Arthur himself taking a page from Herod as he murders thousands of boys in an attempt to prevent Mordred, his successor, from growing up.  Here the boys are simply being sent off as human tribute, as Vortigern’s England has become a vassal state to the Vikings.

Arthur draws the sword from the stone, but is unable to harness its power.  Imprisoned by Vortigern who wants a show trial to debunk the myth that has sprung up around Arthur, the reluctant hero is rescued by Mage and a motley crew of renegade knights, whose number include Aidan Gillen’s “Goose Fat Bill.”  Gillen is Little Finger (a pimp no less) in Game of Thrones, one of Ritchie’s sources, and Gillen and Hunnam have an earlier connection though the British version of the television series Queer as Folk, in which Hunnam played the gay teenager who is seduced by (and subsequently becomes a lover to) the older Gillen’s character.  And other of these renegade knights have just as unusual an assortment of monikers as do the crew in Two Smoking Barrels.

When Arthur is finally rescued from Vortigern, he is not at all eager to embrace the destiny that is his.  Only when he learns that Vortigern has destroyed the brothel that was his home and killed many of his friends does he overcome his initial reluctance.  To prepare for what destiny holds for him, he has the expected passage through nature that tests many a hero, and which introduces him to a number of nightmare-like creatures that will be all too familiar to fans of Harry Potter, most notably a very, very large serpent.  Having regained Excalibur with help from the Lady of the Lake, Arthur prepares to defeat Vortigern, whose power is tied to the height of the Godfriedian tower that he is building.  In a final battle, Arthur manages to kill the overly steroidal and now CGI enhanced Vortigern, and establish peace in his realm, “renegotiating” the treaty with the Vikings, and, with an obvious nod to an anticipated sequel, beginning work on the round table.

Given the film’s dismal performance when it opened, and its cost—it reportedly cost more than $300 million to make and took in less than $15 million its first weekend—a Ritchie Arthurian franchise seems a slim possibility, which is in some ways unfortunate.  King Arthur is not a great film—whether there are any great Arthurian films is a matter of some debate. (There are certainly great medieval films—Alexander Nevsky, The Nibelungenlied, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, and The Virgin Spring for starters.)  Ritchie’s film does avoid the trap of other examples of cinema Arthuriana (and the tyranny of tradition) in not trying to tell the whole story of Arthur.  And, if each age does indeed invent the Arthur it needs, ours is an age without great heroes—and, perhaps worse, one without any recognition that we even need great heroes.  Hunnam’s low-keyed Arthur might, therefore, be just the Arthur for our times.  And with its sources in Geoffrey and in Game of Thrones, Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a more than interesting, double-barreled mix of both medievalism and post-medievalism as film.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, directed by Guy Ritchie from a screenplay by Joby Harold, Guy Ritchie, and Lionel Wigram from a story by David Dobkin and Joby Harold. Cast: Charlie Hunnam (Arthur), Jude Law (Vortigern), Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (Mage), Djimon Hounsou (Bedivere), Aiden Gillen (“Goose-Fat” Bill), Eric Bana (King Uther Pendragon), Poppy Delevingne (Igraine), Freddie Fox (Rubio), Craig McGinlay (Percival), Kinglsey Ben-Adir (Wet Stick), Neil Maskell (Back Lack), Bleu Landai (Blue), Tom Wu (George), Michael McElhatton (Jack’s Eye), Annabelle Wallis (Maggie), Peter Fernando (the Earl of Mercia), Mikael Persbrandt (Greybeard), David Beckham (Trigger), Rob Knighton (Mordred). USA/Australia © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc., 2017. 126 minutes.

Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University