King Arthur returns, in strange literary guises

Once upon a time, in the early days of Christianity, on the dark, Northern edge of civilization, there was a brave king named Arthur who held court in Camelot and defended Britain against invaders.

Or maybe not.

(W.W. Norton) - “The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation” by Simon Armitage.

(W. W. Norton) - “Finding Camlann” by Sean Pidgeon.

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Although Clive Owen and Keira Knightley were very hot together in the Hollywood movie, they fall somewhat short as reliable archaeological evidence.

But beggars can’t be choosy. As archaeological evidence goes, the King Arthur Carrousel at Disneyland is about as good as anything else we’ve got. Fifteen hundred years later, there’s no real proof that King Arthur even existed — let alone Camelot, the Round Table or any of the other fantastical elements of the Arthurian myth.

One of the earliest accounts of the great king shows up in an inventive work of “history” by a 9th-century Welsh monk, but we don’t get the whole story well-told — the sword in the stone, the Lady of the Lake, the love triangle — until hundreds of years after Arthur and Mordred supposedly battled to the death at Camlann, wherever that might be.

Legend has it that Arthur didn’t actually die but merely fell into a sleep from which he’ll arise again when his people need him. And that part of the story, at least, is true. With magic that would make Merlin jealous, poets and politicians and novelists and cartoonists have resurrected the once and future king for every age and commercial application.

His latest appearance comes in a scholarly thriller by Sean Pidgeon called “Finding Camlann.” An editor of science books, Pidgeon has woven 16 years of dusty research and notecards into this novel about the search for the “real” Arthur. Like Ross King, Michael Gruber and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, he’s writing in that curious tradition of academic sleuths: professors and librarians recast as death-defying detectives. For us easily winded bibliophiles, such tales are the best thing to happen to our fantasy lives since the invention of tweed.

The hero of “Finding Camlann” is Donald Gladstone, our knight in shining footnotes. He’s a recently divorced archaeologist who’s working on a book about the transmission of the Arthurian legend. His primary concern is that other, less cautious scholars are trying to make the search for Arthur sound too exciting. In that sense, “Finding Camlann” is something of a corrective. “My point,” he tells a friend didactically, “is that we won’t ever know very much about that period of British history, and it’s a mistake to try too hard to fill in the blanks.” All very good and proper, but something of a wet dissertation to throw over a literary thriller.

In the opening pages, a competing archaeologist whom Donald disdains has unearthed a burial pit near Stonehenge containing 15 human skeletons, most of which were “subjected to a particularly gruesome kind of ritual sacrifice.” Now we’re getting somewhere! Much to Donald’s chagrin, even before these ancient remains can be definitively dated, this flamboyant competitor announces that he may have discovered King Arthur’s grave.