2025 and all that . . . . matters Arthurian

2025 has been a relatively quiet year on the Arthurian front, a noticeable absences of new claims of having identified King Arthur's grave or the usual pseudo-historical books claiming to have identified the 'Real King Arthur'. I'm sure they will be back next year! We have had a remarkable development in scientific techniques in reading a lost Merlin manuscript stitched into the cover of an Elizabethan register without the need to unfold it. And there have been several academic works published.

Rare Merlin manuscript read for the first time in hundreds of years
In 2019 fragments of a manuscript were found hidden in the binding of a 16th-century Elizabethan archival register for nearly 400 years at Cambridge University Library. The fragile 13th century manuscript fragment was found to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur.

The manuscript was identified as part of the French-language Suite Vulgate du Merlin, part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, which was a very popular medieval work but few now remain, has been identified as having been written between 1275 and 1315, a time when Arthurian romances were particularly popular among noblewomen, although the fragment is from a lost copy dated to around 1300.

'The Merlin', or the 'Merlin en Prose', or simply 'Prose Merlin', is the second part in the five part Lancelot-Grail cycle. The first section of the work recounts the life of Merlin and his efforts to promote the cause of Uther Pendragon, the father of Arthur, followed by Arthur’s ultimate rise to kingship and his coronation. The second section, called variously the 'Vulgate Suite de Merlin' also known as 'the Sequal section of the Prose Merlin', describes the events at Arthur’s court after his coronation, which serves as an introduction to the third part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, entitled the 'Lancelot en prose'. The 'Vulgate Suite de Merlin' should not be confused with the Suite de Merlin or the Prophesies de Merlin which while treating similar material both stem from different textual traditions.

Today there are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, with each one uniquely handwritten by individual medieval scribes. 

These fragments have now been digitised using cutting-edge techniques in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library. 

The medieval tale of Merlin tells the early years of King Arthur's court, positioned as a sequel to an earlier text written around 1200 in which Merlin is born a child prodigy with the gift of foresight and casts a spell to facilitate the birth of King Arthur, who proves his divine right to rule by pulling the sword from the stone. In the tale the magician becomes a blind harpist who later vanishes into thin air. He later reappears as a balding child who issues edicts to King Arthur wearing no underwear. Being the child of a woman impregnated by an incubus gave Merlin his shape-shifting powers. He asks to be Arthur's standard bearer on the battlefield. Arthur agrees and Merlin turns up with a magic, fire-breathing dragon.

After being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, this rare manuscript fragment miraculously survived through the centuries after being folded, torn, and stitched into the binding of the book making it almost impossible for the experts at Cambridge to access it, read it, or confirm its origins without risking any damage in unpicking the binding.

Using  multispectral imaging (MSI), CT scanning and 3D modelling the researchers at the library were able to digitally capture the most inaccessible parts of the fragile parchment without unfolding or unstitching it. This preserved the 700 year old manuscript in situ and avoided irreparable damage while at the same time allowing the heavily faded fragment to be virtually unfolded, digitally enhanced and read for the first time in centuries in March 2025.

>> Lost manuscript of Merlin and King Arthur legend read for the first time after centuries hidden inside another book

Arthurian books published in 2025

The Arthurian World edited by Victoria Coldham-Fussell, et al, (Routledge, first paperback edition published 2025). This book includes several essays on the Arthurian legend, covering topics like Arthur in early Welsh tradition and post-medieval interpretations.

This collection provides an innovative and wide-ranging introduction to the world of Arthur by looking beyond the canonical texts and themes, taking instead a transversal perspective on the Arthurian narrative. Together, its thirty-four chapters explore the continuities that make the material recognizable from one century to another, as well as transformations specific to particular times and places, revealing the astonishing variety of adaptations that have made the Arthurian story popular in large parts of the world.

Divided into four parts—The World of Arthur in the British Isles, The European World of Arthur, The Material World of Arthur, and The Transversal World of Arthur — the volume tracks the legend’s movement across temporal, geographical, and material boundaries. Broadly chronological, each part views the unfolding Arthurian story through its own lens, while temporal and geographical overlaps between the sections underscore the proximity of these developments in the legend’s history.

Studies in Arthurian and Chronicle Traditions in Memory of Fiona Tolhurst, Edited by Dorsey Armstrong, K S Whetter (DS Brewer, 2025). A collection of essays from Boydell & Brewer that examines Arthurian and Chronicle texts.

Essays examining Arthurian and Chronicle texts, contexts, and reception, in honour of Fiona Tolhurst's contributions to Arthurian Studies. In her all-too-short but ground-breaking academic career, Fiona Tolhurst made significant contributions to the discipline of Arthurian Studies, advancing, amongst much else, understanding of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthurian Women, the English Mortes, and modern Arthuriana, including cinematic versions of the legend. The essays assembled here reflect her commitment to explication of Arthurian and Chronicle texts and contexts. Several engage with Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining, among other topics, the depiction of women in his narrative of British origins; the function of giants and significance of landscape and geography in his writings; the contrast between Geoffrey's Trojan-British empire and the Graeco-Egyptian foundation narratives of Scottish and Irish chronicles; and the reception and use of his writing from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Other contributors consider characterization and politics in the Brut tradition and Malory; the puzzling dualities of the alliterative Morte; the reception of Malory's "Trystram"; continuities between medieval and modern readings of the Morte Darthur; and the uses, adaptation, and appropriation of Arthurian themes and ideals in the twenty-first century. 

King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition, Andrew Breeze (Uppsala Books, 2025). A scholarly analysis of the Arthurian legend from medieval sources to modern criticism, including chapters on Arthur's historicity, Merlin, and key texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition is a book that revolutionizes our understanding of Britain’s history and early literature. It begins with a compelling demonstration of ‘King’ Arthur as no figure of legend, but a flesh-and-blood warrior of the sixth century. He was not a ruler, but a North British champion fighting other North Britons during the terrible ‘volcanic winter’ of 536-7, and dying a soldier’s death in the latter year at Camlan or Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall. Arguments for this are followed by chapters on Arthur in the literatures of medieval Britain as perceived by scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They include chapters on modern understanding of the Welsh Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Layamon’s Brut, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Thomas Malory’s prose Morte Darthure, the last printed in 1485 by William Caxton. Besides these is dramatic proof on the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, using evidence set out by Ann Astell to identify its author as the Cheshire magnate Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), who will have written it in late 1387 for Christmas revels that year at Chester Castle. Solving problems which have baffled scholars for centuries, King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition is a volume that will fundamentally alter our view of Britain’s past. 

King Arthur and the Languages of Britain: Examining the Linguistic Evidence - Bernard Mees, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

Medievalists have denied the historical existence of King Arthur for over 50 years. Arthur and the Languages of Britaindemonstrates how linguistic evidence can be employed to see if the earliest historical records that mention Arthur are reliable. The book begins with an analysis of the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the response of the Britons, and introduces the main methodological approaches employed in the linguistic analysis of historical records. 

It then provides evidence for Arthur as a Cumbric-speaker active in the region about Hadrian’s Wall, before assessing the linguistic evidence which supports the validity of the references to Arthur in the Welsh Annals and the Historia Brittonum. Bernard Mees reflects on how Arthur is recorded as having taken part in the Battle of Mount Badon, a site that has never been located, and dying at Camlann, now Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall. 

Mees uses linguistic analysis of the evidence recorded for the existence of Arthur to support the historical reliability of these records. Mees concludes with a summary of how Geoffrey of Monmouth created pseudo-historical stories from the references to Arthur in these early sources, turning Ambrosius Aurelianus into Merlin and Mordred into King Arthur’s nephew and the lover of his queen Guinevere. 

Arthurian Literature XL edited by K.S. Whetter and Megan G. Leitch (DS Brewer, 2025).
The 40th volume in a series of academic essays on Arthurian literature and history.

Appropriately for the journal’s fortieth milestone, this volume of Arthurian Literature offers an especially wide range of topics, from printers’ modifications in early Arthurian books to a study of archetypal characters in several linguistic traditions. It begins with the winner of the Derek Brewer Essay Prize, which has this year been awarded to an original and intriguing investigation of how and why Wynkyn de Worde (or various of his staff working under his direction) modified his 1529 printing of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. 

Thereafter, literary-critical explorations range across French, Welsh, and Middle English Arthurian literatures, including examinations of marriage in Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion, Peredur in the Welsh Grail texts, fairies and cosmic providence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the shifting degrees of agency possessed by Malory’s Gwenyvere. 

The volume also features a lively reconsideration of the Arthurian tomb at Glastonbury from the point of view of material culture, and an examination of Arthur’s hagiographical characterisation in Latin-Breton Saints Lives’. It closes with a survey of twentieth-century English-language retellings of Arthurian fiction that highlights female authors’ many contributions to the genre. 

 
Arthur, Origins, Identities and the Legendary History of Britain by Jean Blacker (Brill, 2024). A book addressing how Arthurian histories contributed to British identity. Although published in 2024 this book was awarded the Dhira B. Mahoney prize in 2025.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s immensely popular Latin prose Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1138), followed by French verse translations – Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) and anonymous versions including the Royal Brut, the Munich, Harley, and Egerton Bruts (12th -14th c.), initiated Arthurian narratives of many genres throughout the ages, alongside Welsh, English, and other traditions.

Arthur, Origins, Identities and the Legendary History of Britain addresses how Arthurian histories incorporating the British foundation myth responded to images of individual or collective identity and how those narratives contributed to those identities. What cultural, political or psychic needs did these Arthurian narratives meet and what might have been the origins of those needs? And how did each text contribute to a “larger picture” of Arthur, to the construction of a myth that still remains so compelling today?

Happy New Year!

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