ABSTRACT
So far we have looked at the ancient Greek traditions of Arkas/Arktouros on their own terms. But we can also use a different kind of material, to relate them still more closely to both medieval Arthurian tradition and to the central repertoire of tales to which it in turn owes much of its material. A word of explanation is necessary at this point to those unfamiliar with how international folktales work. Arthurian scholars are particularly familiar with the speed with which versions of Arthurian tales spread in the twelfth century AD and beyond, following the success of the chronicle tradition that surfaces first in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in the Romance industry (for such it became) after the initial impact of Chrétien de Troyes. Many have taken seriously the possibility, or indeed the inevitability, of an oral contribution to the spread of the material, whether in the hands of Breton conteurs or other kinds of storyteller, both before and after this supposedly first literary élan. But rather fewer have come to terms with the relation between Arthurian materials and international folktale as a whole. Folktales themselves have undergone the same process of diffusion and development as Arthurian materials, but over a timetable which is now well beyond our capacity to recover. Occasional and sometimes fiercely disputed efforts have been made to link this or that Arthurian motif, incident or incident-pattern with those of the kind of folklore found, for example, in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the numerous national collections and folk-archives which for well over a century have attempted to collect, analyse and organise the world’s (and particularly Europe and the Near East’s) heritage of storytelling.1 The result has been among other attempts an international indexing system both of motifs (Stith Thompson2) and tales (Aarne and Thompson3) which has at least made comparison possible, if not always uniformly helpful, in dealing with samples of the same tale recurring in widely different times, places and cultures. In the case of tales this involves a description of the basic sequence of events in a tale-type which can at least help us to make connexions and ideally arrive at some understanding of a tale’s mechanism, to say nothing of its possible early history and geographical spread.
Such a concept can at least be applied to the materials at our disposal from ancient, medieval and modern examples of our ‘Arthurian’ material. Attempts to relate Arthur to bears on the strength of Welsh arth are foredoomed to failure: Ashe rejected them out of hand;4 Higham, following Padel, goes as near as he can with the possibility that Arthur’s mythical reputation might be based on an otherwise unattested British bear-cult.5 One can go little further without a means of accessing standard narrative material on the subject, and this can only be done for all practical purposes through the Aarne-Thompson system. Since Arkas/Arktouros is quite literally the son of a bear, whether or not his mother has been changed into one before or after his birth,6 we should automatically relate it to the name-tale of a well-established (but not ideally documented) folktale complex, embracing the tales of ‘The Bear’s Son’ and ‘John the Bear’.7 This complex has been invoked more than once to apply to the adventures of celebrated Epic heroes as assorted as Beowulf and Odysseus. While analyses have not been greeted with universal approval (unsurprisingly, given the great diversity of these two examples),8 the tale-type is particularly useful for explaining not only much of the legendary side of Arthurian literature, but a great deal of the analogous material in classical myth and Caucasian folklore9 as well.
