The Hidden Tale of King Arthur
A rare manuscript depicting an ancient Welsh legend has been found in an unlikely place.
© Gary Perkin/Dreamstime.com
This statue of King Arthur, by the Welsh sculptor Rubin Eynon, is located in Tintagel, Cornwall, United Kingdom.
You may have heard the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but what if you discovered a rare and magical story being used as the cover for a completely different book? This is what happened at the Cambridge University Library in England: researchers pulled a rare manuscript depicting the magical tale of King Arthur from the binding of another book.
The manuscript, called Suite Vulgate du Merlin, was written about 700 years ago in Old French and is one of about 40 copies that have survived to this day. It depicts part of the legend of King Arthur, a story that comes from Wales in the United Kingdom and is about a king and his magician, called Merlin, as well as his Knights of the Round Table.
As the story goes, Arthur becomes king when he pulls an embedded sword from a stone. With help from an advisor named Merlin, the king leads a group of warriors called the Knights of the Round Table. The legend has captured imaginations since it first appeared in the 9th century.
© Album—British Library/Alamy
This writing of a King Arthur story dates back to the year 1310. Another writing of the same story was recently discovered at Cambridge University Library in England.
The Suite Vulgate du Merlin was written around the year 1300 as a sequel to the original story of Arthur, which was a bestseller in its day. The manuscript shows colorful red and blue decorations and letters.
“The Suite Vulgate du Merlin tells us about Arthur’s early reign, his relationship with the Knights of the Round Table, and his heroic fight with the Saxons,” said Irene Fabry-Tehranchi in an interview with the BBC. Fabry-Tehranchi is a French specialist at the library where the manuscript was found. “It really shows Arthur in a positive light—he’s this young hero who marries Guinevere, invents the Round Table and has a good relationship with Merlin, his advisor.”
How the beautiful manuscript became a book cover is surprising. In the 1500s, around 300 years after it was written, someone took the manuscript and repurposed it to cover a book of property records.
For another 400 years, the medieval tale remained hidden in plain sight until an archivist, someone who preserves artifacts, discovered it.
“It’s not just about the text itself, but also about the material artifact. The way it was reused tells us about archival practices in 16th-century England. It’s a piece of history in its own right,” said Fabry-Tehranchi.
The archivists are using special cameras to carefully photograph the manuscript so that they can preserve it and study it digitally. Błażej Władysław Mikuła, the chief photographic technician, says there are likely other hidden artifacts just waiting to be found. “This library is full of treasure that needs to be discovered,” he said.
