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Arthur's northern adventures are little recognized. Early hints and seventeenth-century developments led in the later 1700s to the northern Gothic Arthur of Hole, Betham, and Thelwall. More conservative was the king's nineteenth-century representation by Milman; and his apotheosis, and conclusion, came in the arctic adventurer of Bulwer Lytton's King Arthur. (SK)
ARTHUR AND THE WALRUSES
Over some thousand years Arthur has appeared in strange situations. A Welsh giant threw stone spears at him; King Ryens wanted his beard to complete the collection for a mantle; for Dryden he attacked a tree that turned out to be a fake version of his beloved; Tennyson apotheosized him on a mountain top; Bradley had him impregnate his half-sister at the Beltaine celebrations.
But it seems fair to suggest that none of these situations was as unforeseeable, improbable, or downright weird as when in 1848 Bulwer Lytton made him leader of a Viking ship sailing above the Arctic Circle. And then the walruses attacked:
Uprose a bold Norwegian, hunger-stung,
As near the icy marge a walrus lay,
Hurl'd his strong spear, and smote the beast, and sprung
Upon the frost-field on the wounded prey;-
Sprung and recoiled-as, writhing with the pangs,
The bulk heaved towards him with its flashing fangs.
Roused to fell life-around their comrade throng,
Snorting wild wrath, the shapeless, grisly swarms-
Like moving mounts slow masses trail along;
Aghast the man beholds the larva-forms-
Flies-climbs the bark-the deck is scaled-is won;
And all the monstrous march rolls lengthening on.
'Quick to your spears!' the kingly leader cries.
Spears flash on flashing tusks; groan the strong planks
With the assault: front after front they rise
With their bright stare; steel thins in vain their ranks,
And dyes with blood their birth-place and their grave;
Mass rolls on mass, as flows on wave a wave.
These strike and rend the reeling sides below;
Those grappling clamber up and load the decks,
With looks of wrath so human on the foe,
That half they seem the ante-Daedal wrecks
Of what were men in worlds before the Ark!
Thus rag'd the immane and monster war-when, hark,
Crash'd thro' the dreary air a thunder peal!
In their slow courses meet two ice-rock isles
Clanging; the wide seas far-resounding reel;
The...