Sir Bedivere

Bedivere is older than the Round Table. He first appears as Bedwyr in Culhwch and Olwen, the Welsh prose tale written down around 1100, centuries before the French romances shaped the Arthur we know. There he rides in the war-band at Celliwig, Arthur's court in Cornwall, and the tale describes him with a soldier's precision: though he had but one hand, no three warriors in the same field could draw blood faster than he, and in beauty he was matched by no one in Arthur's court save the king's own champion. He is the sworn partner of Cai, the sharp-tongued steward who is the ancestor of Sir Kay, and together the pair lead Arthur's hardest quests, hunting the monstrous boar Twrch Trwyth across Wales and storming the strongholds of giants and witches. In this oldest Arthur there is no chivalric polish, and Bedwyr is no courtier. He is a raider, a tracker, and a killer with a maimed body and a perfect record, the sort of man a warlord keeps at his right hand.

When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his chronicle of the British kings around 1136, Bedwyr became Beduerus, and the raider grew into a lord. Geoffrey makes him Arthur's cup-bearer, the officer who serves the king's wine and so stands closer to the throne than any general, and rewards him with the duchy of Normandy. In Arthur's great continental campaign against the Roman Empire, Beduerus commands in the thick of the fighting and is struck down, dying as one of the two beloved officers - the other is Caius, the old Cai - whose loss the king mourns above all others on that field. His body is carried to Bayeux in his own Norman duchy and buried there with the honours of a prince, a funeral that tells us how high this one-handed Welshman had climbed.

It is Malory who gives Bedivere the scene that has kept his name alive for five hundred years. At Camlann, the last battle, where Arthur and his treacherous son Mordred destroy each other, the king and Bedivere are the only men left standing on a field of one hundred thousand dead. The dying Arthur commands his knight: take Excalibur, the sword that came from the lake, and throw it into the water. Bedivere looks at the blade, at the pommel gleaming with precious stones, and hides it under a tree instead, telling the king he saw nothing but waves upon the waste. Arthur knows the lie and sends him again. Again Bedivere hides the sword and returns with the same false answer. The third time, shamed by a dying king who calls him traitor, Bedivere runs to the shore and hurls Excalibur with all his strength out over the water. And there an arm clothed in white samite rises from the lake, catches the sword by the hilt, brandishes it three times, and draws it down beneath the waves.

What follows is the end of an age. Bedivere takes the wounded king upon his back and carries him down to the waterside, where a barge draped in black waits with weeping queens and ladies, Morgan le Fay among them. Arthur is laid in the lap of the chief lady, and the barge slides away toward Avalon to heal him of his wound, while Bedivere stands crying on the shore. The knight walks all night through a forest until he comes to a chapel and hermitage, where he kneels by a newly made tomb and takes the habit of a hermit, praying ever after for the king he could not save. In the old Welsh tales Bedwyr had been the warrior who survived everything. In Malory he becomes the man who survives the one thing he cannot bear: the last knight, left alive to remember.