This is Arthur!

There is a popular Reddit / internet debate about which Indiana Jones film is the best. The bulk of the discussion readily dismisses the latter two films, The Crystal Skull (2008) and The Dial of Destiny (2023), as so bad as to be non-canonical and centers on either Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or The Last Crusade (1989). Those who argue for Raiders as the best are usually the same people who argue that Star Wars: A New Hope is the best Star Wars film. Like A New Hope, Raiders has the magic of introducing a beloved franchise. As the first of the series, Raiders likewise has no expectations of what a character will be. It further does not have the ironic or self-parodic elements of later films. However, those who argue for The Last Crusade as the best of the Jones films often point to the richness of the grail legend and its associations with happiness, enlightenment, and fatherhood and/or family in the film. The Last Crusade famously has Sean Connery as Indy’s loveable father, Dr. Henry Jones. One of the elements that makes Dr. Jones Sr. such an attractive characters is that he is what could be called a real college professor. A medievalist obsessed with the grail, Dr. Henry Jones looks like a medievalist, dresses like a medievalists, speaks like a medievalist, and (harshly) grades like a medievalist.

Dr. Henry Jones was not so much an anomaly in 1989 as he is in 2025. For as much as university professors (rightly) complain about lazy and disinterested university students who can’t/won’t read, the same argument can be made about university professors who can’t/won’t teach. There seems to be as much a dearth of good professors as there is good students. Many on the right complain about “Marxist” professors on campus; however, one might ask how many contemporary American university professors have a deep and thorough understanding of Marxist thought. In a similar vein, many conservative professors trumpet their love of the “Great Books,” but one might similarly ask how many conservative university professors truly understand the books they teach.

There are exceptions to this phenomenon, and one of these exceptions is the University of Navarre’s Professor Andrew Breeze. Famous among medievalists and renaissance scholars, Breeze is a devoted Arthurian. Moreover, like Dr. Henry Jones, Andrew Breeze looks like an Arthurian, speaks like an Arthurian, and even dresses like an Arthurian. What is more, like many fictionalized medievalists, Professor Breeze has a curious obsession: he thinks Arthur was a real person, a sixth century British warrior. In his recent work, King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition, Professor Breeze presents a rich and thorough portrait of the Medieval British world.

In contrast to much of contemporary critical theory that attempts to disprove the existence of not only Arthur but labors to diminish and explain away and degrade so much of Western myth and history, Andrew Breeze believes that Arthur was a real man living in the north of Britain who died “like a hero” at Camlan in 537. Professor Breeze notes that Arthur’s existence has been debated since William Caxton (1422-1491) in the fifteenth century. In his edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Caxton notes that even some late Medieval Englishman doubted the existence of King Arthur. Caxton counters these arguments with evidence of an alleged tomb of King Arthur as well as a supposed wax seal of Arthur’s in Westminster Abbey. In the 16th century, a similar battle raged between the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555) and the English John Leland (1503-1552). Polydore Vergil attempted to strip the Arthur legend, inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth, of allegedly fantastical elements, while the patriotic Leland attempted to defend them. It must be noted that Polydore Vergil did not doubt Arthur’s historical existence.

In the 18^th century, the Welsh cleric, Theophilus Evans (1693-1767) presented a patriotic “Welsh” Arthur who fought off the Saxons. This heroic battles that Arthur allegedly fought against the invading Germanic people, according to Evans, explains why his contemporary English, the descendants of the Saxons, were attempting to discredit Arthur’s historicity. The late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were a peak time of Arthurian scholarship. Sir John Lloyd (1861-1947) argued that Arthur was a real figure and not simply a myth, placing Arthur as a historical personage living in the Southeast part of Britain. Sir Edmund Chambers (1866-1954) helped to identify the battles King Arthur allegedly fought.  However, since the 1970s, scholars have nearly been in unison that Arthur did not exist at all. Breeze takes the opposite view, and he has a very specific and clear notion of who Arthur was and wasn’t. According to Breeze, Arthur was not a king; he wasn’t Welsh, and he wasn’t a Romanized Briton who fought the Saxons. He was a British warlord as real as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Ultimately, much of King Arthur is the work of a professor who not only knows his “stuff,” but loves his stuff.

One of the popular terms from contemporary Marxist theory is “Zombie Capitalism.” This term means a few different things, but one of the things it means is that the twenty-first century economy is, running on the leftover ruins of the twentieth century economy. Although remote work is possible for many, if not most, white collar employees, there are still “brick and mortar” buildings that house offices and cubicles, which employees are still required to occupy. Although much of work is becoming a “gig” or contract economy, there is still, at least in some quarters, the expectation of benefits, a regularly salary, and a life-long relationship between an employee and a corporation. In the field of education, America is dotted with beautiful college and university campuses. These campuses often have elegant liberal arts buildings and high tech labs as well as comfy dorms. Nonetheless, with the perseverance of online education and the ubiquity of AI use among students (and faculty) suggests that age of higher education is over. There is no need to have English classes—covering King Arthur (or any other figure)—if the student work (and even some of the teaching) is going to be performed by artificial intelligence.  

At the same time, there is a renaissance in podcasting and YouTubing going on, on the internet. There are innumerable channels and podcasts that offer explorations of key thinkers such as Jung, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. These shows are often deeply informative and entertaining and at least rival the best of college instruction. Indeed, the British history podcast, The Rest is History, hosted by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, recently won Applepodcasts “Show of the Year.” The popularity of The Rest is History and other intelligent podcasts demonstrates that people—even young people—have a deep desire to learn. The underlying question, then, is whether universities can match the quality work done on the internet. As Andrew Breeze demonstrates, there probably was a real king Arthur, and there are still real college professors.

King Arthur: Medieval British Literature and Modern Critical Tradition
By Andrew Breeze
London: Uppsala Books, 2025; 269pp

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