The Return of Arthur: Return of the King

"Farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seëst — if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) — To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound."

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Rex Quondam, Rex Futurus — The Once and Future King

Of all the mysteries woven into the Arthurian legends, none carries a deeper or more enduring hope than this: that Arthur is not dead. That somewhere — on an enchanted island beyond the western sea, or in a hidden cave beneath the hills of Britain — the King yet lives, sleeping, healing, waiting. And that when the world's need is greatest, he will rise and return to restore justice and peace to the land.

This is the promise of the Rex Quondam, Rex Futurus — the Once and Future King. It is not merely a legend. It is an archetype: the promise that sacred sovereignty, once lost, shall be recovered. That the true King, though wounded and withdrawn from the world, is never truly gone.

The return of Arthur is when YOU become the Sovereign Ruler of your Being.

When divine royalty returns to humanity.

The Passing of Arthur and the Isle of Avalon

The earliest accounts of Arthur's end agree on one remarkable detail: he did not die as other men die. After the catastrophic battle of Camlann — in which he and the traitor Mordred dealt each other mortal wounds — the King was carried away, grievously hurt but still living, to a place beyond the reach of the ordinary world.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing around 1138 in his Historia Regum Britanniae, tells us simply that the wounded Arthur was "carried to the Isle of Avalon, so that his wounds might be healed." He names this island the Insula Avallonis — the Isle of Apples — and later, in his Vita Merlini, describes it as a kind of Fortunate Isle from classical myth: a paradise where grain grows without cultivation, where the inhabitants live for a century or more, and where nine enchantress-sisters dwell, led by Morgan le Fay, a healer of extraordinary power. Morgan examined Arthur's wound, laid him upon a golden bed, and undertook to heal him — if he would remain in Avalon for a long time under her care.

This account is deeply rooted in older Celtic traditions of a western otherworld paradise — a blessed island across the sea where heroes do not age and time moves differently. The Irish sea-god Manannán ruled such an island, called Abhlach, meaning "lush with apple trees." Geoffrey drew on genuine Celtic motifs, including the nine sisters who recall the nine priestesses that the first-century geographer Pomponius Mela reported dwelling on the Île de Sein off the Breton coast, women said to cure the sick, foretell the future, and control the weather.

What is essential in every version of the tale is that Arthur's departure is not a death but a withdrawal. He passes from the world of men into a realm of healing and enchantment, and the door is left open for his return. Wace and Layamon, retelling the story in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both record the ancient Breton belief: that Arthur would one day come back from Avalon to rule again. Layamon names the fairy queen of the island as Argante and has Arthur himself declare:

"And I will fare to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom, and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy."

• Layamon, Brut (ca. 1200)

The Breton Hope

This belief in Arthur's promised return became known among scholars as "the Breton hope" — l'espoir breton — because it was among the Bretons of northwestern France that the conviction burned most fiercely. From Brittany it spread to Cornwall, to Wales, and throughout the Celtic world.

The Welsh "Stanzas of the Graves" in the Black Book of Carmarthen — one of the oldest surviving Welsh manuscripts — lists the burial places of many heroes but declares Arthur's grave to be anoeth — a mystery, a wonder, unknowable. William of Malmesbury, writing around 1125, confirms this: "The grave of Arthur is nowhere beheld," and adds that "ancient songs" prophecy his reappearance. The reasoning was powerful in its simplicity: Arthur's grave cannot be found because he has no grave. He is not dead. He is immortal, and he will return.

The monks of Glastonbury Abbey challenged this belief in 1191, announcing they had exhumed Arthur's bones along with a leaden cross inscribed "Here lies the famous King Arthur, buried in the Isle of Avalon." This claim was widely publicized and accepted by some — Giraldus Cambrensis, Robert de Boron, and the author of Perlesvaus among them. It had the effect of grounding Avalon in a specific English location and, by implication, declaring the King dead and buried. But many rejected it. The identification of Glastonbury with Avalon stripped away the otherworldly, paradisal character of the isle, and with it, the great hope of Arthur's return.

Tennyson, in the nineteenth century, restored the celestial vision: Arthur departs over the water to "the island-valley of Avilion," a paradise beyond the mortal world. Malory himself, writing in the fifteenth century, was deliberately ambiguous: Arthur is carried away in a barge by four queens including Morgan, apparently bound for Avalon, but Malory allows that the body may simply have been brought to Glastonbury. He has it both ways, leaving the mystery intact.

The King in the Mountain: The Cave Legend

Alongside the literary tradition of Avalon, a parallel folk-tradition took root among the common people of Wales, England, and Scotland: that Arthur was not on an island at all, but asleep in a hidden cave beneath the hills of Britain, waiting with his knights for the hour of the nation's greatest peril.

This is the Cave Legend — the belief in the sleeping hero, the "king in the mountain" — one of the most ancient and widespread motifs in European folklore. Both versions of Arthur's survival — the island story and the cave story — may trace back to a Celtic myth reported by Plutarch, about a banished god sleeping in a cave on a western island. In Arthur's case, the two streams run in parallel: the literary romances send him to Avalon, while the oral folklore buries him beneath the earth.

Caves in which Arthur is said to sleep have been pointed out by rural folk all over Britain for centuries. The entrances are said to be hidden or sealed, opening only on certain nights of the year — Midsummer Eve, Christmas Eve, or perhaps only once every seven years. Inside, the King lies in enchanted slumber, sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded by his armored knights, the Round Table, and a fabulous treasure of gold and silver. The adventurer who stumbles upon the entrance always makes some fatal mistake — he forgets the magic formula, panics, chooses wrongly between a sword and a horn — and is cast out, never to find the entrance again.

The Caves of Britain

The named locations form a sacred geography of sleeping sovereignty stretching across the island:

In Wales, two caves bear Arthur's name — one in Anglesey, one in Herefordshire. At Craig-y-Ddinas in Glamorgan, a tale recorded by Iolo Morgannwg tells of a Welshman guided into a cave by a magician. Inside, he found the King and his knights sleeping in a great circle, heads pointing outward, armored and armed, with heaps of gold and silver within the ring. The magician explained that Arthur slept until the appointed hour when he would wake and restore justice throughout Britain. The visitor was permitted to take treasure but forbidden to disturb the sleepers. If one woke and asked "Is it day?", the only safe reply was "No, sleep on." The Welshman took gold, squandered it, returned for more, forgot the formula, and was beaten and cast out by the awakening knights. He lived the rest of his days in poverty and could never find the entrance again.

At Cadbury Castle in Somerset — the hill long identified with Camelot — Arthur is said to sleep beneath the summit, and on certain nights his ghost rides out through the ancient gateway with his knights, following a spectral track toward Glastonbury known as Arthur's Hunting Causeway. The nearby River Cam may be the Camlann where he received his fatal wound.

At Sewingshields in Northumberland, near Hadrian's Wall, the legend takes a different form. Arthur, Guinevere, and the knights all sleep beneath the castle, with a bugle and a garter lying nearby. To raise the sleepers, one must blow the bugle and cut the garter with a stone sword. In one version, Arthur actually wakes — but the intruder fails to complete the ritual, and the King sinks back into sleep.

At the Wishing Well of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, the tale involves Merlin himself. A farmer encountered a wizard at a natural spring who offered to buy his horse, explaining that one of Arthur's knights needed it. Merlin opened magical gates in the sandstone cliff, revealing a torchlit cavern where Arthur and his knights lay sleeping with their horses — short by one. The terrified farmer sold the horse, took his gold, and fled. The gates sealed behind him and have never been seen since. On the rock face, a carved face — said to be Merlin's — still watches over the well.

The Eildon Hills and Thomas the Rhymer

Perhaps the most haunting of all the cave legends is set in the Eildon Hills near Melrose in Scotland, and it involves the legendary poet and prophet Thomas the Rhymer — Thomas of Ercildoune, a historical figure of the thirteenth century who passed into folklore as a man who had lived seven years in Fairyland and returned with the gift of prophecy and the inability to speak anything but truth.

In Walter Scott's retelling, a horse-dealer called Canonbie Dick was riding home one night with two unsold horses when a stranger in archaic clothing offered to buy them, paying in obsolete gold coins. This happened several times. Dick grew curious and asked to see where the stranger lived. Thomas — for it was he — warned Dick that he must show no fear, then led him through a hidden doorway beneath the Eildon Hills into a vast torchlit chamber. There lay rank upon rank of sleeping knights and their horses. On a table before them rested a sword and a horn.

Thomas told Dick he must choose: draw the sword, or blow the horn. Dick chose the horn — the wrong choice, for it was the act of a man summoning help, and therefore showed fear. With a sound like thunder the knights began to stir, a violent wind swept Dick from the cave, and the door sealed behind him. He told his tale to shepherds and fell dead. No one has found the entrance since. It is said to have been in a rocky hillock called the Lucken Hare, where witches once held their gatherings.

The Wild Hunt

The cave legends intertwine with another ancient motif: the Wild Hunt. Though Arthur's body lay hidden and sleeping beneath the earth, his spirit was believed to ride forth on certain nights in phantasmal form, leading a spectral company of knights through the skies and across the land. At Cadbury, he had both a cave and a hunting causeway. In France as well as Britain, Arthur became a ghostly huntsman careering among the clouds with other heroes, descending to earth on appointed nights. Gervase of Tilbury recorded this belief around 1211, linking it to the tradition that placed Arthur inside Mount Etna in Sicily — a legend carried there by Norman settlers or Bretons in their service.

The Sleeping Hero Across Europe

The motif of the undying king sleeping beneath a mountain spread widely through medieval Europe, attaching itself to other great figures beyond Arthur. The most famous parallel is the German legend of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, said to slumber inside the Kyffhäuser mountain with his red beard growing through the stone table before him, waiting to awaken when ravens no longer circle the peak. In some Welsh locations, the sleeper is identified not as Arthur but as Owain Lawgoch, a medieval Welsh patriot. The pattern is always the same: the true sovereign is not dead but withdrawn, hidden, sleeping — and will return when the need is greatest.

Both Plutarch's account of a banished god sleeping in a cave on a western island and the widespread Celtic reverence for the otherworld suggest that this motif runs very deep in the Western mythic imagination — far older than any single hero, older perhaps than any recorded history.

Aragorn and the Return of the King

J.R.R. Tolkien, a scholar steeped in the Arthurian and Northern European mythic traditions, wove this same archetype into the heart of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, is the hidden heir of the ancient kings of Númenor and Gondor — a royal lineage long broken, a throne long empty, a kingdom that has slowly decayed into a kingless wasteland ruled by mere stewards. He wanders the wild as a Ranger, unrecognized, his true name and lineage concealed, bearing the shards of a broken sword that was once the weapon of kings.

The parallels to Arthur are deliberate and profound. Like Arthur, Aragorn is the rightful king whose sovereignty has been lost to the world. Like Arthur drawing the sword from the stone, Aragorn's kingship is confirmed by the reforging of the broken blade Andúril — "Flame of the West" — from the shards of Narsil. Like the Breton hope for Arthur's return, the people of Gondor preserve an ancient prophecy that the king will come again:

"The crownless again shall be king."

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Aragorn's return restores not only the throne but the land itself. The White Tree of Gondor, long dead, blooms again. The realm is healed. This is the same mythic pattern: the true king's return heals the wasteland, just as Arthur's awakening will restore Britain, just as the The Fisher King's wound, once healed, makes the barren land green again.

Tolkien understood what the medieval storytellers understood: that the Return of the King is not merely a political event but a cosmic restoration — the moment when sacred sovereignty, long exiled and forgotten, reasserts itself over the fallen world.

The Inner Meaning

The Return of Arthur is ultimately an interior truth. The King who sleeps in the mountain is the divine sovereignty within every human soul — the higher Self, the Christ-mind, the inner royalty that has been forgotten, buried, driven underground by the long reign of the ego and the wasteland of separation. The enchanted cave is the deep unconscious; the sealed entrance that opens only on sacred nights is the rare and luminous moment of spiritual awakening; the knights sleeping in a circle are the dormant virtues and powers of the soul, armored and ready, awaiting the signal to rise.

Arthur's promised return is the promise that this sovereignty can never truly be lost. It sleeps. It waits. And at the hour of greatest need — when the soul remembers, when the right question is asked, when the sword is drawn rather than the horn blown — the King awakens, the cave opens, and the wasteland is healed.

The Once and Future King is the pattern of every soul's journey: Fall, exile, forgetting — and then, at the appointed hour, the Return.

Related Pages

• Avalon
• The Passing of Arthur

Sources