Sir Bedivere

Bedwyr in the Welsh Tradition

In the oldest Welsh material Bedivere is Bedwyr fab Bedrawd, and he is never far from Cai. Culhwch and Olwen names the pair together again and again as the two men Arthur will not undertake anything without, and describes Bedwyr in a striking phrase: though he is one-handed, no three warriors in the same field draw blood faster than he does, and a single thrust of his spear opens nine counter-thrusts ¹. He is also the handsomest man in the island after Arthur himself, and no one is swifter of foot ¹.

The early poem Pa gur likewise places Bedwyr in the front rank of Arthur's men, fighting on the shores of Tryfrwyd, and later Welsh tradition keeps the Cai-and-Bedwyr partnership intact ². Whatever else changed as the legend travelled, that pairing survived every retelling for a thousand years ^2,8.

Geoffrey's Butler

Geoffrey of Monmouth latinised him as Beduerus and gave him a court office to match Kay's. Where Kay is the steward, Bedivere is Arthur's butler or cup-bearer, and after the conquest of Gaul he is created duke of Normandy ³. The two go up Mont-Saint-Michel together to deal with the giant who has carried off Helena, kinswoman of Duke Hoel — Bedivere is sent ahead to scout, finds the old nurse weeping over the girl's grave, and reports back before Arthur takes the monster hand to hand ³.

Geoffrey then kills him. In the war against the Roman procurator Lucius, Bedivere charges too deep into the enemy line and is run through by Boccus, king of the Medes; Arthur's men recover the body and it is carried home for burial at Bayeux, the city Geoffrey says his ancestor had founded ^3,8. In this earliest connected narrative, then, Bedivere does not outlive his king — the role that made him famous had not yet been invented ⁸.

The Return of Excalibur

The scene every modern reader associates with him belongs to the end of the story. Arthur, mortally wounded at the last battle, orders his sole surviving companion to take Excalibur to the water's edge and throw it in, then report what he sees. Twice the knight hides the sword — in Malory under a tree, because it seems to him a sin to waste something so precious — and twice he comes back and reports only wind and waves, and twice Arthur, who can hear a lie from a dying man's pillow, sends him back. On the third attempt he throws it, and a hand rises from the mere, catches the sword, brandishes it three times and draws it under ^4,5,6.

Bedivere then carries the king on his back to the shore, where a barge waits full of hooded women, among them three queens, and Arthur is taken away to Avalon ^4,6. In Malory the knight, left alone, walks all night through the forest and comes at dawn to a chapel where a hermit — the former Archbishop of Canterbury — is praying beside a fresh tomb. He never learns for certain whether the body in it is Arthur's. He stays, takes the habit, and lives out his life there ⁶.

Who Actually Threw the Sword

The assignment of that errand is one of the small textual puzzles of the legend. In the French Mort Artu, the last companion is not Bedivere but Girflet, son of Do, and it is Girflet who tries twice to keep the sword and Girflet who watches the barge leave ^4,8. The switch to Bedivere happens in the English tradition: the fourteenth-century stanzaic Le Morte Arthur, one of Malory's known sources for his final book, already gives the task to Bedivere, and Malory follows it ^5,6,8.

Why the change was made is not recorded, and scholars have offered rather than settled explanations — that Bedivere's ancient standing as Arthur's inseparable companion made him the more fitting choice to an English audience, or simply that Girflet meant nothing outside France ⁸. Malory keeps Girflet elsewhere in the book as Griflet le Fise de Dieu, so the two characters coexist; it is only the last scene that moved ^6,8. His brother Lucan the Butler shares the final vigil in Malory and dies of his wounds while trying to lift the king, which leaves Bedivere alone by attrition rather than by design ⁶.

Tennyson's Bedivere

Tennyson made the episode canonical for the modern imagination. His 1842 "Morte d'Arthur", later folded into the Idylls of the King as "The Passing of Arthur", follows Malory closely but slows the three throwings into an extended study of temptation, self-justification and shame, and gives Arthur the famous rebuke to a man who has broken faith for the sake of a jewelled hilt ⁷. It is Tennyson's version, not Malory's, that supplies most film and television treatments ^7,8.

The result is an odd late career for a warrior who began as a one-handed spearman in a Welsh hunting tale. Bedivere survives in popular memory almost entirely for an act of obedience he twice failed to perform — the last man standing, telling the truth on the third attempt ^7,8.