It’s October, my favourite month of the year! I love the turning of the season to gold and orange and the creepy notion of spirits returning to haunt us. Now, having written several books dealing with the legend of King Arthur, I started to wonder if ghostly spirits ever appear in Arthurian legend.

Belief in ghosts in the Middle Ages wasn’t as common as you might think. While the pagan religions of Europe certainly had room for tales of the spirits of the dead returning, early Christianity strongly disapproved of such things with Saint Augustine claiming that ghostly apparitions were merely demonic illusions. That doesn’t mean that the later Arthurian romances, filled with supernatural goings on as they are, don’t have at least a couple of references to what we might consider to be ghosts.

An early Welsh tale called Branwen ferch Llŷr found in The Mabinogion, refers to a magical cauldron which restores life to dead warriors, although robbing them of their speech. Horrifying though this might be, these beings are rather more like zombies than ghosts. It is in later legends that we see a few encounters with beings of a more ethereal nature.

A really chilling tale perfect for Halloween is The Awntyrs off Arthure, a Middle-English poem known in modern English as The Adventures of Arthur at Tarn Wadling a translation of which can be read here. In this, Gawain and Guinevere (here named ‘Gaynore’) become separated from Arthur and his knights while on a hunt. At the edge of a lonely mere, they encounter a hideous specter, shrouded in cloth and covered in serpents and toads. This ghostly woman reveals herself to be Guinevere’s dead mother who warns the pair to live morally and give charitably to the poor. She also predicts the fall of Arthur and the Round Table due to the treachery of one who currently ‘plays ball’ at Arthur’s court (Mordred, most likley).

The battle with Mordred looms large in Arthurian myth and is the reason the spirit of Gawain himself returns to warn Arthur in Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. On the eve of battle, Arthur dreams that he is visited by Gawain who was savagely slain by Mordred earlier in the tale. Gawain appears in the company of all the women he fought for in life and claims to have been sent by God to persuade Arthur to make peace with Mordred else many men on both sides will be slain.

Despite the disapproval of Augustinian teachings, ghosts found more of a place in Christianity with the development of the concept of purgatory from the 11th century onwards. It is after this that we see such specters in the Arthurian tales. The souls in the above tales have a specific purpose to warn the living against following the destructive paths they are on.