With the patience of an archaeologist excavating an ancient site, writer Dr. Norma Lorre Goodrich spent years unearthing the story of King Arthur.
For centuries the story was thought to be a fable, with British roots and a powerful appeal to generations. But beneath the legend of Camelot and Queen Guinevere, the Knights of the Round Table and Lancelot, Ms. Goodrich discovered what she called the true story: King Arthur was not a myth but an actual person, born to a royal family. He did not live in Britain or Wales but in Scotland.
Though her findings clashed with years of scholarship and conventional wisdom, Ms. Goodrich was confident:
"Time to clean house in Camelot," she said when her book was published.
Ms. Goodrich, a prolific author and former professor at the University of Southern California and Claremont Colleges who surprised students and colleagues with her sometimes controversial discoveries, died Sept. 19, 2006 of natural causes at her home in Claremont, Calif., said her personal assistant, Darin Stewart. She was 89.
In 45 years of teaching comparative literature and writing, Ms. Goodrich viewed writings not as staid, already discovered treasures but as dynamic works that kept yielding truths.
"Literature has the answers to the problems of our times," Ms. Goodrich told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1967. "Young people study literature because they are looking for answers, and if they come for that reason, they're going to be writers."
Ms. Goodrich was born May 10, 1917, in Huntington, Vt. When she was 5, her aunt Alma gave her a copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson's book "The Idylls of the King" and set her on a literary path. Ms. Goodrich graduated from the University of Vermont in 1938 with a bachelor's degree and continued her studies at universities in France, where she lived for many years and once owned and directed a school.
She married Joseph Lorre and the couple had a son, Jean-Joseph Lorre. They divorced in 1946. In 1965 she earned doctoral degrees in French and Roman philology from Columbia University.
Published in 1960, "Myths of the Hero" was one of her earliest explorations of myths from ancient and medieval times. In it she wrote, "The hero myth may be the one that has most influenced culture down the centuries." A Times critic called the myths as retold by Ms. Goodrich a "remarkable collection" that generates a sense of universal connectedness, a link with the heroic thrust in all men.
In 1964 Ms. Goodrich married John Hereford Howard and began teaching French and comparative literature at USC and she continued a practice of writing a book a year, "always beginning her writing the day after Labor Day" said Stewart."
In 1971 she became dean of the faculty at Scripps College, a women's college in Claremont.
By 1986, Ms. Goodrich was professor emerita at the Claremont Colleges and had turned her attention to the legend of "King Arthur" after discovering a void in the scholarship: "All the books on Arthur have been on the mythology, the legend," she told a Times reporter then.
With the help of Mr. Howard, Ms. Goodrich spent years researching. During the summers the pair traveled to Scotland and followed routes laid out by ancient maps, unearthing the historical King Arthur. The feat was an exercise in detective work, piecing together clues from linguistics, archaeology, geography and anthropology.
At the National Library in Paris, Goodrich read manuscripts dated from 1066 to 1399, including a manuscript written by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Monmouth listed the battles of Arthur not in Gaelic but in Latin. She translated the Latin back into Gaelic and made claims that the names coincided with places in Scotland. From this, she determined that King Arthur was an actual person who once lived in Scotland, not in southwestern England or Wales as others had postulated. Guinevere was a Pictish queen, and Lancelot was a Scottish king. The fact that her King Arthur findings contradicted those of other scholars did not trouble Goodrich.
In October 1990, she and her husband were knighted into British royalty.
Goodrich followed the book with related works on Merlin, Guinevere and the Holy Grail. In her 1994 work, "Heroines: Demigoddess, Prima Donna, Movie Star," Goodrich explores the women of operas, novels and screenplays.
As Sigurd Towrie stated, the validity of Goodrich's claims is a question that raises its head often in the Arthurian newsgroups. Goodrich joined the ranks years ago of the historical research authors out of grace with Arthurian scholars. She was controversial in her opinions and not well regarded, to the extent that her conclusions are not only queried as to their validity but sometimes derided. As Kim Headlee and others pointed out, she was not even given a mention in Lacy's The Arthurian Encyclopedia.
Every study into the real King Arthur must contain a degree of speculation, a detailed analysis combined with a synthesis of available sources. Goodrich claimed to address the problems from a language viewpoint and falls into the group of scholars that would place Arthur in Northern Britain. If you can struggle through her books with an open mind, you may find that she occasionally has flashes of insight. A number of her ideas are insightful and clever. Being a professor emeritus of French and comparative languages and the author of a number of other non-Arthurian books, she shows her strengths in the vast array of source material she draws on along with her excellence as a linguist. She was fluent is several languages.
At least, the continued discussion of Goodrich shows that our search continues and is renewed by each generation. One should buy a selection of studies including Ashe, Morris, Alcock, Matthews, Turner, and Markale. Try to find translations of some of the Latin, French and Welsh sources.
Her books include King Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Priestesses, Medieval Myths, Ancient Myths, The Holy Grail, The Ways of Love, Myths of the Hero, Giono, The Doctor and Maria Theresa, Heroines and Charles Duke of Orleans, The Jungle of Academe and Charlemagne. See the book page on this website for a complete list.