Today is the Feast of St Garmon of Auxerre. He is most famous nowadays presumably from the way he is portrayed (as Bishop Germanius) in Antoine Fuqua's irritating 2004 film King Arthur.
The film itself, I seem to remember, is based (er, loosely) on Howard Reid's book Arthur, the Dragon King, whose thesis was that a lot of the romantic traditions that ended up in the Matter of Britain (ladies in lakes, and so forth) were survivals from authentic traditions in the Roman cavalry corps - specifically those of the Sarmatian cavalrymen who served in the Roman Army in Britain as auxiliaries. The idea is an appealing one: it would be like the Gurkhas telling each other fantastic stories about Lord Hastings, and then having them written up a hundred years later by J K Rowling.
On the other hand, the film is far from perfect. Craig Owen is just as rubbish as King Arthur as he is in just about everything -- and he's not even a king until the last shot. The real King Arthur was a cavalry officer (well, duh!), but he was also of royal blood. And he certainly wasn't Lucius Artorius Castor. He wasn't a Cockney either, and given that Ioan Gruffudd is in the film as well, looking foxy and authentic as Sir Lancelot, that's something of a disappointment. Merlin, according to the film, was a Votadini soothsayer, Guinevere a snooty feminist Votadini princess. (No! and No!) St Garmon himself did visit Britain several times, but his last visit was twenty years before the date when the film is actually set.
Probably most annoying of all tough is the scene with King Arthur and his Knights, not to mention Germanius himself, sitting at the Round Table (Good!) in a very obviously square room (Huh?) - no one having put two and two together and worked out that the reason why the Round Table was round was because the room it was in, not to mention the hill-fort it was on, were round as well. The difference between the round buildings of Britain and the rectangular of Europe was of course a perennial one, and would no doubt have been striking enough to assume a quasi-mysterious significance when the British stories of entrenched Christian opposition to advancing pagan invaders found their way across the Channel to France and further afield. In the film of course the mystical implication of the Round Table is supposedly that Arthur was a Marxist... er, Protestant... er, Pelagian. Phew! Just about got away with that one - except that although St Garmon was sent to Britain to preach against Pelagianism (the one authentically British heresy - i.e. "There ain't no such thing as Original Sin, and we can get by just fine without Grace." Sound familiar?) King Arthur was certainly not a Pelagian himself.
