King Arthur's ancient trail across Britain
cnn.com
cnn.com
The stories around King Arthur are not confined in that way. Heck, Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a renaissance around the myths. He came a few hundred years after the mythos was established.
The historians try to point out that things are as about in-flux as possible, but the author misses it. They do end on a line reflecting the meaning, and explore some of the various aspects, but... they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the fanfic of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and over again. You can be certain of exactly nothing when it comes to those myths.
Excalibur? Not in the earliest stories. No sword in stone, no Lady in the Lake. Caliburnus and Excalibur might be the same sword, in which case Caliburn is noted in an early piece of Celtic origin, but just as a sword belonging to a warlord (Bram). Nothing much special about it. (Wikipedia's page on the sword is... Painful. Most of the focus is on the latter adaptions, of course. But the origin is not clearly Welsh. There is... Debate.)
Merlin? There's a possibility that Merlin and Arthur were the same person at one point. Artr Myrrdin Gwyls is one of the earlier mythical names for the magical bard. (Where Robert Jordan pulled a lot of his inspiration for Artur Hawkwing, rather than more modern tales.)
Guinevere? Didn't exist until seven hundred years after the original tales became widespread. Part of the romantic movement.
Arthur fought the Saxons, right? Sometimes it's the Saxons. Sometimes the Romans. Sometimes the French. Whoever the writer felt it in-vogue to fight, pretty much.
Rant over... They got close to the point, but missed it. Arthur is a story without grounding. It's supposed to be something you can take, shape, and tell a moral about your own culture. And we do. The TV shows, movies, and constant reinventions, are what the character has been for most of its existence. A tale, waiting to be told.
A tale that many of us will read, and watch, and listen to, time and time again, for when the next author finds something to be inspired for.
This is super important to emphasize. In its first hundred years, the printing industry made much (if not most) of its profit off of what were essentially trashy paperbacks, pumped out as fast as they could acquire them because there was no concept of copyright yet. The authors tasked with writing that content took all the old history books - most of dubious historicity to begin with - and wrote wild fantasies based around them. The King Arthur legend is one of the most popular ones, probably as widely read as the flood of translations of the classics.
Since this coincided with a large increase in literacy, these fiction books calcified the fiction into legend and pop culture.
Adding AI to the mix makes zero actual difference at this point.
The problem is when... maybe not so smart or experienced in life people come, and desperately need things to be clear and simple for them. Clear yes and no, good and evil, good wins, just tell me what to think and what is the right way. People don't want to hear about boring life facts or how life is infinitely complex and everything and everybody is some form of shade of grey. I can see it well and alive these times too so additional education ain't gonna save us.
The only difference with say bible is that nobody sat for a while few centuries after (if anything actually happened at all, pretty skeptical here) and wrote it down clearly enough so that major deviations from that point were hard to justify. Until of course new canon is written and everything old is thrown out of window... would love to see how original biblical verses read compared to over-translation that happened 1500 years later, given what was left in mostly old testament I'd say it would read pretty horribly and be completely incompatible with our modern values and ways of life. I'd even say Vatican would rather destroy such evidence, no sense keeping such an atomic bomb around in vaults.
Maybe archaeology will eventually shed some objective light on this.
Um. The New Testament is generally dated to the late first century AD, which is to say, within living memory of Jesus. We have fragments of those texts that date to around AD 200, and several complete copies from the late 300s.
> I'd even say Vatican would rather destroy such evidence, no sense keeping such an atomic bomb around in vaults.
Rather than destroying such evidence, they keep them in their vaults, and they've even digitized them so you can see them online: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1209
While archaeological technologies are getting better, the past decays and is continually overwritten by the present. For any historical event, there comes a time when there is just no more information to recover.
The way I understand it, the French also loved the tale(s) of King Arthur but hated that they didn't have a role in it because Anglo/French rivalry is like that. So they wrote fanfiction (Lancelot), which eventually became part of canon.
You should dive deeper into the underlying themes.
The graal is derived, almost certainly, from elements like Celtic sacred cauldrons which also offered bounty in exchange for service. (https://esploro.libs.uga.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alm...)
The sacred spear and an element of the cuckoo king—a ritual sacrifice and murder of the reigning king against a “gouk stone” by the pending king on whom the communities ails are offloaded. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14702541.2022.2...)
Stones, you might say, are a bit important to the Celts. If it didn’t start with them, it was carried on by them from an earlier culture.(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowk_stane)
In the same turn the fisher king and wasteland are elements that lie at the core of Celtic belief systems and are again overloaded on the backdrop of the saxon invasion of the isles. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/388667?jou...)
Myths are composed of and use archetypes to get at the heart of the matter close to a people by dressing it up in the trappings of their culture. To that end, Arthur is and always has been a Celtic cultural hero (with arguable, and improvable to date, roman connections).
Read the Mabinogion and Y Gododdin. (https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Mab... ) And I’d also recommend the Ulster Cycle as it also contains references to the Calad Bolg. (http://theswordlibrary.blogspot.com/2014/02/caladbolg.html?m... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Excalibur-Arthurian-legend)
This is why studies in humanities matter. People read too literally. Everything valuable in myth will be lost on young minds otherwise.
The graal first appears in 1190CE, "Perceval ou le Conte du Graal". Whereas Arthur appears in "Annales Cambriae" - maybe added to the text around 970CE, and probably earlier.
It is not clear, and the Celts themselves are a major reason for that. The love of mystery, retelling oral stories, also lets call it "lying" or Tall Tales or whatever.. Don't get me wrong, I am not against the grain of that at a fundemental level.. but no, the Celts themselves have guranteed that the origins of Aurthur and all the variations are lost in mists of time.
The grail legend as we have it was largely assembled in the middle ages, but it is fundamentally a Celtic tale in that the primary thematic elements that are at the heart of it come down from Celtic myth and culture. Which in turn came from even older Celtic myth and culture which in turn came from the common soup of Indo-European myth. That means if you broaden your scope enough, you’ll see elements of the tale everywhere in the eastern and western world, it’s true.
But speaking of Arthur…
There are many translations of old texts. One of the oldest that mentions Arthur is Y Gododdin by Aneirin (ca 6th century) I mentioned, which has helped fuel speculations about a northern origin rather than one in the south or Wales (as what is now Scotland and Wales and some northern English counties was a series of Celtic and Romano-Celtic kingdoms joined by a similar culture and language). The poet Taliesin is also worth studying as he writes about Arthur and Merlin as well. Both of those poets are from around the same time period. The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology is an excellent and very rich resource to tie it all together. (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...)
It may also help to go down a wikihole on some contemporary figures (like Urien mentioned in the poem noted above: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urien)
The Irish tales go back even further in some cases. They had the advantage of a bit of isolation—slightly less cultural domination and churn for a little while at least.
If you’re savvy, it helps to dabble in linguistics and etymologies. Some of the mystery is shrouded in the language itself. It might surprise you how many cultures are tied together conceptually through a handful of simple syllables.
People who havent really studied this stuff get really hung up on the window dressing. Chivalry, Christianity, noble and ignoble knights—these were the dressings of the middle ages applied to archetypal patterns telling a more profound cosmological and philosophical view that came from the way the Celts saw their place in the world (and pretty much every other ancient cultures share similar perspectives if you study symbols).
It’s quite hard to get the most important things across in life. Most people want you to shut up, pay up, or get out of their way while they pay for a new bathroom or something. These stories are regularly adapted by fans but also by people who want to ensure the important themes make new inroads into the imaginations of the time because thats where everything good and bad begins.
Being a good king isn’t about the castle.
I hope you read into it. There’s something funny in it all. It seems to begin and end with a question.
It isn't about what my favourite trivia is. It's that everyone can have their favourite bits.
“I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...
I am of course open to hear what these aspects are. But let's be clear that lucid understanding and humour are the best parts of civilisation.
is funny and serious in the right moments.
For more historical diving, Oxford maintains a list of books and papers written on the matter.