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> 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.

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.

That's a sobering thought right there: that one people's mythos, the foundations of their culture, could trace back to... a bunch of randos in the early printing era, who figured out they can get rich quick by flooding the world with slop.

I wouldn’t expect any mythos to be perfect, because they have often been constructed quickly and hastily due to external pressures for national unity. Various countries that saw a surge for independence during the 19th century age of nationalism, often based their mythos on Romantic-era poetry that sometimes has aged well (e.g. the Kalevala), and sometimes has aged quite badly (a few Eastern European countries).

change "printing era" to "ai era" and you might be onto something!

Not really. "AI era" is adding a flood of new crap to the world already drowned in slop. The last couple decades marked the time where everyone could publish books, videos and music, and a lot of people did, creating more content every day than any human could consume in a lifetime. And that's discounting the orders of magnitude more useless garbage that advertising industry has been mass-producing for like a century now.

Adding AI to the mix makes zero actual difference at this point.

I guess your main reference is Historia Brittonum, the oldest source about Arthur's myth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum

You can say that about literally any mythos/origin story, including bible and probably old hebraic stuff too.

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.

> 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.

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

The Mark fragment from Papyrus 137 (P.Oxy. 83.5345; P137) may even be from the first century.

> Maybe archaeology will eventually shed some objective light on this.

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 only real sword in the stone is in Italy anyway, the nordic legends come years after the saint Galgano Who, according to the canonization process, planted his sword in the ground and it solidified https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Galgano.

Britain is not "nordic" .. it is a middle Kingdom, with connections North and South.. like London?

>Heck, Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a renaissance around the myths.

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.

England forgot where Richard III was buried for 500 years. Or they just didn't like the Plantagenets.

What seems like a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs

It certainly is a Celtic tale. Not in its present form. Most tellings are derived from later medieval retellings. Arthur and graal cycle are in turn composed from even older Indo-European mythical elements. (Hint: his name means bear https://treesforlife.org.uk/into-the-forest/trees-plants-ani....)

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 grall, sacred spear, and so on are... Not part of the earliest tales. So no. There's no guarantee whatsoever that it is a Celtic myth. Later stories were certainly modified by it.

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 certainly is a Celtic tale.

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.

I freely admit that my knowledge of Arthur comes from and is pretty much limited to the Monty Python and Disney movies. Is there somewhere I should start for the real story?

What’s funny is that the way the tone of this thread is going is that there is no real story and the Python and Disney renderings are as legitimate as all of the others.

There is no singular, “real” Grail story as such. Ignore the lines about Disney, though I enjoyed their version of the sword in the stone. Thats from a retelling written in the early 20th century.

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.

Change the Wikipedia page for Excalibur if you have better info.

That was rejected a few years back for using written references that weren't digitised as they're hundreds of years old. Wiki couldn't validate them.

Hmm? Nah, you can do that, references that only exist on paper and have to be sought in physical libraries are perfectly fine. What edit do you refer to that was rejected?

Yeah sadly you need an academic paper on the written reference and then a WP:RS on the paper to make a definitive statement on Wikipedia survive.

"Definitive statement", what? If an old manuscript says something about excalibur (or Caliburc or whatever), you can say the old manuscript says it. This is not a problem. If instead you want to say "Excalibur definitely was of Irish origin because this old manuscript said so", you're using Wikipedia to promote your own original research, which will conflict with the next wingnut's original research about how Excalibur was in the Old Testament ... and doing that would obviously be a problem. There's no "sadly" about this. "Sadly, guidelines discourage the cranks from fighting over fringe theories in article space".

I thought the article was fine, historically, as a pop travel article. You seem to have hate-read it because it wasn't encyoclopedic enough and left out some of your favorite bits of Arthurian trivia.

You seem to have missed my final point - it isn't about the trivia. The reason that Arthurian legend is so broad and encompassing, is because it's all fiction. That people should write new stories with it.

It isn't about what my favourite trivia is. It's that everyone can have their favourite bits.

What's your favorite film or book on the topic?

Given the usual vainglorious soup of mythical names, claims, swains and dames, I think the one film to recommend remains... Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“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...

it is painful to see Monty Python anti-story of comic relief drawn up to stand alone without understanding.. the psychological and historical themes in Aurthur speak to worlds that are gone today. Comic relief specifically mocks and deflates many important aspects of the myth. By saying "oh that is the ONE for me" it basically flushes a lot of content into ludicrous, and yes funny, cheap theater.

> many important aspects of the myth

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_and_Future_King

is funny and serious in the right moments.

I loved The Sword in The Stone as a child, and should probably re-read it someday. However, I found the later books were nowhere near as interesting, with characters going into long monologues that were just White propounding his own theories through his characters mouths.

Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex is even more wittier.

If I have a comfy chair, nice music, and an afternoon to relax, probably Le Morte d'Arthur. Or if I'm looking to forget the world, Mists of Avalon.

For more historical diving, Oxford maintains a list of books and papers written on the matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...

Now with extra oppression of the masses by supreme executive power derived from a farcical electoral ceremony.