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Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

If you like Arthur, you may be surprised that some scholars think he wasn't English, but rather he was Cymro/Welsh: https://www.wales.com/about/history-and-heritage/welsh-tradi...

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Wht do you mean by some surely it is all who think he is non English,

The Angles – ancestors of the English were the people whom he was fighting against.

Now was Arthur Roman or Celtic or Welsh etc is up to debate.

Well, no, the mythology has him fighting against all kinds of people, notably including the Saracens.

The more typical question would be "is Arthur based on any historical events at all?"

Sorry never seen that - where does it say he fought Saracens.

Mallory's Morte d'Arthur.

Most of the Arthur "myth" is deliberately constructed fiction by specific authors, rather than folk myths.

I'd put Le Morte D'Arthur as the first modernization of the myths, not another myth.

Yeah. There is a difference between something like Geoffrey's "De gestis Britonum" which was thought by the author to be sort of true, and Malory who knew he was writing literature.

Most of what people think about as part of the Arthur myth are from literary sources, like Lancelot, the Knights of the Round Table, or the Grail quest.

Peredur from the Mabinogion and Chrétien De Troyes Perceval are pretty strongly related, implying that there is a common Celtic source tale, but I don't think anyone has ever found one.

It is unknow whether it is based on a real historical person, but is there any question the oldest known version of the legend is Welsh?

The oldest known legends that obviously relate to the Arthurian mythology are Welsh.

But the further back you go, the less historical they become. And I don't mean in the sense of historical records being less reliable farther back in time; I mean that the characters in the oldest legends are clearly supernatural figures. There is no reason to postulate supernatural figures as having historical enemies. Why would they?

> the further back you go, the less historical they become

This makes zero sense.

That's wrong. All scholars know he was a Briton, or sometimes called "Romano-Briton". The "English" (Angles, Saxons etc.) were usually the antagonists of the Britons.

I only recently started to understand that the post-Roman "dark age" was not quite as dark as I thought it was. Scholars and other interested parties can tease out a fair amount of knowledge of these times. Even though it gets quite obscure.

I have a recent book by Caleb Howells about "King Arthur" and he goes into some interesting detail about some of this stuff. He also has a YouTube channel. There is real history to be discovered here still (but much can only ever remain speculative unfortunately).

perhaps I am somewhat better informed than others, but I've gone under the assumption that familiarity with the Welsh background of Arthur was the norm since I was in my early teens, so many decades back.

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