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Was King Arthur?

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Was King Arthur real or not?

Arthur is the creation of one man, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey of Monmouth makes statements about his sources which are partly helpful, partly baffling. He can be shown to have use an older welsh “history” which gives a list of Arthur’s battles. There are also other early Welsh references. Using these and the results of archaeology, scholars have tried to reconstruct a “historical Arthur” In new discoveries by challenging an assumption which scholars have made, the original Arthur can be identified. Several different kinds of evidence converge upon the same conclusion. Arthur, as identified, fits in with the Welsh matter and with archaeological findings. The battles and the legend making can now be better understood. …show more content…

or, to put it another way, is there any historical basis for the tales told of King Arthur? The short answer is, yes, there is a historical basis. Beyond that, though, it is necessary to distinguish between the man whom we may call the historical Arthur and the man whom we should call the legendary King Arthur. The historical Arthur appears to have been a Romano-Celtic dux bellorum, or leader of battles, a commander-in-chief of the combined forces of Britain who aimed to prevent the invading Anglo-Saxons from overrunning Britain during the late fifth and early sixth centuries. That no early historians of the battles between the Britons and the Germanic peoples mention Arthur by name need not make us doubt Arthur's existence, if we understand "Arthur'' as an honorific title rather than a personal name.Scholars have long attempted to identify Arthur with some specific historical British leader. Most recently, Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman have asserted, with perhaps more enthusiasm than hard evidence, that Arthur was really Owain Ddantgwyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys (Wales). This Owain was of Scottish descent, and indeed, in Scotland as in Wales, we still find sites associated with the name of Arthur. But this Arthur is not the King Arthur whom the world knows, the King Arthur of legend and literature played a part in shaping the actual history of Britain, and whose …show more content…

In the mid-fifteenth century, about two decades before Caxton mentioned the Winchester Table in his preface to Malory's works, John Hardyng chronicles that "The Round Table began at Winchester, / And there it ended, and there it still hangs."This Winchester Round Table is among the most vivid reminders that the legend of King Arthur could and did affect later British history. The Round Table of Arthurian literature appears to have originated in the late twelfth century, in the pages of the Roman de Brut, by a Norman cleric, Wace. Scientific evidence suggests that the Winchester Table was made during the later thirteenth century, probably during the reign of Edward I (1272-1307),perhaps for the tournament in 1284 at Nefyn celebrated by Edward to commemorate his victory over the Welsh.Both Edward I and his grandson, Edward I'll, demonstrate a strong interest in King Arthur. In 1278, about a century after the initial discovery of the supposed tombs of Arthur and Guenevere at Glastonbury (about which more will be said later), Edward I causes the royal "remains" to be moved to a place of honor in front of the high altar of Glastonbury Abbey. Sixty years after Edward l's celebration at Nefyn, Edward Ill and his knights reenact a tournament of the Round Table

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