King Arthur

Loves me some Arthurian mythology..

Excalibur is still one of the better movies

There was a young knight
named Sir Lancelot
Who folks all said was askance a lot
for every time he would pass
A presentable lass
The front of his pants would advance a lot.

@Jacko1971

Why Welsh dragons ?
I thought he was supposed to be English ?

Did someone call for King Arthur?

From everything I've read and seen in documentary videos, chances are there was no Arthur and most of the stories originate from France. And reading Malory's LE MORTE D'ARTHUR gives one a whole different concept of knightly chivalry -- I seem to remember quite a few women being killed by knights in that? Or maybe I'm wrong, it's been well over a decade since I read it.

My understanding is that all the Arthurian legends were based on one book written in the 16th century...

This is a slide from my presentation. I plotted the map myself. It is for reference only. It is not meant to be perfect.

A 6th Century monk named Gildas wrote about 12 battles but he didn't didn't say where they happened nor did he name Arthur as the protagonist.

A 9th Century monk named Nennius named Arthur but he didn't refer to him as a king. He also suggested locations for the 12 battles. More than 200 years had passed by then so it's very difficult to give too much credence to his speculations.

Opinions differ on the actual locations described by Nennius. I have seen several different maps and they vary a lot. I just happened to pick one at random that I felt aesthetically pleasing. The fact that the shield symbols line up with the border I drew is purely coincidental. It does help to make a statement though.

Of course King Arthur is not the subject of my study but it is an interesting distraction.

ive never studied it

Disregard everything from the fables accept the round table which has even earlier references around 1115 CE.

Please bear in mind the best fiction is usually based on a little bit of truth. And I do suspect that table is a little bit of the truth....

https://www.thecollector.com/true-history-round-table-king-arthur/

There's nothing magical about a round table for any band of knights.

For a start, ignore any Hollywood-esque nonsense.

In fact ignore stories about Arthur, Lancelot, Holy Grials and the like.

King Arthur is a work of fiction.

There has never been a King Arthur since Norman times (late-11th Century); and no known, English, King Arthur from the Saxon era the Normans replaced.

Even if there had been a Saxon king, when England was coalescing from several kingdoms, who might have inspired the story, he and his militia would not have looked anything like the characters in your illustration. That shows Mediaeval practice, contemporary with the Arthur story's original publication.

The Arthurian legends were invented in the 15th Century by the English writer. Sir Thomas Malory, in one of the first known novels. Even the writer Malory's identity is vague because there are several Thoman Malorys identified in the official records of the time!

Malory drew on older French sources for inspiration, and subsequently the French writer Chrétien de Troyes added Lancelot and the Holy Grail to the stories.


So if you want to study the Saxon era seriously and credibly, don't use a Mediaeval Norman novel as a source!