King Arthur and His Mythology

The historical Arthur, if he existed at all, was probably a British or Romano-British war-leader of the late fifth or early sixth century who won one or more battles against the encroaching Saxons. The figure who comes down to us through the centuries is something quite different: a high king of all Britain, the wielder of the sword Excalibur, the founder of the Round Table, the husband of Guinevere, the lover of Lancelot, the companion of Merlin, the king who will one day return. The story of King Arthur is the most elaborate and the most durable of the medieval European folk-heroic cycles.

This article is part of the wider survey of Medieval European Heroes and of the larger survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It follows the Arthurian legend from its Welsh and Latin origins to its modern retellings, and it connects to the wider currents of Celtic Folklore, the Welsh dragon legend, and the Celtic saint lore of the British Isles.

The Welsh and Latin Sources

The earliest known source of the Arthurian legend is the Historia Brittonum, a Latin history traditionally attributed to a Welsh monk named Nennius and probably composed in the early ninth century. It lists twelve battles fought by a war-leader named Arthur, of which the most famous is the Battle of Badon, in which the Britons defeated the Saxons. The Annales Cambriae record a battle of Badon in 516 and the death of Arthur at Camlann in 537. These two early sources are frustratingly brief, and they describe only a successful war-leader, not yet the legendary king.

The Welsh tradition of the Mabinogion, preserved in medieval manuscripts, contains three of the earliest Arthurian tales — Owain, Geraint and Enid, and Peredur son of Efrawg — and presents a darker and more ambiguous Arthur: a king who goes to war with his own nephew and is carried off wounded to a magical island. The Welsh Triads of the Island of Britain mention Arthur, his wife Gwenhwyfar, his nephew Gwalchmai, and his sword Caledfwlch (the Welsh equivalent of Excalibur).

Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, and the Round Table

The figure of Merlin (in Welsh, Myrddin) is one of the great creations of the medieval European imagination. He is a combination of two earlier figures: the prophetic madman Myrddin of the Welsh tradition and the historical Ambrosius Aurelianus. The combination was made by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Vita Merlini of c. 1150. Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae of c. 1136, a Latin history of the kings of Britain from Brutus to Cadwallader, is the great founding text of the Arthurian legend in its later form, providing the basic story of Arthur for almost every subsequent European retelling. The Lady of the Lake is, in the earliest versions, a powerful enchantress of the Celtic otherworld rather than the gentle fairy of the later English tradition. In the French prose romances of the thirteenth century she becomes the giver of Excalibur and the protector of Lancelot.

Two of the most famous images of the legend are the sword in the stone and the round table. The sword in the stone appears in Robert de Boron’s late twelfth-century verse romance Merlin, in which the young Arthur proves his right to the throne by drawing a sword from a stone. The round table appears in the French Lancelot-Graal cycle and in Wace’s Roman de Brut of c. 1155: it has no head, no place of honour, and no lord but the king, and it is one of the most influential political symbols of the Middle Ages.

The Christianisation by Chrétien de Troyes

The Christianisation of the legend was the work of the French romancers, especially Chrétien de Troyes, whose five great romans of c. 1170-1190 transformed the dark Welsh warrior-king into the high king of a chivalric dream. Chrétien introduced the figure of Lancelot, the great knight and adulterous lover of Guinevere, the figure of Yvain, and the figure of Perceval, the innocent who sees the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail, in the earliest versions a magical vessel of plenty, becomes the cup of the Last Supper in the Christianised versions of the thirteenth century, and the quest for the Grail is the central story of the later romance tradition.

The English Tradition and Malory

The English tradition begins with Layamon’s Brut of c. 1200, an English verse adaptation of Wace that introduced the English place-names of the legend. The Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, printed by William Caxton in 1485, is the most influential of all English Arthurian works. Malory drew on the French prose Lancelot-Graal and the English Grail tradition to produce a long prose work of eight tales. He is a complex writer, at once a knight of the late medieval English order and a deep critic of the chivalric ideal. His book ends with the ruin of the Round Table and the famous last words: “And I, Thomas Malory, have done as much as I could to set forth the noble history of the Sangreal, and of the most renowned Christian king, King Arthur.”

Modern Retellings

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 1848, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, made the Arthurian world one of the great subjects of English painting, and Tennyson’s long Idylls of the King of 1859-1885 shaped the Victorian image of Arthur for several generations.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an enormous expansion of the legend. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King of 1958 is a long prose work in which Arthur is a Wart, a child who becomes a king by accident and spends his life trying to build a perfect kingdom; it was the basis for the 1963 Disney film The Sword in the Stone. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon of 1983 retold the legend from the women’s point of view, and helped to bring about a generation of feminist retellings. The recent BBC series Merlin of 2008-2012, the Guy Ritchie film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword of 2017, and a long series of historical fantasies have all helped to keep the legend alive.

The Celtic and Welsh Roots

The Arthurian legend belongs, in its deepest roots, to the Celtic Folklore tradition, and the comparison of Arthur with the Irish Cú Chulainn and Finn mac Cumhaill is a small study in itself. The Welsh dragon legend is the deep ancestor of the later chivalric stories of the knight and the dragon, and the comparison of the dragon lore with the Arthurian stories is one of the most fascinating cross-cultural comparisons in European folklore.

Sources and Further Reading

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by Michael A. Faletra. Broadview, 2008.
Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Translated by William W. Kibler. Penguin, 1991.
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. Edited by P. J. C. Field. Boydell, 2017 (orig. 1485).
Higham, Nicholas J. King Arthur: Myth-Making and History. Routledge, 2002.
Green, Thomas. The Beginnings of Arthurian Romance (multiple).