1 - The early Arthur: history and myth

Summary

For anybody concerned with the origins of the Arthurian legend, one literary work should represent the point of embarkation: the Historia Brittonum or History of the British. It is both the earliest clearly dated text to refer to Arthur, and the one upon which most efforts to locate and identify a historical figure behind the name have been based. From it, three different routes of enquiry proceed, which may be characterised as the textual, the folkloric and the archaeological, and each of these will now be followed in turn. / The Arthur of literature / Any pursuit of Arthur through written texts needs to begin with the Historia itself; and thanks primarily to the researches of David Dumville and Nicholas Higham, we now know more or less exactly when and why it was produced in its present form. It was completed in Gwynedd, the north-western kingdom of Wales, at the behest of its monarch, Merfyn, during the year 830. Merfyn was no ordinary Welsh ruler of the age, but an able and ruthless newcomer, an adventurer who had just planted himself and his dynasty on the throne of Gwynedd, and had ambitions to lead all the Welsh. As such, he sponsored something that nobody had apparently written before: a complete history of the Welsh people. To suit Merfyn's ambitions for them, and for himself, it represented the Welsh as the natural and rightful owners of all Britain: pious, warlike and gallant folk who had lost control of most of their land to the invading English, because of a mixture of treachery and overwhelming numbers on the part of the invaders. The identity of the author will never be known.