Is King Arthur An Amalgamation Of Historical Figures?

In England, there is a story about a mythical Celtic warlord who held out against the Anglo Saxon invasion. His right-hand man was a wizard, he was handed his famous sword by a deity, and he was a romantic — and chivalrous — hero.

The story also says that he isn’t dead. He’s merely asleep, and will rise again when the time is right to expel the invaders and turn Britain back into a Celtic land.

He is widely known as King Arthur, a figure so imbued with beauty and potential. But was there a real man behind the myth? Or is he just our platonic ideal of a hero — a respectful king, in today’s parlance?

Today, Arthur's supposed exploits have left behind a tourist trail across the UK and beyond, with scores of sites claiming connections to his myth.

It’s nothing new. For centuries, the legend of Arthur has fascinated much of Europe.

He was supposedly the leader of a tribe of Celts — indigenous Britons — when the Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century.

The Saxons — people from modern-day Scandinavia, Germany and France — eventually colonized Britain, but there were fierce pockets of resistance from the Celts, especially in the far west of the country. Wales and Cornwall — England’s southwesternmost county – were the last to fall. The Celtic languages that all Britons originally spoke held out here, while elsewhere people began to speak what would become English.

Arthur was, according to tradition, a leader resisting to the end against the Saxon colonizers. Fittingly, both Cornwall and Wales (among other places) claim him. Today, he is best associated with Tintagel Castle, where remains of a settlement dating back to the fifth century perch strikingly on an islet off the wild coast of Cornwall. Supposedly, Arthur was conceived here.

But the myth of Arthur is also bound intrinsically with Glastonbury Tor (a hill in Somerset where Merlin, his magician, is said to be asleep, waiting to return), Caerleon Castle in Wales (this was said to where Arthur had his court, Camelot), and South Cadbury in Somerset, where archaeologists in the 1970s thought they’d located Camelot.

In Wales alone, Arthur is meant to have killed a giant on Yr Wyddfa (Mount Snowdon) and a fearsome beast in Llyn Barfog lake, while Merlin is said to be buried both on Bardsey Island, off the north coast, and in a cliff at Nevern. Mind you, Arthur is also rumored to be sleeping in that cliffside — as well as buried at Glastonbury Abbey, Baschurch in Shropshire, and Mynydd y Gaer, a mountain in Wales. Even for a mythical figure, he got around.

There’s also Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh — the names of Arthur and Merlin are "right at the top of the list" of historical figures who’ve loaned their names to places, according to Mark Stoyle, professor of early modern history at the UK’s University of Southampton.

Even the French claim a link with him, with some arguing that he was from Brittany — another Celtic part of Europe. The study of his story is, apparently, on the national school curriculum in France.

For Stoyle, it’s likely that the myth of Arthur has at least its roots in fact.

"Nobody knows for sure," he says. "Historians are so divided on it."

He says that an increasing number of archaeologists and historians believe that Arthur is an amalgamation of various historical characters, rather than an actual figure himself —although plenty still believe that Arthur himself existed.

Stoyle himself is in the former camp.

"When the Roman empire fell, the Anglo Saxons took over in the east of England and then moved to the west. There was fierce resistance to them which lasted a long time, and it’s easy to believe that there was one or more local chieftains who opposed them, and that those stories are perhaps the germ for the story of Arthur," he says.

"My gut feeling is that there has to be someone extraordinary behind this [these stories] but we have so little hard evidence, and some things [which he is said to have done] he definitely couldn’t do."

That would be things like pulling a sword out of a rock in which it was lodged (this marked him out as the rightful king), or getting his most famous sword, Excalibur, handed to him by "the lady of the lake," a kind of water deity (Cornish people swear this happened at Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor). Excalibur has, of course, become so rooted in our global consciousness that it was not only the subject of the 1963 Disney film "The Sword in the Stone" but also is the name of a medieval-themed resort in Las Vegas.

Whoever inspired these stories is almost a moot point for Stoyle. "In a way, everybody has their own Arthur — perceptions about who we want him to have been," he says.

Perhaps he’s the chivalrous knight who spent more time instilling good behavior at Camelot than killing his enemies. This is the Arthur that went viral in the medieval period, when chivalry was all the rage.

Perhaps he’s the romantic hero, the king who fought for love when his wife Guinevere ran off with his most trusted confidant, Lancelot. That’s the erotic Arthur beloved by the pre-Raphaelite artists and poets who obsessed over him in the 1800s.

Perhaps he’s the mystic — the proto-New Age king who was led to victory by his trusted magician Merlin. Modern-day mystics swarm to Glastonbury to soak up his magic there.

Or maybe he’s supernatural — a man who never really died, but lies sleeping, ready to return when his country needs him. This Arthur will kick the Saxon colonizers out and return Britain to its native Celtic culture. That’s the guy who, says Stoyle, the Welsh and Cornish "absolutely believed" in for centuries.

As for Merlin, Stoyle says that most leaders of that age would have been accompanied by a sage. Merlin is the model in popular culture for the likes of Gandalf and Dumbledore, he says.

(Note: It was pointed out by one Historian that the Celts themselves were colonizers from Central Europe. England does not have indigenous peoples because it was settled, not fertile. The Beakers predate the Celts. Moreover, the Welsh and Cornish were Bretons, a sub-ethnic group of the Celts. To merely call them Celts erases their individual languages, customs, and beliefs.)