Who Was King Arthur?

Will that argument hold up in King Arthur's court?

Let's sit 'round the table and discuss it.

The Arthur myth is extremely rich with its themes of lost causes, nobility & forgiveness, love and betrayal, mysticism. Most myths have some base in fact, but over time other stories become woven in. And then someone like Mallory, influenced by the romance troubadors, codifies it with all the errors intact. A thousand years, two thousand years later, we're still unravelling the threads and getting wisdom from it. (Did Arthur forgive Guinevere and Lancelot because he loved them both, or one of them? Or was the forgiveness purely political?)

I love both the myth and the historical research. Thanks for this thread.

If my history of the Britsh Isles is in any way correct, the Celts were in Britain then the Angles, Saxon and the Fresians came before the Julius Caesar spotted flaxen haired maidens of the Isles.

Your history is incorrect, talk. The britons (Celts) were the original inhabitants of the British isles, which were conquered by the Romans before Gaius Julius Caesar's demise in 44 bce. The Romans ruled Britain until the early 400s ce when they began to withdraw their legions to help guard their homeland against the escalating and accelerating invasions of Germanic "barbarians." It was after the Romans had withdrawn their protection that the Angles, Saxons, Mercians etc. etc. decided to come in and look around. It's against the Anglo-Saxons that the semi-mythical Arthur, a Briton, waged war.

Of perhaps (if only slightly) related interest - From the A2K Wayback Machine, Setanta & timber have at Arthur (and others) through a half-dozen back-and-forth posts across a couple pages or so.

Hmmm ... I don't know about that, talk7200. According to Colin McEvedy (Atlas of Ancient History), at the collapse of Rome in 362 AD, Britain was almost totally Celtic, although there would have been Germanic (Saxon, Angles, et al) settlements of auxilliary legions by then. Julius Caesar didn't see much of the country during his two invasions in 55 and 54 BC, so I don't think we can take his word on the ethnographic makeup at that time. What I can remember from past reading is the flaxen haired came to Britain in the turbulent years after the fall of Rome. (Assuming that you meant "flaxen haired" to be germanic and nordic peoples.)

Thanx for pointing us to those posts, Timber. I had missed that thread. But, as you yourself point out, the succession of Anglo-Saxon "kings" is really peripheral to the history of Arthur. He won the battle of Badon Hill but lost the whole shootin' match to the invading Saxons.

After the Romans came the Vikings as the raided from the north via the Hebrides. The Isle of Man speak Norse. The ports oflondon, Dublin were created by the Vikings.

Anglo-Saxon mercenaries

The site above explains that Angles and Saxons were mercenaries. I always puzzled as to why these Germans would travel all the way to the British Isles.

Your chronolgy is off again. The major serious viking invasions didn't occur until long after the Anglo-Saxons had taken over, roughly between 800 and 1000 ce. Sweyn (Swegn) and Canute (Knut) claimed Kingship over the English, but that was much later. The old Roman Empire had ended long ago and Charlemagne had been installed as Holy Roman Emperor by the time the Norse started to feel their oats and go a-viking. You're absolutely right, of course, that Dublin was created a Norse city with damned few Irish residing there. London, however, (known as Ludinium) had been around for centuries, first established by the Romans.

Breaking news: Fresh trivia on Roman doings in pre-Conquest Britannia:

Anna Tyacke, I think, has been tippling at the local pub, in company with the gullible Daily Telegraph Reporter who wrote that article. The presence of a coin dating back o 145 bce doesn't prove anything more than that some Roman soldier in the army of occupation may have had some pretty old coins in his possession while stationed in Britain. A thousand years from now, would finding a Kennedy Half-dollar in Iraq prove that the US invaded Iraq in the 1960s rather at the start of the 21st sentury?

Decent point, MA ... and just add to the ambiguity, particular strikings of denarii coin are known to have remained in circulation for a century and more. Coulda been there almost any time from before the Julian Occupation through the Roman departure from Britain.

Two points here--the first regards London. There is evidence that there was a hill fort there when Iulius Caesar first invaded. Britain was the only defeat in Caesar's career, so he comments very little on the first invasion, and there are few records of it. However, in historical times, there were legends of the site being sacred to the Britons, and just because the Romans were the pre-eminent engineers of the ancient world doesn't mean they were the only ones who had sense enough to fortify Tower Hill. During excavation for a building project (don't recall when it was, although i have a book on London which could tell me, if i weren't too lazy to dig it out), the skeletal remains of dogs were found to the east of Houndsditch Street, and the thinking is that either they were a propitiary sacrifice when a dun (fortress) was built by the Britons, or that when the dun was taken, the Romans killed the dogs, and threw them into the ditch of the lower stockade of Tower Hill. Kelts commonly loosed dogs on the rath of a dun at night in order to help protect it, and to give warning of the approach of strangers. Tower Hill was likely a fortified spot long before the Romans arrived. The area in which London is located is also an area of low hills, when there are no hills nearby either to the north or the west--and as it is the last place in which the river runs swiftly before it widens into its estuary, it made a logical place to fortify and set up a trade fair.

The second point regards the coin. When Caesar took the west of Transalpine Gaul, one of the people he encountered and subdued were the Armoricans (in what is today Brittany). These were a sea-going people, who regularly traded with the islands. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that coins would have arrived in Britain long before they ever saw a Roman. Throughout most of history, and up until as recently as the early 19th century, specie (gold, silver and copper coins) was sufficiently rare that all kinds of shifts were made to keep them in circulation, and many coins were circulated literally for centuries. I suspect, though, that in Britain, were specie was not produced until after the Roman occupation, coins might have been cherished and jealously guarded as the outward sign of affluence.

Yes, that there may have been a British hill fort at the site which is now part of London proper should come as no surprise to anyone. The spot was (and is) perfect for a settlement and it's quite likely that some sort of settlement was there before the Romans came and turned it into a Roman-type of opidum.

The city where I was born -- Riga, Latvia -- has a similiar history (though later in time). The official history books all say that the city was established in 1201 ce by the Teutonic Knights, subsidized by the Bishop of Bremen. But excavations make it quite clear that a settlement existed at that spot long before the Germans arrived. Nobody knows what it was called by the local Letts but, like London, it's a perfect spot for a trade and defensive outpost. It's located at the mouth of the Daugava River where it flows into the Baltic Sea and provided a perfect harbor for trading ships from Gotland, Sweden and Denmark. Sometimes the Norsemen came to trade, sometimes to raid. In any case, the Teutonic Knights recognized the importance of the location and dedicated a city there, replacing the much more primitive fort which preceded it. The Germans built of stone, a skill they had learned from the Romans; the Latvian hill forts -- incidentally, very similar to the Celtic fortifications -- were made of logs.

I have the DVD 'Guinevere' which I will watch as soon as I log off.