King Arthur, the sword Excalibur, the Round Table, the wizard Merlin, Queen Guinevere, Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail: few legends have enjoyed such success in literature, art and film. But who was Arthur, if he ever existed? And where are the places linked to his myth? This page offers a journey between history and legend through Arthurian Britain.
A king between history and myth
If a historical Arthur existed, he was probably a military leader of the Romanised Britons who, in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, fought the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The monk Gildas, writing around 540, recalls a great British victory at Mount Badon, but never mentions Arthur. His name first appears in a Welsh poem, Y Gododdin, and then in the Historia Brittonum, written in Wales around 830, which credits him with twelve victorious battles; the Annales Cambriae record the battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut are said to have fallen. Most historians today regard Arthur as a legendary figure, perhaps built on the memory of one or more real war leaders.
How the legend was born
The legend took shape in the 12th century. Around 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae, which made Arthur a great conquering king, son of Uther Pendragon, conceived at Tintagel with the help of Merlin's magic and mortally wounded in his last battle, after which he was carried to the isle of Avalon. The book was an extraordinary success all over Europe. Soon afterwards the French poet Chrétien de Troyes added Lancelot, courtly love with Guinevere and the Grail, and the French prose romances developed the quest for the Holy Grail. In 1485 the Englishman Thomas Malory gathered all these stories in Le Morte d'Arthur, one of the first books printed in England by William Caxton. In the 19th century Tennyson's poems and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites revived the myth, which in the 20th century passed into novels, musicals, films and television series.
Arthur's places
- Tintagel, Cornwall: according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the place where Arthur was conceived. The ruins of the 13th-century castle, built precisely to evoke the legend, stand on a spectacular headland linked to the mainland by a footbridge opened in 2019; a bronze statue, Gallos, evokes the king. Beneath the cliff lies "Merlin's Cave".
- Glastonbury, Somerset: identified with the isle of Avalon. In 1191 the abbey's monks announced they had found the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere, a discovery that drew pilgrims and donations; the site of the supposed tomb is still marked among the ruins. The Tor rises above the plain that was once marshland.
- Cadbury Castle, Somerset: a great Iron Age hillfort, identified as early as the 16th century as a possible Camelot; excavations in the 1960s found traces of an important 5th-6th century hall.
- Winchester: in the Great Hall hangs a great wooden Round Table, actually made around 1290 and painted in the time of Henry VIII with the king's image in place of Arthur.
- Caerleon, South Wales: the ruins of the Roman fortress's amphitheatre were long thought to be the Round Table, and the town is named as one of Arthur's courts.
- Dozmary Pool, on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, is one of the lakes where the sword Excalibur was supposedly returned to the Lady of the Lake.
- Wales is full of Arthurian places: Carmarthen, Merlin's town, the hill of Dinas Emrys in Eryri, where the young Merlin is said to have revealed the fight between a red dragon and a white dragon, and Bardsey Island, held by some to be the wizard's last home.
- Stonehenge too enters the legend: according to Geoffrey it was Merlin and his arts that brought the stones from Ireland.
- In Scotland, Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh bears the king's name, though the link is uncertain.
An Arthurian itinerary
A journey in Arthur's footsteps might begin in Winchester, continue to Glastonbury and Cadbury in Somerset, cross Bodmin Moor to Tintagel on Cornwall's Atlantic coast and end in Wales, between Caerleon and Eryri. Along the way you also pass Bath, Salisbury, Dunster and the splendid north Cornish coast, as far as St Ives.
See also the history of the United Kingdom, the history of Wales and travellers of yesterday.