How Old is the Arthurian Legend？

The historical Arthur lived near the end of the 5th century, right around the year 500 or so, but that's only if he existed And that's a pretty big if. You see this period of around the year 500 is well after the Romans had left Britain and so had Stopped recording their history And it's not too long after the Germanic tribes had started migrating into England and the tensions that that might have caused with the islands original Inhabitants probably didn't make for great conditions for writing things down The Christian missionaries were detailed in Bede's famous history wouldn't arrive until the end of the 6th century so almost a hundred years later and Even then those church authors had little interest in chronicling the deeds of a secular war leader So if we can't know precisely when the historical Arthur lived Well, how old is his legend and what are the earliest sources that attest to Arthur's existence? And how close do they get to the period when he had supposedly lived right around the year 500? Hi, I'm dr Gavin Davis at a PhD in medieval literature in this video is gonna be about perhaps the biggest gap in our knowledge Concerning the history of early medieval Britain. You see there is an Arthur sized hole in the historical record We just don't have enough information to prove that he existed And we also don't have enough information to prove that he didn't exist And although authors and historians have attempted to fill in this hole with legends and conjecture Responsible historians have accepted the fact that we just can't be sure whether or not there ever was a Factual person who was the basis of the Arthurian legend However, there is an Arthurian legend that does exist It is shady Fragmented across centuries and cultures and pieced together from many different sources that have very little to do with one another You know the idea of something getting lost in the mists of time. Well, this is it so rather than focus on what we don't have this video is going to focus on what we do have and see what the Oldest hints of Arthur's fame are that do survive from this period. I want to be getting familiar territory So after a quick review of how legends work We'll briefly mention Jeffrey's history of the Kings of Britain before covering the Welsh literary tradition and in the Latin histories Which will move us more or less backwards in time as we do So while this video doesn't have time to bring us into contact with every mention of Arthur in the pre-galfridian tradition We certainly will cover the major ones including Mabinogion and Uchidolvin as well as the earliest references to Arthur's name That survive in the literary record. Finally, if you find this content interesting I want to invite you to check out the other videos on my channel If you want to see one of the embarrassing first videos on this channel One of the first projects I did was on how old the Beowulf poem is and well more recently I've been moving through the early Arthurian material ever since completing graduate school a year ago my project has been to make college-level education on medieval literature freely available here on YouTube and Even almost a year in now It still feels like this project is just getting started if you want to support this project The best way to do that is through my patreon where for three or five dollars a month Literally the price of a monthly cup of coffee You can help keep the lights on and the cameras rolling if you're interested in joining There'll be more information at the end of the video. But for now, let's get to the content Legends are funny things. So let's set some realistic expectations I don't want anyone to get too disappointed at what they find But also I imagine a lot of you are creatives authors dungeon masters who are invested in how legends work So let's talk about it when we look back on the earliest form that a legend takes It might be tempting to think that the earliest true form of a tale would be the fullest Richest most complete version of the story and that would then diminish in scale as it fragments into a legendary tradition But that assumes that there's a big seminal story or event that got the legend started and even if there was we wouldn't have that version of the story because then it wouldn't be a legend you see while the Word legend has a lot of possible meanings in the study of early literature legend technically means a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated a fable a myth and Oftentimes the same mechanisms of time in history that have swallowed up the original story Have also swallowed up a lot of the context around that story So it's not just the original story that's lost but a lot of the tradition that's around it now oftentimes we have complete versions of these stories that seem definitive and they might easily be billed as the original story if you would believe a books marketing But complete or comprehensive legends are more often than not much later Attempts to compile recover or even just fill in the parts of a story that have been lost to time So while these early retellings might look really foundational and authoritative because they're big popular complete in themselves are really old by now Rarely, are they truly representative of a legends earliest tradition and this isn't at all unique to the Arthurian legends Because it absolutely applies to the Germanic legends the Norse legends and the Greek legends as well The effect then is that for real legends Oftentimes the later works in the legendary tradition are more fully fleshed out More detailed with added context and maybe just even be more artfully rendered while the earlier stuff is what is increasingly fragmented illusory hazy Scattered and oftentimes just shorter for this reason I want to start with Geoffrey of Monmouth's the history of the Kings of Britain Since it represents the watershed moment in the Arthurian tradition that kind of separates the early material from the later In fact, there's even a term for this It's the Galfridian tradition everything that comes after is the post Galfridian tradition the post Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition and everything that comes before is the pre Galfridian tradition Geoffrey's history of the Kings of Britain is the earliest complete account of Arthur's life that survives today Even if it's not actually all that early as will soon become very clear Nevertheless, Geoffrey's history was famous within the Middle Ages providing the legendary historical framework That was accepted as authentic and accurate by later medieval authors This is what we would call the post Galfridian tradition now to be fair We shouldn't give Geoffrey's history all of the credit since it was only part of an explosion of literary work that was being done about Arthur during the 12th century there were Saints lives that were written about this time And of course, there's Chrétien de Troyes who is another major writer who is writing in France at the end of the 12th century But the point I'm trying to make here is this Geoffrey's history, which was written around the year 1135 Marks a significant shift in the Arthurian tradition in which the Arthurian legends were Adapted to fit the distinctly courtly cultures of the high Middle Ages the post Galfridian Arthur is a nightly figure an Icon of chivalric culture and courtly fashion which was rapidly becoming one of the defining characteristics of the medieval literary tradition and as a result of this many of the images plots and Characters we now associate with the Arthurian tradition things like Lancelot Galahad and the grail quest these come from this period and later that's why if you free associate off of Arthur's name a Person's more likely to think of a knight in shining armor with all the pageantry and heraldry of the high Middle Ages Rather than a warrior who looks like let's say Beowulf Even though if the legendary historical timelines would be believed Arthur and Beowulf were just about contemporaries So that brings me to my other point about the Arthur of the post Galfridian tradition. It's just not that old Geoffrey writes his history around the year 1135 and it is the beginning of the post Galfridian tradition in just for reference. Sir. Thomas Mallory writes Lamorte Arthur around 1470 which is perhaps the most iconic version of the Arthurian story and it comes to us from the end of the medieval Arthurian tradition in just about the end of the Middle Ages itself about 300 years separates Lamorte Arthur from Geoffrey's history in Just for reference of scale about 300 years separates Lamorte Arthur from Washington's crossing of the Delaware which means because the way math works about 600 years separates Geoffrey's history from the American War of Independence and Even though Geoffrey's history of the Kings of Britain is the earliest surviving complete account of Arthur's life that we have today there also happens to be about 600 years between it and when the historical Arthur supposedly lived so the big question is What is the pre-Galfridian tradition and what was Arthur's legend in those mysterious? 600 years The next most obvious place to look for the earliest traditions of King Arthur is in the Welsh literary tradition Since we know that Arthur was already famous by the time Geoffrey recorded his history And well, it was the Welsh oral storytelling culture that was preserving these legends after all according to tradition The Welsh are the descendants of the Britons who were the people of King Arthur, but that's the tricky thing about oral storytelling cultures They don't tend to write things down Because then they wouldn't be an oral storytelling culture The two most famous works from the Welsh literary tradition are the Mabinogion and the Godalden and they do offer unique Insights into the pre-Galfridian Arthurian tradition So let's take each of these in turn The Mabinogion is a compilation of 11 medieval Welsh stories that were only gathered under the name the Mabinogion sometime in the 19th century When they were translated from Welsh to English These 11 stories represent a broad chronological spread from across the Middle Ages and they deal with a bunch of different subjects But two of these stories seem to contain a version of Arthur from the earlier Arthurian tradition For our purposes the more significant of these tales is a story called Cilchwch and Orwen Which is only about 35 pages or so. In the story a strapping young hero named Cilchwch Wants to win the hand of the beautiful Orwen who is the daughter of the giant, Ysbyddod and Bencor In order to win the hand of Orwen, Cilchwch travels to Arthur's court where he enlists the help of the king and his Company of heroes in order to accomplish the series of impossible tasks They must complete before the giant will give up his daughter. And in the story Arthur's household contains such familiar names as Kay, Bedwyr, and Arthur's wife Gwynhwybar. All of the story of Cilchwch and Orwen is in prose It is mostly dialogue and when you read it, you can kind of imagine a court poet performing this as a one-man play there are the kinds of predictable mnemonic elements that are distinctive of oral literary cultures and the series of impossible tasks feels like a Montage of even older folktales. In one of them, the one that gets the most time in the story Arthur himself goes on an epic hunt for Turchtruy, a monstrous boar who was a wicked king before he had been transformed on account of his sins. It is a Fascinating tale, a fantasy tale. And do you see how it feels kind of different from the post Galfredian tradition? The world of Cilchwch and Orwen feels a long ways away from the world of court politics and chivalry Sure that later Arthur and his knights will be well known for going on all kinds of strange quests But in the tale of Cilchwch and Orwen, Arthur himself hunts a transfigured boar all across a land full of giants, enchantments, and magic. The odd selection of details and the magical elements make it feel much more like a world of folktale like Beowulf or maybe even some of the oldest sagas and it offers a tantalizing taste of what the early oral Welsh Arthurian tradition might have been Might. And therein lies the rub. Because something like the tales of Cilchwch and Orwen might feel old But as researchers the next question we have to ask is well, how old can we prove it to be? And that's where it gets sticky Identifying when a medieval story was originally composed is one of the great challenges of working in the field of medieval literature Because any one story might get passed around in oral culture for centuries before getting written down And then, even once it is written down, it might get copied and revised into new manuscripts several times over even more centuries before it survives in a physical copy that survives today that we can study. And for Cilchwch and Orwen, the manuscript history isn't very forgiving. The sole manuscripts we have that preserve the story of Cilchwch and Orwen were written around 1400 and on the grand scheme of things, that's not very old at all The story probably existed before this time and using linguistic evidence Some researchers have placed the composition of Cilchwch and Orwen right around the year 1100, which is significantly earlier than its manuscript date and that's swell But that still makes it barely older than Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the Kings of Britain if it's even older at all. Now the difference between the story of Cilchwch and Orwen and Geoffrey's history is that while Geoffrey's history seems to be taking these older traditions and adapting them to his contemporary moment Cilchwch and Orwen seems to be more retrospective Even if it's written around the year 1100, it seems to be looking backwards further into the more ancient legendary Welsh tradition. This is why some of the elements must be older We just don't know what elements or how much older and for this reason if you're reading about the Mabinogion online or Buying it in a bookstore It's common to find folks trying to sell the story as something that comes from the ancient age of Welsh mythology But that's only half the truth and not the full picture. Look, I'm right there with you I would love it if the Mabinogion was an ancient work of Welsh poetry preserved for our enjoyment today But if you thought this was going to be that easy or straightforward Get used to disappointment. If what we're interested in doing is figuring out precisely when this work was written I think the responsible approach is to work with what you have and not with what you wish you had and If we can't prove that something was older, then we have to work with the oldest date We have available and for Cilchwch and Orwen it seems to be right around the year 1100 Even if parts of it might very well be older. All right Well, how about the other story, the Godalden? Well in some respects the Godalden seems to offer something even older than Cilchwch and Orwen The Godalden is a beautiful series of short Elegies. Think like little poems you would say in memory of someone who had died and these elegies Commemorate the fallen warriors of the Godalden recounting their fame and their courage. Sometime around the year 600 There was a battle where warriors of the Godalden fought and died against vastly superior numbers at the Battle of Catraith which is somewhere in what is now Yorkshire. The poem is attributed to Aneirin and Considering the language of the poem, its attribution, and its content, it's quite possible that parts of what survive Maybe really do come from the early 7th century I hadn't read this poetry before until I was preparing for this video and it was an absolute treat to read It's not a narrative poem But it's gorgeous elegy that offers a glimpse of the beauty and tragedy of traditional warrior societies Are you ready for this? Here's an excerpt commemorating a warrior named Guarthur Charging ahead of the 300 he cut down the center and the wing Blazing ahead of the finest army. He gave horses from his winter herd He fed Ravens on the fortress wall Though he was no Arthur among the strongest in the war Guarthur Citadel That's it Did you catch it? Guarthur, which is a different name from Arthur, was apparently an excellent warrior. He led the charge from the vanguard He was wealthy He was able to give from his stock of horses even in the winter and he killed his enemies on the fortress wall Which is how you feed Ravens in battle poetry, but for all his fame He wasn't Arthur That's not much to go on Technically this could be any old Arthur but it does seem to suggest that whenever this poem was written Arthur was Already a famous warrior to whom Guarthur could be compared and the audience of this poem was just expected to know who that Arthur was in oral poetic cultures where everyone is familiar with the same set of stock characters and sources Well, this is exactly how we might expect a famous warrior like Arthur to appear in an early text We don't need to explain who he is because everyone already knows But you can allude to him through comparison as a poetic device and everybody will know who you are talking about So never mind that it's remarkable that this poet's reference still carries the same weight on the order of a thousand years later This seems to be pretty good evidence that by around the year 600 There is already a famous legendary warrior named Arthur However, how old can the Godalvin be? Once again brace yourselves for disappointment the Godalvin exists in only one manuscript from around the year 1265 which is not early and it seems that two different scribes worked on the project Interestingly the work of one scribe seemed to repeat a little bit of the work of the other scribe and some of those repetitions Contains some slight differences and the bit that mentions Arthur. That's one of those slight variations So was it added because a scribe had access to an older more authoritative version Or was it added because the scribe thought he could improve the poem by including a reference to a well-known hero This practice of silently adding or editing material is called interpolation and it's not uncommon in early medieval stories if this mention of Arthur is an interpolation which it very well might be Then this mention of Arthur might not be one of the old parts of the Godalvin and that's even if the Godalvin is as Old as it seems But if this mention of Arthur's name was somehow original to the poem as it very well might be And this could be the oldest mention we have of Arthur's name coming from sometime in the early 7th century Which puts it within a hundred years of the historical Arthur to some that's really exciting I know for me it is because whether or not this refers to the actual Arthur Honestly, this search led me to gorgeous works of poetry that I didn't know about beforehand However, for others who are looking for slightly more concrete evidence of an early Arthurian tradition I can see why this might seem pretty thin There are a few other works in Welsh, the Welsh Annals and the Welsh Triads but they fall into similar patterns only brief allusions to Arthur and they can only be dated in broad strokes to somewhere between the Godalvin and the tale of Ceolchanolwin So if that's about all the Welsh tradition can provide what about the Latin histories? When it comes to the Latin sources We once again have to be realistic about our expectations for the most part early Latin chroniclers were Christians who were associated with the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms who were often the political rivals of the Britons So there's little reason that a Christian Anglo-Saxon cleric would want to detail the accomplishments of a secular Military hero from a rival kingdom and by the way for these Latin sources I'm using the broad view anthology of medieval Arthurian literature, which is one of the more recent Arthurian textbooks to have come out Generally, I preferred not getting my primary sources from a textbook But when it comes to the scattered Latin texts like the ones from the early Arthurian tradition They're so short and esoteric that they're not really worth printing on their own And while many different translations may exist online, they might be of dubious quality So even though a textbook anthology lacks a lot of the context around these works or even just you know, the complete works It's still tough to find good complete copies of those works And at least this is a reliable way of accessing the parts that are the most interesting Perhaps the single most important work for the historical placement of Arthur is a work called Historia Brittonum the history of the Britons Which was written right at the year 830 maybe 829 later on the name Nennius is tacked onto this history as a possible author So you'll sometimes hear people referred to this work as Nennius or the work of Pseudo Nennius Which is what I'm going to call it because the history of the Britons is too close to the history of the kings of Britain Which was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth 300 years later In fact, we actually have very good reason to believe that Geoffrey used Pseudo Nennius' history as one of his sources Besides the scant bits that we can pull from the hazy Welsh tradition this history by Pseudo Nennius Includes the earliest mention we have of Arthur's name and it is integrated into at least some kind of historical Context when Pseudo Nennius describes the resistance of the Britons to the Saxon invasion there are just a few lines that mention Arthur in his military accomplishments a Dux Bellorum a leader of war named Arthur fights twelve battles against the Saxons Carries iconography of the Virgin Mary on his war equipment and he's credited with killing 960 men in a single day at the Battle of Mount Batten On top of this in a later part of Pseudo Nennius' work He describes the wonders of Britain in which there's a mention of a footprint on a rock left by a dog named Cobble the hound of Arthur when he was hunting the pig Troy Keep in mind that Pseudo Nennius does not prove the existence of a historical Arthur Nennius' work is not very internally consistent, which suggests he was working from other sources, which is great But we don't necessarily know what those sources were also, he talks about how he has himself seen some of these very miraculous wonders of Britain which Considering their dubious plausibility those inclusions don't do much to add to the author's credibility as a historian But even though Pseudo Nennius doesn't prove the existence of a historical Arthur at the end of the day it might be just what we're looking for because it does clearly demonstrate the existence of an Already established Arthurian tradition by the year 830 So if what you're looking for is the earliest reference we have to the existence of an Arthurian legend I think we kind of get to pick between either the line from the Godovan or this passage from Pseudo Nennius Depending on your willingness to tolerate uncertainty the line from the Godovan might be more aesthetically satisfying Considering its placement in a poem But it lacks the details provided by Pseudo Nennius that help us identify which Arthur we're talking about Also, we can't be sure if that line in the Godovan concerning Arthur was in the original poem And we don't have a narrow date for the Godovan either in contrast Even though it is later Pseudo Nennius' history of the Britons can be confidently dated to the year 830 or just about Which all things considered maybe isn't too bad. 300 years after the historical Arthur is a long time But if we take Arthur's warrior identity described in Pseudo Nennius and align it with even Conservative estimations from the Welsh tradition. I think we can pretty confidently say that Historical or not, Arthur's legend had already gained a fair degree of traction by the early 800s there is one final source that is like so many of these sources a tantalizing piece of almost evidence Gildas was a British writer who wrote a work called De Excedio and Conquestu Britanniae On the destruction and conquest of Britain. This work was written somewhere between 490 and 560 Right around the years. The historical Arthur is supposed to have lived. Now, Gildas was not a historian His on the destruction and conquest of Britain is a diatribe against the Britons Basically an explanation for why they sucked and deserved everything they got So in other words unlike Nennius or a lot of the Welsh poetry Gildas is not at all sympathetic to the cause of the Britons Gildas does mention a leader of the Britons called Aurelius Ambrosius a name that is connected with the Arthurian tradition in both Pseudo Nennius and Geoffrey and what Gildas is primarily interested in talking about the defeats of the Britons He does mention one victory Battle of Baden which Gildas says occurred during the year of his birth whenever that was So what are we to make of this? Well, it does seem to confirm the history of the Battle of Baden Hill which according to the later Arthurian tradition will become one Of Arthur's greatest victories, but then there are at least two follow-up questions One why didn't Gildas mention Arthur after all Gildas is in theory Literally Arthur's contemporary and lived during one of Arthur's greatest accomplishments But two even if Arthur did exist Why would Gildas want to mention him after all Gildas is a religious writer whose project is primarily to undermine the legacy of the Britons So mentioning the battlefield accomplishments of a military figure no matter how famous would be countered to his point these questions like so many others in this video are Unanswerable. They just add to the cluster of data points that exist around an Arthur sized hole in the historical record that Might be filled by War leader of the Bretonic speaking peoples who won a famous battle at Mount Baden carried Christian iconography on his war equipment But it might also be easily explained by any number of other things. My business here isn't to fill this with conjecture I wanted to make this video because I wanted to know how far back a concrete idea of the Arthurian tradition begins to take shape in the surviving literary record and Depending on your interpretation of a lot of this evidence the origins of the Arthur you're interested in can be found in the late 500s the early 800s or the early 1100s or some hazy place in between and that's okay an important part of being a responsible scholar means sitting with the uncertainty of just Not knowing some of these things But one thing that can't be taken away by scholarly debate is the beauty of these stories that we do have that are the Inspiration for stories we continue to create today the Arthurian legend has mysterious beginnings But it also has mysterious endings because it's not over yet But lastly, I will leave you with one final piece of evidence for the larger point I want to make about the Arthurian legend, which is just how much we don't know This is the Archivalt of a cathedral that depicts a series of knights on a quest and one of them is labeled Artus de Britannia Arthur this sculpture on the cathedral can be positively dated to being made somewhere between 1120 and 1140 So right around the time that Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing in the 12th century Which is when the legend of King Arthur seems to be really taking off Now if this cathedral sculpture was somewhere in England or Wales or Scotland that would make a lot of sense Geoffrey's writing was popular So it makes sense that there was already an audience who is interested in the matter of Britain But this Archivalt is not in Britain. It's the Medina Cathedral in Italy this suggests to me that the hole left by the pre-Galfridian Arthurian tradition was a big one Because Arthur's legend was already Internationally famous by the 1100s and while it's sad to have lost so much It's cool to know that so much Arthurian lore did exist Even if we don't know precisely what it was Thanks for joining me today I was looking forward to researching the content for this video for a long time And I'm excited it led me to such works that I hadn't read before in the future I'll be curious to explore more of the Mabinogion and especially the Godelvin because it Intersects so much with my expertise in Old English battle poetry I have a PhD in English literature specializing in old books with swords in them and ever since I graduated in 2025 I've been building this channel to be a place where anyone can access college level content on medieval literature For free here on YouTube if you want to know more about Arthur by all means check out my other videos on where to start Exploring Arthur's legend and how Geoffrey of Monmouth's history fits into the broader Context of the 12th century and if you want to stay in touch and want to help support me and the channel Far and away the best way to do that is by joining my patreon for either three dollars or five dollars a month literally the price of a Monthly cup of coffee my patreon subscribers have access to some additional behind-the-scenes content But most importantly it is my primary source of income that keeps this channel sustainable since it's just me back here It takes me about two weeks to make each video This community of people allows me to give this project the time it deserves So if you want to join me in supporting this project see the link in the description below I would love to have you on board Medieval literature is for everyone. This channel is about old books with swords in them. I'm Gavin the medievalist and I'll see you next time