Medieval Expert Shocked By Accuracy Of King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword

I cannot remember any sort of three women, snake, siren type character in Arthurian legend. That's David Beckham, about the only footballer I know. He's got a sword out so this does not look good for Vortigern's wife and he has just brutally killed her. Hi my name's Heta Howes, I'm a senior lecturer in medieval literature at City St George's, University of London. I recently wrote a book, Poet Mystic Widow Wife, The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and some Arthurian legends do make an appearance in that book. I'm about to do a deep dive for history hits into the 2017 King Arthur Legend of the Sword film. There are a lot of different King Arthur films, this is a Guy Ritchie one. I don't think I've ever seen a Guy Ritchie film. I've heard the name, I don't know what to expect. Let's get into it. Oh right so here's clearly some sort of massive creature, not sure what yet and presumably this is some dark magic. There is lots of magic in King Arthur so that's not untoward. There's a sort of horse running here, oh an elephant! Okay, not familiar with any elephants in the Arthurian legend, all of them being in battles in England. A little bit of artistic license there but that's fine, looks good on camera right? I don't think we can win this. Ah dude, Jude Law looking confused. So we've got quite an epic battle scene it looks like going on here and that is entirely in keeping with lots of legends of King Arthur because one thing in both traditions of Arthurian legend, history and romance, the one thing we get all the time is massive battles, usually on foot like this, maybe not with elephants but certainly big battles on foot and lots of nights that tracks. Quite nice to see Uther Pendragon, if Eric Bana is Uther Pendragon here, having a bit of time in the spotlight. Uther Pendragon, there's sort of slightly more record of him existing than in fact King Arthur himself. So Uther crops up in a number of different chronicles in Welsh and other traditions and he's Arthur's dad. So Uther Pendragon has to flee the country for a bit when the tyrant Vortigern takes over and then he comes back but he's most famous partly for his name, Pendragon, which one very famous writer Geoffrey of Monmouth believed meant real dragons whereas actually at the time it just kind of meant in charge, head honcho, kind of the main guy. So Geoffrey of Monmouth has this whole backstory for Uther Pendragon where he sees a comet shaped like a dragon and then decides that he will take on the banner of the dragon. He's also, he's a good king in the sense that he manages to sort of marshal together a lot of Britain even before Arthur comes along but his parentage of Arthur is really dodgy. He convinces Merlin, or Merlin kind of goes along with, allowing him to look like his enemy because he's fallen in love with his enemy's wife. Arthur's parentage is actually coming out of ostensibly rape because Arthur's mother, Igraine, thinks she's sleeping with her husband. It is in fact not her husband, it is Uther. So it will be interesting to see if any of that backstory remains in the film. Oh okay, I think this is Excalibur. This film is called Legend of the Sword so I assumed Excalibur was going to play a part at some point although there actually are two different swords in Arthurian legend. People think that Excalibur and the sword and the stone are the same. This has got to be Excalibur if we are pre-Arthur although I've not read anywhere Excalibur being associated with anyone other than Arthur so if Uther of Pendragon is wielding Excalibur that is a little bit of artistic license also. The thing about Excalibur is just a mighty sword, it gets the job done. So if Uther's got that sword it looks like things are probably going to go his way in this battle. So Camelot is one of the biggest sort of enduring parts of the Arthurian legend. We don't actually get written record of Camelot until a bit later with the legends, so around sort of 12th century, but essentially it's the stronghold that King Arthur sets up. It's the place where everything happens, where the round table is, where he sort of has his kingship and it becomes really romanticised in Arthurian legend this idea that Camelot is the best possible place for the best possible knights and ruled by the best possible king. So it's really the heartland and so it's not surprising at all that Camelot would be a sort of key site. To have it pre-Arthur is a bit of a... I wouldn't have made that decision. Usually Camelot is coming with Arthur, so it's interesting to have Camelot already as a stronghold before Arthur is potentially even walked into the scene. Um cool, I think we'll move on to the next one then. This is really fun by the way, thank you for letting me do this. Oh man no, it's really good, I'm excited about this one. Are the men ready? Yes they are. Are you sure about this my lord? Listen to me woman, I need you to do as I tell you. What's going on? I need to get you and the boy away from here and I'll join you as soon as I can. I'm scared Uther. I have the sword, hurry. How do you know of this place? So it looks as if Vortigern, shady doodler, has got a plan in place and Uther is trying to get his son away, presumably Arthur here, the young Arthur, out of Helmsway and then we've got it sort of spliced with the story, the scenes of Vortigern and his presumably wife. Vortigern doesn't really have a wife that is named or given any kind of story in the legends and chronicles so interesting to see her. She looks like she really cares about him. He's got his sword out so this does not look good for Vortigern's wife and he has just brutally killed her. Vortigern, according to legend, is not a nice character. He is a tyrant. He sort of invites in Saxon rule to further his own interests which then leads to lots of bloody battles in the country. So yeah, not surprised to see him doing something so horrible but I don't remember him killing his wife in the legends. And there's no recorded sort of battle of this kind between Uther and Vortigern. Vortigern does fight with Uther Pendragon's brother, much older brother, that this scene seems like interesting fiction. So he's killed his wife. We've got a body of water. Normally in Arthurian legend if you've got water something's going to come out of it so I would expect that to happen. Possibly we might get the Lady of the Lake character like that. Arthur and his mother and father are fleeing right now. So this is, it's worth saying that this mother is Igraine then and the character Igraine is Uther Pendragon's wife who he sort of managed to steal from her own husband. Happily for Uther Pendragon, just after he'd slept with Igraine they discovered that Igraine's husband was dead so they were, you know, it was fine for them to get married. Everybody wins except for Igraine. Although according to the Chronicles she's very happy about it. We don't get told very much about Igraine in the sort of various different sources for Arthurian legend. We know she was incredibly beautiful, one of the most beautiful women in England. We know she was Arthur's mother. Beyond that we know almost nothing. Yeah, there she goes. That's actually a very affecting scene, I think, to have the young Arthur watching his mother fall back into the water, presumably killed by Vortigaunt or his forces. Again, in many of the legends Igraine actually lives for quite some time. Arthur doesn't end up meeting her until he's older when Arthur's a baby. Merlin sort of takes him away to keep him safe as the rightful heir of England because there's so much infighting going on. But in some versions of the legend he does meet his mother later on. Again, she only ever plays a bit of a side role. But to have her killed in this way with Arthur witnessing it is a sort of added emotion to the original story that we don't find in the sources. Okay, so we've got some women washing by the side of the water. And actually, just pause on that a second, totally true in tons of most of the medieval periods it was women who did the washing and it would be in sort of groups by the side of the water. And actually for quite a lot of the Middle Ages, this sort of idea of women laundering by the water had quite a mixed reputation. So this idea that laundresses on the one hand are doing this important work, keeping clothes clean and often working even for nobility. But on the other hand, also often wrongly associated with prostitution and sex work, this idea that there's something untoward about women on the outskirts of society doing their washing, chatting, gossiping, we don't quite know what they're talking about or what they're doing. So there's sort of a sort of mixed history of women doing this kind of labour, but it would have been a sight not uncommon to see. Oh, Arthur's just popped up in the boat, bless him. He's a very cute kid, I must say, this Arthur, and they're carrying him back to town. So we're getting this sort of pan out now of what looks to be a version of medieval London. It's difficult so far to try and date the time period of this film. In terms of the costumes, it's all a bit mixed. The history chronicles tend to put Arthur in around the fifth or sixth centuries, and they put him in a bit of a vacuum in history. We know very little about what happens when Rome withdrew from England and what happened in the sort of couple of hundred years after that. And a lot of the times the chronicles, sources about King Arthur, whether he was or wasn't real, have him placed in this kind of time. So you're talking about Britain that has recently been under Roman rule is no longer under Roman rule. So even in this scene here, we can see some sort of leftover remnants of sort of pillars that look quite Roman, monuments that look quite Roman, which there would have been all these traces of Roman rule left. And in fact, in some of the sources, King Arthur goes off to conquer, like, for example, bits of the empire himself, Gaul, most famously. So it is definitely along the right lines that Guy Ritchie has decided to have this sort of Roman influence here. But what's also interesting about how tricky it is to date the time period of this film is that a lot of Arthurian legend is a bit of a mishmash in terms of time period. On the one hand, you've got these history chronicles putting him in the fifth or sixth centuries. The Romance, or sort of more legendary tradition, tends to have him in a kind of imagined past, a sort of recent but not too recent medieval past that has a lot of elements of the contemporary. So if you think about something like Game of Thrones that is sort of quasi-medieval, Arthurian legend is sort of quasi-historical. So again, the fact that we can't date it that easily in terms of what it looks and feels like is actually very true to the spirit of Arthurian legend, I think. Arthur's growing up in what? Oh, OK, a brothel. Yeah, that is not something that happens in the legend at all. Arthur was not brought up in a brothel. I mean, I suppose he could have been. Neither the chronicles nor the legends are particularly interesting in Arthur's childhood, to be honest. We have this idea of him being a bit of an underdog because of sort of later narratives, and by later I mean sort of things like T.H. White, The Once and Future Kings, sort of 19th century onwards. This sort of romantic idea that Arthur grows up not knowing his true parentage. It's absolutely true in the chronicles that Arthur doesn't know his true parentage, but they don't really go into what growing up was like for him. And actually, he was a squire. So in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, for example, one of the definitive 12th century narratives, the first real introduction of Arthur, he is sort of squirreled away by Merlin to protect him. And then he is a squire to Sir Hector and his brother Kay. So it's not as if he's kind of growing up roughshod. He would have had a pretty nice upbringing. He wouldn't have known he was sort of heir and he isn't a knight, but certainly nothing like what we're seeing here. These sort of images of violence and bullying and poverty and these scenes of the brothel. I suppose Guy Ritchie's playing on this idea of Arthur being an underdog. And one thing that's been true of Arthurian legend right from its inception is that it tells us as much, I think, about our current moment in history as it does about the legends themselves. It's such a flexible myth. It's a myth that's ripe for being tailored to a particular moment in time. So in 2017, I imagine quite a lot of us are quite interested in that sort of underdog, come from nothing, rough and ready type hero, which is what we're seeing here. He's obviously learning how to fight better. He's slowly taking over on the streets. So I think that tells us perhaps more about what we're looking for in a hero than what the original medieval people were looking for in a hero. Arthur tends to be very courteous, very well-to-do, very noble. Even though his origins are a bit shrouded in mystery and his parentage is unknown, he's still very much a knight in his spirit, even if not early on. Right, so here we've got Vortigern. I'm fairly certain there's no way Vortigern in history would have been nearly so handsome as Jude Law. But he's going down back to the water where we saw him earlier, and I thought something was going to pop out from the water. It didn't then, so perhaps it will now. So I was right. Here's a weird snake thing coming out the water. So far, no idea what this is. Okay, so it looks like we have three women in a weird snake situation. I thought we were going to get the Lady of the Lake. So Lady of the Lake is a massive Arthurian character from quite early on. She has various different names. Some people think there's lots of different Ladies of the Lake. Some think there's one under different names. Sometimes Nimue, Ninian, Vivian. But she is always very closely linked with King Arthur. She is the one that gives King Arthur his sword. So maybe that's going to come up here. She gives him Excalibur. She's also the one that takes Excalibur back towards the end of the legend when Arthur is mortally wounded. She also, side note, fosters Lancelot, who has not popped up in this film yet, and then sort of brings him up and encourages the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, which eventually helps bring down Arthur's round table. I cannot remember any sort of three-women-snake-siren-type character in Arthurian legend. We had a deal. When the blood of a loved one is spilt in these waters, my desire must be met. There is no ambiguity, my lord. We kept our side of the covenant. It was you who lost the boy and the sword. Have I not sacrificed enough? And have you not felt your power increase? You have. Okay, so now we have an explanation for what was going on earlier. Vortigern killed his wife in order to strengthen his own kingdom, to strengthen and fortify his tower, to gain traction in the kingdom. Now, in the legend, Vortigern does not kill his wife, but he is actually associated with a sacrifice to do with fortifying the tower that he's building. So according to legend, Vortigern is invited in Saxon rulers to try and sort of make gains. This has backfired horribly for everyone, including him. He sort of goes and tries to build a tower that can be fortified, that he can kind of retreat to, and he can kind of regroup. But every night when he wakes up, the materials used to build this tower have vanished, and the walls are crumbling. And actually, I'm remembering now, the sort of opening scene of this film, we had a sort of glimpse of a tower. He calls all of his advisors and asks them what to do. And they say if he can find a young boy who is born without a father and sacrifice him and sprinkle his blood, then the tower will be able to be built. So he searches and he finds Merlin. So this is the first introduction of Merlin to Arthurian legend. And Merlin comes along. And even as a young boy, Merlin is very canny. And Merlin says, who has told you that sacrificing me is going to do any good at all? And he says, well, all my advisors have said this. Merlin tells him to dig and to see what he finds. And what they uncover is two dragons, a red dragon and a white dragon, whales in England, sort of representing tussles in the country. And because Merlin has helped Vortigern, Vortigern does not sacrifice him, doesn't kill him. But it's interesting here that we do have Vortigern associated with sacrifice and bloodshed and a tower, but it's kind of replaced Merlin with the loved one, presumably just for emotional impact. So now we have Arthur all grown up and like pretty much every other man in this film so far, very handsome, which is true. Arthur was supposed to be a very handsome knight and then a very handsome king. Interestingly, he's been transported from Londinium to this place where we have the sword in the stone and whoever pulls the sword out of the stone is going to be named rightful king of England. Now, in most of the original versions of this story, the sword in the stone event actually happens in or around Londinium. So it's interesting that he's been taken out of Londinium to go to sort of queue and see if he can get the sword from the stone. And Vortigern is obviously trying to get through as many young men as possible so he can find the true king and then eradicate him. Lots and lots of versions. Sword in the stone moment is one of the pinnacles of Arthurian legend. It's one of those moments if you say to someone, what do you know about King Arthur? They probably know about sword in the stone. It pops up pretty early on. Geoffrey of Monmouth again, like with most Arthurian legends, fleshes it out a bit more and then later romance writers add to it. The idea is that there is this sword, no one can pull it out. Whoever pulls it out will be named king of England. In most versions, Arthur pulls the sword out without knowing what he's doing. So he's travelled with Sir Hector and his brother Kay, with Kay planning to have a go at pulling out the sword. He sees that his brother Kay is without a sword, quickly grabs the sword from the stone, gives it to Kay and everyone's like, hang on a minute, where did you get this sword from? Obviously we don't have characters of Hector or Kay in this film. So we've got Arthur queuing up to sort of try his hand and much as in the original stories, he doesn't really seem to know what's going on. He's just been transported here by the enemy and is waiting to see what happens and then hopefully go home. That's David Beckham, about the only footballer I know. I think someone called him Trigger, that is not a name I'm familiar with from Arthurian legend either. Okay, so Arthur puts his hand on and has sort of a weird flash, that doesn't happen in the original. I sort of expect him to just pull it straight out there. David Beckham telling him to use both hands. I can see why Beckham hasn't had many other roles in films. Ten digits, round the blunt bit, give it a tug. Left foot, right foot, collect your brand, back on the barge. So yeah, very dramatic scene. He's got his hands on the sword, starting to pull the sword out and you can see the words on the sword are starting to light up. In Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which is a really famous version towards the 15th century, the sword does have writing on it, whosoever pulls out this sword will be the rightful king of England. So presumably riffing off that. I think Richard's done a really nice job of this scene, you know, because it's this sense of nobody expected this to happen. No one expected this particular guy to pull the sword out of the stone. Now in the original version of the legend, it's a very different kind of Arthur, but I think that spirit of it's still there. But it looks as if Arthur's having some trouble with the sword, which again feels like an intervention in the story. But yeah, just to clarify, here the two swords Excalibur and the sword in the stone are being sort of conflated as the same sword. They are two different swords in the legend. Some writers do also get them a bit confused though, so Guy Ritchie is in good company, but ultimately they are two distinct swords. Excalibur is a great sword that Arthur uses for fighting, the sword in the stone is a sort of magical sword that needs to be pulled out and shows who the rightful king is going to be. Hi there, I'm Dan Snow and if you love history, you know that History Hit is on a mission to bring the past to life. Every week we travel the world to film original and in-depth documentaries and now History Hit has launched a YouTube membership to give you access to even more films released weekly. Become a History Hit channel member now to make sure you never miss out on exclusive documentaries on topics like newly discovered shipwrecks and the clash of gladiators. We cover all time periods and all subjects from Pompeii to D-Day. Click the join button on the History Hit YouTube channel or click the link in the description and see for yourself what History Hit has to offer. We can't wait to have you join the team. Bloodstick, meet Percival. Rubio, meet Baklak. Sbedevir runs this aristocratic family of cave dwellers. Meet Blue, son of Baklak. The infamous Goose Fat Bill needs no introduction. So. Okay, so it seems like we're getting introduced properly, finally, with some names to Arthur's group. I don't, I hesitate to call them knights here because that's not the way Guy Ritchie is leaning. Wetstick and Baklak, not clear who they are but he has mentioned a couple of names here that I'm like, oh okay, I know who we've got. So Sbedevir and Percival as well. The way I often think about Arthurian legend is a little bit like the Marvel universe or the DC universe that you have these characters that are fairly consistent and pop up time and time again but depending on what film you're watching, some of them are more prominent than others and their personalities will shift a little bit depending on who's making the film or who the film is targeted at. Arthurian legend is exactly like that. You've got a few characters that pop up again and again, Sbedevir is one of them, Lancelot, Galahad, Percival, Tristan, all these different names that you get time and time again. Some of them get their own spin-offs, they get whole books dedicated to them, for example, by Chretien de Toile writes a lot about Lancelot but also their characters shift a little bit. So Sbedevir early on is sort of a marshal, a right-hand man to Arthur. As his character develops, he becomes even more instrumental in the story because he's the one who gives Excalibur back to the Lady in the Lake. So when Arthur's dying after his final battle, he gives Sbedevir the sword and says, can you go deliver it to the Lady in the Lake? They have a lot of adventures together, Sbedevir and Arthur. They fight a giant, for example, together at one point so I like the fact that he's quite a prominent character although historically he often only has one hand. Percival was originally associated with the Grail stories. So by the time you get to Thomas Malory writing in the 15th century, Galahad is the knight who takes the Holy Grail, the sort of talisman that's associated with Jesus and the Last Supper but in early versions, it's Percival and Percival is this sort of childlike, innocent and sometimes a little bit annoying us too many questions character who pops up again and again. Tristan, involved in a very famous love triangle. One thing I've noticed so far about this film actually is that we don't really have any romance. I wondered when the mage popped up if she was going to maybe be a love interest for Arthur. A lot of the Arthurian legends make a lot of sort of the romances that spring up and rescuing damsels in distress. That's not such a big part of this film. Now we've got this kind of, I imagine I've not seen a Guy Ritchie film before where this feels like a kind of classic scene where they're sort of running through the back streets against this enemy. So, so far in this film, it feels like we have Arthur and his men, and again, I'm saying men, not knights at the minute, set up against these sort of much more military accomplished fighters who are working for Vortigern. Not particularly realistic in the sense that in all the legends, his men are knights as well. And it's not as if, you know, the Saxons were so much more elite and better fighters than the Britons. So, you know, that's a little bit of evoking, I think, other films and traditions. They look a little bit stormtrooper-y, don't they? So we can easily see they're their enemy. And again, this idea of wanting to sort of side with the underdog in the 21st century. And I just love this idea that these sort of ragtag men have sort of invaded this industrial house, this house where someone's just trying to get on with their day and make the cloth. And this is realistic. You would have sort of cloth makers situated near the water because that's where the trade happens. So that makes total sense. His friend has died, yes. He's essentially rejecting his fate. And if you want to comment on the fact that he throws it by the blade, that bothers me so much. Like why? Just why? You just wouldn't. Particularly if you're like... We've just seen how powerful and deadly this sword is. Yeah. So we've got more of this narrative here that's sort of run throughout so far and is completely fictional of how Arthur is sort of feeling conflicted about his birthright. We don't get this in any of the Arthurian legends from any of the medieval periods. The idea is that Arthur finds out he's king. He's very happy to be king. He's excellent at it. Job done until he dies. Whereas Guy Ritchie's having him a little bit conflicted about it. I've got two problems with this scene, right? So firstly, Arthur would not throw his sword away even if his friend had died. He would be very sad, but he would not throw his sword away. Either way, he's got all the sword in the stone. More problematic is he's picked up this incredibly powerful sword by the blade when the handle was right there. And also Beckham has very clearly taught him earlier in the film, how to pick up a sword with both hands by the handle. So why he's forgotten his tutelage there, I'm not sure. Now in the legends, Arthur only gives his sword back to the water when he is dying. And that is because he doesn't want anyone to get a hold of it. He wants to kind of keep it for when he comes back, hopefully. There's this sort of question mark of whether he's going to come back from the fairyland of Avalon and be healed or whether he's gone forever. And Morgan le Fay, his sort of enemy in many of the stories, throws a scabbard of Excalibur into the lake. But at no point do we have Arthur throwing his sword in the lake, sort of mid-story. Okay, a hand has reached out, sort of beautiful feminine hand to reach the handle of the sword. She knows how to hold a sword, so maybe she should be king of England because she's holding it by the handle. This presumably has got to finally be the Lady of the Lake. I expected to see her earlier when instead we saw sort of the weird siren women talking to Vertigern. The Lady of the Lake is a sort of massive figure in Arthurian legend. She is associated with the fairyland of Avalon. Always she is in the water and she's always associated with the sword as well. So she is the one who gives Arthur Excalibur. So sword in the stone. We have two swords, sword in the stone, pulled from the sword on Christmas Eve, probably put there by Merlin. Excalibur given to Arthur by the Lady in the Lake. So she's always got this sort of resonance with the sword and then when Arthur's dying, he gives Bedivere the sword to go back to the Lady of the Lake. So you can see what Guy Ritchie's doing here. This moment doesn't happen in the legend, but it's kind of drawing on moments that do happen in the legend with her character. Now the sword is sort of flaming in her hand. Not sure what Arthur's going to do, except of course we know what he's going to do because the film is King Arthur, Legend of the Sword. So he's obviously going to take it back and we see him pulling it out of the mud now and raising it up over his head because you cannot escape destiny. Let's get this done quickly. Put him on his knees. Oh, big snake. Big, big snake. Yeah, that's terrifying. I don't particularly like snakes. Also, really wracking my brains to think what kind of relevance this massive snake that's about to eat everyone has to Arthurian legend. One thing I can think of, I suppose, which feels super tenuous, is that there is this story about the last battle between Arthur and Mordred. So the battle of both of them are killed, actually. Although, is Arthur dead or not? Big question at the end of Arthurian legend. But one of the many things that contribute to things going wrong in the last battle is that there's been this agreement that no one will fight unless someone kind of shows their naked blade of their sword. It's supposed to be like they're meeting on the battlefield, but they're going to have a chat. Hopefully they can come to some kind of agreement. But one of the soldiers, I can't remember on which side it is, but one of the soldiers on one side of the battle sees an asp and he gets out his sword to kind of kill the asp before it bites him. Obviously, everybody clocks this and all hell breaks loose and the battle starts. Was Guy Ritchie thinking about that moment or was he just wanting a massive snake? I don't know. So we've got Arthur. He's got Excalibur. He's figured out all of his emotional baggage and he's totally on top of Excalibur now. So hopefully we'll see some good fighting. Oh yeah, okay. So Arthur is pretty superhuman in this scene, right? He is decimating the other side who I think we're calling the Blacklegs in this film, Vortigern's men. He's moving incredibly quickly. He's super strong. In the Legends, Excalibur is this incredibly powerful sword and Arthur doesn't want anyone else getting it, which is why he tells Sir Bedivere to give it back to the Lady of the Lake when he thinks he's dying at the end of the Legends. However, this kind of magic of the sword feels probably more modern than medieval. The one thing I would say though is from the very first references we get to Arthur, which are in the writings of a Welsh monk called Nennius in the 800s, even in those earliest references, Arthur is an incredibly good fighter. So in the original mention of Arthur, which is pretty cursory by this Welsh guy, Nennius, we're told that he was in 12 massive battles and he decimated the Saxon enemy. And then in later versions in Geoffrey and Monmouth, for example, we have him killing over 900 men in one fell swoop. Getting some Beowulf vibes though with how superhuman Arthur seems here. Arthur's always a man and he's always human in the Legends. There's never any sense of him being supernatural in any way, although supernatural characters move around him. In a story like Beowulf and a sort of Anglo-Saxon hero, we have this sense of him being perhaps almost monstrous or superhuman in some way. I mean, now we've just got Arthur looking around surrounded by dead bodies and that feels very true to the way that chronicles and romance write about him. This guy that can just take down hundreds of men in one go. Okay, so this is a scene we've all been waiting for. We've had yet more sacrifice from Vortigern killing his daughter. I thought it was bad enough when he killed his wife. I'm really not a fan of his anymore and this is gonna be the big showdown. There is no such showdown between Arthur and Vortigern. Vortigern is long dead by the time Arthur is even conceived. So a sort of fictional battle, A, in the sense that Vortigern and Arthur would never ever have fought, but also in the sense that even though there's quite a lot of supernatural beings in Arthurian legends, I don't recall anything like what's happening to Vortigern here, this sort of super devil creature man who has superhuman strength. So that is sort of, I guess, a cinematic addition. You know, if we were going to try and draw a parallel, this feels quite a lot to me. Like it has elements of the final battle between Arthur and Mordred. So the big battle that sort of ends the round table is when Arthur and his son face off together. And it's described as the most doleful battle that's ever been. And at one point, Arthur looks around and realises that pretty much everyone except him, Mordred, Bedivere, and a handful of others are gone. Just tens of thousands of men are dead. And these two remain on the battlefield fighting. And even though Arthur's had a prophetic dream that he should give up, they continue to fight and they end up killing one another. There's elements of that here in the sense that we have these two mighty enemies fighting one another. But of course, in the narrative of this film, Arthur has to fight. He needs to get the sword because he needs to get the crown. And also we don't have quite the massive body count. It looks like a lot of Arthur's men are still going strong. It's interesting how the sword and the crown are so conflated in this film too. In the original stories, it is that Arthur is the rightful heir. He has to demonstrate that by pulling the sword from the stone because he's sort of been removed from his original parentage, he's a dragon and a grain. But he doesn't have to fight any battles to get the crown. He fights lots of battles after getting the crown to create an empire, basically. He ends up taking over lots of different places, becoming a bit of an emperor on the continent as well as in England, in Britain. But yeah, we don't have that association in the legends between him needing to defeat an enemy in order to establish himself as king. He's already established as a king and often once he's king, it's everyone else doing the fighting for him. So at this point in the film, Arthur has won. He's beaten Vortigern. He is king. So this is the point, funnily enough, where most Arthurian legends in the medieval period start. We don't get too much backstory, particularly later on. We're more interested in what happens after Arthur's king. So it's interesting that this end point is the beginning point of a lot of the legends. So when we tend to think about Arthurian legends, we often think about the sword in the stone, about Camelot, and of course, the round table. The round table, we think, was probably circulating in oral tradition, stories told by word of mouth before it was written down. And originally, actually, it's associated with Uther Pendragon. Uther Pendragon, Arthur's dad, is the one who sets up the round table. But by the time, sort of 13th century, most legends have Arthur setting up the round table, just like we see here. The idea is that it's a sort of egalitarian table because it's round. No one is more prominent than anybody else, including Arthur himself. So we have this Norman poet called Wass, writing 1100s, 12th century. And he sort of fleshes out this idea of the round table, that it's a place where Arthur holds court with knights from all over the country, Androvans, Flemings, Englishmen, you know, people from all over the place. So it's setting up Arthur as a sort of good, conscientious ruler who takes everyone's opinion into account, who is not trying to sort of be the kind of tyrannical ruler that someone like Vortigern was trying to be. It's a sort of new age of kingship, if you like. And then that gets embellished in different legends too. So there's an English writer called Learman, writing not so long after Wass, and he has the establishing of the round table, sort of putting an end to fighting. So the barons are all kind of arguing with one another and King Arthur's like, right, stop this. We'll have the round table. Here, of course, it's being established as something Arthur does straight away. He's king, first move, let's make the round table. It's not kind of putting an end to any fighting. It's just sort of a marker of how things are going to be from now on. I have to say, in some ways, I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I think it does a good job of capturing the spirit of original Syrian legend in the sense of we have the supernatural, we have this kind of things not being what they see, magic, big battles, all that sort of thing. But then we also have at the heart the story of the boy king, someone, you know, obviously in this film I've had a very different backstory to what he does in the legends. But this sense of being marked out by destiny and you might have no idea who you are, but you might aspire to greatness, you might become great. And then, of course, towards the end of the film, the sort of bringing in of key motifs like the round table, this sense of, you know, what's important in ruling a kingdom, what's important in being a leader. I think a lot of that is quite true to the spirit of the original. I think there was obviously quite a lot of artistic license being used and then a little bit of a mashup, of course, between the aesthetic of Robin Hood and the sort of merry men and the ruffians and what we tend to think of as Arthurian knights, sort of genteel nobility. Thank you for watching my deep dive into King Arthur Legend of the Swords, the 2017 Guy Ritchie version. Clearly there's a lot more to it than just a cameo from David Beckham, so worth a watch. If you'd like to see more content like this, make sure you subscribe to the History Hit channel where you can see other deep dives into other films and commentary on their history.