Arthur's Battles

Extract

Arthur's knights are myths. They can be traced to Celtic deities, and there is no history to be gathered from attempts to analyse legends about them. But Arthur himself is not a myth: he is a tradition. Nobody has succeeded in identifying him with any god of prehistoric Europe. He arrives unadorned, at first; it was only later that romances dressed him up in the trappings of a Viking Age hero. He is announced simply as the Roman-Briton who won twelve battles against the Saxons. ‘Nennius’, who says this, is as unknown as Arthur himself, but the statement is backed by the very definite mention of the crowning victory at Mount Badon in the bit of autobiography of Gildas, and by the acceptance of this by Bede as a fact.