Historicity of King Arthur
While there have been many claims that King Arthur was a real historical person, the current consensus among specialists on the period holds him to be a mythological or folkloric figure.
[1][2] The first definite mention of Arthur appears circa 828 in the Historia Brittonum,[3] where he is presented as a military leader fighting against the invading Saxons in 5th- to 6th-century Sub-Roman Britain at the Battle of Badon, written more than three centuries after the events depicted.
He develops into a legendary figure in the Matter of Britain from the 12th century, following Geoffrey of Monmouth's influential but largely fictional Historia Regum Britanniae.
Historical figures involved in such theories include Artuir mac Áedán, a son of the 6th-century king of Dál Riata in modern Scotland; Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led a Romano-British resistance against the Saxons; Lucius Artorius Castus, a 2nd-century Roman commander of Sarmatian cavalry; and the British king Riothamus, who fought alongside the last Gallo-Roman commanders against the Visigoths in an expedition to Gaul in the 5th century.
[11] David Dumville took the opposite position in the same year: "The fact of the matter is that there is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books.
[16] In 2007, O. J. Padel in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography described Arthur as a "legendary warrior and supposed king of Britain".
[18] In a 2007 review, Howard Wiseman followed Sheppard Frere (1967), saying that "the evidence allows, not requires belief", and follows Christopher Snyder (2000) in emphasising the need for a better understanding of the period, regardless of whether Arthur existed.
"[1] In a 2019 review, Brian David reported that "Few topics in late antique and medieval history elicit scholarly groans quite like the idea of a supposedly 'factual' King Arthur.
For academics today, the question of the realism of King Arthur has been largely banished to popular books, video games, and movies.
"[2] Andrew Breeze argued in 2015 and 2020 that Arthur was historical, and claims to have identified the locations of his battles as well as the place and date of his death.
[33] According to linguist and Celticist Stephan Zimmer, it is possible that Artorius has a Celtic origin, being a Latinization of the hypothetical name *Artorījos derived from the patronym *Arto-rīg-ios, meaning "Son of the Bear" or "Warrior-King".
He proposed all such occurrences were due to the importance of another Arthur who may have ruled temporarily as Emperor of Britain,[10] and suggested a period of Saxon advance was halted and turned back before resuming in the 570s.
Gildas describes the battle as taking place "in our times" and being one of the "latest, if not the greatest" slaughter of the Saxons, and that a new generation born after Badon had come of age in Britain.
Later Cambro-Latin sources give the Old Welsh form of the battle's location as Badon, such as in the Annales Cambriae, and this has been adopted by most modern scholars.
In the context of the central Middle Ages, it was a king's role to head the army, leading the forces of subaltern rulers.
Despite its name, the work attempted to reconstruct British history in general by drawing together the varying accounts of Gildas, Bede, Nennius, and various chroniclers.
[41] Arthur is mentioned in several 12th- to 13th-century hagiographies of Welsh and Breton saints, including those of Cadoc, Carantoc, Gildas, Goeznovius, Illtud, and Paternus.
After a long career as a centurion in the Roman army, he was promoted to prefect of Legio VI Victrix, a legion headquartered in Eboracum (present-day York, England).
[54][56] In a 1975 essay, Helmut Nickel suggested that Artorius was the original Arthur, and that a group of Sarmatian cavalry serving under him in Britain inspired the Knights of the Round Table.
He suggested that the Sarmatians' descendants kept Castus' legacy alive over the centuries and mixed it with their ancestral myths involving magical cauldrons and swords.
[58] Few of the Caucasian traditions cited to support the theory can be traced specifically with the Sarmatians; many are known only from orally transmitted tales that are not datable before they were first recorded in the 19th century.
[62][58] Additionally, many of the strongest parallels to the Arthurian legend are not found in the earliest Brittonic materials, but only appear in the later Continental romances of the 12th century or later.
Anthemius requested help from Riothamus, and Jordanes writes that he crossed the ocean into Gaul with 12,000 soldiers into the land of the Bituriges, likely to Avaricum (Bourges).
The location of Riothamus' army was betrayed to the Visigoths by Arvandus, the jealous praetorian prefect of Gaul, and Euric defeated him in the Battle of Déols.
Finally, the Arthurian romances traditionally recount that King Arthur was carried off to Avalon (called insula Auallonis by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first author to mention the legendary isle) before he died; Riothamus, after his defeat at Déols, was last known to have fled to the kingdom of the Germanic Burgundians, perhaps passing through a town called Avallon (which was within Burgundian territory and not far from Bourges).
[note 2] Cognates of the name Riothamus survive in Old Welsh (Riatav/Riadaf) and Old Breton (Riatam); all are derived from Common Brittonic *Rigotamos, meaning 'Most Kingly' or 'Kingliest'.
