Concepts of Arthur

"What Tom Green argues is that Arthur actually never existed. He argues that all the legends we have about Arthur demonstrate that what we have here is essentially an Iron Age god. Some people over the years have suggested this in passing, but Tom Green is the first person to make a really strong stand-up case. Personally I disagree with him, but he does it with such style that even if you disagree with his final conclusion, the journey is extremely interesting and very revealing about the way that Arthur was seen by the British Celts in the Middle Ages. They’ve tied him down to about four or five different people. In the appendix of my book I look at the characters that are sometimes wheeled on as possible candidates. We have, for example, a Roman Arthur – Arturius – who lived in the second century in Northern Britain, the commander of a group of Persian cavalry. We have an Irish Arthur who lived in the Hebrides in the seventh century. And then we have what’s sometimes called the warlord Arthur, who would have been fighting somewhere in the British lowlands – perhaps Bath or Bristol – in the fifth or sixth centuries. I think it’s a demonstration of just how colossal our ignorance is, that we’re limited to hopping round these two or three figures. Of course, as soon as you’ve got two or three figures in the Dark Ages, it means you’ve got literally tens of figures who we don’t know anything about, who could equally be candidates for the Arthurian legend. I haven’t seen it, I’m afraid – living in Italy I’m spared these things! Merlin as a character is very interesting. He arrives in the Arthurian legend not in the Celtic lands themselves. He was later ‘welded’ on to Arthur by English and Continental writers. We actually have no evidence that Merlin and Arthur were associated. But he was an authentic Celtic hero, called ‘Mervyn’, but this was too close to the French word ‘merde’ and so the French cunningly changed the spelling of his name to make him a little more polite."