In this first lecture we consider the ways in which stories of King Arthur could have begun – was there a real king named Arthur, or did a purely fictitious character emerge from the mysterious and little-understood landscape of Britain during the Migration Period? We examine the earliest written sources, from those of Gildas and Nennius to the first great account of Arthur’s reign by the Welsh cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

The fictitious knight as a military entity, the code of chivalry and the Arthurian legend all began evolving together in the 12th century, and with them came a new literary genre – the chivalric romance. Arthurian romances, in particular, became wildly popular in the two following centuries, inspiring not only poets but also visual artists, especially the illustrators of illuminated manuscripts. Much of what we recognise as Arthurian was introduced during this period. Far from being an archaic fantasy however, for medieval people these stories were intensely contemporary and relevant, reflecting current values, desires and aspirations  

Perhaps most influential writer in the history of Arthurian literature was one Sir Thomas Malory, who, rather unchivalrously, wrote his monumental The Death of Arthur (Le Morte d’Arthur) in prison. His incarceration seems to have given him the time necessary to assemble a great many disparate poems and stories, written during the three previous centuries, into a giant meta-narrative – a comprehensive amalgamation of diverse branches of a pan-European story tradition. This ultimate version of the story of Arthur then became the key to the survival of the mythos down to the present. Victorian poetry, stage plays and ultimately Hollywood films, all dealing with Arthur and his knights, have almost exclusively been based on Malory. In this final lecture we trace that later history from Alfred Lord Tennyson, to T.H. White, to Lerner and Lowe, to John Boorman.