Quote:
Originally Posted by soopaman2
Angles lent thier name to your fine island, and our language. Also your famous King Arthur came about in this time period this thread discusses.
No I do not believe that he was real, but with what was going on there, with all the invasions going on, I can see a medieval urban legend popping up to give people hope.  |
Arthur almost certainly existed in some form. The modern character of King Arthur is surely the creation of people like Geoffrey of Monmouth, but earlier references to him in Welsh and Breton poetry as well as other early Medieval literature were quite likely based on a historical person (or maybe several).
Charlemagne was the subject of much of the same fiction as King Arthur (he's supposedly 200 years old in
The Song of Roland, for example), it just happens that we have much more surviving evidence of his reign than we do anything that happened in Britain in the early Dark Ages (thanks in no small part to Charlemagne himself).