A Lot Of Camelot
During a brief letup in wholesale Austerity, we found ourselves the other day in 57th Street Books. mollpeartree coveted Jared Diamond's Third Chimpanzee, so I had an opening and took it, buying Mike Ashley's Mammoth Book of King Arthur for the amazingly low price (for a 670-page book) of $13.50. I've had spotty luck with the Mammoth series before; some are
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The problem there is that so little of the relevant archaeological record has survived 1500 years of civilization, coal-mining, and Victorian archaeologists. Plus, my understanding is that there isn't a whole lot of reliable epigraphy for the era. Certainly we're not likely to find a marker labeled "Welcome to scenic Badon Hill. On this site, King Arthur, or as we liked to call him, Cadel Bright-Sword, handily defeated the Saxons in 497 A.D. We think it was cloudy, and a Tuesday."
I read Geoffrey in college as part of a linguistics project, and I'm quite inclined to think that a lot of the more popular figures are extremely heavily influenced by the politics of the day....
To bring this back to King Arthur, I wouldn't be surprised if the Arthur figure is also in large part a contemporary figure, but I can't recall right now any of the Welsh leaders at the time, and again, I haven't really had the chance to look into all of this.
I think it's probably beyond question that Geoffrey (a border Welshman from Monmouth, with Breton blood to boot) clearly wanted to identify Arthur with Gruffyd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd (or, if you go with a slightly later date for the History, with Owain ap Gruffyd) but couldn't do so as clearly as all that if he wanted to keep in sweet with Henry I. I imagine Higham goes into this in more detail.
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