The first king of the kingdom of Wessex, and certainly one of the most interesting of its kings, was a man known as Cerdic. A considerable amount of speculation has been made concerning who this man really was, where he came from, and how he may relate to the Arthurian legends.
Caleb Howells
Was King Arthur Welsh?
In some casual commentaries on King Arthur, we sometimes encounter the statement that he ‘defended the English from the Anglo-Saxons’. Of course, such a statement is deeply flawed, because the Anglo-Saxons were the nation from which the English developed. The very word ‘English’ is rooted in the word ‘Angle’. So in other words, the English … Read more
Was King Arthur Real?
Perhaps the single most fundamental and important question a person could ask about Arthur is, Did he exist? This is the foundation on which all other questions about the man are constructed (such as ‘Who was his wife?’, ‘Where did he live?’, ‘Did he have descendants?’).
There is no universal consensus on this issue, but scholars generally fall into two main camps. One of these is the idea that there most likely was a historical military leader named Arthur at the core of the stories. The opposing theory is that Arthur was actually a figure of mythology or folklore, but then he came to be ‘historicized’ as the centuries went on.
