Except that for a very long time, this story did not exist in anything like the form we know today. Plenty of other versions did. In a sense, something similar happened to Arthur as happened to the vampire – although this particular current may also reveal something new about the way we think about Worldinterflow.

The ingredients, characters, objects and events of Arthur’s story come from different centuries. Some were already present in the earliest traditions we know, while others were added much, much later. Some characters were once central figures but are now almost forgotten. Others arrived centuries afterwards and somehow became indispensable.

How did that happen? What determines which parts of a story survive, which ones change and which disappear? The more than thousand-year history of King Arthur gives us an unusual opportunity to watch that process unfold.

A Hero We Know Almost Nothing About

The beginnings of Arthur’s story are – as we may already suspect from our previous cultural investigations – rather hazy. We do not even know for certain whether there was a real historical person whose life and deeds formed the basis of the legend.

The earliest reliably datable text to mention Arthur by name is the ninth-century Historia Brittonum. Arthur is not even a king there. He is described as a military leader who led the Britons against the Saxons in twelve battles. One of the most famous is the victory at Badon, an event later traditions would repeatedly return to.

Other similarly early texts also refer to Arthur as a legendary warrior or hero. In the Welsh poem Y Gododdin, for example, another warrior named Gwawrddur is praised for his great deeds – but the poet adds that even he “was no Arthur”.

At the very least, this suggests that Arthur’s name may have been widely known long before the familiar world of knights, kings and mysticism took shape. The British tradition already contained the image of an exceptional hero around whom different stories could gather.

Imagine that, a thousand years from now, someone tried to reconstruct one of our stories from a handful of ancient fragments. One text says that in an old city there lived a strange heroic figure called Batman. Another lists a few of his famous deeds and describes criminals he captured. A third praises somebody by saying that he was almost as brave as Batman. And that is all.

From that alone, we could not reconstruct everything we now think of as Batman’s world. But we could probably tell that we were looking at the memory of an important figure.

Arthur’s earliest history presents researchers with a similar problem. And from the surviving texts, we cannot reconstruct exactly what stories about him circulated orally, or what other works may have disappeared over the centuries.

The King Who Hunted Giants

The early Welsh Arthurian stories take us into a very different world from the one we know from modern films. In Culhwch ac Olwen, a tale that took shape around the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Arthur leads a company of warriors with extraordinary abilities. His relative Culhwch wants to marry the beautiful Olwen, but to win her hand he must complete a series of almost impossible tasks. Arthur and his companions help him.

The story contains giants, magical objects, strange animals and warriors with astonishing powers. One of its most memorable adventures is the hunt for the supernatural boar Twrch Trwyth. Cai and Bedwyr – early forms of the later Sir Kay and Sir Bedivere – both play important roles. Cai can remain underwater for nine days, go without sleep for the same amount of time, grow to enormous size, and wounds inflicted by his sword cannot be healed.

(In later romances, he loses much of this legendary stature and often becomes an irritable, mocking or even comic member of Arthur’s court.) Bedwyr is another of Arthur’s close companions and an exceptionally skilled warrior. In the early stories he has only one hand, yet can strike faster than three armed opponents, and his spear possesses unusual qualities. Arthur himself is also a warrior of superhuman strength, but perhaps more importantly, he is the leader of this extraordinary company.

This world feels much more like a mythological wilderness of adventures than the later courtly romances. There is no tragic love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, no Holy Grail, and Camelot is not yet the familiar centre we now imagine.

And yet these giant hunts and strange heroes once belonged to Arthur’s world too.

Why, then, does almost everybody today know Excalibur, while the name Twrch Trwyth means something mainly to enthusiasts of Arthurian legend? It is not necessarily because one story is more interesting than the other. Nor is it simply because Excalibur is easier to pronounce than the boar’s name. (If we remember that Excalibur’s earlier Welsh form was Caledfwlch, that explanation becomes rather less convincing.)

The writers, copyists and readers of later centuries selected different elements. And as Arthurian stories entered new cultural environments, the centre of gravity of the tradition changed.

Geoffrey of Monmouth Puts a Story Together

Around 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his Historia Regum Britanniae. The work set out to tell the history of Britain’s kings, and Geoffrey gave Arthur an entire royal career.

His Arthur is now a grand king who leads campaigns, conquers territories and even clashes with Roman power. His story is built out of dynastic relationships, wars, betrayals and political conflicts.

Geoffrey also made another enormously influential change. From earlier Welsh prophetic traditions and other stories, he fashioned the figure of Merlin and connected him to Arthur’s story. One predecessor was Myrddin, the legendary Welsh prophet; another was Ambrosius, the fatherless boy with extraordinary knowledge who explains the mystery of King Vortigern’s collapsing tower. Geoffrey combined earlier motifs into the single figure of a prophet and magician.

In Geoffrey’s version, Merlin already plays a crucial role in Arthur’s conception. He is not yet the wise teacher and adviser of the young king, however. That part of the character would emerge through the work of later writers.

Geoffrey therefore functioned as a kind of node. He drew on different traditions, while reshaping and expanding the material he inherited. His book became extremely popular, survived in numerous manuscript copies and provided a starting point for many later authors.

Imagine somebody writing one enormous historical biography of Batman. They collect the various adventures, remove details that cannot easily be reconciled with one another, and create a grand overarching storyline in which the hero of Gotham eventually becomes a ruler determining the fate of entire nations.

Then imagine that the book becomes so successful that people gradually forget much of what came before. Earlier versions fade from shared memory, and subsequent generations learn primarily from this new work and continue developing the character from there.

Something rather similar happened with Geoffrey. Many elements of the earlier tradition survived, but they were now contained inside a new and highly influential narrative. The work of one person shaped the way people would think for centuries about a figure whose origins were already much older than he was.

There is another revealing detail. One of the most important parts of Geoffrey’s story – Arthur’s campaign of European conquest – almost completely disappeared from many later versions. What one age considered essential, another filtered out and simply abandoned.

1155: Suddenly, a Table Rolls In

If we had to choose one moment to demonstrate how a story can acquire new elements, 1155 would be an excellent candidate. That was when the Norman poet Wace completed the Roman de Brut, his Old French reworking of Geoffrey’s history. Wace inherited a great deal from his predecessor, but one new motif appears in his version: Arthur’s Round Table.

We should be careful about saying that Wace simply invented it. What we can say with confidence is that this is its earliest securely identifiable appearance in surviving literature. He may have drawn on earlier traditions that have since been lost.

The original purpose of the circular table was to prevent arguments among Arthur’s knights about who was entitled to sit closest to the king or occupy the most prestigious position. A round table had no privileged seat, so the knights could sit around it as equals. An important detail is that in Wace’s account this equality concerns the knights’ relationship with one another; it does not abolish Arthur’s royal authority.

From this simple idea, however, something much larger emerged. The Round Table eventually became the name of the knightly fellowship, a symbol of belonging and almost an emblem of the Arthurian tradition itself – alongside Excalibur, or its childhood name, Caledfwlch. Today, it is difficult to imagine King Arthur without it, even though it is absent from the earlier centuries of the tradition.

Imagine the same thing happening to Batman. A present-day writer invents a symbolic meeting place where Batman and his allies – Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and the others – regularly gather. Let us call it the Summer Kitchen. Later creators adopt it, give it new functions, attach increasingly important events to it, and a few centuries from now nobody can imagine Batman’s world without the Summer Kitchen, even though there was no trace of it in the original stories.

The Round Table also had another particularly useful property: it opened space for an almost unlimited number of new stories. If Arthur has knights, those knights can have adventures, relationships and conflicts of their own. In principle, another hero can always be given a seat at the table.

A small addition had changed the structure of the entire story-world.

When Arthur Does Not Even Have to Be the Main Character

In the second half of the twelfth century, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes introduced another major shift. In his works, Arthur’s court increasingly became a hub from which different knights could set out on adventures and to which they could return – assuming, of course, that they survived.

Chrétien’s works contain the earliest surviving literary use of the familiar name Camelot. The love between Lancelot and Guinevere becomes a central theme in his stories, while the Grail appears in the unfinished Perceval ou le Conte du Graal.

The essential change is that Arthur’s world no longer has to be entirely about Arthur. The knights pursue goals of their own, fall in love, make mistakes and face extraordinary trials. Arthur’s court connects their stories, creating an increasingly rich shared background into which different writers can place new narratives.

This may sound familiar from modern fantasy or shared comic-book universes. Gotham City, for example, has long ceased to exist solely as the setting for Batman’s adventures. Other characters can have stories of their own while remaining part of the same larger world.

In Arthur’s case, such a world gradually emerged through the interaction of many writers and traditions. There is a parallel here with Tolkien’s Middle-earth, whose development we explored in an earlier article. The difference is that Tolkien’s world had one overwhelmingly dominant author, while Arthur’s story-world was built by creators working across centuries, often producing versions that contradicted one another.

A single hero was gradually becoming a shared world capable of containing the stories of many other heroes.

The Mysterious Dish

One of the clearest examples of cultural transformation is the story of the Holy Grail.

The Old French word graal originally meant a dish or serving vessel. In Chrétien’s story, Perceval sees a strange procession in which a golden vessel decorated with precious stones carries a communion wafer. So the object already has a religious significance, but it is not yet the Holy Grail as we know it today.

The Grail story may also have older roots. Celtic mythology contains numerous magical vessels that provide inexhaustible food, possess extraordinary powers or serve only those worthy of them. In one old Welsh poem, Arthur himself journeys into the Otherworld in search of a magical cauldron that refuses to cook food for cowards.

Scholars have long looked for connections between such traditions and the later Grail legend. A direct line of descent cannot be proven, but it is entirely possible that Chrétien was drawing on traditions in which extraordinary vessels already played an important role. Christian religious motifs may then have attached themselves to this material.

Around the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Robert de Boron added a new story. The Grail became the vessel from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea later collected Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion. The Grail was transformed into a holy relic.

Other writers imagined it differently. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, for example, the Grail appears as a supernatural stone.

(Wagner began writing Parsifal partly from this material, although by the time he finished, the result had moved quite a long way from Wolfram.)

The meaning of the Grail continued changing, and the story changed with it. In Chrétien, Perceval stands at the centre of the quest. In the thirteenth-century French romances, however, Galahad appears – Lancelot’s son, whose purity and unwavering faith ultimately allow him to fulfil the quest. Perceval remains, but somebody else takes over the most important role.

Over the centuries, then, not only the meaning of an object changed, but also the story surrounding it and even its protagonist.

Eventually, the Grail escaped its religious setting altogether. In modern language, it can simply mean an almost unattainable and exceptionally valuable goal. Archaeologists, scientists and collectors can all search for their own “Holy Grail”. A vessel from a medieval story has accumulated so many meanings that we now use its name in situations that have nothing to do with Arthur’s knights or Christian tradition.

There Were Two Swords

Arthur’s other indispensable accessory is, of course, his sword. The weapon already appears in the early Welsh tradition as Caledfwlch; later forms of the name include Geoffrey’s Latin Caliburnus and, through French and English versions, Excalibur. The name travelled a long way while the object remained Arthur’s extraordinary weapon.

The familiar story in which young Arthur pulls a sword from a stone entered the tradition later. It appears in narratives connected to Robert de Boron’s Merlin in the early thirteenth century. Whoever can draw the sword from the stone is the rightful king of Britain. Arthur succeeds and therefore takes the throne.

And here comes a particularly interesting detail. In Thomas Malory’s great fifteenth-century Arthurian narrative, the sword from the stone and Excalibur are two different weapons.

Arthur first draws the sword from the stone, but it later breaks in combat. Merlin then leads him to a lake, where the Lady of the Lake gives the king another exceptional sword. That sword is Excalibur.

In many modern versions, however, the two stories merge and the sword drawn from the stone is Excalibur itself. Two scenes with different origins are reorganised into a single, simple and highly recognisable story. The name survives, the function of the object survives, but the story attached to it changes.

Mordred, Who Became a Traitor Along the Way

The fate of characters can be just as interesting as the fate of objects.

Today, Mordred is remembered as King Arthur’s traitor, whose rebellion ultimately destroys the legendary kingdom. But his earliest surviving mention gives us a very different picture – or, more accurately, almost no picture at all. The Welsh chronicle Annales Cambriae, compiled in the tenth century, simply states that Arthur and Medraut – the earlier form of Mordred’s name – both fell at the Battle of Camlann. It does not tell us whether they fought beside one another or against each other.

In other Welsh stories, Medraut can appear as a brave and good-natured warrior, although elsewhere he is already Arthur’s enemy. One tale has him ravage Arthur’s court and even strike the queen, which is not particularly nice, and Arthur understandably takes revenge. In other words, several different images of the character coexisted in the earlier tradition.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth, however, he is clearly a traitor. While Arthur is away, Mordred seizes the throne and eventually goes to war with the king. Later writers continue reshaping him. In some versions he is Arthur’s nephew; in others, his own son, born from an incestuous relationship. Eventually Mordred becomes one of the best-known villains in Arthur’s world.

The name survived, as did the memory of the fatal battle. But the character’s personality, relationships and role within the story changed substantially. From among the many earlier possibilities, the traitorous Mordred became the version most widely remembered.

Malory: Many Stories Become One Book

By the fifteenth century, Arthur’s story-world had become extraordinarily complex. French, English and other European writers had produced huge numbers of romances, adventures and connected story cycles. The different versions did not always fit together.

From this enormous inheritance, Thomas Malory created Le Morte Darthur around 1469–1470. He drew on earlier works, selected stories, shortened them, connected them and rearranged them. The result was a grand narrative encompassing Arthur’s rise, his knights, the Grail quest and the destruction of his kingdom.

Then, in 1485, William Caxton printed the book.

This matters because the survival of stories is shaped not only by what they contain, but also by the form in which they travel and the people they can reach.

In manuscript culture, transmitting a work required copyists, patrons, time and money. The printed book offered a new way to reproduce and distribute the same textual version on a much larger scale. Caxton’s edition was followed by further printed versions, and Malory’s work became one of the most important starting points for modern Arthurian literature.

This does not mean printing preserved everything that had previously been known. Malory himself selected from the tradition, while Caxton, as editor and publisher, further shaped the form in which the work appeared. The surviving manuscript of Malory’s text differs from the printed edition at a number of points.

So writers are not the only people who shape the transmission of stories. Copyists, editors, publishers and the conditions of distribution also leave their mark.

Arthur Is Born Again and Again

Arthur’s popularity did not simply increase in a straight line across the centuries. Interest in the medieval world of knights changed over time, and different periods found different meanings in the stories.

In the nineteenth century, Arthur received renewed attention. Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, published in stages from 1859 onwards, drew heavily on Malory while also bringing Victorian moral and social concerns into the story. Arthur’s kingdom became a stage for ideals, moral responsibility and human weakness.

Painters and illustrators reinterpreted the stories too. Through their work, Arthur’s world acquired an increasingly strong and recognisable visual form. Knights in armour, castles, swords and the visual language of medieval romance became familiar to new generations.

Then cinema transformed the tradition again in the twentieth century. Disney’s 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone, based on T. H. White’s novel, focused on the relationship between the young Arthur and Merlin. John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, by contrast, presented a darker, more mythic and tragic world in which the fate of the kingdom was tightly connected to magical forces.

Monty Python then dismantled the entire ideal of the chivalric world in 1975 with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Arthur, the Round Table and the Grail quest became the basis for a series of comic situations. Coconut horses, the Black Knight and the Killer Rabbit have since become cultural references in their own right.

Parody is particularly interesting because, for it to work, audiences must already know at least roughly what is being parodied. Monty Python and the Holy Grail therefore owes part of its humour to the fact that Arthur’s world had already become a collection of widely recognised motifs. At the same time, the film itself added new material to that cultural world – just in a rather different tone.

One of the more recent major adaptations, Guy Ritchie’s 2017 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, took the legend in another direction again, combining it with the rhythm of a modern action film, spectacular magical elements and a protagonist who rises from street survivor to king.

The story also continues through fantasy, comics, television and video games. Sometimes Arthur himself stands at the centre; elsewhere Merlin, Excalibur or another version of the Grail appears. Pulling a sword from a stone is now a recognisable reference even if Arthur’s name is never mentioned.

Elements of Arthurian tradition can therefore begin lives of their own and attach themselves to stories that have very little remaining connection to the old British legend.

Why Did These Parts Survive?

Looking back across the centuries gives us a rather strange picture. The supernatural boar hunts of early Welsh tradition have largely disappeared from the familiar Arthurian story. Geoffrey’s great European campaigns have gone too. Cai and Bedwyr, once among Arthur’s most important companions, are secondary figures in many later adaptations.

Meanwhile, Lancelot, the Round Table, Camelot and the Grail – all later arrivals – have become almost indispensable.

Why?

The Round Table is a simple and immediately recognisable symbol, and it creates opportunities for many additional stories. The sword in the stone is a spectacular scene capable of demonstrating a ruler’s chosen status in a single action. The love of Lancelot and Guinevere introduces human conflict into the idealised world of Arthur’s kingdom, while Mordred’s betrayal offers a dramatic explanation for its collapse.

These qualities may have helped the motifs to be reused again and again. It is also interesting that the elements which survived are broadly compatible with the dramaturgy of a modern blockbuster: hero, antagonist, conflict, goal, fellowship, symbols, obstacles, romance and so on.

But that alone can hardly explain everything.

It also mattered which stories people heard, read or saw. Which author’s work was copied repeatedly? Which book was reprinted? Which film was watched by millions? What values did a particular period consider important, what kinds of stories did audiences want, and which elements did creators find useful for expressing what they themselves wanted to say?

Survival and widespread recognition are also two different things. An old story may continue to exist for centuries in manuscripts, libraries or the traditions of a smaller community while almost everybody else forgets it. Then a new adaptation can suddenly bring it back into view.

This is what we mean here by cultural selection: during the transmission of information, some elements are preserved, some are transformed and others recede into the background. We can see the result of that process; its causes lie in the relationships between people, stories and the conditions through which those stories are transmitted.

The Story Written by Many People

Perhaps the strangest thing about the story of King Arthur is that there is no single creator whose work can serve as the original standard against which every later version is measured.

Geoffrey, Wace, Chrétien, Robert de Boron, the authors of the medieval prose cycles, Malory, Caxton, Tennyson, filmmakers and modern game designers all worked under different circumstances, with different goals and different possibilities. Some preserved something they inherited; others expanded it, altered it or discarded the parts that mattered less to them.

And then there are all the people whose names we do not know: storytellers, copyists, translators, readers and audiences without whom these stories could never have reached the next generation.

Arthur’s history therefore makes something particularly visible that is also present in other cultural phenomena. Information travels through people and through time, but along the way it continuously enters new relationships. When somebody encounters a story, their own knowledge, experience, interests and environment influence what they do with it.

As the story passes onwards, it is not only transferred from one person to another. The thoughts, decisions and interpretations of those people also leave marks on it.

Over the centuries, King Arthur became a cultural figure that might be unrecognisable to the people who first told stories about him. And yet a recognisable chain of connections still leads from the earliest surviving traditions to films made today.

And if there really was once a war leader named Arthur who led people into battle fifteen hundred years ago, he could hardly have imagined that one day his name would be associated with magical swords, love triangles, killer rabbits and video games.

Sources and Further Reading

Ronald Hutton: The Early Arthur: History and Myth
The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
On the earliest historical references to Arthur, the significance of the Historia Brittonum, and the uncertainties surrounding a historical Arthur.
Cambridge University Press – study

Gerald Morgan: Welsh Arthurian Literature
A History of Arthurian Scholarship, Boydell & Brewer, 2006.
On early Welsh Arthurian stories, including Culhwch and Olwen, and on traditions that differ considerably from the later chivalric romances.
Cambridge University Press – study

Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (eds.): The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
A comprehensive volume on the development of the Arthurian tradition, from Geoffrey and Chrétien through the medieval romances to modern adaptations. Its chronology is particularly useful for checking the earliest known appearances of individual motifs.
Cambridge University Press – volume and table of contents

Michael Lysander Angerer: Arthurian Worldbuilding around the Round Table: Wace’s History, Chrétien’s Fictions, and Continental Romance
New Medieval Literatures, 2024.
On the earliest known appearance of the Round Table and on how it became an element connecting later stories within the Arthurian tradition.
Cambridge University Press – study

Richard Barber: The Search for Sources: The Case of the Grail
A History of Arthurian Scholarship, Boydell & Brewer.
On theories concerning the origins of the Holy Grail, its possible Celtic antecedents, and the historical problems surrounding the different interpretations.
Cambridge University Press – study

Mordred
Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, Boydell & Brewer, 2012.
On the different medieval portrayals of Medraut and Mordred, the emergence of the traitor figure, and his changing relationship with Arthur.
Cambridge University Press – study

Thomas Malory: Le Morte Darthur
1469–1470; first printed edition by William Caxton, 1485.
One of the most important syntheses of the Arthurian tradition. The first book separately tells the story of the sword drawn from the stone and of Excalibur being given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake.
Project Gutenberg – complete work, Volume I

Barry Windeatt: The Fifteenth-Century Arthur
The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
On the significance of Malory’s work, his organisation of earlier Arthurian stories, and the later influence of the printed edition.
Cambridge University Press – study

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