Historia Brittonum

No names, no mention of a marriage, no Skota.

And it should be mentioned that Historia Brittonum is not a reliable history anyway.

Its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is notorious for repeating legends as fact, treating stories about giants and dragons and Merlin and King Arthur as genuine history.

Now for a brief intermission.

The earliest written references appear more than three centuries after he supposedly lived.

Those early mentions are found in Welsh prose and Latin compilations, the annalistic notices in the Annales Cambriae, the eight-sided battle list in Nennius' Historia Brittonum, and a few poetic verses in Y Gododdin.

Each of those sources is, from the standpoint of historians, an eyewitness record or not at all.

They were produced well after the supposed time of Arthur.

So we have to ask how much of that is pure narrative, not verifiable history.

Then you have Nennius with the Historia Britonum, which is traditionally attributed to him but might be a later compilation.

Its claims about Trojan settlers and Brutus give us an almost mythical opening line to British identity.

Scholars debate whether Nennius really authored it or whether someone else stitched earlier material together.

The legend of King Arthur is simply that.

It was a story developed from the early 9th century when we first get it in a British text called Historia Brittonum, the history of the Britons.

and then built upon and manipulated to suit the times and added to and variously changed right up until our own time, with significant points in that being the early retelling in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, upon whose story of Arthur...

The medieval Arthur was based then by Thomas Mallory, who wrote at the later part of the Middle Ages what one might think of as the canonical version of the Arthurian legend with Guinevere and Lancelot and the Grail and Camelot and all that stuff.

And one is, as you say, focused on a figure called Arthur App Pedder, Arthur, son of Pedder.

He was a well-documented, by the standards of the time, king of the southwest Welsh kingdom of Doved, the descendant in political terms of the Roman civitas or civitas of the Demetai, and his existence is almost indisputable in the standards of contemporary scholarship on the kings and dynasties of the western north of Britain.

Why he has not been more discussed as a possible historical author is, I think, because scholars in the past have been looking for an author at broadly the time that Historia Brittonum, that early 9th century text, that kickstarts the Arthurian legend, says there was a historical Arthur.

That is, the late 5th and early 6th century.

So Merlin, he's already appeared in all versions of Merlin.

He's appeared in Nennius, Nennius' History of the Britons, but he's not called Merlin in that.

We've got Merlin appears in the early Welsh poetry.

He's quite a different figure and he doesn't necessarily live in the reign of Arthur.

Yeah, me too.

But within a few centuries, dragon symbolism had mutated in these Septidials, as discussed in the 9th century Historia Brittonum, as written by Three Ravens recurring character Nennius, as well as in the Mabinogion as well.

And these early historical texts provide the earliest written foundations for the lore of Britain's elemental dragons, cementing these creatures as literal representations of warring factions and land energies.

explicitly linking draconic behaviour to catastrophic seasonal and agricultural disturbances.