Was King Arthur real? And I think I might leave it as open as that because I'm really interested to hear your view on whether you think there is any degree of truth to this legend of King Arthur.

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 then in the 19th century, the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson being the birth, if you like, of the modern understanding of the Arthurian legend, the Arthurian legend of the musical Camelot and the Monty Python film.

So, we have the legend and we can forget about that so far as the possibility of a historical author, a real guy in the 5th or 6th or maybe 7th centuries.

What do you think?