King Arthur, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Grail: medieval legend rather than ancient religion, drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, the Vulgate Cycle, and Malory.
37 entries in 9 chapters
Challenger of the beheading game: the green giant who rides into Camelot, survives his own execution, and holds Gawain to a bargain.
A chimera with a serpent's head and a leopard's body whose belly barks like thirty hounds, pursued for generations by knights who never quite catch it.
The once and future king: a shadowy British war-leader who medieval writers rebuilt into the emperor of Camelot and the Round Table.
Queen of Britain and Arthur's wife: a figure repeatedly stolen, blamed and reinvented, whose love for Lancelot brings the Round Table down.
First knight of the Round Table: a French invention raised by a lake fay, whose love for the queen makes him the best knight and ruins the kingdom.
Britain's prophet and enchanter: a mad Welsh seer whom Geoffrey of Monmouth rebuilt as the wizard who made Arthur possible.
The traitor of Camlann: Arthur's nephew and, in later tradition, his incestuous son, who seizes the crown and destroys the Round Table.
The courteous knight and Arthur's nephew: England's favourite of the Round Table, demoted by French romance and redeemed by an English poet.
The fay of Avalon: healer, shape-shifter and Arthur's half-sister, who became the legend's great enchantress and its most useful enemy.
Lancelot's son, invented to succeed where his father failed. The spotless knight who filled the Siege Perilous and achieved the Holy Grail.
The dragon-star king whose deceit, arranged by Merlin, conceived King Arthur at Tintagel. A thin Welsh figure before Geoffrey of Monmouth gave him a full story.
The forest-raised innocent who found the Grail castle and failed to ask the one question that mattered. Arthurian romance's first Grail knight.
Lancelot's cousin and one of three knights who achieve the Holy Grail, and the only one who lives to tell the court what happened at Sarras.
Arthur's foster-brother and seneschal. A magic-gifted warrior in Welsh tradition who became the sharp-tongued butt of French romance.
A fifth-century British ruler blamed for letting Saxon warbands into Britain, and the villain of the red-and-white-dragon prophecy that leads to Merlin.
The one-handed spearman of Welsh tradition who became the knight who returned Excalibur to the lake and carried Arthur to the barge.
Tristan and Iseult (Isolde) drank a love potion meant for another and could not stop. Europe's oldest great romance of adultery and doom.
The maimed king who guards the Grail and fishes because he cannot walk. His wound waits on a question no knight thinks to ask.
A noblewoman who dies of unrequited love for Lancelot and drifts to Camelot in a barge, now better known as Tennyson's Lady of Shalott.
The isle of apples: the healing island where Excalibur was forged and where the wounded Arthur was carried, neither dead nor returned.
Arthur's chief court: a place named almost by accident in one French poem, which grew into the most famous city that never existed.
The Cornish clifftop where Geoffrey of Monmouth set Arthur's conception, and where archaeology has since found a real, wealthy post-Roman stronghold.
The Somerset abbey that announced Arthur's grave in 1191, almost certainly a fundraising fiction, and became identified with Avalon ever after.
The vessel of the quest: a serving dish in an unfinished French poem that became Christendom's most famous relic and the ruin of the Round Table.
The table without a head: invented in 1155 to stop knights fighting over precedence, it became the name of Arthur's whole fellowship.
The sword of King Arthur: a Welsh blade called Caledfwlch that became the weapon drawn from a stone, given by a lake, and returned to the water.
A sword fixed in a churchyard stone, drawable only by Britain's rightful king. Robert de Boron's invention, distinct from Excalibur in most versions.
The vacant place at the Round Table that kills any knight who sits in it unworthily, kept for the one who would achieve the Holy Grail.
The real oak Round Table hanging in Winchester's Great Hall: tree-ring dated to the reign of Edward I, not Arthur's, and repainted for Henry VIII.
Tennyson's Victorian retelling of the Arthur story in blank verse, published across 26 years — the most influential English version of the legend after Malory.
Wales's earliest surviving Arthur story: a cursed suitor, an impossible bride-price, and Arthur's warband of superhuman heroes hunting a giant enchanted boar.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's 1136 pseudo-history that invented most of the Arthur legend as we know it, and was believed as literal fact for four centuries.
Thomas Malory's 15th-century compilation of the whole Arthurian legend, printed by Caxton in 1485 and rediscovered in a lost manuscript in 1934.
The battle that ended Arthur's reign: a single line in a medieval annal grew, over nine centuries, into the mutual destruction of Arthur and Mordred.
A single line in a 6th-century sermon became the British win historians can't agree on the date or site of — and the victory later tradition gave to Arthur.
