The legends about King Arthur are very old. We think they started as stories about a real Celtic war leader who fought against the Anglo-Saxons landing in Britain between the years 400 and 600. A historian, Nennius, wrote about him three hundred years later, when the story-tellers had already had time to add to the truth. 

It was perhaps from Nennius that Geoffrey of Monmouth got any facts that there may be in his “history” of Britain (about 1100). But we think the legends were already mixed with the romantic dreams of the story-tellers. Geoffrey of Monmouth added some of his own dreams, we believe. 

The stories about King Arthur were told in the west of England, in Wales, and in Brittany. Those are the parts of Europe that the Celts were driven to by people from the north and east. 

In the Middle Ages, about 1000 to 1500, there was great interest in romantic stories of the kind the Arthurian legends had become. Writers and story-tellers in several European countries added their own colour. They described the knights and ladies of their own time. Even the castles, armour, lances and shields they described were those of the Middle Ages, not those of a war leader of a thousand years before their time. 

Wace of Jersey, a French writer, added the “Round Table”. And legends about other men and women, gods and goddesses, magicians and fairies got changed to make them fit into the King Arthur “cycle” of romances.

People in France and Britain, and in other parts of Europe, began to think up and write their own stories about the knights and ladies of King Arthur’s court, one of the best-known British stories of this kind is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We don’t know who wrote it. It was written before 1400 in very fine poetry. 

The first book of stories of King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table to be printed was the Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Caxton printed it in 1484 (he had set up the first printing house in England in 1476). It is not in poetry but in very good clear English of the time. It is a putting together of the best-known Arthurian stories of Malory’s time. Most of them were translated by him from the French. 

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