From Troy to Camelot: The Classical Origins of King Arthur

By James Turner

The Historia Brittonum, or History of the Britons, is the first great pillar upon which the mighty edifice of the Arthurian legends rests. Unlike most texts from this era and part of the world, dating this foundational work of pseudo-history is relatively simple.

Conveniently, the Historia’s fourth section explicitly states that it was written 829 years after the birth of Christ—a date that aligns well with other claims in the text suggesting it was composed relatively early in the reign of Merfyn Frych, a king of Gwynedd who took the throne in 825.

Dating, Authorship, and the Nature of the Text

Certain versions of the prologue to the Historia Brittonum push the date of composition forward several decades, stating that it was written 859 years after Christ’s birth. However, the earliest surviving version of the text that includes any form of this prologue comes from the eleventh century, suggesting that the prologue was a later addition and perhaps not wholly reliable on this matter.

It is also important to remember that medieval texts were not formally published or released in the way they are today. Authors could continue to revise and redraft their work even as earlier versions were already being circulated and copied by contemporaries. This is to say nothing of the alterations and adjustments that scribes routinely made to such texts. For this reason, talking about a definitive version of the Historia—and a singular completion date—is extremely difficult and perhaps not even particularly useful.

Unfortunately, matters surrounding the Historia Brittonum’s authorship are no clearer. The author identifies himself as Nennius, a Welsh monk and former student of the famed Bishop Elfodd of Bangor. This lends further support to the idea that the Historia was composed around the 820s, since the Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogion notes that Elfodd died in 809.

However, as already noted, this identifying prologue appears only in later copies of the text from the eleventh century and is entirely absent from earlier versions. This curious omission has led many scholars to suggest that the Historia Brittonum—which appears to have been compiled by combining several sources with minimal editing—was the product of an anonymous compiler who gathered and consolidated loosely related material.

Traces of Arthur Before the Historia?

It is honestly a little unclear if the Historia Brittonum is the first source to mention Arthur or not. The name comes to us in scraps of verse and poetry of ambiguous provenance that may predate the Historia.

Such poems purport to be representations of a thriving oral tradition, yet they are only known to us today from books and collections compiled during the twelfth, thirteenth, and even fourteenth centuries. Again, the vast gulf of time between such poems’ supposed date of composition and the first versions available to us makes them of dubious historical value.

Consider Arthur’s appearance in a poem commemorating the warriors of the Welsh kingdom of Gododdin and their heroic defeat at the hands of the Saxons during the Battle of Catterick in 600. The poem names no fewer than eighty individual warriors, all of whom are afforded some unique words of praise. We are told that one warrior fought well and killed many enemies, although he was no Arthur.

Arthur is portrayed here as the very embodiment of the martial ideal. Evidently, even though no flesh-and-blood warrior could match Arthur’s skill, mere comparison was compliment enough. After all, the poem was meant to praise the honoured dead, suggesting that its author and audience believed the comparison, no matter how one-sided, was in itself flattering.

The poem purports to have been written shortly after the events it described, a claim perhaps supported by its depth of detail and the vast number of individual combatants its author clearly felt compelled to praise. If true, this poem—written in the opening decade of the seventh century—would be an earlier written source for Arthur.

In addition to all the issues surrounding the distinction between composition and transcription covered above, there is considerable evidence that many of the references made to Arthur in Welsh verse were later insertions supplanting the place of a lesser-known regional hero. The potential ubiquity of this practice, presumably done to provide their new audience with an instantly recognisable touchstone, speaks to the level of cultural influence Arthur had achieved in Wales by the eleventh century.

On top of the dubious chronology and accuracy of Arthur’s appearance in verse before the twelfth century, almost all of the references to Arthur in these earlier poems were just that—references. The Arthur of these poems has few actual deeds credited to him. He takes no part in either personal or political drama. Instead, he is simply totemic of martial prowess and lethality.

In contrast to these orphaned allusions, the Historia Brittonum provides Arthur and his legends with substance and a sense of the momentous.

Arthur in the Historia Brittonum

We are told that Arthur, while not a king himself, was the dux bellorum of the Britons—the leader of battles. Under Arthur’s leadership, the kings of Britain fought twelve battles against the Saxon invaders. This unbroken chain of victories culminated in the outright slaughter of the Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon.

We are assured that in addition to his status as a general and leader of men, Arthur was both personally pious and a great warrior in his own right. In Arthur’s eighth battle, fought at or near the fortress of Guinnion, he went into battle carrying the image of the Virgin Mary. The slaughter that followed the Saxon pagans’ attempted retreat is specifically credited to divine favour. At Mount Badon, we are told that Arthur led a great charge against the enemy, killing well over a hundred of them single-handedly.

This account of Arthur’s career and exploits was to set the model for all future iterations of the legends. It proved particularly influential on the work and fertile imagination of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose magnum opus, the Historia Regum Britanniae, first brought Arthur’s legend to the attention of an audience outside of Wales.

Written in the mid-1130s, the proliferation of the Historia Regum Britanniae fortuitously coincided with a rising interest in romance literature and the cult of chivalry within medieval aristocratic culture, resulting in its explosion in popularity across the continent. Yet Geoffrey’s work—the foundation of the Arthurian legends as we now know them—doesn’t begin with Arthur. It begins with a very different hero. It begins with Brutus—a figure borrowed from the earlier Historia Brittonum.

According to the Historia Brittonum, Brutus was a member of the royal house of Troy, the same city that the Greeks besieged for ten years in Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad was an epic poem created and popularised in Greece sometime during the eighth or seventh centuries BC. It emerged as one of the central pillars of Classical Greek culture and literature.

Classical Greece was politically fragmented, with numerous polities that maintained significant cultural variances. As a result of this diversity, the celebration of the Iliad—which depicted the various peoples and polities of Greece working together—became one of the main staples of collective Greek identity. In short, it provided all Greeks with a shared heroic past as great warriors.

After a decade-long siege and a seemingly endless series of one-on-one duels, Troy was finally taken through trickery and the city was sacked. According to the Historia Brittonum, however, this was not the end of the Trojans, who wandered the Mediterranean as refugees before eventually settling in Italy.

Brutus and the Trojan Origins of Britain

This story is clearly based upon the Roman poem The Aeneid, written by Virgil in 20 BC. The Aeneid follows Aeneas, a minor royal and demigod, as he journeys across the Mediterranean leading a group of Trojan refugees fresh from the horrors of the siege. After a series of false starts and misadventures, the gods eventually lead him to central Italy, where he settles. His descendants intermarry with local royalty to form the line that would eventually produce Romulus, Remus, and the foundation of Rome.

The Historia Brittonum provides a sequel of sorts to these two staples of Classical literature—one Greek, one Roman. Born in the Italian kingdom of Alba Longa, Brutus was, depending on the version, either the grandson or great-grandson of Aeneas. As a child, it was prophesied that he would grow into a great man, much to the displeasure of his father, who feared being surpassed by his son.

Sure enough, shortly after coming to manhood, Brutus accidentally kills his father while hunting and is exiled from Italy. He and his followers travel through Gaul, waging war against the locals, until they stumble upon the British Isles. Brutus names this new land after himself, settling it and founding the city that would one day become known as London.

Geoffrey of Monmouth expands upon this story in his Historia Regum Britanniae, in which it forms the earliest foundation of Britain and the beginning of its recorded history. In Geoffrey’s meticulously constructed pseudo-history, Brutus wages war against the Greeks to free a group of enslaved Trojan descendants, survives an encounter with the Sirens, and is led to Britain by a vision he receives from the goddess Diana. In doing so, Brutus emulates—or even surpasses—the heroes of Classical mythology.

Odysseus, the titular hero of the Odyssey and the mastermind behind the fall of Troy, also faced the Sirens on his way home. In the Aeneid, Aeneas is guided to Italy by his mother, the goddess Aphrodite, imbuing the kingdom he builds there with a special, divinely sanctioned destiny. Brutus corrects the tragedy of the Trojan War and surpasses his forebears by gathering together members of the Trojan diaspora and symbolically refighting the war with the Greeks.

Perhaps the most significant change introduced by Geoffrey of Monmouth is the addition of a fearsome race of giants who dwell within the British Isles. Under Brutus, the Trojans defeat these giants, claiming the land for themselves. Even the giants’ king, Gogmagog, is defeated in a wrestling match by Brutus’s second-in-command, Corineus, and hurled into the sea.

Genealogies, Giants, and Shared Origins

Fascinatingly, the idea that the Britons shared a common heritage with their eventual Roman conquerors was not an invention of the Historia Brittonum. Instead, it originates from the Frankish Table of Nations, a genealogical work produced in the 520s. Despite its name, the Table of Nations was probably Byzantine—or eastern Roman—in origin and only began to circulate among the Franks when it was translated from Greek into Latin.

The numerous versions and variants of the Table of Nations are the result of an ambitious attempt to synthesise and unify Classical and Biblical traditions. The ancestry of the various Germanic peoples who now dominated the former Western Roman Empire—heavily based on the writings of the first-century Roman historian Tacitus—was combined with biblical genealogies and a dash of Classical mythology to create a vast family tree. This structure connected the peoples and kingdoms of Europe to specific sons of Noah and, through them, ultimately to Adam and Eve.

In the Table of Nations, the Franks, Britons, and Romans are depicted as closely related peoples with a common ancestor: Hessitio, the eldest son of Alanus, a descendant of Noah’s son Japheth and the first European. The author of the Historia Brittonum, clearly aware of the Aeneid and the Roman belief that they were descended from Trojans, combines this with contemporary ideas about the Romans’ and Britons’ shared origins to give the Britons a Trojan connection of their own. He includes a variant of the Historia that adds Aeneas, Brutus, and the royal family of Troy into the genealogical line of Japheth.

Another possible piece of the puzzle can be found in the work of Saint Isidore of Seville. In addition to his duties as archbishop and advisor to the Visigothic royal court, Isidore produced the Etymologiae in 625, the first encyclopaedia of Latin etymology. In it, he suggests that the name of the British Isles may derive from the Roman word for “broad,” since they were the largest islands encountered by the Romans. It is possible that the author of the Historia Brittonum, who maintained that the islands were named after Brutus of Troy, was aware of this etymological uncertainty and seized the opportunity to provide an alternative explanation—one that tied into the growing belief that the Britons and Romans shared common origins.

The account of Brutus of Troy and his journey to Britain, included within the Historia Brittonum, provided the Welsh with an ancient and glorious past on par with any in the world. Rather than being a politically fragmented people besieged by more powerful neighbours, they were recast as the heirs to a formidable martial and imperial tradition. They were no longer simply native to the British Isles—they were descendants of noble Trojans and close relatives of the empire-building Franks and Romans.

It was a considerable pedigree. In contrast, their Saxon—or English—neighbours occupy a far less prestigious position in the Frankish Table of Nations. Descended from a younger son of Alanus, named Negus, the English are presented as being most closely related to the Vandals and Bulgarians—neither of which group enjoyed special prestige or cultural cachet in ninth-century Wales.

Myth, History, and Political Utility

The Historia Brittonum thus draws upon and recasts some of the most influential and substantive works of Classical literature to provide the aristocracy of ninth-century Wales with an ennobling and unifying shared identity. These classical poems were not the only works repurposed by the Historia for this purpose.

The account of the struggle against the invading Saxons and Arthur’s twelve great victories over them is partially based upon the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (Ruin and Conquest of Britain). Its author, Gildas, was a British monk of considerable education and resources, writing sometime in the late fifth or perhaps early sixth century. He later emigrated to Brittany, where he became the founder and abbot of a monastery at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys.

Gildas makes no mention of Arthur. Instead, the war against the Saxons is led by a man of Roman descent called Ambrosius Aurelianus. As presented by Gildas, he is an avatar of the old world, now sadly lost. In contrast to Arthur’s unbroken chain of twelve victories, the Britons under Ambrosius are said to have fought a long and bitter conflict in which they lost as many battles as they won. Mount Badon is presented as a magnificent victory that quelled the Saxon threat for a generation.

Yet by the time of writing, Gildas presents this advantage as already squandered by the infighting and wickedness of Britain’s native kings. The Historia Brittonum reworks this apocalyptic polemic and warning against sin into a more aspirational message of Welsh prowess. It tells its audience that under Arthur, the Welsh were able to inflict defeat after defeat upon their enemies. The glorious victories of the past suggest that with piety, unity, and the right leader, the Welsh could once again achieve such triumphs in the present.

This affirming message of Welsh martial success and cultural identity is carefully and deliberately layered upon a story of noble pedigree and prestigious origins. It further suggests to the audience that the revival and rise of such a people was perhaps inevitable—the product of a great destiny on par with both their Trojan forebears and Roman brethren.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s alterations to the story of Brutus were not made simply to enhance its entertainment value—although, who doesn’t enjoy a war against a kingdom of giants? Instead, his subtle reworking of the material shifts the focus from Wales to the whole of the British Isles.

Geoffrey was a cleric of likely Norman or Breton descent. He was certainly well connected to the network of Norman aristocrats who had muscled their way into a partially colonised southern Wales. The prolonged military clashes caused by the Norman efforts to construct and expand powerbases within Wales also resulted in a degree of cultural exchange and hybridisation.

Geoffrey belonged to the Welsh Church and had access to the rich traditions of Welsh culture and literature, but he owed his position to his status within an invasive elite sustained by military force. The Historia Regum Britanniae suggests that Britain itself is a special land—populated by giants, marked by divine visions, and separated from the rest of the world until the destined arrival of a new ruling dynasty.

In many ways this parallels the Norman Conquest. While the British Isles were far from isolationist before the invasion, they were still considered culturally distinct—part of the extended Scandinavian world. The various cultures that called it home were instinctively viewed by the Normans and their continental neighbours as strange and somewhat alien.

This reworking of Classical literature to reflect and justify the circumstances of the Conquest is continued in Geoffrey’s portrayal of Arthur. Rather than a Welsh warlord, Arthur becomes the ideal knight and king. A paragon of continental rather than British traditions, he is the soul of chivalry and the architect of a new kingdom in which the values of knighthood and civilisation are championed and fused with governance. To the Normans, these elements were both familiar and aspirational, obliquely ennobling and justifying their conquest of the island.

Fascinatingly, both models of Arthur—one touting the noble heritage and destiny of the Welsh, and the other reshaped into the image of an ideal Norman king—anchor their portraits in works of Classical literature. Both versions of Arthur beckon their audience toward a bright future. Yet it is a future that owes a great debt to the past.

James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry

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Top Image: 14th sculpture of King Arthur’s head at the German National Museum – Wikimedia Commons