I read a book a while back called King Arthur: The True Story, by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman. In it, they seek to deduce whether King Arthur was a real person in history, and if so, who was he. Through a series of investigations, deductions and ofttimes pure speculation they concluded that King Arthur was a man known as Owain Ddantgwyn.
It should be stated now that this theory hasn't gained much traction in scholarship. The speculation has been criticised, especially as a lot of it is derived from the use of names but I have to say I really like the theory they put forwards and, after all, they used to refer to that period as the Dark Ages for a reason, there is little surviving evidence and so, to an extent, everything we know about it is speculation in the form of a calculated guess based on limited evidence. Granted, their evidence is even more limited than most, but some of it just seems too coincidental to not at least have a foundation, but that might just be my fantastical mind getting overexcited. But do fictional writers really care that much? In it was a story, a story of how Owain Ddantgwyn became the mythical king Arthur and I was determined to write it.
One problem, of course, is that every character in the Arthurian myths connected with our king has pretty much been disproved, or proven to be a myth in their own right but connected to the Arthurian one. At first, I decided I would not use any other character names, then decided one or two wouldn't hurt: my narrator would be his kin so why not have his kinsman from legend? Owain would be marrying a princess so why not Guinevere? After that I began shamelessly namedropping Arthurian names in left, right and centre. I admit I probably got carried away, but it did mean I didn't have to research too many ancient Welsh/Celtic names so swings and roundabouts.
Whether King Arthur is a real person or not, King Ambrosius certainly was and acted much as a prelude to King Arthur, a Romano-British noble who became king, uniting the Britons and stemming the tide of the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
I deliberately used the Roman names for places as I don't think only a generation or two after the Romans had left that the stone towns that they built would have lost their Roman names. I did hear on a podcast recently that actually many Britons didn't use the stone settlements anyway. However, the book was already written then and the joy of writing fiction is that you can just make it up to suit your story anyway.
I certainly made up a lot of stuff. I hope you enjoyed it. There is more to come.
YOU ARE READING
Winter's Blossom: The Seasons of Arthur
Historical Fiction"Strangely, I did not move for a moment. I just accepted death with a reluctant peacefulness. I knew I was about to die and there was nothing I could do about it. I did not even have a sword in my hand, for I had kept my arms free while running. I c...
