King Arthur

King Arthur is the legendary ruler at the centre of the medieval British tradition now called the Matter of Britain. Early Welsh material and the ninth-century Historia Brittonum present Arthur as a warrior associated with battles against the Saxons, while Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century history developed him into a king with a court and an imperial career.

Later romances added Camelot, the Round Table, Excalibur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail. No contemporary evidence confirms a historical King Arthur, and scholars disagree over whether the legend preserves any memory of a fifth- or sixth-century leader. Fiction should therefore identify Arthur as legendary rather than treating the romance biography as established history.

In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century Connecticut engineer, is struck unconscious and wakes in the legendary Britain of King Arthur. In Angus Donald’s The Broken Kingdom, Arthur, a young Dumnonian cavalryman, travels with warriors, his mother Igraine and his half-sister Morgan through a landscape divided by dynastic ambition.