LogFAQs > #914870641

Zikten posted...

my theory is they were an oral tradition and never written down, in a pagan culture. and then Christianity came and the stories were so loved they got edited to be christian and then finally written down

My theory is that I'm actually the child of an ancient divine space being and destined to rule the world as your benevolent god-king, but strangely, no one else seems to believe it because there's absolutely no evidence to support it whatsoever, and a fair amount of evidence that would seem to suggest otherwise.

The problem is that if you're going to make assertions you can't just go with them because you think it's a neat idea or that it's aesthetically pleasing, it has to be supported by SOME form of evidence to suggest it might be true. And no, "there's no evidence that says it CAN'T be true!" is not evidence.

And nearly everything we know about Arthur is that that simply isn't the case. At BEST, we can say that some stories about Arthur started out as stories about someone ELSE (like Fergus mac Roy having the sword Caladbolg, which is often assumed to have evolved over time into Excalibur), and Arthur sort of got grafted into them. And that the main corpus of what we think of as "Arthurian myth" has a lot of elements of other stories that sort of got pulled in over time (like stories about Gawain or the Welsh Owain likely pre-dating Arthur entirely). But Arthur himself as a distinct concept really doesn't exist until post 500 AD or so.

I went through a huge Arthur kick as a teenager - I did a TON of research into this kind of shit.



Zikten posted...

I read once about how there might be a pagan origin to the quest of the holy grail, except it was a quest for a magic cauldron or something.

What you're thinking of is probably this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branwen#Her_story

Though it might also be one of the cauldrons from these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Treasures_of_the_Tuatha_D%C3%A9_Danann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Treasures_of_the_Island_of_Britain

There were a number of cauldrons in Irish and Welsh mythology, and a lot of people like to assume that those influenced later Arthurian stories about the Grail. But the key thing to remember is that the Grail aspects of Arthurian myth came in VERY late - they were more influenced by stories from France than they were native to the British Isles, and they were deliberately incorporated into the narrative hundreds of years after it had originally been documented. So it's something of a spurious connection at best.

If you're actually interested in pre-Arthurian folklore of Britain that likely inspired some of the earlier Arthurian stories (ie, a lot of the ones involving errant knights fighting against monsters or evil knights and rescuing maidens), you should probably start with the Mabinogion.


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