 So if the holy grail wasn't holy and the round table was a fake, what else have we got to go on? What can lead us back to the historical kernel that lies at the heart and at the beginning of all of these other iterations of the Arthur narrative? If the literary trail only leads us back to Jeffrey of Monmouth and Keele Hook and Olin in that time period or to Cretia de Troyes, then how do we go beyond that? Well, when our literary trail runs out, we have disciplines like history and archaeology that we can use to sort of triangulate our search. If any one of those disciplines can't answer our questions, maybe the three of them together can. So let's start with Camelot. Surely if there was some magnificent palace 1500 years ago on the island of Britain, there's something left, some archaeological remains that we can find today. The name Camelot first appears once again in Cretia de Troyes in his Lancelot or the Night of the Cart. Keep in mind, this is the first time we have Lancelot named, the first time he's a character, the first time obviously that he's described as having an affair with Guinevere. Cretia de Troyes also gave us the first reference of the grail and our first sort of representation of Percival is a grail knight. There are a lot of firsts in Cretia de Troyes and once again, Cretia de Troyes is the first one to give us the reference to Camelot. As it turns out, there was a Roman fortification, a nice sort of stone-built castle, not quite what we see in representations of later Middle Ages, but something, well, much more advanced than your average Celtic fortification. And it was called Camulodinum, and that's pretty close. It was a militaristic fortification, the first two syllables and possibly the third sound very similar. It sounds like we have a candidate for Camelot. There's just one problem with this and that is that this area of the east coast of Britain, at the time that the Battle of Mount Baden was fought, was already well garrisoned by the Saxons. This was solid Saxon territory. There was virtually no way there could be like a little island of Britons in an ocean of Anglo-Saxons. Another city that is frequently associated with King Arthur is the southern British city of Winchester. Thomas Mallory identifies Winchester twice in LaMorte d'Arthur as the location of Camelot. This is where the Winchester round table was preserved, although unfortunately, it doesn't date back beyond the 13th century. But is Winchester a potential candidate? It was a Roman fortification and it would have made a good capital, except once again, this is part of Anglo-Saxon England at the time when Arthur would have fought if he fought at the Battle of Mount Baden. But there's another location for Arthur's court that's mentioned frequently before Cretan, and even sometimes after Cretan, and even in Cretan's Lancelot, right before he mentions Camelot, he says that Arthur departed his court at Carleon in order to ride to Camelot to hold court there. This introduces us to two concepts, one of which is that Arthur's court was mobile. Some early versions of the round table have it being described as portable. You can break it down and take it to the next place. That's because a high king at this time would have to go from location to location in order to make sure that all the various regions of his realm were remaining loyal, were seeing him face-to-face, and that he could see what was going on. For the same basic thinking that goes into the round table, you don't want anyone to feel superior by their proximity to the king at the table. You also don't want them to feel superior or inferior based on proximity to the king geographically. So Arthur's frequently described as having a roaming court. But most often the place that court is held is at Carleon in southern Wales. Carleon is a real place and it was a Roman fortification and it very likely could have been settled by the Britons. Remember that the word Welsh means foreigner precisely because this was an area that the Anglo-Saxons who gave the Welsh that name could not penetrate. They couldn't push that far in. However, there's an even more intriguing location that is not a Roman fortification, but is a very, very old Iron Age hill fort. And even though it's not much more than a hill now, it's referred to as Cadbury Castle in the South Cadbury region of southern England. And what makes this location stand out? And it was noticed at least back in 1723 when this drawing here above me was drawn. It was identified even then as Camelot. As you can see in the drawing, there are these terraces that some of which allow for a road to go from the lower ground area up to the top. But some of them are there seemingly just to be ramparts, to be areas that attackers would have to climb and be at an extreme downhill of disadvantage. And even though this particular site was settled and abandoned and settled and abandoned over and over again over centuries and centuries, it was abandoned during the Roman period, but it was resettled right after the Romans left Britain. That indicates that this was a place that was chosen as a garrison, as a sort of outpost against the Saxons. And located, as it is, writing distance to Carleon. So Chrétien tells us that Arthur left his court at Carleon to go to Camelot. And it's also close to other sites that are associated with King Arthur. His reputed birthplace was at Tintagel in Cornwall. The town of Glastonbury has very strong associations with the island of Avalon, which I'll talk about in another lecture. And Stonehenge, which is a pre-Celtic site, it was there before the Celts even came from continental Europe to the island of Britain. But it shows up in Arthurian literature, at least as a landmark. Unfortunately, what we have with South Cadbury is a likely location that we can match with a narrative, but so far all of our narratives are being written down 500 years after it was once again abandoned. So what does this tell us about what Camelot would have looked like? Well, once again, if we're looking at the history, then it would have been a terraced hill with earthwork ramparts with wooden posts and wooden fences built up around it that would look something like an American pioneer outpost, military outpost in the 1800s or even sooner, made of wood, not of stone. The Roman fortifications would have been made out of stone, but they would have been occupied with the Saxons. So it would have looked much more primitive than we're accustomed to seeing in illustrations and in movies. That doesn't mean we can't imagine that when we're reading Cretantitua, because Cretantitua clearly imagined something much grander than what would have been around 500 years before him. The medieval manuscripts that depict Camelot as a castle always depicted as one of the more opulent castles of their own time, whether that's the 13th or 14th century. It's anachronistic, but within the narrative that's what the author is clearly portraying. Unfortunately, that just doesn't connect with the archaeology. And that leads us to Arthur himself. This person who is said in Geoffrey of Monmouth and in later accounts to have been so powerful that not only did he unite all of Britain under his rule, but when threatened with subordination by the Roman Empire, he rode out with his knights across Europe, conquering all of these other lands, and even forced Rome to yield to him so that it became his fiefdom, his sort of vassal state. So if you ever read Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, you'll get a very interesting portrayal of King Arthur. But it'll be without a lot of the elements that we typically assume are integral and absolutely necessary to an Arthurian story. He is the King of Britain. He does have a sword called Excalibur or Caliburnus. However, he doesn't pull the sword from a stone and he doesn't get it from a lake. Merlin is a very prominent figure, but there is no round table. Gwynevere is mentioned, but she's not having an affair with Lancelot. She seems to have an affair and betray Arthur for Mordred. Arthur does have some of the best knights in the world, Sir Gowen, Bedivere, Yvan, Kay, but Lancelot has not appeared yet. Percival has not appeared yet, unless he's the king named Peridur who shows up in Welsh literature. There's no Sir Gallowhead. There are stories about Sir Tristan, but he's not Sir Tristan, he's just Tristan. He serves King Mark, not King Arthur. Those narrative traditions haven't merged to make him one of Arthur's knights yet. There's no quest for the Holy Grail. There's no Lancelot to have an affair with Gwynevere. A lot of Geoffrey's narrative focuses on Arthur's conquest of Rome, and upon returning to Britain after this conquest of Rome, he is betrayed by Mordred, who is his illegitimate nephew, not his son like in later accounts. And after this battle, after Arthur is what seems to be fatally wounded, but he's still alive at the end and he's taken to the island of Avalon to be healed by Morgan Le Fay. And Morgan Le Fay is described in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, especially in the Vita Merlini, but she is not an enemy of Arthur and she is not apparently his sister or half-sister. She is someone who lives in the island of Avalon and is quasi-supernatural and able to heal this otherwise mortal wound that Arthur has. So not what we might consider a complete Arthur narrative, but many of the basics are there. But what about when we go back before Geoffrey? Almost 200 years before Geoffrey, we have the Welsh annals, or the annals cambriae. Annals are basically just lists of what happened in a particular year and then move on to the next year and the next year. And I've got the estimated years listed on the right, but the original text is on the left and you'll notice there's no numbers there. That's because they just say in this year this happened and most of those years are blank. But in the listing for 516, there is described the Battle of Baden and it's the Battle of Baden in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britons were the victors. Keep in mind the invading Anglo-Saxons at the time were a non-Christian. They hadn't been converted to Christianity yet. They were pagans and the Britons had been converted for the most part. So they were Christian. The invaders were not. So this became a very sort of religious, for lack of a better word, crusade. Not one of the great crusades to the Holy Land, but a conflict that could have just been cultural takes on a religious element. But we don't get much more description than that. Arthur shows up again in 537 and we're told at the Battle of Kamlan in which Arthur and Medroth fell. While Medroth is the Latinized version of Mordred, the thing is you'll notice that it doesn't say Arthur fell fighting Mordred or Arthur and Medroth fought each other at the Battle of Kamlan. Grammatically it is possible that we're being told that they fell side by side in the same battle. We're just not given enough information. You'll notice several entries below that of a person named Gildus. I'll come back to him in a little bit, but I point it out because this shows that Gildus was a near contemporary to the Battle of Kamlan and the Battle of Baden. And in 573 you'll see a listing that I made a reference to in the last lecture about Merlin. At the Battle of Aphrodirith between the sons of Elephor and Gwynthalo, son of Kidio, in which battle Gwynthalo fell, Merlin went mad. Now this does not appear in the earliest copies of the Welsh annals. It does appear in later ones and it might be an interpolation, an addition made after the fact, after someone is looking at these references to Arthur and deciding, well, some reference to Merlin should be there. The thing is they use Merlin and not Myrthen. Remember that it's Geoffrey of Monmouth who changes Myrthen, the name associated with the bard who had the gift of prophecy. And he changes it because in the Latin that makes it sound like the word for shit. So he changes it to make it more eloquent, but this copy of the Welsh annals has already changed as well. So this might be something that was added at a later date. It's tempting to see Merlin and Arthur referred to in this earlier text, but we can't be exactly sure that this was the way it was in the original. Before that, another 150 years, around the year 800, we have a reference to Arthur from the Historia Bretonum, that is history of the Britons. Sometimes you will hear this referred to as if it was authored by a man named Ninius. There was a scribe named Ninius at the time, but it turns out that this was actually misattributed at what probably wasn't Ninius that wrote it. But we have a description of Arthur fighting battles against the Saxons. This time he's not just fighting one battle, but he's fighting 12 different battles. And this is the earliest reference to Arthur by name that says what he did, that he fought. There are going to be earlier references to the Battle of Baden, but this is the only one that references Arthur as fighting at the Battle of Baden. And you'll notice here that he's described as a commander. Though there were many more noble than himself, this means that there are many more aristocratically higher in society, more noble than him. So he's not a king and he's not the heir to a throne. He is someone who has chosen 12 times to be a commander. And the Latin word here is Dukes Bellarum, D-U-X. You can see it barely where the yellow arrow is at the top of the screen. D-U-X is where the English word Duke comes from. So it's not a king, but it is a military title. And it comes from the Roman ranking of a battlefield military leader. And it's 12 battles here and they seem to be kind of perhaps a little bit exaggerated, especially if we look at the Battle of Baden. The 12th battle was a most severe contest when Arthur penetrated to the hill of Baden. And this engagement 940 fell by his hand alone. No one but the Lord affording him assistance. So maybe that means that only his troops following him rather than following one of the other sort of low-level kings or other commanders on the battlefield. But I don't know, it kind of sounds like they're saying that he killed 940 by himself. We also have his or Christian context referenced here when we're told that in the 8th battle near the Gernian castle where Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin Mother of God upon his shoulders, that if you remember the earlier image where Arthur is standing on top of the crowns of all of these fallen kingdoms, he has a shield and there's the Virgin Mary holding Jesus on the shield. This kind of depiction doesn't make it into later literature. Typically, he's got a coat of arms that's pretty closely resembling the family coat of arms of whoever happens to be king of the country where the narrative is produced. But we at least have a name Arthur associated with particular battles at a particular point in history. If the history of Bretonum is the first reference to Arthur's name in relation to what he's doing, the first reference to his name at all is in this Welsh poem, the E Gadothen. The double D's there are pronounced as a th sound, Gadothen. And this poem dates to around the year 600, although the only addition of what we have is from the book of Aniryn, which Aniryn is a famous poet, a Welsh poet. And in this poem, it's commemorating the fall of the Gadothen, Northern British tribe against another tribe. They fell in battle and they have a leader named Guarðir, that's G-W-A-R-D-D-U-R. Sounds kind of like Arthur, but it's not Arthur. In fact, we're told specifically in the poem that he is not Arthur. So the only reference to Arthur here presumes that you know who Arthur is, that Guarðir is a great warrior, but he's not Arthur. It doesn't say why he's not Arthur, it doesn't say how they're different. It doesn't say anything about Arthur himself. It just says that over 300 of the best men were slain, Guarðir pierced them in the center, and on either side he stood out among the noble host. In winters, he gave out horses from his herds, so he's giving out the way war leaders in the Old Norse and Old English poetry are described as a good leader is one who doles out wealth. If you remember in the Pentecostal oath, Arthur is promising that he's going to give his knights lands and titles and wealth as long as they follow the Code of Chivalry. But Guarðir here is at least keeping his men loyal by being generous. He gave out horses from his herds, Guarðir summoned the black crows down before the fortress walls. In other words, he's killing a lot of bodies, so the crows are all flocking in so that they can eat the flesh from the bodies of the dead. These are why crows are usually referenced. But despite that, despite of how many bodies he left on the battlefield, he was no Arthur. That's it. We've got to figure out what that means. Does that mean there was an Arthur who left more bodies on the battlefield? And if so, is that all he's known for? And is this a reference to the Battle of Baden? We kind of have to put this together ourselves. But it's enticing because it is within a century of possible dates for the Battle of Mount Baden. But that's it for Arthur's name. Now, there is more about the Battle of Baden. Remember, I mentioned the monk named Gildus, who was mentioned in the Welsh annals. Gildus wrote a work called the Exidio et Conquista Britanniae, on the downfall and conquest of Britain. And he names a historical figure that we know of named Ambrosius Aurelius. This is possibly, this is at least the same name as the boy who predicts that there's two dragons fighting underground in the earlier account that Geoffrey of Monmouth is later going to change from Ambrosius to Merlin. It seems that Geoffrey sort of conflates Ambrosius and Merlin. But Ambrosius shows up in other Arthurian texts as well as either the uncle or the grandfather of King Arthur through Uther Pendragon, usually as the brother of Uther, Arthur's father. But Gildus tells us only this about Ambrosius and about Baden. Under Ambrosius Aurelius, our people revived their strength and provoked the victors to battle. By the will of the Lord, triumph was theirs. In those days, the citizens of Britain sometimes emerged victorious and sometimes their enemies won the day. In this way, the Lord tested that people, as is his want, as is his way, as if it was present day Israel. Now, this is very important. Gildus is writing what's called Jeremiah. It's after the prophet Jeremiah who says the same thing about Israel. After Israel is overrun, conquered from without, he looks for an explanation and says, you know, why would God let his people be defeated? Well, it must be as punishment. We must not be living the way he wants us to, and so he is sending these foreigners to punish us. So Gildus is saying the same thing about the Britons. This is why they're being beaten by the Anglo-Saxons according to him. This state of affairs continued until the year of the siege of Mount Baden, which was the latest, though not the least, of the defeats of those churls, those, you know, simple-minded Anglo-Saxons. That battle took place during the year of my birth, and I reckon that to be 44 years and one month ago. Okay, so a reference to Mount Baden, one person named, that's Ambrosius Aurelius, but no reference to Arthur here. Does that mean that there was no Arthur, that he didn't know who Arthur was? That's not necessarily the case. What he's writing here is a Jeremiah. It is a lament for the religious state of affairs. He's ridiculing the aristocracy at the time for being sinful or something. They're leading Britain in the wrong direction. Britain's being punished. That's Gildus' point. He's not really interested in, you know, who killed who. He's not going through enlisting all the battles, enlisting all the names of the people involved with that. So it's helping to confirm certain things, like Ambrosius Aurelius and Mount Baden, unfortunately not confirming Arthur. Somebody who, if Arthur was fighting at the battle of Mount Baden, Gildus would have been a contemporary. He would have been alive at the same time, but he doesn't leave us with anything. So where does this leave us? We have, I've got two lists here. We've got Arthur-type figures. People who are not named Arthur but are connected to Arthurian literature or whose actions show up pretty conspicuously attributed to King Arthur. And we have people who are named Arthur and who were at least battlefield leaders, some of them like low-level kings and these small chiefdoms scattered throughout the Celtic Britain. But we don't have the two sort of meeting up. First of all, I've already mentioned Ambrosius Aurelianus or Ambrosius Aurelius or Jeffrey calls him Aurelius Ambrosius. This is a historical figure. He was a Roman. He was someone who seems to have been a descendant of a Roman family who had lived in Britain and remained there after the rest of the Romans departed. He's described as having worn the purple. Well, that means he's from high-ranking Roman aristocracy. The family name Ambrosius connects him to the other aristocrat who later became a Christian saint, that's Saint Ambros, although the two aren't closely connected. He's remembered in Welsh as Imris Wledig. The term Wledig is just a king or a high king. Imris is the Welsh pronunciation of Ambrosius and Ambrosius did lead the coalitions of Britons against invading Irish, invading Picts. Remember that the Picts were coming from down from Scotland. Now that the Romans were gone they were coming over Hadrian's Wall and of course the Anglo-Saxons were coming from the east. And Ambrosius, to really honest, was one of those in the early 400s who was uniting these scattered chieftains of Celtic tribes who were no longer connected by Roman political structure. He was rallying them to form a unified resistance. Now before him, during the time when Britain was Roman, there was a guy named Magnus Maximus and he's remembered in other Welsh texts as Maxim Wledig. He was an actual Roman commander of Britain and when Rome was being threatened initially during the first invasions of Visigoths and others and also suffering a lot of sort of split between the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire Magnus Maximus took over Britain. He got his legions to be loyal to him and they went into Gaul, modern-day France and so all the Celtic areas of the Roman Empire are now supporting this guy who seems to be making a bid for the emperor ship and he was very successful for a long time. He invaded Italy in 387 and he was eventually defeated and executed by the Emperor Theodosius. But the fact that he rallied troops from Britain and actually invaded the Roman Empire in order to make Rome subject to him connects him with one of the earliest stories about King Arthur with Geoffrey of Monmouth which was that he actually led his knights of the round table to invade Rome. Of course in Geoffrey's version he's successful and Rome becomes subject to King Arthur. Now both of these historical figures are mentioned in Arthurian traditions so that would seem to indicate that neither of them could have been a model for Arthur if they're also remembered alongside. They have to be distinguished. However we remember how doublets work. We've seen a lot of literature already where what appears to be the same story is told twice within the larger narrative. So the example of the sea nems and the Odyssey. Searcy has her own island and she's an enchantress and she tries to trap Odysseus and his men there and the gods have to intervene to help Odysseus trick her and get away. But then Odysseus ends up on the island of Calypso, another supernatural enchantress who tries to keep him there with her. So these seem to have been maybe the same story at one point but they were retold by different oral storytellers over a long period of time until they grew apart. Then someone heard both of them and wanted to put them both into the Odyssey and rather than pick one or the other just put both. We've seen this happen in a lot of texts. Very likely that could have happened with both Ambrosis Aurelianus and Magnus Maximus where they're added into the Arthurian story but also their stories are sort of attached to Arthur or in the case of Ambrosius attached to Merlin. Now on the right is a list of people named Arthur. This list was compiled by Mike Ashley in his book Brief History of King Arthur and he goes describes each of them in detail you know the pros and cons, how closely they fit to the Arthur requirements and that sort of thing when they lived what they did. And the first one is a familiar name if you've seen the 2004 King Arthur movie with Clive Owen. That is Lucius Artorius Castus. However you'll notice the date there doesn't quite line up with the Battle of Baden. He's alive around 140 to around 197 and he did go to Britain for a short time although he began and ended his life elsewhere in Europe pretty far away. He did have ties to the Scythians on the northern coast of the Black Sea but that's where the sort of 2004 movie historical connections end and that movie is based on a book which went to greater links to try to make these connections but those connections are just too speculative. So a Roman named Art, something like Arthur, who had possibly local Britons unified underneath him. Maybe that happened but it doesn't quite line up historically. There are several other authors or people with a name like Arthur, particularly Art Weir. Each of these is tied to one or a series of battles. Many of them could be potentially been low-level chieftains although none of them would have been a high king, a king who had other powerful nobles and potentially other kings as subordinate to them the way Arthur is later remembered. The last two might actually be the same person and there's a scholar and historian named Jeffrey Ash who has made the case that Rheothamus was probably the closest to an actual Arthur figure, although he's leading his military campaigns in Gaul in continental Europe rather than on the island of Britain. But another thing these names indicate is that the name existed. It wasn't just Lucius Artorius Castus, he wasn't the only person with an Arthur type name. The reason for that is in Brythonic languages, Celtic languages, pre-Roman, pre-Latin languages, the word Arth meant bear. And here we have a clue that we might have yet another bear's son, another reference to the bear as the sort of apex predator for the northern Europe, northern countries, associated with a powerful individual. And while Arth by itself is quite enough, the diminutive forms, so like the son of the bear or the grandson of the bear would be Arthane or Arthur. Not only bears, but there are bear gods like Artaeus, which means bear-like. So all of these are names that could have very easily been given to someone who was remembered in oral poetry enough to carry that story on and may have been so famous that Aniran or whoever wrote the Gadotan didn't have to say what this person did. Everyone who would have known who Artaeus was. But we just don't know. This is, again, very speculative. We have more possibilities. And unfortunately, in a situation like this, more possibilities actually leads to more confusion. This is the situation we've been in ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the more fragments we find, actually the more loose ends we have, we don't get closer to anything like a complete solid picture. There's no other text. And if we did find a historical figure here, notice we've lost all of our boxes. This Arthur is not the king of Britain. He's at best a battlefield leader. There's no sword in the stone, no Lady of the Lake, no Excalibur, no Merlin, a round table of Gwynevere knights that we know by name, no Grail. And what to make of the Isle of Avalon, we don't know. I will talk more about the Isle of Avalon in a later lecture. So we're left with kind of a ghost. And that's one of the reasons that I actually like a statue that a lot of Arthur historians and scholars really hate. Just a couple of years ago in 2016, this statue was added to Tintagel, a former fortification that juts out into the ocean. It's in Cornwall in southwestern Britain. It is the location of Arthur's birth according to many early sources. This is the castle that Uther Pendragon had to get into in order to sleep with the grain, the wife of the Duke of Tintagel. This is why Merlin had to change his appearance so that he looked like the Duke of Tintagel. Well, this is an actual Iron Age fortification. It's a really good, strategically a good site, easy to defend. During the 1100s, it was re-fortified. You still see those ruins if you go there today. But back in 2016, this statue was added. And when it was added there, a lot of people complained that Tintagel, that sort of rough, rocky features and the remains of this Norman castle was a ruin. And it had some authenticity that way. And when they had this statue and they added a face of Merlin, they carved into a rock in another place. These sort of things led people to compare it to Disneyland. They're saying they're Disney-fying this archaeological site. And there may be some truth to that. But I like the way this statue was designed. It was sculpted, the sculptor was named Reuben Einen. And the way he did it, he didn't just put a really impressive statue of a king. He has this, you know, emptiness. You can see through him. He's sort of a ghost. He's a statue, but he's a ghost as well. When we look at him, we're also looking through him. And I think a lot of the fears about the dignification of these types of sites has some legitimacy to it. But this is not a new complaint. In the year 1125, before Geoffrey of Monmouth publishes the history of the Kings of Britain, William of Malmsbury, someone who did describe Arthur and Sir Gowen, although he described them briefly in his history, he says when he describes Arthur, giving just a few facts, he says this is the same Arthur of whom the Britons even today spout such nonsense. So what this tells us is whatever is being said, we don't know how much of Arthur's myth has been developed before Geoffrey of Monmouth, but we know that however much it is, it's enough to annoy William of Malmsbury. He sees it as too silly, too much nonsense, attached to what he sees as something serious. So this leaves us with something of a choice. Do we agree with William of Malmsbury that whatever the earlier tradition is, keeping it simple, that's going to be the extent of the story of Arthur. And if that's the case, we might have Camelot that is not the impressive stone castles we see in the movies, but a hill fort made of wood and built up on earthworks. Is that still Camelot? What if Arthur didn't pull a sword from a stone? What if he didn't have a round table? What if he didn't go on a quest for the Holy Grail? What if he wasn't even a king? And what if his name wasn't even Arthur? How much of the Arthurian legend can we take away? Once we see that so many of these familiar elements of Arthurian legend come from specific texts written at specific times in specific cultures, do we then say that this is no longer part of the real legend, the real story? Or can we say that there's sort of a center of gravity between the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Mallory, where the things like the round table and the Holy Grail and Lancelot and Guinevere, courtly love and chivalry, when these things are added to a story that was already centuries old, but yet give us something that really defines this story for us? Well, you and I don't have to make that decision, but every time a new narrator, a new author wants to create a new piece of this larger story, anytime someone wants to create a new narrative, they have to decide which of these threads from this larger fabric do I use to interweave into my particular narrative? And what do I add to this? And what parts of my culture do I want to add to this 1500 year old process of story formation? Every narrative that makes its way into the Arthur story is both a continuation of a previous story formation process and also a piece of a specific place and time that says something from a particular cultural point of view, whether it's Chrétien de Troyes adding the story of the Grail in Percival or Robert de Boron making that Grail into the Holy Grail or it's Terry Jones making the quest for the Holy Grail a lampoon. So the texts that we're going to read for this unit are going to have to make that same sort of decision. Notice when you read it, not just what the plot is, but how that specific narrative attaches itself to this larger world. And even if King Arthur is a background figure, even if the whole court and all the familiar elements are just background, the sort of backstory for this particular narrative, is this particular narrative something that could have been set elsewhere? Or is it something that needs this story world in order to do what it does? And even if you forget everything I just said in the last three lectures and everything you read in this class about King Arthur, about anything else, it's very important to learn that this is how narratives work. When we try to follow a thread back to its source, we don't find one source. We find this constant activity going on. And the sort of amorphous, protean literature of King Arthur is an excellent example of this.