‘Yvain’ Exploring Arthurian Britain,15

Exploring Arthurian Britain
What was Britain like in the fifth and sixth centuries? Documentary sources are fragmentary and hard to authenticate. Fertile ground for myth and legend. Most potent are the stories that have grown around King Arthur.

‘Yvain’ Exploring Arthurian Britain,15
Were any of the characters who feature in the Arthurian romances real people? Finding just one would raise the possibility there are others. And there is one of the knights of the Round Table we can be reasonably sure was based on a real historical figure: Sir Yvain, who appears in The Knight with the Lion, written around 1180 by French poet and master storyteller Chrétien de Troyes, a tale later adapted and embellished by others, including an anonymous medieval Welsh version in which he appears as Owain who became king of Rheged on the death of his father around 586, and is believed to have been buried on the land now occupied by St Andrew’s Church, Penrith.


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