In particular, Arthur features in a number of well-known lives of post-Roman saints.
In addition to featuring in pre-Galfridian Welsh poems and tales, Arthur appears in other early texts.
One stanza praises the bravery of a warrior who slew 300 enemies, but says that despite this, “he was no Arthur” – that is, his feats cannot compare to the valour of Arthur.
One of the most famous Welsh poetic references to Arthur comes in the collection of heroic death-songs known as Y Gododdin (The Gododdin, attributed to 6th-century poet Aneirin.
The third and final strand is that the early Welsh Arthur had a close connection with the Welsh Otherworld, Annwn. The pre-Galfridian Arthur who was a figure of folklore, particularly topographic or onomastic folklore, and localised magical wonder-tales, the leader of a band of superhuman heroes who live in the wilds of the landscape. Some of these are human threats, such as the Saxons he fights in the Historia Brittonum, but the majority are supernatural, including giants, destructive divine boars, dragons, and witches. Arthur as an unrivalled warrior who functioned as the monster-hunting protector of Britain from all internal and external threats. The earliest literary references to Arthur come from Welsh and Breton sources, which have three key strands: The textual sources for Arthur are as a result usually divided into those written before Geoffrey’s Historia, pre-Galfridian texts, and those written afterwards, post-Galfridian. When I started this project, I spent the first few weeks researching the many Legends of King Arthur. The stories of King Arthur as most prominently told through literature with the literary persona of King Arthur that most people are familiar with beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-historical Historia Regum Britanniae, History of the Kings of Britain, written in the 1130s.
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