Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Was there a real King Arthur?

Episode Date: June 2, 2018

The legend of King Arthur is very old and very established. By the time the king who saved Britain and united it was first written about, his story was already hundreds of years old. And while many of the details of his life and adventures, from the Lady of the Lake to Merlin the Magician, seem fictional some archaeologists believe that Arthur -- and much of his life -- was real. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, this is Chuck. Welcome to Saturday Selects. Hope you had your pop tarts and your breakfast cereal and you watched your morning cartoons because now it's time to learn a little something.

I'm gonna pick, was there a real King Arthur from January 14, 2014 as my select pick this week. You know, I love my history podcasts and all the episodes we do about history and one of my favorite things is to take a look at these figures from literature and lore and think, wow, were they real people? Is there a basis in reality, in fact?

And that's what we did with King Arthur. So I hope you dig it, I certainly did. Here we go, was there a real King Arthur? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry Waved, everybody. Quiet, Jerry.

That's Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. That's us. That is us. The legend. You know, it was impossible for me to research this without only thinking of two things, two movies. Five on.

Nope, didn't see that one. It was good. Was that the one called King Arthur? Okay, it was a good. I thought so. I'll check it out, cause I dig this character and I've seen a lot of the movies that tackle Camelot, but Excalibur and Monty Python and The Holy Grail, of course.

I surely have seen Excalibur, cause I had Showtime when I was a kid. It was a big, hot movie when you were 12 in the early 80s. Yeah, yeah. And then of course, The Holy Grail. I mean, how do you not see that? It's The Holy Grail of comedies, some say. Yeah, I could see that.

You should check out Excalibur. It actually holds up pretty well. Does it? It's somewhat notable for having a couple of early appearances by actors that went on to be much bigger. Oh yeah, I love movies like that. Yeah, Gabriel Byrne is in it and just barely and Liam Neeson.

Oh really? And I think both of them, it was their first roles. Wow. And they're like hardly in the movie. Who was, who played King Arthur? Was it anybody like I've heard of or like they were, they had to have been big at the time, right? Who was it?

Richard Burton. You know, when I was like 13, I saw Richard Harris do Camelot at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. So is that like pretty neat, huh? Is that based on the Arthurian legend? What, the musical Camelot? Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Okay. But I mean, you know, it's a musical. Yeah. And it's from the 60s, so you can never tell. Like it could have just been named Camelot. That's what I was asking. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's about the Arthurian legend.

But out of all of them, I would say hands down, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the best of the Arthurian legend movie adaptations. Yeah, I haven't seen it in years, but it's like one of those that I saw so many times, I can still quote most of it, you know? I mean, it has it all. It has the killer rabbits, the killer bunnies.

Yeah. It has the coconut carrying swallows. It has the nice to say knee. It has the black knight who merely has a flesh wound. Yeah. It has everything. It has singing, dancing. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. The great Graham Chapman as Arthur. Yeah. And bring out your dead. Yeah. So many things that are in the lexicon. All came from that movie. Yeah.

Nigel Terry played Arthur in the Excalibur movie. I don't know who he is. You'd probably recognize him. Helen Mirren was Morgana though. Oh, wow. But yeah, small roles. Oh, Patrick Stewart was the other guy. Gotcha.

He played... Was he bald? Has he always been bald one of those guys? I'm sure he had hair at some point. Oh, I'll bet he looked weird with hair. I can't imagine him with hair. What if he was born with like a full head of hair? And that was it.

He started losing it after that. Right, for two days and then it all came out. All right. So anyway, started to disrupt us early on, but those two movies, I just, every time I saw Ootha Pendragon. This is a cool name. That's a great name.

I couldn't help but just kind of say those lines in my head. So, I mean, you make a good, or you raise a good point. There's so many Arthur movies out there. Sure. Arthur books. Sword in the Stone was pretty good too. Yeah. That everybody has a kind of a basic idea

of the King Arthur legend, the Arthurian myth or romance it's sometimes called too. Sure. But what I think probably a lot of people don't know is that it is a syncretized, meaning the Catholics got their mitts on it and threw a bunch of Christianity on top of something that was already extant.

And in this case, what was extant was a group of myths that arose from the Celts, the Celtic people, which is pretty substantial that we have this because the Celts never wrote anything down, mainly on account of the fact that they didn't have a written language. Their tradition was entirely oral, which is why we have very little of an understanding

of the Celts. Most of our understanding of the Celts comes from outside observers like Pliny the Elder. Thank God for Pliny or else we might not even know the Celts ever existed. But the Arthurian legend is very clearly based on Celtic mythology, but even more enticing to me is the idea that it's possibly, or it's possible that that Celtic legend

that Celtic mythology is rooted somewhat in fact. Like Arthur may have been a real person. Yeah, that's sort of the age old question. Yeah, but I mean, I find that in astoundingly fascinating. Like there's places that are part of the Arthurian legend that do exist in real life, but whether or not they actually were a part of Arthur's life, if there was a real Arthur,

I mean, each spot generates awesome debate. So for the anthropologist, the history major in me, I just, I'm fascinated by the whole thing. Agreed, sir. So let's go over the basic legend of Arthur. Killer King, legendary hero, saved Britain when Britain needed saving. Yeah, because the Roman Empire had crumbled.

Yeah. And the Saxons were all over Britain, the Germanic tribes. Yeah, and he defeated them. Yes. And brought great peace to the land and built a castle called a Camelot, gathered up knights together around a round table, which we'll get into.

And to help bring peace to the land. And he did. And he did so very successfully. And in fact, in 2002, the BBC voted King Arthur as number 51 in the poll of 100 Greatest Britons, even though he might not even be a real dude. And the Britons are smart folks, and they still voted him that.

They're pretty sharp. Yeah, so those are the broad strokes, but depending on which version you're reading, it's gonna be different. Did he pull a sword from a stone? Was it Excalibur? Did he get it from the lady in the water? Was his undoing Mordred?

Or was it Guinevere and Lancelot? Yeah. Depends on which version you're reading. And we'll go over those versions. Right, and you can kind of trace these back to, you can see layer after layer being added. So when you look at the Arthurian legend as we understand it now,

you can kind of peel back layer by layer and get to the original stuff, which is pretty old indeed. Like they think that, well, we'll get to that. Let's talk about the Arthur story. Okay. So you've got Arthur. He comes along at a time when Britain is in its greatest need.

There were some great kings, possibly relatives of Arthur like Uther Pendragon, his father supposedly would have been one of the rulers. Yeah. Right? But you're smiling because you like that name. All I can think of is I am Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon. Okay.

So you just say that anytime you want, man. But he arrives at a time when Britain is being overrun by the Saxons. It's being ruled by the Saxons. Like there's no British king on the throne. And there's a legend that comes up that there's a sword in a stone and only the rightful king, meaning only the line of Uther Pendragon.

Yep. I'm not gonna say it again. Will be able to remove the sword from the stone. And when that person comes, he will be dubbed the King of Kings and will restore the rightful lineage to the British throne. Yeah.

And in some stories, like I said, a young man, a young Arthur pulls the sword. Stored? It's a sword. From the swan. Right. And in other legends, it does come from the lady in the lake.

He rides out on a barge and the hand stretches up with the sword in it. All you see is the arm coming from the water and he gets the sword that away. Well, and then I think a third way, he pulls the sword from the stone proclaiming himself Arthur. Yeah. And everyone goes nuts.

The ruler Britain. Everyone's like, he's the dude. Right. Like we got one of our own back in power now. And then that sword breaks and that's when he gets Excalibur from the lady of the lake. That's right.

The most powerful magic sword in all the land. It's what you call a bitchin' sword. This is a bitchin' sword. Merlin in some stories comes around right about this time and he appears when Arthur is a teen, generally, associated with the lady of the lake. They're an Avalon. They're both from the same neck of the woods, apparently.

Which Avalon is a magical mystery place, even outside of the Arthurian legend. As far as the Celts go, it was, it means apple land. Really? Yeah. And I guess apples were super magical to the Celts. But Avalon itself is almost in otherworldly afterlife kind of area,

even though it's a physical place you can go to in Britain. Right. Still. Interesting. It's interesting that the apple has always been a strange fruit. Yeah. I know it probably wasn't an apple in Eden,

but it's in Southern Baptist called it an apple. Yeah, and I wonder what it was originally in like Aramaic, and when it was converted to apple. Because where's the apple indigenous? I don't know. Or the apple in the, what was the children's? Was it not Snow White? Was it Snow White, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, with the poison apple. Poison apple again. Yeah. I saw a video today that we've been eating apples wrong. Did you know that? I've seen that. I can't bring myself to eat an apple like that. There's a middle spindle, AKA the core,

that is not to be consumed. That is not true. I won't do it. It's just too weird. But you can eat the core. There is no core. There is a core. I make it every, I create the core.

I show it just like a sculptor reveals the sculpture within a slab of stone. So too do I reveal the core in an apple. Let me ask you this. If you cut the apple up into the eight pieces and get the seeds out, you can just eat, that's the whole apple. No, no, you have to shave off like that inner part,

the core. For those of you who don't know, there's a video of a dude eating an apple from the bottom end forward, and he just eats the whole thing. Cause he's a psychopath. Okay. Sorry to get sidetracked by that.

Sorry to get sidetracked by the history of the apple. Well, no, I think you do raise a really, really interesting point, Chuck. I wonder, you know, when the apple started getting a bad rep, when the apple stood in for other fruit, I think that's an excellent thing to look up to let me know what you find. All right.

So Arthur, like I said, he builds Camelot. That's his castle. Once he restores peace. Yeah. Well, no. I know. No, I think that was, he went out and got all the nights to help him restore peace.

Oh, okay. So he built Camelot in anticipation of restoring peace. Exactly. And recruited nights for the round table. And we might as well go ahead and leak that the round table was supposedly round because we're all equals and there's no head of a round table.

Makes sense. And it was either fashioned by Merlin, or it was a gift from Guinevere, who we haven't gotten to yet, a wedding present from Guinevere's father, even though he got it from Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon. Yeah.

And her father was King Leo de Grants, who I think that was Patrick Stewart. Gotcha. Enix caliber. So the nights go out, they defeat all the outsiders there. Peace reigns in that it's why Camelot to this day has the connotation of,

and especially with the Kennedys like this, you know, like peaceful, idyllic situation. Right. That's Camelot, although it was a place. You know what I'm saying? I do. It sort of represents more than a place. Right.

It represents the peace that he brought with these nights. Okay. Then he meets Guinevere, falls in love with this little hottie, and then depending on what story you read, there might have been an affair with Lancelot, or Mordred, who was either his nephew,

or depending on what you read, or his son, which technically he could be both, because supposedly he had Mordred with his half sister, Morgana. Yeah, that makes sense. Who was translated into Morgan Le Fay, who's like this kind of enchanting, temptress, evil woman,

who helps Mordred try to take over Camelot, tries to take over the throne. And Arthur says, Ne, to you, we will do battle at a place called Camelon. That's right. And that is- Mordred dies. That's where Mordred is killed, and Arthur is wounded. And depending on the version of the story,

Arthur's either mortally wounded, or just kind of wounded, but either way he gives his sword, X caliber, to Bedivere, and says, you need to return this to the lady in the lake, after kind of waffling, because Bedivere's like, I could use X caliber. He finally gives, he throws X caliber to the lake,

and this arm comes up and goes ching, and like catches it, and then goes back down. And he's like, there was a lady of the lake. Yeah, that's the X caliber movie version. They follow that version, because I remember distinctly him trunking the sword out there and the arm coming up. That's cool.

It is very cool. I have some vague mental memory of that as well. Sure. And then Arthur's taken to Avalon, to either die and be buried, or he recuperates and hangs out there to come back to reign over Britain in its next time of greatest need, which is why Arthur is frequently referred to,

and there is a book titled, The Once and Future King, because he will return again when Britain needs him, which makes him like kind of the British Superman. Yeah. Before we go any further, my friend, I think it's a good time for a message break. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["I Heart Radio"] Hey, now we're back. So that's the, that's the basic legend. I mean, like we just basically condensed thousands of pages

of different books and thousands, well, not thousands, but hundreds of years of folklore into a few minutes. But you get the gist of it. Sure, you know the story. And if this, if this ignited your fancy and you're like, I want to know more, man, you've got a, you could dedicate the rest of your life to researching and reading Arthurian legend.

Somehow. Cause there's tons of it. And it's all, like we said, it's a literary tradition, but it's rooted in an oral tradition among the Celts, the pagan Celts, but this literary tradition itself is really, really old. The first mention of Arthur is from, I think the fifth century, right?

The fifth century Welsh poem. Sixth. Sixth century Welsh poem. But when you're off by a hundred years. Back then. Yeah, it had no big deal. Especially with a man who may or may not have existed. Yeah, true.

But Arthur pops up in one line in this Welsh poem called the Gododen. Gododen. Gododen. Yeah. It's a great word. And this poem eulogizes the Welsh warriors. Maybe Britain's oldest poem.

Yeah. Because the Celts would have started to have become Christianized around this time. Hence things would have started to have been written down. So this poem would have popped up really right around that cusp between the end of purely Celtic culture. Because the British Isles were the last stronghold of the Celts, which swept all the way to Asia.

Like they covered Europe, parts of North Africa. The Celts were everywhere. But it was the British Isles that were the last holdouts until about like the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth centuries when they became Christianized. All right. So they're Christianized at this point. Yeah.

By the time this poem came out, the very fact that there's a written poem that shows you that the Christians have made their way in this area. And the Celts are all just telling stories, looking their wounds and telling stories still. Right. Not writing stuff down.

They're like, are you familiar with mistletoe? Yeah. Do you know about knocking on wood? Look at you utilizing all your information. So some other references in literature. The Historia Britonum, History of Britain, AD 800. And the Annalis Cambrier, The Annals of Wales, a few hundred years after that,

they were basically history books, the main history books of Britain and Wales. Right. And, but they themselves were just compilations of other books and can't be like factually verified. Yeah. But nevertheless, they were used and Arthur was mentioned in both.

The Arthur we know and love today, you can trace back to Geoffrey of Monmouth. And he was a priest who wrote Historia Regum Britannia, the history of British kings and the 1100s. But he based his stuff on the Historia Britonum, but it just became really popular. Right. So like he kind of based it on the other thing.

Well, I mean, some people even say you plagiarized, but it became so popular, he was kind of golden. Right. And I think, I think also he, I mean, most histories are based on previous histories. Sure. So that's that in and of itself isn't a bad thing.

But yeah, I don't know what this article is implying that like he was, that he stole work or he fabricated it. Well, he was accused of fabricating some of it. So. So well, either way, he gave the world the Arthurian legend. That's right. Like Arthur existed before this, like as we've seen,

but he was the one that said, like there's a great story here and I'm going to bulk this up. Yeah. So he started naming places. Yeah. He started contemporizing things. Like he took this legend and put it into a context that the people who lived in his time would understand

and be fascinated by. Yeah. And he introduced Christianity for the first time to the story. The French got ahold of it and then they're all about a good romance novel. So they sort of introduced the love elements or not introduced, but emphasize the love elements

a little bit more. Yeah, about 50 years after Geoffrey of Monmouth made his history, Cretan Detroit came up with some stories that added that romantic part. And a lot like the, I think the grail stuff too. Oh yeah. Yeah. He was the one who came up with the romance

between Lancelot and Guinevere and the grail, the search for the grail, which wasn't a part of the story up until the 12th century. And most of this stuff had been like history books and poems. Starting with the Vulgate cycle or prose Lancelot is when you started getting these great prose stories and Christianity is woven in even more. And this is between 1210 and 1230.

Right. Just to give you an idea of where we are. And they don't know if these stories were like maybe part of a popular literary trend at the time. So we're a bunch of people writing them for. Yeah, like Chilvery was a big thing to write about. Right. Yeah.

Or if it was one author writing a series of stuff and they were not attributed to any single author, but they're collected together as a body of work, the Vulgate cycle. Yeah. And those ones focus a little more on like Lancelot and the chivalrous knights and all that. Yeah, and the grail too.

Yeah, with Gallowhead. Yeah, they said that Joseph of Arimathea, who was in the Bible, he was the one who gave Jesus his tomb after Jesus was crucified and brought back. And he said, well, he didn't say that, but they said Joseph of Arimathea brought the grail to Britain. But then Gallowhead, Sir Lancelot's illegitimate son

was said in the Vulgate cycle that he discovered the grail because he was pure, of course. Yes. And he went to the Castle of Anthrax, remember that scene? And the pure and chaste goes to the castle and there's all the ladies that are like tempting him. And it's Michael Palin, he's just like wide eyed. That's such a great movie, man.

And then the big one that most of our modern stories are based on is Thomas Mallory's La Morta d'Arthur, the death of Arthur. And I read this in college. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it was tough. It was sort of like a bit of a modernized middle English.

It wasn't quite Chaucer, wasn't that tough, but it was still a tough read. And I remember thinking at the time, can I just watch Excalibur? And it turns out I could, because that movie was specifically based on the death of Arthur. Right.

And so you're kind of seeing like each new century, each new author is adding their own thing to it. Yeah, he didn't actually write it. I should say that. He compiled the stories together. Oh, okay. Surely he cleaned them up and... Well, yeah, but he didn't create a new work.

He's known as a compilation. Well, he did add some new stories about some other knights, Sir Gareth and Sir Tristan. And he also kind of took the focus off of the Celtic pagan mythology and really focused it onto the Christian mythology. And at this point, the idea that this whole thing is based on Celtic ideals and myths is lost largely to history.

I mean, at the very least, it doesn't become nearly as apparent. Was he the one that added the Lady in the Lake, though? Oh, no, that was the Vulgate cycle. Yeah. Which is surprising to me, because I would think that would be ancient Celtic mythology, but that wasn't added until the 13th century.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, the Lady in the Lake and the idea of Mordred as Arthur's son by his sister. You'd think those two would be real old. Yeah. No, no. No, it was part of the preoccupation of the weirdos in the 13th century.

Well, I think Mallory did add the after Guinevere and Lancelot are busted, they go their separate ways to become a nun and a monk. Oh, yeah. Respectively. Right. So after Mallory, you have Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote the Idols of the King.

Yeah, that creepy looking dude. And great poet, though. Yeah, but scary looking. And I love his name, too. Yeah. And then T.H. White wrote the Once and Future King, and that was the basis of The Sword in the Stone. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Disney action. That was a good movie, if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was good. Merlin was kind of like a kooky. I mean, he was weird, right? In that story? Yeah, in The Sword in the Stone.

I don't remember that one that much. Was that the animated? Uh-huh. OK. Yeah, where he's like a young King Arthur, pulls the sword from the stone and... I didn't see that. I must have seen it, but I was all about the Jungle Book.

The sword just came out about the same time. I know, but I was probably so obsessed with the Jungle Book. Same exact animators and everything, yeah. You're like, I can't pay attention to this. All right, so... I got mobility to lend my fascination to. All right, so we should talk a little bit about the real ties to real history, and whether these people were real

or these places are real. Uh-huh. So let's get to that after this message break. Stuff you shouldn't know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, buddy. So what's the deal?

Was there a Camelot? Was there an Arthur? Were these nights real dudes? Probably. All right. So we'll just end it. So, well, so take Merlin, for example. OK.

He seems probably the least likely to have existed, because he is a magician, a sorcerer. A magical wizard? Yeah, yeah. A wizard, that's a great word. Actually, is he a wizard, or is he just a magician? So, well, I mean, come on, the two are fairly interchangeable. Oh, you just wait, my friend.

There'll be some LARPers emailing. Oh, right, yeah. It is not nearly the same, sir. Let me explain to you the difference between a cleric and a mage. So he was apparently based on one or two people that really did exist, and both of them were holy men. They would have been druids.

At least one of them would have been druids. He was, one was named Merton Wilt. And another one was named Emerus Willedig. That's a tough one, W-L-E-D-I-G. Well, there's two vowels, and both of those names combined, you know? It's just, yeah, it's almost like Russian. It's tough to read. And both of them lived in the late sixth century.

And one was the first one, Merton. He was this wild man who went into war and saw too much and like went crazy and fled into the jungle. I've seen too much. Yeah, apparently suffered from some sort of PTSD and went and fled into the jungle, while not the jungle, because this is a British Isles. But the woods, we'll call them, and lived as a wild man

for many years. And he was apparently a famous local magic wild man. The other one, Emerus, was like a full-on, straight-up druid. He was like a prophet and advisor, and he definitely lived. So they think that possibly one of them was Merlin, or folklore combined the two together and made him Merlin. I think that's what most of this stuff is, possibly based on real people add a dash of this and a dash of that

and mix it up, and you come up with a literary figure. That's just my take. Camelot, supposedly, if you read the Historia Regum Britannier, he wrote that it was Cornwall at Tintengale Castle. And they've actually found a stone there in the 80s, 1980s, the inscription that said, a descendant of Arthur, father of a descendant of Cole. And Monmouth, actually, the writer of that history book,

names King Cole, as in, Mary Old Soul was he, that same King Cole, as one of Arthur's ancestors. But there's a little bit of a rub because that castle was built in the early 1100s, many hundreds of years later, after Arthur was supposedly living. Right, and the author of this article accuses Joffrey of basically using Tintengale Castle as a way to please his patron, who had a cousin that lived there at the time.

But some archeological excavations have found that this Tintengale area was settled from at least 300 AD and was definitely in full swing, was a trading post, basically, and a fortified castle around the time when Arthur would have been conceived. So it actually is archeologically possible that this was a place where he was born, at the very least, if there was a real Arthur, and he was born in the timeframe

that we're talking about, Tintengale Castle was settled and in full operation in that area. Oh, really? Yeah. So it wasn't built hundreds of years later? The castle, as it stands, now was. Oh, okay, it could have been a different castle. The settlement was built upon settlement and as they've

excavated down where they found that at that time, yes, there's plenty of. So that stone could, in fact, be real? Uh-huh. Wow, all right. Busted. Yeah. Thomas Mallory said Camelot was Winchester Castle.

And for many hundreds of years, there was a wooden round table that hung on the wall with all the little names of the Knights of the Round Table there. But Winchester Castle was built in the 11th century and they carbon dated the table to 1340 and said it was probably painted during the 1500s under King Henry VIII because everyone

was way into chivalry and medieval history at that point. Right. Are you going to bust that one or is that one? No, that one makes sense. All right, that is busted, unbusted, I mean. The Cadbury Castle, the fort that's in Somerset, that's mentioned in here too. That one, if anything, was Camelot.

It would have been that place. Oh, yeah, is that the leading? Yeah, but it wouldn't have been Arthur's. It would have been one of the rulers that basically handed over Britain to the Saxons that Arthur had to come in and whose mess he had to unmake. It would have been that rulers. And there's a 16 foot thick fortress made of timber

and stone that is apparently unique to this castle. That's from the 5th century that was written about from that time frame or from that period of time was supposedly built around that period of time. So you have documentary evidence in the literature. And then you also have the actual physical evidence of this castle that's built in a way that's just unique to it that supposedly belonged to this guy

that Arthur may or may not have come in and taken over. If he were ruling in this area at the time, that would have been the castle that he would have taken over. Gotcha, because it's the most heavily fortified. Yes, and it was just like a prime castle in the area that he would have been in. So if there was a camelot, a castle that he ruled from, that probably would have been it.

All right, so you're going, Josh Boat's for Cadbury Castle in Somerset. Yes. Okay. Avalon is supposedly Glastonbury where they have the music festival now. Oh yeah. I think they have a big music festival there. My TV tells me, and here's the deal there.

That was the Glastonbury tour, which is sort of, I guess, for England, for that area that's a mountain. It's like a hill. It's a little hill. Yeah. Like the Englishman who went up the hill and came down a mountain.

Right. The Glastonbury tour had the ruins of St. Michael's, which was an abbey built in the 12th century, which replaced an earlier abbey that was burned down. And while they were building the newer abbey, these monks said, you know what? We found graves containing bones. Look at the bones.

Yeah. Man and a woman. And this is King Arthur because there's a cross there. Yeah. It's described in Latin and it says it's King Arthur and Guinevere. So there's your proof. Even though the cross doesn't exist anymore,

the bones don't exist anymore. They did read the inscription that was supposedly copied verbatim from the monks. And they said some smart dudes said, no, that's 12th century Latin, my friend, not 6th century Latin, you silly people. Yeah. So I guess there's a difference and they knew.

So that was quashed or are you about to debust that? Debusting that. Sweet. So Glastonbury tour, this conical hill used to be an island. And at the top of it is Glastonbury abbey, which was built in the 12th century, but was built on the ruins of an early one. So that thing actually did happen.

It did burn down. Apparently in the 1980s, they excavated and found a pair of sixth century graves, stone line graves, the bones are gone, there's no markers or anything like that. But they would have been the kind of graves and they were dated to Arthur's era. Okay.

So that checks out. Yes, furthermore, there was evidence that these graves were disturbed in the 13th century and the 1200s or is it the 12th century? Sorry, that they were disturbed in the 12th century. So there's evidence that these graves are from the sixth century and that these 12th century monks did find them and open them up.

So whether or not they were Arthur and Guinevere or if this crossover existed and what it said, it still remains to be proven. But I mean, it's very possible that these monks were just trying to drum up patronage to rebuild their abbey. So they're like, hey, we found Arthur. So they may have forged the cross, but it's still entirely possible

that that was Arthur and Guinevere. Just because they beefed up the story with the story of a cross doesn't mean that it wasn't truly their final resting place. Yeah, at the very least, there were a pair of sixth century graves there. With bones. No bones.

Oh, well, where'd the bones go? I don't know if they moved them in the 12th century or if they just dissolved. Okay. We've been talking a while. Yeah, sure. All right, so is that your vote? Yeah.

All right, Josh votes for the Glastonbury tour. Right. All right. Which I want to go to. All this makes me want to go to the English countryside and just find all this stuff. Yeah, it's pretty neat. I like old things

and it's hard to get anything super old in this country. Yeah, 1600s. Maybe 1500s if you go down to St. Augustine. Let's go to Rome. You wanna see some old stuff? Go to Rome. I have. Yeah, I have to.

It is neat. It's kind of neat to stand there in the Coliseum and think, holy cow. Yeah. This is the oldest thing I've ever seen. That was the one that got me in Yumi was the Coliseum. Yeah, me too. I mean, everywhere else we're like, yeah,

this is pretty cool. For something about the Coliseum, it was, that was there. Yeah, I was pretty blown away too. Yeah. Yeah. And boy, the people, man, good looking. The Romans?

Yeah, just all over Italy. The dudes, the chicks, they were all like models. Yeah, very stylish. Very stylish. And cats everywhere. Were there? Yeah, street cats in Rome. They're known for it.

I don't remember seeing too many cats. Oh, you saw some cats. Oh, don't they live in like all of the ruins and everything? They're everywhere. Yeah, I like the Trevi fountain there. That was something else. That one kind of took my breath away.

We should start a travel show. We should, I think we just did. And finally, maybe some of these knights were real dudes. Sir Bedivere, he was one of the earliest knights to appear in the Arthurian legends and one of his right hand dudes. He has appeared in other writings, historical writings. That have nothing to do with the Arthurian legend.

Exactly. And he was known as Bedward, Bedridant, a member of the Royal House of Findu, which rose to power in Wales in the sixth century. And then Sir Kay was also possibly a real dude. Yeah, both of them appear in a Welsh collection of warrior poems called the Mabinogion. Mabinogion.

Take your pick. Yeah. I'm not Welsh. You're not Welsh. So either one. We get crap for not pronouncing things right, but this stuff is tough. Oh yeah, man.

I've got like 13 letters in one vowel. It's like, what do you do with that, you know? And I mean, I'm looking at the alphabet that I recognize. My brain just won't put it together. Uh-huh, agreed. And finally, Arthur himself. Yeah. My vote is on a compilation of real people.

Like I said earlier, some folks say he might have been a Roman leader named Lucius Artorius Castus, or maybe a Roman named Aurelius Ambrosius. See, I saw that Aurelius Ambrosius was his uncle, was Uther Pendragon's brother. And Uther and Aurelius had to seize power to start to restore their lineage.

And then Arthur followed after that. Okay, see? Well, I guess it depends on who you're reading, you know? Yeah. Some folks say he was a British historian named Allen Wins Wilson. Says he was a Welsh king, Arthuis in the seventh century.

Yeah. I think everyone wants to claim a piece of it. I think that's what's going on here. You know, I think they're saying, no, he was this Welsh king, or no, he was this Roman king, when I think he might have been all of them. Well, the idea that he was sent by the Pope

to basically restore order or take the British Isles back from the Saxons, definitely is like credence by the idea that he kind of comes out of nowhere and like pulls the sword from the stone and is like, I'm arrived. I'm the king of kings now. Yeah.

So the idea that he came from somewhere else is, I mean, that would suggest that he could have possibly been some Roman commander. Yeah. And there were Roman commanders who did come to Britain and fight the Saxons successfully. Was one named Arthur? Yeah.

One was named Artorius. Well, there you have it. Yeah. And then some people say that Arthur wasn't a name but a title, Arth, which in Latin means bear. And if that's the case, it could just be like, you know, could be anybody. Yeah.

Could be short for Arthur. Yeah. Could be bear. So why does this story persist? Because it's got romance, it's got chivalry. It's got all the classic elements of drama in literature and fiction. So there you have it.

And plus Monty Python's take on it doesn't hurt in perpetuating everything. What kind of a man can summon fire without flint or tinder? Man, you know that movie inside and out, don't you? I watched it a lot at one point in my life. I think that's my favorite part of the movie. The nun shall pass when they have to pass the guy

that spits, tells them about the rabbit. I remember the nun shall pass. I don't remember the spitting. Yeah, when he's talking, he's got a list and he's spitting all over everybody. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, if you want to learn more about King Arthur,

you can type in King Arthur in the search bar. We also recommend you go just look up stuff about King Arthur. There's plenty of stuff out there. It's fascinating. You, let's see, I said search bar, right? You did, sir. Okay, well then that means it's time for listening to mail.

I'm gonna call this tribute to my father for Megan. Josh Chuck and Jerry wanted to write to tell you thank you immensely for the show. My dad Howard passed away nearly a year ago and while I don't think he listened before he passed, I think he would have really enjoyed it. He was a tinkerer and loved learning new things. In fact, when I was younger and visited him during the

summers, I'd be alone most days at his apartment while he worked and he would encourage me to search random things on the internet and read about them to learn something new. He would even leave me lists like the planet Jupiter, the state of Wyoming for the year 1845. I thought at the time it was pretty silly and only did it a few times, but now as an adult,

I've since found your podcast a few months ago and I find it really fascinating and it reminds me of my dad and has been really helpful to me when I get down about him being gone. It makes me happy to know that he would probably think it's awesome that I spend my days learning about things now. So, Megan from Plano, Texas, thank you for that.

And in memory of your father Howard, I think he would have liked the show too. That's pretty cool. I'm sorry he's not around to hear it. No, but I mean, we're carrying on his legacy. Exactly. Nice. So I guess we need to do a show on the year 1845

for the state of Wyoming. Never. Not Wyoming. If you, thanks a lot for that Megan, that was nice of you to share that. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us anything you like, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com and you can join us at our super dope home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. ["Snowball"] For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. ["Snowball"]

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.