King Arthur and his Knights
Sovereign of the knights of the round table, Arthur was the adulterous son of Uther Pendragon and the beautiful Ygerne whom Pendragon induced by mistake by taking the traits of her husband.
Sovereign of the knights of the round table, Arthur was the adulterous son of Uther Pendragon and the beautiful Ygerne whom Pendragon induced by mistake by taking the traits of her husband.
Historically he was inspired by a real Gallic king who lived at the turning of the V (fifth) and VI (sixth) century. He took the lead of the resistance against the conquest of Great Britain by the Angles and Saxons. This king became a national hero because the remembrance was immediately transmitted from generation to generation. King Arthur was quickly taken into a mythological movement which amounted to what is called the “British material” and the cycle of the Grail.
Brought up away from the court and from men but placed under the protection of Merlin who had already intrigued for his conception, Arthur acceded to the royalty. Arthur drew out the sword Excalibur from a rock, forged in Avallon – the land of the apples, also called the other world. He married queen Guinevere and founded the “brotherhood” of the round table where no knight took precedence of the other. When some of the knights (Perceval and Gawain) left for the quest of the Grail, Arthur discovered that his wife cheated him with Lancelot, one of the bravest heros of the round table. Subject to the usage of that time like all human institutions – even if it is from a spiritual inspiration and marks the supernatural manifestation in the order of terrestrial affaires – Arthur’s kingdom exhausted bit by bit. When in the quest of the Grail the young Galahad, son of Lancelot, took the place of Perceval; when Lancelot himself violated all the vertues of the “worldly chivalry” in his love for Guinevere; when the quest of the Grail finally came to its end, Arthur’s kingdom was subject to declination. It was a real end of the universe that happened at the moment when the king died, succumbed in the battle where he affronted the arms of his incestuous son Mordred whom he had with his half sister Morgan. Because of this incest the whole society was messed up; dusk has fallen upon humanity.
The cycle of the Grail and the history that began with the passion of the Christ closed with this death: while Arthur was intered at “Black Chapel”, someone threw his sword in the neighbouring lake where a hand grasped it and carried the sword with it to the bottom of the lake. In an evident relation with this hand, that have then thrown the sword into the air, the Grail could be seized. Some versions reported as well that after his death, Arthur went on a voyage towards the isle of Avallon where Morgan came to pick him up in a bark, accompanied by his servants.