Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND The best stories are the old stories. This legend of Arthur and his court, which Tennyson tells in the Idylls of the King, has been known to English literature for over a thousand years. The historic basis on which the legend rests is dim and all uncertain, but it may well be true that, in those early centuries when the native British were struggling against the Saxon invaders, there arose a strong chieftain, rough and wild, undoubtedly, in rough, wild times, but so good a fighter that the hopes of the Britons clung about him and, race of poets that they were, they comforted themselves in their defeat by telling more and more splendid tales of their lost leader's prowess. Whenever one of these wandering minstrels heard of a brave deed done by some other hero, this he would add to the feats of Arthur, so that the legend grew like a magic tree, whose singing branches finally cast their dreamy shadow over the half of Europe. The earliest of English historians, Gildas, surnamed the Wise, writing in Latin about the middle of the sixth century, mentions a decisive victory (apparently 516 A.d.) gained by the Christian Britons over the heathen Saxons at Bath Hill, or Mount Badon, yet he says nothing of Arthur. His successor, the Venerable Bede, a studious monk who died in 735, maintains a like silence. But the so-called Nennius, whose history, also in Latin, was written, according to the most recent conclusions of scholarship, at the end of the eighth century, tells of twelve great battles in which Arthur beat back the Saxons, and namesMount Badon as the last of the twelve. It is hard, with distance of time and change of names, to identify the sites of those battles, but they seem to have been distributed over nearly all England. This is what the devout old...