King Arthur is the gravitational centre of a vast body of medieval legend, and his historicity is one of the enduring puzzles of early British history. A shadowy figure, perhaps a Romano-British war-leader who resisted the Anglo-Saxon advance around the sixth century, appears in the earliest Welsh sources, but the Arthur the world knows is a literary creation, assembled and elaborated from Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century through the French romances to Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.
In that tradition he draws the sword from the stone, or receives Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, proving his right to rule; gathers the knights of the Round Table at Camelot; sends them in quest of the Holy Grail; and is betrayed by the love of Lancelot and Guinevere and the treachery of his nephew Mordred, falling at the battle of Camlann. Mortally wounded, he is carried to the isle of Avalon, from which, the legend promises, he will one day return, the "once and future king." Arthur endures less as history than as myth: the image of an ideal kingship, a golden order betrayed from within, and a hope of restoration.