Note 369 — Chapter XXI · THE MYTHOLOGICAL “COMING OF ARTHUR”

“The existence of a sixth-century bard of this name, a contemporary of the heroic stage of British resistance to the Germanic invaders, is well attested. A number of poems are found in mediæval Welsh MSS., chief among them the so-called Book of Taliesin, ascribed to this sixth-century poet. Some of these are almost as old as any remains of Welsh poetry, and may go back to the early tenth or the ninth century; others are productions of the eleventh, twelfth, and even thirteenth centuries.”—Nutt: Notes to his (1902) edition of Lady Guest’s Mabinogion.