So I’ve been working on writing Merlin fanfic and, like a moron, I decided I wanted it to be more historically accurate because the actual canon is a shitshow about that.
I start doing some writing, some researching, and discover that stirrups won’t arrive in Britain until the 10th century or so. King Arthur is like… early 500′s roughly.
So no stirrups. That’s not a big problem. Except it is argued that it might have been a major contributor to feudalism. Which, ok, good to know. So Arthur is pre-feudalism, got it. Shouldn’t change too much, right? (wrong)
Oh, what’s this that feudalism requires for those new wealthy landowners?
Fucking. Primogeniture.
(friendly reminder: this is the right of inheritance for the firstborn son. Like for land, or titles of nobility… or kings)
So if my research is right, King Arthur didn’t have an inherent right to the throne because he was the firstborn male heir. He was fucking ELECTED. (or maybe a lady in the lake threw a sword at him, who knows, this is all myth anyway)
But the fucking kicker?
The thing that DOESN’T EXIST in King Arthur’s time?? Because feudalism won’t show up for several centuries?
Fucking.
Knights.
In summary, the story of King Arthur is just modern day fanfiction from medieval/feudal Europe with rampant OCs, overpowered everyone, too much fucking drama, and like three different werewolves.
Also no stirrups.
this is how i learned young there’s no such thing as canon
King Arthur was ahistorical fanfic in the 12th century when the tales as we know them took shape, and in every retelling since then. It’s basically always been about projecting the author’s values backwards in time to an idealized past.
There’s literally a book exploring this and how modern retellings have continued the spirit of High Medieval versions called Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy. Because silk and potatoes, like stirrups, knights, and feudalism, were also not seen much in post-Roman Britain.
There really is no “historically accurate” way to write King Arthur. Even attempts to set the story in the 6th century are constructed ahistorical fantasies. You basically just have to decide which brand of anachronism you want to go with.
Hello, I have a doctorate in medieval English literature and am here to tell you: Arthuriana was always fanfic. What’s more, they’ve always been EXACTLY like BBC’s Merlin – a mash-up of time periods in their setting, but ‘modern’ (for each rewriting) in their tone and priorities and in-jokes – plus, of course, a dash (or a whole lakeful) of “It Was Better Back In Those Days”. Exactly which days “Those Days” were changes from century to century – by the fourteenth (Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc) they were mostly looking back to the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine if they were specific at all. In Eleanor’s time, which we tend to think of as the golden age of chivalry, Arthurian authors (Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes) were looking back even further (and there’s some wistfulness for a lost pre-Norman England there too); in the fifteen century, Sir Thomas Malory (who gave us what ebcame our definitive English-language collection of Arthuriana for later centuries) was looking back from the vantage point of years of civil war to the glory days of the mid-fourteenth and Edward III’s court.
And Geoffrey of Monmouth (who, yes, is a character in Merlin) is the 12th-century historian that @star-anise mentions who was the first person to popularise these obscure Celtic and British and Welsh myths by pulling them together into something that looked like history and writing them up in Latin AS part of his “history of the kings of Britain” – a work which is itself heavily nostalgic for pre-Norman times – and, incidentally, deciding on a “date” for them to have happened.
But yes, Arthurian knights always had stirrups and were feudal because that was true of the times in which they were written and 100% of Arthurian writers agree that JOUSTING KNIGHTS ARE FUN and that is important. Actually, a lot of them also wore the high fashions of whatever day their stories were written in, because what better way to convey “this fairy queen was unimaginably beautiful and wealthy” than to have her wearing amazing exotic textiles and colours and jewels you’ve only just heard of from far-away lands?
Brinens and Things 