Howard
Reid.
Arthur the Dragon King: The Barbaric Roots of Britain's
Greatest
Legend.
London: Headline,
2001.
Hardback ISBN
0747275572.
Publisher's
recommended price £18.99
Over the
years countless
historians have sought the truth behind the story of King Arthur. Many
have produced plausible but ultimately unsatisfactory hypotheses,
locating
the Arthur story in Cornwall, in Scotland or in Wales. But now Howard
Reid's
radical reassessment turns received wisdom on its head. Does the King
Arthur
story actually have its roots much further afield, in the steppes of
central
Asia, with the mounted warrior nomads whose extraordinary culture
predates
our own by many centuries? Can we, in fact, trace the Arthur legend, so
crucial to our ideas of civilisation, to the very people history
usually
dismisses as barbarians?
Given
that dark
age Britain inherited the twin legacies of the Celts and the Romans,
one
might logically expect to find the trappings of the Arthur story -
swords
in stones, ladies in lakes, chivalrous knights on horseback - in the
myths
and legends of those traditions. Such narrative details are
conspicuously
absent. However when we begin to examine the sophisticated culture of
the
nomadic warriors - the Scythians, Sarmatians and Alans - of central
Asia,
parallels begin to emerge. And when you further realise that these
great
horsemen first came to northern Europe around AD 175, you begin to
think
that the Arthur story doesn't look so strange after all...
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