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Howard Reid.
Arthur the Dragon King: The Barbaric Roots of Britain's Greatest Legend. London: Headline, 2001.
ISBN 0747275572;
ISBN-13: 9780747275572.
Hardback, perfect bound.
160x240x23mm.
xii,244pp plus 8 pages of colour plates.
Very good condition: an unused copy with some light shelf wear to the dustjacket.This item £14.50
298g.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 ...
Arthur the Dragon King provides a provocative new theory on the reality behind a story we all think we know. Brilliantly argued and full of fascinating detail, it will change the way you think about the 'once and future king' once and for all.
Related pages: | Arthurian studies |
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