King Arthur and Arthurian Romances
In the year AD 1133, Geoffrey of Monmouth produced a manuscript called the Historia Regum Britanniae. This work was the medieval equivalent of a 'best seller' and helped draw the attention of other writers, such as Robert Wace and Layamon to these stories, who then expanded on these tales of King Arthur.

While many scholars believe that Geoffrey is the source for medieval interest in King Arthur, at least one scholar, Roger S. Loomis, has argued that many of the tales surrounding King Arthur actually come from Breton oral traditions, from Brittany, which were spread through the royal and noble courts of Europe by professional storytellers known as jongleurs.

There is no doubting that King Arthur was to become as well known in Brittany and parts of France as in Great Britain in the Middle Ages.

The French medieval writer, Chrétien de Troyes, recounted tales from Arthurian Romances during the mid-12th century, as did Marie de France in her narrative poems called lais. In any case, the later stories told by these two writers and by many, many others, appear to be independent of what Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote.

In many Arthurian Romances, which gained popularity beginning in the 12th century, King Arthur gathers the Knights of the Round Table. At King Arthur's Court, most often held at Camelot in the later prose Romances, could sometimes be found the wizard Merlin. Arthur's knights engaged in fabulous quests as for example the Holy Grail.

Other stories from the Celtic world came to be associated with King Arthur, such as the tale of Tristan and Isolde. In the late prose romances the love affair between King Arthur's champion, Lancelot, and the Queen, Guinevere, becomes the central reason for the fall of the Arthurian world.

In Robert de Boron's Merlin, later followed by Thomas Malory, King Arthur obtained the throne by pulling a sword from a stone and anvil. In this account, this act could not be performed except by "the true king," meaning the divinely appointed king or true heir of Uther Pendragon.

This sword may have been the famous Excalibur and the identity is made explicit in the later so-called Vulgate Merlin Continuation.

However in what is sometimes called the Post-Vulgate Merlin account, Excalibur was taken from a hand rising from a lake and given to Arthur sometime after he began to reign by a sorceress damsel (confused by post-medieval writers with The Lady of the Lake). In this Post-Vulgate version the sword's blade could slice through anything and its sheath made the wearer invincible.

King Arthur was a casualty in his last battle, the Battle of Camlann, which he fought against the forces of Mordred. The Prose Lancelot and the later prose cyclic romances state that Mordred was also a Knight of the Round Table and the child of an incestuous union between King Arthur and his sister Morgause.

In almost all accounts King Arthur was said to be mortally wounded, but after the battle he was taken away to Avalon (sometimes identified with Glastonbury in Somerset), where his wounds were healed or his body was buried in a chapel. Some texts refer to a return of King Arthur in the future, like The Once and Future King of T.H. White.

Arthurian Romances spread far across the continent. An image of King Arthur and his Knights attacking a castle was carved into an archivolt over the north doorway of Modena Cathedral in Italy sometime between 1099 and 1120.

A mosaic pavement in the cathedral of Otranto, near Bari also in Italy was made in 1165 with the puzzling depiction of Arturus Rex bearing a sceptre and riding a goat. This may have been meant to be amusing.

15th century merchants set up an Arthurian Hall in his honour in Danzig, Poland.

It is Arthurian Romance that impressed the Victorians, such as Lord Alfred Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; and which forms our images of King Arthur to this day.
 

Romances, came in the forms of verse or prose. They include history, legends, the supernatural, or pursuits for another's love.

The name refers to Romance languages and originally denoted any lengthy composition in one of those languages. Later the term was applied to tales specifically concerned with knights, chivalry, and courtly love. The romance and the epic are similar forms, but epics tend to be longer and less concerned with Courtly Love.

Romances began to appear in western Europe in the 12th century and reached their greatest popularity in the late 13th century. They remained in vogue until the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century).

At first, they were related orally by troubadours and trouvères.

Subsequently, they were written by court musicians, clerics, scribes, and aristocrats for the entertainment and moral edification of the nobility. Popular subjects for Romances included the Macedonian king Alexander the Great, King Arthur of Britain and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Frankish emperor Charlemagne.

The Arthurian Romances fall into three broad groups. Some, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous, late 1300s), are tales that involve the moral testing of a young knight. Others, such as Tristan und Isolt (1210) by the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg, describe the conflict between passion and duty. The third group, exemplified by the romance Percival, or the Story of the Grail (1190?) by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, is concerned with the search for the Holy Grail.

Later prose and verse narratives, particularly those in the 19th-century Victorian romantic tradition, are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times, like most Romances they stress adventure and supernatural elements.

The vast majority of Arthurian Romances are religious works. At their heart, they have the struggle made by great and exemplary men and women to be true followers of God.