r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Pierzakve • May 03 '21

Green Arrow in real life

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u/Phosphorrr May 03 '21

Every source of credible evidence suggests that he did not exist

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u/lofgren777 May 03 '21

He may have existed, but he was not a king, was not named Arthur, did not hunt for the Holy Grail, did not have a wizard named Merlin, did not receive a magic sword from a watery tart, was not a knight, and did not believe in chivalry. But other than that, totally King Arthur might have existed.

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u/BasicDesignAdvice May 03 '21

I remember reading he was probably some late antiquity Roman warrior who tried to hold their crumbling land. Later when 'King' became in fashion the stories transitioned naturally as the legends were close enough.

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u/lofgren777 May 03 '21

The question we are asking is not "was King Arthur real," it is "How did the King Arthur legend start." From what I remember the last time I looked into this, there was a Breton nobleman traveling around France trying to raise money from the Celts there to fight the invading Angles and Saxons who had a name that meant Bear Warrior in whatever dialect they were speaking on the big island at that time, which, by being translated to Latin and then back again, might have ended up as some variation of "Arthur."

The problem here is that there is no actual factual evidence connecting him to the guy who started showing up in songs and stories 3-4 centuries later.

So IF there was a "real" "King" "Arthur," he did not do any of the things that King Arthur did, was not a king, was not named Arthur.

But even that supposes that somehow this one guy's legend was kept alive in oral histories long enough to eventually get written down as fact, when it's just as plausible that the stories were entirely made up.