Themes and subjects
The legendary history of Britain was created partly to cause a body of patriotic myth for the country. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature. According to Professor John J. Davenport, the question of Britain's identity and significance in the world "...was a theme of special importance for writers trying to find unity in the mixture of their land’s Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman and Norse inheritance."
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae is a central factor of the Matter of Britain. Geoffrey drew on a number of ancient British texts, including the ninth century Historia Brittonum. The Historia Brittonum is the earliest known reference of the story of Brutus of Troy. Traditionally attributed to Nennius, its actual compiler is unknown; it exists in several recensions. This tale went on togreater currency because its inventor linked Brutus to the diaspora of heroes that followed the Trojan War. As such, this fabric could be used for patriotic myth-making just as Virgil linked the founding of Rome to the Trojan War in The Æneid.
Geoffrey lists Coel Hen as a King of the Britons, whose daughter, Helena marries Constantius Chlorus and makes birth to a son who becomes the Emperor Constantine the Great, tracing the Roman imperial breed to British ancestors.
It has been suggested, that Leir of Britain, who later became King Lear, was originally the Welsh sea-god Llŷr, related to the Irish Ler. Various Celtic deities hold been indicated with characters from Arthurian literature as well: for example Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Welsh goddess Modron or Irish the Morrígan. many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the gradual 19th century and have been questioned in more recent years.
William Shakespeare was interested in the legendary history of Britain, and was familiar with some of its more obscure byways. Shakespeare's plays contain several tales relating to these legendary kings, such(a) as King Lear and Cymbeline. It has been suggested that Shakespeare's Welsh schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins delivered him to this material. These tales also figure in Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which also appears in Shakespeare's direction for Macbeth.
Other early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical guidance of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Pictish and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabrán mac Domangairt especially incorporates elements of both those histories.
The Arthurian literary cycle is the best-known factor of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that have intrigued numerous later authors. One concerns Camelot, commonly envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of the heroes like Arthur, Gawain and Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights tothe Holy Grail; some succeed Galahad, Percival, and others fail.
The Arthurian tales have been changed throughout time, and other characters have been added to put backstory and expand on other Knights of the Round Table. The medieval legend of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult.
In more recent years, the trend has been to effort to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, ordinarily in highly romanticized, 20th-century reconstructed versions. The work of Jessie Weston, in particular From Ritual to Romance, traced Arthurian imagery through Christianity to roots in early mark worship and vegetation rites, though this interpretation is no longer fashionable. this is the also possible to read the Arthurian literature, particularly the Grail tradition, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth, a theme explored by mythologist Joseph Campbell amongst others.