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Mythical kings of Britain

The mythical kings of the British kings of the britonske Britannia . The kings are mentioned by sources that are written down in part much later. The earliest sources Nennius and Gildas , but whoever wrote the most about the topic of Geoffrey of Monmouth , who was born about 1100 , ie more than 450 years after the last of the mythical kings died. They called British kings, or kings of Britain, because it is not possible to attach them to a clearly defined territory.

There is no doubt that at least a portion of the kings list really lived, at least the last of them and the Roman Emperor who are included. But they all still referred to as mythical, because they belong to a royal variety that has its origins in prehistoric times and is strongly myth. The list includes several queens, yet it is consistently referred to in the text as a list of kings. This is probably due to that there was a patriarchal line, and that queens were exceptions.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's work from about 1136 , Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the King of Britain), it is primarily the source of the list below. Geoffrey constructed a largely fictional story brito founders , ancestors of Welsh , kornikerne and Britons , partly based on the works of earlier medieval historians like Gildas, Nennius and Bede the Venerable , partly from Welsh family trees and biographies of saints, partly from sources that are gone lost and can not be identified, and partly from what he himself invented. Several of his kings are still based on actual historical figures, but act in a non-historical narrative. A number mellomwalisiske versions of Geoffrey's Historia exist. All exist after Geoffrey wrote his text, but may give researchers some insight into the indigenous traditions that Geoffrey may have relied on.

Geoffrey's story begins with the exiled Trojan prince Brutus , that Britain is said to be named after a tradition that had been previously recorded in a less elaborate form in the 800s in the Historia (Brito The history), a work tentatively attributed to the monk Nennius. Brutus is a descendant of Aeneas , the legendary Trojan ancestor of the founders of Rome , and his story is apparently akin to the legends surrounding Rome's foundation.

The kings before Brutus comes from a document that aims to track the travels of the Bible 's Noah in Europe and once attributed to the Babylonian historian Berossus . Today it is known that this document is a fabrication from the Italian writer and hustler Annio da Viterbo in the 1400s . Renaissance historians as John Bale and Raphael Holinshed looked at the list of kings from Celtica, which had been set up by pseudo-Berossus, and also made ​​them the kings of Britain as of Gaul . John Milton , known from Paradise Lost , recorded these traditions his work History of Britain (Britain's history), but gave them little confidence.