If you head down to your local library or bookstore, you can find loads and loads and loads of books about King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail.

Most of them will be in the fiction section.

But quite a lot of them will be in non-fiction, a lot of them offering to tell the 鈥渞eal story鈥� of the 鈥渉istoric King Arthur.鈥�

And about 99 per cent of them are bunk.

The era when King Arthur supposedly lived is either called the Early Middle Ages, or Sub-Roman Britain, or if you don鈥檛 mind an outdated term, the Dark Ages.

Once the Roman army pretty much abandoned their colonies in Britain, somewhere around 400 CE, they left behind loads of people who still considered themselves Roman citizens. They spoke Latin and local Celtic languages. They had, for the most part, become Christians along with the rest of the empire in the wake of Constantine鈥檚 conversion.

And suddenly they were more-or-less defenceless against pirates and raiders from what are now Ireland and Scotland, as well as increasing numbers of soldiers and settlers from what is now Germany and Denmark 鈥� the Saxons.

Arthur, if he actually existed, was one of the leaders of the Romanized British, who spent several generations fighting off the Anglo-Saxons who eventually came to dominate southern England. This was a long process. What is now Cornwall wasn鈥檛 conquered for nearly 400 years. Wales resisted for even longer.

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The legend of Arthur, one of many leaders during that long period, was woven into myth on the Celtic fringes of Great Britain. From there it jumped the English Channel to France, where Chretien de Troyes and other poets wove stories of Arthur and his knights into tales of Camelot and quests.

(If you want to check out a pretty good book on what we know, and how we know it, about the Arthurian legend and the real history, Guy Halsall鈥檚 Worlds of Arthur is at the Fraser Valley Regional Library.)

The idea that it鈥檚 all a series of overlapping stories, with at best a tiny kernel of truth at their centre, has never sold well. A lot of serious historians will just tell you that we have very few records from that era, and not nearly enough archaeological evidence. But what we do have pretty much rules out the existence of King Arthur, Merlin, or any version of the Round Table.

So, while most historians are going through ancient church records, and archaeologists are looking at unearthed coins and pottery fragments to try to document the spread of the Anglo-Saxons, the field of 鈥淎rthurian studies鈥� has been ceded to enthusiastic amateurs who go looking for evidence with their conclusions already in place.

Frankly, I think Arthur is a bit boring compared with the truth, whatever that turns out to be. On the one hand there are shining knights out of fairy tales. On the other hand, real people, suddenly thrown into a world they never expected, desperate to survive.

I know which sounds more like reality.