Arthurian Mythology List

Bertilak is the lord of Hautdesert and the human identity of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is the generous host who welcomes a weary Sir Gawain into his castle, offers him food and shelter, and proposes a game that seems far safer than the appointment awaiting him at the Green Chapel. Each morning Bertilak rides out to hunt while his wife visits their guest; each evening host and guest exchange whatever they have gained that day. Beneath the warmth of the household lies a test of the promises that hold knightly society together. Bertilak is also the green challenger who entered King Arthur's court, survived Gawain's beheading stroke, and demanded that the knight return the favour a year later. Transformed through the power of Morgan le Fay, he joins hospitality to danger and courtesy to temptation. His final revelation turns the hunter, the host and the apparent executioner into one figure whose judgement exposes a small but telling failure in Gawain's otherwise honourable conduct.

The Black Dog of Maelgwn represents one of the most spectral and historically grounded monsters of early Welsh Arthurian tradition-a creature that bridges the gap between folklore, historical chronicle, and the supernatural landscape of medieval Wales. To understand the Black Dog, one must first understand its master: Maelgwn Gwynedd (Maelgwn Hir, "Maelgwn the Tall"), a historical 6th-century king of Gwynedd whose court at Deganwy featured prominently in early Welsh Arthurian poetry and whose life was chronicled by the monk Gildas in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (c. 540 CE). Maelgwn's name itself carries canine associations: it translates as "Princely Dog" or "Warrior Hound" (mael "prince/warrior" + gwn "hound/dog"), connecting the historical king to the animal that would become his supernatural familiar. Gildas condemned Maelgwn as a tyrant who had once been a monk but abandoned his vows to seize power, describing him as the "dragon of the island" whose sins included murder, fornication, and the persecution of the church.

The spectral black dog enters Arthurian tradition through the fragmentary Welsh poetry and triads that preserved the legends of Maelgwn's court. In the Black Book of Carmarthen and related manuscripts, Maelgwn's court at Deganwy appears as a setting where Arthurian heroes interacted with historical Welsh kings, blurring the line between history and legend. The spectral hound associated with Maelgwn belongs to the widespread British tradition of the "black dog" as a death omen and guardian spirit-creatures known variously as the Black Shuck in East Anglia, the Barghest in Yorkshire, and the Gwyllgi in Wales. These dogs were typically described as enormous, shaggy, black hounds with glowing eyes that haunted roads, churchyards, and the estates of the powerful, serving as omens of death or as guardians of forbidden treasures. In Maelgwn's case, the dog may have represented the king's own moral corruption given supernatural form-a hellish familiar appropriate to a ruler Gildas portrayed as demonic.

Lady Blancheflor of Beaurepaire is the first love of Perceval, the knight who would one day achieve the Holy Grail, and she is the lady whose siege tested everything the young knight had learned. She is the niece of Gornemant de Gohort, the lord who knighted Perceval and taught him the meaning of chivalry, and she is the mistress of a castle that had been besieged for a winter and a summer by the time Perceval arrived. She is the woman who greeted a starving stranger with venison, five loaves, and reheated wine, and who came to his bedchamber at night weeping, with a knife hidden in her casket ready to kill herself rather than submit to her besieger. She is the lady whose complexion, white and red like the purest flower, would one day send Perceval into a trance when he saw three drops of blood on snow and thought of her face. And she is the woman Perceval left behind to find his mother, the love he could have had and the lordship he refused, because the call of blood was louder than the call of the heart.

Blaunchard is the magnificent flower-white horse given to Sir Launfal by Tryamour, the fairy queen of Olyroun, as one of three magical gifts that transformed a poor knight into the most celebrated champion in Britain. It is the steed that carried Launfal to victory against the giant Sir Valentyne in the tournament fields of Lombardy, its light-footed speed outmatching every horse in the Lombard host. It is the horse that vanished in an instant when Launfal broke his sacred vow of secrecy, disappearing along with the invisible servant Gyfre and the ever-full purse, leaving the knight poorer than before. It is the destrier that returned at the hour of Launfal's greatest need, brought by Gyfre to the court of King Arthur so that the vindicated knight might ride away to the Otherworld with his fairy lady. And it is the only named horse in the Breton lay tradition of Launfal, a creature whose flower-white coat marked it as property of the fairy realm and whose presence signalled that its rider enjoyed the favour of powers beyond mortal ken.

Blodeuwedd is the woman created from flowers by the magicians Math and Gwydion to be the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the hero cursed by his own mother Arianrhod never to marry a human woman, and who betrayed that husband for love of another man, only to be transformed into an owl as punishment for all eternity. She is the maiden of oak and broom and meadowsweet, conjured from blossoms into the fairest woman ever seen, baptised in the old way and given a name that meant simply "flowers" before her creator changed it to "flower-face," the word that is also the Welsh name for the owl. She is the wife who fell in love with Gronw Pebr, the warrior and hunter from Penllyn, and who conspired with him to murder her husband by discovering the secret conditions under which alone he could die. She is the traitor whose punishment was not death but metamorphosis, condemned to fly by night and be hated by all other birds, never to show her face in daylight again. And she is one of the most complex figures in Welsh mythology, a being created without consent for a purpose she never chose, whose crime was to love the wrong man and whose punishment was to become the very creature that haunts the Welsh darkness, the owl whose cry is the voice of a woman who was once a flower and is now a bird forever.

The Boobrie is the shapeshifting demon of the Scottish lochs, a creature that can be a gigantic water bird one moment and a galloping water horse the next, preying on calves, sheep, and otters across the misty waters of Argyllshire and the western Highlands. It is the monster whose bellowing cry sounds more like an angry bull than any bird, whose black beak is said to be wider than a man's hand and longer than his forearm, and whose webbed feet leave prints in the mud as wide as the spread of a red deer's antlers. It is the creature that terrified a minister out of his propriety, that dragged a farmer's plough and three horses into the depths of Loch Frisa on Mull, and that once rescued a kidnapped maiden by charging from the water as a colossal black bull. It is the abode of a spirit bound in transformation, the thing that lurks where the heather meets the shore and the fog rolls down from the hills to hide the water's edge. And it is the last echo of the great auk and the bittern in the minds of Highlanders, a monster born from real birds and older gods, the bellowing voice that reminds every farmer that the loch is not a pond but a door to something older and hungrier than sheep.

Bors is the Arthurian knight who returns from the fulfilment of the Grail Quest to tell the story that his companions can no longer tell. Known as Bors the Younger or Bors de Ganis, he is the brother of Lionel and the cousin of Lancelot, a warrior whose family loyalties repeatedly collide with the demands of faith. Alongside Galahad and Percival, he reaches the final mysteries of the Holy Grail, but unlike them he returns to Arthur's court. His path is marked by difficult choices: rescuing a threatened maiden while his brother is in danger, resisting deceptive visions, and facing Lionel's anger without simply abandoning their bond. The romances portray him through the image of a spotted white bull, an emblem of their concern with chastity, repentance and spiritual endurance. Bors remains a legendary literary figure rather than a documented historical knight. His importance lies in the choices he makes and in his role as the witness who carries the Grail adventure back into the human world.

Bran is the giant king of Britain whose severed head, buried beneath the White Hill in London, was said to protect the island from invasion until King Arthur dug it up and declared that Britain needed no guardian but his own strength. He is the son of Llyr, the sea god, and Penarddun, a figure so vast that no house could contain him and so heavy that he used his own body as a bridge across the River Shannon for his army to march upon. He is the owner of the Cauldron of Rebirth, the magical vessel that could restore the dead to life but left them mute, unable to speak of what they had seen beyond the grave, a cauldron he gave to the King of Ireland as a peace offering and that became the weapon that nearly destroyed his own army. He is the brother of Branwen, the White Raven, whose marriage to the Irish king Matholwch set in motion a war that slaughtered both nations and left only seven survivors to carry his head home. And he is the guardian whose talking head entertained his men for eighty-seven years at Gwales, whose silence began only when a door facing Cornwall was opened, and whose burial at the White Hill made him the original Palladium of Britain, the raven king whose spirit still lingers in the ravens that guard the Tower of London today.

Brandin of the Isles is the Copper Knight, the Saxon-allied lord of Dolorous Guard, the enchanted castle on the River Humber where any knight who wished to enter had to defeat twenty guardians in single combat before facing Brandin himself. He is the paramour of Niniane, the Lady of the Lake, who taught him the enchantments that made his castle a trap for the bravest knights in Britain, a place where the names of the defeated were carved on false gravestones while the men themselves languished in the Dolorous Prison. He is the warrior who fled before Lancelot's fury, who fell from his own castle wall and killed one of his own men in his panic, and who was later captured while leading a night raid against King Arthur's camp with a hundred and fifty men. He is the trickster who disguised himself as a humble vavasour to lure Sir Gawain and Sir Yvain into a second prison, only to be outwitted by Lancelot once more. And he is the fallen lord whose castle Lancelot renamed Joyous Guard, turning the seat of sorrow into the fortress of joy, a transformation that marked the beginning of Lancelot's rise to greatness and the end of Brandin's reign of terror.

Brangaine is the handmaiden who changed the course of Arthurian legend with a single flask, the woman entrusted with a love potion meant for a queen and a king who instead gave it to the two people who should never have drunk it together. She is the companion of Isolde of Ireland, the girl who sailed with her mistress to Cornwall to marry King Mark, carrying a golden vial given by Isolde's mother to ensure the bridal couple would love each other forever. She is the guardian who left the potion where Tristan and Isolde could find it, or who deliberately substituted it for poison when Isolde planned to kill her escort, depending on which version one follows. She is the virgin who lay in King Mark's bed on his wedding night so that Isolde's honour might be preserved, and who was later ordered murdered by the very queen she had served, only to be spared by servants who could not kill her. And she is the go-between who carried messages between the lovers and proved that in the Tristan legend the most important figure is sometimes the one who stands in the shadows holding the flask.

Branwen is the white raven of Welsh mythology, the fairest maiden in Britain and the sister of Brân the Blessed, whose marriage to the king of Ireland set in motion a war that destroyed two islands. She is the daughter of Llŷr, the sea-god whose children ruled the Island of the Mighty, and the half-sister of Efnisien, the man whose rage would cost her everything. She is the bride who sailed to Ireland with hope and who was beaten in the kitchens by the butcher for three years, reduced from queen to scullery maid because of a slight she never committed. She is the woman who trained a starling to carry a message across the Irish Sea, begging her brother to rescue her from a life of humiliation. She is the mother of Gwern, the little boy who was thrown into the fire by his own uncle before her eyes. And she is the woman who died of a broken heart on the banks of the River Alaw, looking back at Ireland and forward at Wales, crying that two fair islands had been laid waste because of her, and whose grave still stands on Anglesey as one of the most moving monuments in the British landscape.

Brennius is the legendary British prince whose quarrel with his brother Belinus grows into a story of exile, reconciliation and the conquest of Rome. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, he is the younger son of Dunvalo Molmutius and the ruler of the northern part of the island under his elder brother. Unwilling to remain subordinate, he seeks support abroad, loses a war at home and rebuilds his fortunes among the Allobroges in Gaul. His return threatens another civil war until their mother Conwenna persuades the brothers to make peace. United, they carry their armies onto the continent and into Geoffrey's imagined Roman campaign. Brennius then remains in Italy while Belinus returns to Britain. The tale belongs to medieval British legendary history, not a securely documented biography of a British conqueror. Its resemblance to accounts of the Gallic Brennus is important, but the two traditions must be distinguished rather than combined into one unquestioned life.