King Arthur is back at his mythical home – Wales. Guy Ritchie’s Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur is currently being filmed in Snowdonia, starring Charlie Hunnan opposite villain Jude Law. This in the same week that Bangor University’s rare books collection boasts the extension of its Arthurian archive after a generous donation from Flintshire County Library.
Ritchie’s surefire Hollywood blockbuster is due to be released in the summer of 2016, and there are early reports that it could be the first of up to six films.
Yet another film about King Arthur, possibly six? You might have thought that there have been enough renditions of the Arthurian legend to occupy anyone remotely interested. In just the last 15 years we’ve had the BBC’s Merlin. Joseph Fiennes starred in another TV series, Camelot. Then there was King Arthur, the 2004 film starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. The more gritty historical version in 2007’s The Last Legion. The list goes on.
But it seems that we just can’t have enough of all things Arthurian – the legend and its many possible permutations never cease to fascinate.
By choosing to shoot parts of the film in North Wales, Ritchie signals that he’s taking the legend back home, where some of the stories – and our obsession – originated. We know that Jude Law’s villain is the warlord Vortigern, which hints that Ritchie is returning to one of the first legends about Merlin.
The story goes that Vortigern, fleeing from the Anglo-Saxons, was trying to build a fort at Dinas Emrys, but the tower his men built kept on collapsing. A young Merlin (in the legend, Ambrosius – Emrys in Welsh) reveals that this was happening because two dragons, one red, one white, were fighting in a pool underground and so toppling Vortigern’s tower. Merlin prophesied that the red Welsh dragon was to overcome the white Saxon dragon.
