Halsall goes into what we really know about King Arthur, and why it is so much less than most people think we know. After he acknowledges that all we know for certain about Arthur is that he probably existed, he proceeds to let us know about the world as it was in the time when Arthur most probably existed. This is an excellent book for fans and students of Arthurian legend.

Excellent summary of the current evidence and understanding of British history circa 500CE. As a long-standing if amateur student of the period I was impressed by Halsall's marshalling of the evidence, his debunking of the nutters, and his suggested interpretations of the history. I don't necessarily agree with all his conclusions, but they are reasonable and credible, and food for thought. He only gets technical on us once, on the dating systems used (or misused) in the Annales Cambriae, and otherwise this book can be read with pleasure and profit by interested layfolk. Halsall has a nice line in snarky humour, too; the chapter debunking the idea of the survival of 'Celtic' paganism in the 6thC is titled 'These aren't the druids you are looking for'.

Recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Britain after the Romans. Not recommended for romantic believers in Arthur. ( )

Engaging, accessible and cogent demolition of historic and recent attempts to identify King Arthur.

This is definitely one for those with a serious interest, as it assumes you have a fair amount of context - newcomers familiar only with Malory or worse Hollywood may be deeply confused. A great addition for any with serious / long term interest in Dark Age Britain.

At times a little repetitive and perhaps overly detailed regarding supporting evidence that is at best peripheral to the main thrust of the argument, but never totally bogged down and generally fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by arguments pertaining to Magnus Maximus and Vortigern! ( )

There is a lot of good information in this book, but I'm afraid it doesn't do what it sets out to do, and I'm afraid it is aimed at entirely the wrong audience.

Halsall states in the introduction that his goal is to write a book for non-academics that debunks the ideas found in most books about Arthur that are aimed at a popular audience. Bookstores are full of books that claim to tell the truth about the historical Arthur, and many of them claim to have uncovered new and exciting information. The book that Halsall says he is going to write needs to be written: we need a book for a popular audience that explains how little we know about King Arthur and explains why those other books are wrong.

Unfortunately, this is not that book.

I should point out that I am not part of Halsall's intended audience: I have an academic background, and my PhD dissertation uses a lot of the same sources that Halsall uses in this book. So it is quite possible that I am underestimating Halsall's intended audience.

Having said that, I think Halsall's intended audience is going to be very disappointed with this book, primarily because the title gives the wrong impression. In the first chapters, Halsall describes all of the sources we have for this period, and points out that they say basically nothing about Arthur. Then, for the rest of the book, he talks about new interpretations of the late Roman/early Anglo-Saxon period in Britain.

Since the book is titled "The Worlds of Arthur", and since he claims that he is going to provide information for Arthurian enthusiasts, people are going to expect some information about Arthur in this book, when there is none. Halsall's point is a very important one to make: his point is that the historical sources say absolutely nothing reliable about Arthur, and the quest for a historical Arthur is futile. It is very important to make that point to a popular audience, and Halsall makes it well.... but if this is going to be an Arthurian book, then the rest of the book should really talk about why people continue to search for a historical Arthur, or offer more detailed refutations of other books that claim to have found a historical Arthur.

Another major problem with this book is that Halsall assumes that his audience has read enough about Arthur to know that if there was a historical Arthur, he existed in the 5th or 6th century. I don't think that's a safe assumption. When most people think of Arthur, they think of the high Middle Ages, with shining armor and jousting. I think a lot of readers will have absolutely no clue why Halsall is going on about the 5th century. He also provides no historical background: the straw man he is fighting for most of the book is the idea that Britain was heavily Romanized, that Anglo-Saxons came in from the east and fought their way west, and that Britain became English instead of Roman. However, he never provides that background: readers who don't already have some knowledge of Dark Age Britain will have no idea what Halsall is arguing against.

I also wish Halsall would engage more directly with some of the books he argues against in his first chapters. He is refuting claims made by those who think they have found the historical Arthur, yet he never mentions any of these authors or books by name. It's very polite of him to be so circumspect about the people he is lambasting, but I'm not sure that his audience will understand the subtlety.

Finally, I think most of this book will be of far more interest to budding academics than to a popular audience, so Halsall does his readers a disservice by not providing footnotes and other apparatus that will be useful to his academic audience.

I really wanted to like this book. But I think it's a classic example of the giant rift between academic history and popular history. We need more academics writing popular history: a lot of the history books written for a general audience are just bad history. But academics don't seem to know how to write for a popular audience, and this book shows exactly what happens when they try. Halsall starts with a topic that will be exciting to a popular audience, and then proceeds to bore them to death by not providing enough background material, and by not doing what he promises to do in the opening pages. ( )

This is an engaging and well-written overview of the state of current historical, archaeological, and anthropological knowledge of late Roman and post-Roman Britain specifically and the British Isles a bit more generally - "Arthur's Britain," as it's sometimes called. Halsall's goal is to demonstrate that it isn't actually possible to identify or reconstruct a historical King Arthur, and that those who believe it is are rather wilfully disregarding the limits of available knowledge.

Since my familiarity with this period is through the literature, I'm not really qualified to evaluate a lot of Halsall's scholarship, but the book is well-written and his arguments are cogent and relatively easy to follow. Halsall sometimes, I think, forgets that his basic thesis is that there's a lot we can't know - he seems pretty well convinced he's correct, and he can be a perhaps unnecessarily contemptuous of those he disagrees with. But I think his main points - that so very much is lost to history, and that what we do know has been looked at largely in isolation from what is known about the continent in the same period - hold true.

This is a really interesting read and well worth a look for those interested in the period. It's written accessibly, without a lot of footnotes, but with an extensive narrative bibliography and a long further reading list. The style is engaging, and although it's helpful to have some sense of the history and of the basics of Arthurian literature, it's not essential. I enjoyed this a lot and would recommend it to anyone interested in the period. ( )