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King Arthur was a legendary king of Britain that was fighting against the Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. There are many scholars that still can't decide whether he was a real man or in reality never existed.
The thing that we know for sure is that King Arthur got his fame in medieval times mainly thanks to Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. In some of the earliest tales about King Arthur, he appears as a hero defending Britain from enemies and supernatural power. There are many versions and types of retelling the legends of the king, so there isn't any main tale or legend, they are all different.
The popularity of Geoffrey's History of the Kings of Britain was a starting point for other writers to create different versions of Arthurian literature works. In the 12th century, Arthur himself wasn't already the center of the tales, because there were new characters related to him to appear - Lancelot, Knights of the Round Table, Arthur's wife Guinevere, the magician Merlin, as well as the Holy Grail.
In the end of the Medieval Ages, a lot of people lost interest in the legends of King Arthur and it wasn't until the early 19th century, when interest in Arthur and the medieval romances were reawakened and continues to this day! The 20th century gave quite a lot of new Arthurian literary works that include: T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970), Thomas Berger's tragicomic Arthur Rex, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982), etc.
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Film and theatre industries found the Arthurian legends and tales interesting as well. In 1960, a stage musical Camelot was made, and in 1963 Walt Disney created an animated film The Sword in the Stone.
Arthur continues to be a popular hero to this day which we can in modern TV series, video games and films. It is without any doubt one of the ancient heroes of English folklore that will never die.
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