These stories draw on pre-Christian Celtic myth, folklore, and Welsh history and tradition to tell a magical set of stories that reach back to the Iron Age and Arthurian romance. Oral tradition (the Mabinogion and assorted saints' legends) mention a Gildas who was a junior son of Caw, and who had it in for Arthur because Arthur executed his oldest brother Heuil (apparently on justifiable grounds, such as robbery, plunder and murder). First told orally by unknown generations of Welsh storytellers, 'The Mabinogion' was subsequently written down in the 13th century in the form of a collection of prose tales. This may, or may not, be the Gildas responsible for writing the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae - one of the most important sources for the history of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries, as it is the only significant source for the period written by a near contemporary of the people and events described. Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, is a compendium of Greek myths and heroic legends, arranged in three books, generally dated to the first or second. Please see Darrell Wolcott: Foundations of 'The Men of the North' - Part 2.
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