History Literature / HereLiesArthur

* AllForNothing: Myrddin's schemes cost him everything, and ultimately achieve nothing; [[spoiler:Arthur ends up alienating all of his allies, whether by attacking his neighbours or killing/plotting to kill his relatives, and is finally defeated by his nephew and dies on the battlefield. Merlin himself essentially ends up being chained to Arthur's cause since he's invested too much in him by this point, and the stress of trying to salvage his master's reputation eventually leads to his having a stroke.]]

* BastardBastard: Arthur is the son of the warlord Uther and a SexSlave, and a nasty piece of work. In keeping with the conventions of this trope his half-brother Cei, Uther's legitimate son, is significantly nicer, although unusually the brothers aren't enemies.

* ButterflyOfDoom: When he kills [[spoiler:Bedwyr]], Arthur also dispatches some men to kill [[spoiler:Medrawt]] before he can come back for revenge. As they are heading to the target's house, their leader, the only guy who knew what they were supposed to be doing, is injured or killed in a random accident. This gives Gwyna enough time to warn him (through Peredur) and let him get away, then return with an army to kill Arthur.

** Gwyna's first job for Myrddin is to swim underwater into the middle of a lake and hold Caliburn above the water for Arthur to grab, becoming the basis for the legend of Myth/TheLadyOfTheLake and the hand that holds out Excalibur; people believe in the Lake Lady already, and Myrddin and Gwyna just exploit their belief. A couple of times she considers telling people the truth, but realises that nobody would believe her. Later in the story she also does some of the deeds attributed to Merlin's apprentice Nimue, albeit not quite in the way the stories tell.

** Instead of Merlin being magically bound inside a tree by Nimue, [[spoiler:Gwyna buries Myrddin inside a hollow tree once he dies, since the ground has frozen too hard for her to dig a conventional grave]].

** While the story of Arthur drawing a sword from a stone to show he's TheChosenOne is just a story Merlin made up, he claims that the sword-in-stone insignia was brought to Britain long ago by Arthur's ancestor Artorius.
** Merlin also admits the story about Arthur getting conceived through a BedTrick is just another story he made up. In reality Arthur's father simply carried off his mother by force.

* AdaptationalUgliness: Not necessarily ugly, but Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere) definitely isn't the beautiful young redhead readers are familiar with. That said, it's mentioned that she was moderately attractive when she was younger, and can still look fairly handsome in the right light or WhenSheSmiles.

** Sir Percival is one of Arthur's greatest knights in most versions of the story, but here he is an incompetent fighter whose real talent is music.

** Medrawt (Mordred) is actually one of the kinder soldiers in the warband, and rebels against Arthur only to [[spoiler:avenge his brother]].

* AllForNothing: Myrddin's schemes cost him everything, and ultimately achieve nothing; [[spoiler:Arthur ends up alienating all of his allies, whether by attacking his neighbours or killing/plotting to kill his relatives, and ends up being defeated by his nephew and dying on the battlefield. Merlin himself essentially ends up being chained to Arthur's cause since he's invested too much in him by this point, and the stress of trying to salvage his master's reputation eventually leads to his having a stroke.]]

* AllForNothing: Myrddin's schemes cost him everything, and ultimately achieve nothing.

* AGodAmI: When Gwyna asks Myrddin if Arthur believes in the old gods or the Christian God, he replies that Arthur believes they all exist, but doesn't worship any of them because he thinks he's their equal. Later, when they enter Aquae Sulis and see the church, a converted Roman temple, Gwyna notices him eyeing the empty plinth where the semi-divine emperor's statue once stood and fantasising about putting his own statue there.

* FakeUltimateHero: The basic premise of the story is that King Arthur was in fact just a moderately successful warlord with a good PR guy, as well as being a pretty nasty piece of work.

[[quoteright:500:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/hereliesarthur.jpg]]

* ConstantinopleNotIstanbul: Obviously based on the time period Welsh or Latin place names are used rather than modern Saxon or Norman-derived ones, i.e. Aquae Sulis for Bath and Dumoniia for Devon.

** When Gwyna is staying in the Irishman's house the other girls quickly realise she's not like them, and start to gossip about who she really is. One of them suggests that Myrddin created her from flowers, a common motif in Celtic mytology.

* DeathOfTheOldGods: Downplayed. Britain is in the midst of Christianisation, where the urban population and most important people are at least nominally Christian, but most of the common people either hold onto the old superstitions as well as praying to the Christian God, or are just outright pagans. However, it's made clear that the old beliefs are on their way out, [[spoiler:and one of the things that dooms Arthur is that his killing Bedwyr and throwing his severed head into a hot spring previously dedicated to a pagan goddess could be seen as making a sacrifice, angering many local Christians and some of his own men]].

** No one objects when Arthur, who's married to Gwenhwyfar by this point, brings his first wife Cunaid (whom he'd previously set aside) to join him in Aquae Sulis and treats her as his real wife in everything but name, yet Gwenhwyfar is expected to stay loyal to him. Consequently, when Arthur kills [[spoiler:Bedwyr]] for sleeping with Gwenhwyfar, nobody has a problem with him murdering his wife's lover; they just object to the manner in which he did it.

** Gwyna's first job for Myrddin is to swim underwater into the middle of a lake and hold Caliburn above the water for Arthur to grab, becoming the basis for the legend of Myth/TheLadyOfTheLake and the hand that holds out Excalibur. A couple of times she considers telling people the truth, but realises that nobody would believe her. Later in the story she also does some of the deeds attributed to Merlin's apprentice Nimue, albeit not quite in the way the stories tell. (People believe in the Lake Lady already, and Myrddin and Gwyna just exploit their belief.)

** The Britons vs. Saxons angle that early Arthurian pseudohistory takes is very downplayed here, as they did fight a war a generation ago but now the Saxons are generally content to stay put in their territories, and Arthur fights mainly other British petty lords. The Saxons are generally just invoked as a looming threat and motivator for Myrddin's plans for Arthur. There was a big, significant Battle of Badon Hill, but it happened a generation before the story begins, and Arthur later fights a smaller and less significant battle in the same area that later gets merged with the earlier battle in folk memory, and Myrddin suggested the battle site so this exact thing could happen and so Arthur is glorified further.

* FakeUltimateHero: The basic premise of the story is that King Arthur was in fact just a moderately successful warlord with a good PR guy.
* FakeWizardry: Myrddin's not a wizard and will honestly tell the few people he trusts that there's no such thing as magic, however, he's happy to let people think he's a wizard as it serves his purposes.

* FreudianExcuse: Myrddin fanatically hates Saxons. He eventually reveals to Gwyna that when he was a boy the Saxons destroyed his home, killed his family and enslaved him for years, though by this point Gwyna's trust in him has been shaken so she isn't sure if he's telling the truth.

* IJustWantToBeLoved: Gwyna muses that Gwenhwyfar and [[spoiler:Bedwyr]] are so obsessed with each other because they're really obsessed with the joy of being needed by ''someone.''

* SympatheticAdulterer: ZigZagged. Gwenhwyfar's marriage to Arthur is a loveless and sexless political match, and follows her previous, similarly loveless ArrangedMarriage to Valerius. They don't live together and Arthur doesn't even pretend to be faithful, bringing his previous pagan wife to be his HotConsort. This would all normally add up to her affair with [[spoiler:Bedwyr]] being depicted sympathetically but Gwyna believes she is selfish; partially because she herself has a crush on Gwenhwyfar's much younger lover, and mainly because it was almost inevitable that Arthur would find out and Gwenhwyfar made sure Gwyna knew about their relationship (meaning Arthur would kill her too if he did learn the truth) and is holding the fact that she knows Gwyna was Gwyn and the "Lake Lady" over her head to ensure her silence.

* MoralEventHorizon: [[spoiler:Arthur murdering Bedwyr]] marks the point in the story where he goes from profoundly flawed to a straight villain.

* OddFriendship[=/=]VitriolicBestBuds: Myrddin and Cei start out as this, a devout Christian warrior and an atheist storyteller posing as a pagan wizard, but who nonetheless respect and genuinely like each other, even if they throw affectionate insults back and forth. Cei is also the only person besides Myrddin and Gwyna who knows that Myrddin is a fraud and Arthur receiving Caliburn was a trick. They grow apart as Myrddin depicts Cei as an asshole in his stories to prevent him outshining Arthur. Myrddin eventually [[spoiler:sends Cei to his death]] without much regret.

* InTheHood: Myrddin wears a black hooded cowl like a monk's, although he usually has the hood down, only outing it up when he wants to look mysterious and intimidating. Gwyna later [[spoiler:takes it after he dies]].

Britain in the 5th Century AD. Rome and its Legions are long gone, and when they departed Britain collapsed into a patchwork of warring kingdoms and fiefdoms, easy prey for the Saxon raiders who now control the eastern half of the island. However Gwyna, a slave girl from a small farm in the contested borderlands between some of the stronger petty kingdoms, doesn't know or understand any of this; all she knows is that the farm has been raided by a warband and she needs to flee into the forest to survive. She escapes a soldier by diving into the river and swims as far as she can. Exhausted on the bank she is discovered by a strange man who introduces himself as Myrddin, personal herald to Arthur; ''Dux Bellorum'', King of the Britons and the man who just torched her home.

* DeathOfTheOldGods: Downplayed. Britain is in the midst of Christianisation, where the urban population and most important people are at least nominally Christian, but most of the common people either hold onto the old superstitions as well as praying to the Christian God, or are just outright pagans. However, it's made clear that the old beliefs are on their way out, [[spoiler:and one of the things that dooms Arthur is that him killing Bedwyr and throwing his severed head into a hot spring previously dedicated to a pagan goddess could be seen as making a sacrifice, angering many local Christians]].

* HollywoodAtheist: Myrddin is an atheist and thinks that anyone who believes in gods or the supernatural is a fool.

* HiddenDepths: Once when Gwyna and Myrddin are alone on a beach, Myrddin finds what looks like a stone shell, which we would recognise as a fossil. He muses how it to came to be and confesses to Gwyna that if the Saxons weren't in Britain he would be a philosopher (more like a scientist as we would understand it) and devote himself to uncovering the mysteries of the natural world.

* AGodAmI: When Gwyna asks Myrddin if Arthur believes in the old gods or the Christian God, he replies that Arthur believes they all exist, but doesn't worship any of them because he thinks he's their equal. Later, when they enter Aquae Sulis and see the church, a converted Roman temple, Gwyna notices him eyeing the empty plinth where the emperor's statue once stood and fantasising about putting his own statue there.

Britain in the 5th Century AD. Rome and the Legions are long gone and when they departed Britain collapsed into a patchwork of warring kingdoms and fiefdoms, easy prey for the Saxon raiders who now control the eastern half of the island. However Gwyna, a slave girl from a small farm in the contested borderlands between some of the stronger petty kingdoms, doesn't know or understand any of this; all she knows is that the farm has been raided by a warband and she needs to flee into the forest to survive. She escapes a soldier by diving into the river and swims as far as she can. Exhausted on the bank she is discovered by a strange man who introduces himself as Myrddin, personal herald to Arthur; ''Dux Bellorum'', King of the Britons and the man who just torched her home.

** Gwyna spends most of her childhood living as a boy and adapts to it pretty well. When she hits puberty and has to start living as a girl again she finds it very difficult, although she does appreciate the ability to be open and honest about her feelings. At the end of the story she starts living as Gwyn full-time. It's not clear if she is intended to be a trans male, a cis female who just got used to living as a male for nearly half her life and finds it difficult to stop, or she simply prefers the greater freedom and opportunities that men have; while there are parts she likes and dislikes about living as each gender, presenting as male is easiest when you actually want to get stuff done.

* SweetPollyOliver: Gwyna spends most of her childhood after Myrddin finds her living as a boy. She spends her teen years as a girl, but decides to live as a man again once she strikes out on her own. When she's recognized by people who know one or the other persona, she just claims to be their sibling.

** Gwyna spends most of her childhood living as a boy and adapts to it pretty well. When she hits puberty and has to start living as a girl again she finds it very difficult, although she does appreciate the ability to be open and honest about her feelings. At the end of the story she starts living as Gwyn full-time. It's not clear if she is intended to be a trans male, a cis female who just got used to living as a male and finds it difficult to stop, or she simply prefers the greater freedom and opportunities that men have; while there are parts she likes and dislikes about living as each gender, presenting as male is easiest when you actually want to get stuff done.

** Gwyna spends most of her childhood living as a boy and adapts to it pretty well. When she hits puberty and has to start living as a girl again she finds it very difficult, although she does appreciate the ability to be open and honest about her feelings. At the end of the story she starts living as Gwyn full-time. It's not clear if she is intended to be a trans male, a cis female who just got used to living as a male and finds it difficult to stop, or simply prefers the greater freedom and opportunities that men have.

* SweetPollyOliver: Gwyna spends most of her childhood after Myrddin finds her living as a boy. She spends her teen years as a girl, but decides to live as a man again once she strikes out on her own; while there are parts she likes and dislikes about living as each gender, presenting as male is easiest when you actually want to get stuff done. When she's recognized by people who know one or the other persona, she just claims to be their sibling.

* DeathOfTheOldGods: Downplayed. Britain is in the midst of Christianisation, where the urban population and most important people are at least nominally Christian, but most of the common people either hold onto the old superstitions as well as praying to the Christian God, or are just outright pagans. However, it's made clear that the old beliefs are on their way out.