User blog comment:Adelina Le Morte March/Statements regarding Arthurian Legend in general I cannot take seriously/@comment-5995315-20130220140714

I've heard most of these plus a couple of others. I haven't heard the one about Merlin being gay in the legends. I think people are getting confused between the subtext in the series and the actual legends.

I suspect most of the stupid questions about the legends come from Americans. In the U.S. the Arthurian legends are more or less unknown. Not even I knew much about them, and especially about their importance to the British people.

Speaking as an American, I'm in favor of the general idea of "retelling" the Arthurian legends. The legends must somehow touch the lives of the people who live in Britain today, not those who lived there ages ago. In the case Merlin, for example, I'm all for Guinevere being black. Theses legends must be, and I think were always  meant to be, for all British people, whoever they now are. That includes non-straights, too,  so I'm also in favor of the same-sex attraction hinted at  in the series.

There is no one Arthurian legend. There are many. Each generation seems to have added a new layer to the original story to suit the needs of their time, so we get conflicting accounts of the same stories. Even as late as the Victorian era, the tales were being rewritten to downplay the less savory parts and extol things the Victorians liked, such as duty and virtue. With Merlin, we get the 21st century edition of the legends. So the Arthurian legends  come in layers, and this series is simply the latest installment. In other words, Merlin is as equally part of the Arthurian legends as any earlier version. It the for now the topmost layer of a story people never stop telling.

I was saying Americans really never heard the original legends. But this show is seen all throughout the U.S. anyway. That means that this series is the only exposure most Americans have to the legends, so they don't know what has been re-invented and what's true to the originals. What's more, Bradley James's King Arthur is the only representation of that king Americans have to go on, so to us he is the  King Arthur, the only image  of Arthur that we can visualize.

So I think a lot of the confusion comes from Americans posting online. Yet, at the same time,  this show is now as much part of the Arthurian legends as any other version. The legends live and breathe with each retelling. And now people outside of Britain are starting to find out about them. As an American, the most important thing I learned from watching Merlin is how passionately the British people count this as their founding narrative.