The Polychronicon Of Merlin, Joseph & Arthur By Mark Olly Imagine the most popular heroic story ever written, one which spans three millennia & goes to the very heart of the largest religion in the world, but which has now almost entirely devolved into myth. Ignored & avoided by the establishment, shunned & unexplored by archaeologists & historians, consigned to the back-rooms of academic study, yet everyone knows the characters & the plot - the tales of King Arthur & his Knights Of The Round Table. But no-one knows the reality! Or do they? Suppose everything you thought you knew about King Arthur was invented by an invading foreign power unsympathetic to the truth & seeking to subvert & overthrow a long & ancient existing regime? Suppose the incredible truth was a story so strong & so mysterious that it could support an entire nation through its truly darkest hours &, perhaps, re-invent that same nation for a new Millennium? Here at last is what survives of that ancient truth. The Polychronicon is a ‘symphony of history’ over 40 years in the making, stretching from the end of the Greeks to the rise of the Tudors, focusing especially on topics which impact directly on the mythology of Merlin, Joseph of Arimathea, & Arthur, reconstructing the entire supposedly lost history of the Dark Ages from actual source materials written down at the time. This ‘symphony’ rises to a grand finale listing the majority of actual surviving written material clearly showing that Ancient Britain is nowhere as ‘dark’ as some would have you believe. This is real history & archaeology, not just the invention of creative minds, & it reveals incidents & characters as they really were, listed in chronological order, leaving the impression that Britain has always been a very different place to the one painted by popular history. Merlin becomes one of an ancient line of Pythagorean scholars & political visionaries, Joseph of Arimathea a religious dissident fleeing persecution & death to far off foreign shores, Arthur a hardened womanizing battle leader who loses his entire family & culture to war & eventually natural disaster. For the first time ever the Saxons, Danes & Vikings are placed into an Arthurian context, associated legends are examined, international sources investigated, completing missing developments that led to the medieval legends we now know so well, revealing the real & surprising geography of Arthur’s Britain & ‘The Old North’. If you want the whole truth about Arthur, the Holy Grail, Camelot, Excalibur, the Round Table, heroic knights, Guinevere, the ‘Matter of Britain’ & where this all took place, this popular & easy to read ‘Polychronicon’ is the book for you.