Then she took a right into a large wood-paneled, L-shaped room and found a seat, third row from the back. Scanning the room as students continued to file in, she didn’t find a single familiar face. Eventually the lecturer, a fortysomething woman dressed completely in black, came to the podium and cleared her throat, a cough that reverberated from the speakers and echoed off the walls.

“Good morning, everyone. I’m Dr. Fowler,” she said when the chatter had died down. “We’ve got a lot to cover this morning, so let’s get started.

“ ‘The Matter of Britain’ is the name that we give to the works that form up the early pseudo-histories of Britain, as told by the Anglo-Saxon settlers, orally, and recorded by monks in the ninth and tenth centuries. It should be noted as being separate from Celtic legends-in this context predominantly Welsh, Irish, or otherwise Gaelic legends, although there was quite a lot of crossover, as we shall see.”

The professor tapped a few keys on her laptop and the board behind her displayed an image of an ancient piece of paper with nearly indecipherable text printed on it. “This,” she continued, “is the first page of the Historia Brittonum written around 870 Common Era by the scribe Nennius. It is perhaps the oldest English account of the settling of the British Isles-and the originator, perhaps, of a lot of the confused and conflated myths traditionally associated with the settlement of Britain, myths that initially branched out of the Trojan tales of Greece, which were also very popular in Rome. It is thought that the work was created for wealthy Welsh families in the fifth century as a way to justify their claim to nobility and to cement their position as a ruling class-and obviously has little relation to objective fact. The tales centre around the legendary Brut, a son of-yes?”