Sublime

5. A Song That Sustains the Prisoners

Gildas’s silence on Arthur says one of three things: that he was unknown to Gildas (perhaps his orbit was local; perhaps he was not yet famous when Gildas wrote); that his story came with inconvenient baggage (a reputation for extreme brutality or licentiousness, perhaps, like Gildas’s tyranni); or that he is a poetic figment of later imagination.