Sir Kay

Kay — Cai in the Welsh tradition — is one of the oldest figures in Arthurian literature, present in the earliest Welsh texts centuries before the French romances invented Lancelot. In Culhwch and Olwen, one of the earliest Arthurian tales, Cai Hir — Kay the Tall — is a warrior of extraordinary gifts: he could hold his breath for nine days underwater, his wounds would never fester, and he could make himself as tall as the tallest tree when he chose.

The French romances transformed this elemental figure into a petty bully — a sharp-tongued seneschal who mocks newcomers and fails at quests while greater knights succeed. It is an unkind transformation of an older, stranger hero. But the traces of the original Kay remain: the insults and failures of the romances have a quality of ritual humiliation that suggests a figure who was once important being deliberately diminished.

Caer Gai, a Roman auxiliary fort on the hill above the town of Bala in Gwynedd, preserves his name — Cai's Fort — and is held by local Welsh tradition to be where Kay was born and where he held his stronghold. The Roman earthworks are still visible. The connection between a Roman fort and an Arthurian hero in the Welsh hills feels exactly right: the Dark Ages are precisely where Arthur and his companions live.