It is absolutely impossible to reconcile the many conflicting accounts of how King Arthur’s Round Table was obtained. One report is that it was made by Merlin for Uther Pendragon; that Uther gave it to King Leodegraunce of Cameliard; and that Leodegraunce gave it as a wedding gift to Arthur when he married his daughter, Guinevere. Malory confirmed this in his _Book of the Round Table and the Three Quests_, when he put these words into the mouth of the king--“I love Guinevere, the King’s daughter, Leodegraunce, of the land of Cameliard, which holdeth in his house the Table Round, that ye told he had of my father, Uther.” And Leodegraunce, when he heard of the projected marriage, said: “He hath lands enough, he needeth none; but I shall send him a gift that shall please him much more, for I shall give him the Table Round, the which Uther Pendragon gave me; and, when it is full complete, there is a hundred knights and fifty; and as for a hundred good knights, I have myself, but I lack fifty, for so many have been slain in my days.” King Arthur received the Table Round and the hundred knights, “which,” he said, “please me more than right great wishes.” In the _Book of Sir Galahad_ we find that King Arthur “would wit how many had taken the quest of the Sancgreal, and to account them he prayed them all. Then found they by tale an hundred and fifty, and all were knights of the Round Table.” But obviously this Round Table which seated a hundred and fifty knights and left a space for the Holy Grail, was not the special Round Table for King Arthur and the favoured twelve knights of his selection; though it may have been the Round Table which in the _Book of Sir Percivale_ we are told Merlin made “in token of the roundness of the world: for by the Round Table is the world signified by right. For all the world, Christian and heathen, resort unto the Round Table, and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table, they think them more blessed, and more in worship, than if they had gotten half the world.” So said the Queen of the Waste Lands to Sir Percivale. Yet in regard to this great institution there exists the bolder idea of its astronomical derivation, and considering to what extent astrology has entered into the Arthurian story the theory that the Round Table was suggested by the movement round the Pole of the Great Bear--“the seven clear stars of Arthur’s Table Round”--must not be overlooked. Each age of chivalry has had some such institution, and the Round Table continued to exist in this country until the time of the Third Edward. Yet the actual era remains unverified “When first the question rose About the founding of a Table Round, That was to be, for love of God and men And noble deeds, the flower of all the world.”