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I am obsessed with Morvran Afagddu’s life story. With how he’s expected to amount to nothing to the point that his mother tries to make him talented with a potion and someone else gets it instead and he grows up to be a great bard anyway. With how no matter how great he is, what he says is doomed to be obscure forever. With how that’s contradicted by Uther Pendragon himself mentioning Afagddu while Uther is dying. With how that shatters all the timelines, since Morvran is a child at the start of Arthur’s reign and also survives Camlann. With how he survives Camlann because of his appearance, the reason why they thought he wouldn’t get anywhere in the first place. With the life he built and kept partly because of the things which people thought were wrong with him. With how he might not even be one person, might be two characters who blurred into one and in the process made a story which is one of Arthuriana’s most hopeful, a story formed from fragments and only existing on the boundaries of other people’s but existing nonetheless.
Morvran might be my favorite knight of the Round Table, and he’s not even technically a knight. A lot of Arthuriana is tragic, at least when you look at overarching narratives, and that pathos is extremely compelling, but it's also refreshing and joyful when a character can rise above it and endure against odds that seem impossible, and that's what Morvran's story is to me.
References: Ystoria Taliesin, "Angar Kyfundawt", "Marwnat Vthyr Pen", Culhwch ac Olwen, Marged Haycock's notes in Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin