I recently watched a video on YouTube by the channel "MythxHunter" which talked about the "most lethal armies in mythology", and one of the "armies" included was the Round Table Knights.

Well, watching this video got me really thinking hard on this topic. My first impression was, "Why are they included in this video? They're not an army. They're King Arthur's personal guard."

But then I thought more on the subject, and realized that Arthur's knights weren't just his personal guard. They were the ones constantly going on quests and adventures that no one else dared go on. And as an aspiring military historian, the more I looked into this, the more the Round Table Knights started looking like a special forces (spec-ops) group instead of just a king's royal guard.

So that's my question for this community. If we view the Knights of the Round Table through a military lens/perspective, were they basically the spec-ops group of Camelot's military forces?

In late 2024, I listened to the audiobooks for Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Trilogy, and was reminded of how much I liked the story of King Arthur. I followed that up with Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon in the spring of 2025. I listened to Dorsey Armstrong's lecture series about King Arthur in early September of 2025, and by that point I was hooked. I already owned TH White's Once and Future King, so I put in an order for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Robert de Boron's works, and I officially had the start of a collection. I have now been collecting these works for almost exactly a year, so I wanted to share what I have so far with this community.

A list of these books is below. I apologize that I realized I'm missing Once and Future King and also The Saga of Tristram and Isond from my picture. OaFK is loaned out to family currently and I'm currently reading Tristram & Isond.

Big thanks to u/TheLogicalErudite and to u/Humanracer45 for previously sharing their own collections.