Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-1916997-20151020145336/@comment-1916997-20151022153204

Hmcooper4 wrote: And I did not say that it was unreliable. Only that it is not the most reliable of sources. It has good information, but sometimes it also has misinformation. The point is that anything yout get from IMDB needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and does not stand on it's own merit.

The chances are quite good that Vortigan is the original Dark One, particularly since A & E promised that we would be meeting him/her (looks like a him at this point) sometime during the arc.

But the question has been raised as to who Vortigen is, aside from the original Dark One. Where does he fit in the Arthurian story. (From what I can tell, he does not fit into any of the legends, so this would be something that the writers have added/mashed up). He actually does fit into Arthurian Legend, but is a more recent edition. From his Wikipedia page:

Vortigern's story remained well known after the Middle Ages, especially in Great Britain. He is a major character in two Jacobean plays, the anonymous The Birth of Merlin and Thomas Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, first published in 1661. His meeting with Rowena became a popular subject in 17th century engraving and painting, for example William Hamilton's 1793 work Vortigern and Rowena. He also appeared in literature, such as John Lesslie Hall's poems about the foundations of England.[11]

One of Vortigern's most notorious literary appearances is in the play Vortigern and Rowena, which was promoted as a lost work of William Shakespeare when it first emerged in 1796. However, it was soon revealed as a hoax written by the play's purported discoverer, William Henry Ireland, who had previously forged a number of other Shakespearean manuscripts. The play was at first accepted as Shakespeare's by some in the literary community, and received a performance at London's Drury Lane Theatre on 2 April 1796. The play's crude writing, however, exposed it as a forgery, and it was laughed off stage and was never performed again. Ireland eventually admitted to the hoax and tried to publish the play under his own name, but met with little success.[12] [13]

Vortigern often appears in modern Arthurian fiction. In the miniseries Merlin (1998) which uses the legend of Merlin and the dragons, Vortigern is played by Rutger Hauer. The film The Last Legion (2007), based in part on the novel of the same name (2002) byValerio Massimo Manfredi, features a highly fictionalized portrayal of Vortigern under the pseudo-authentic name Vortgyn. Jude Law plays Vortigen in the film Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur (2016).