Finding Arthur (27 page)

Kingmaking by taking a sword from a stone is unique to the legend of Arthur. Arthur had once taken a sword from the stone on the summit of Dunadd, and I knew that sometime soon someone else would do the same thing. I wanted my son, Eliot, to be the first person known to have taken a sword from this stone since Arthur.

The only problem I had was that I did not
have
a sword. I am not a sword type of person. There are, however, several shops that sell swords to tourists on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, within a hundred yards of where I work, and so I bought a sword.

On May 25, 2002, just after dawn and in heavy rain, my then eleven-year-old son Eliot and I climbed to the summit of Dunadd. The rain and the time of day worked to ensure that there was no one about to see us, which was good because I wanted to keep the location of the stone a secret and I didn’t want to be seen running about Argyll with a large sword that the police might have considered an offensive weapon.

I kept the sword a secret from my son by following him up the hill with it wrapped in a car-shawl, which I carried alongside a golf-umbrella. When we got to the top of the summit of the fort and I produced the sword, he took it in stride, although, I suspect, if he had known the story of Abraham and Isaac he might have done a runner.

I had Eliot put his foot in the footprint first to empty it of rainwater before I had a go. I am not daft. The footprint is average size. I wear a 9½ / 44 shoe, and it fit me perfectly.

My son then put his foot back in the footprint, and I gave him the sword to hold. When he stepped out of the footprint he became the first person known to me to take a sword from the stone from which Arthur once took a sword, since Arthur. (I was too self-conscious to do the same.)

As we walked back down the hill to the car park I explained that the sword was not a real sword and that I had bought it in an Edinburgh gift shop. Eliot said that did not matter, because the sword Arthur had taken out of the stone was Arthur’s father’s sword and the sword he had taken from the stone was
his
father’s sword, and so it was just the same. The special moments come unexpectedly.

B
Y
575 A
EDAN
was sufficiently secure to leave Argyll for Ireland to attend the great council of Drumceatt. Argyll was at peace or at least subdued, and so he was almost certainly accompanied by Arthur, who had a lot to learn. Columba-Crimthann too was included in Aedan’s train.

The hillfort of Dunadd, the ceremonial capital of the Scots of Dalriada, Argyll. The footprint seen in the foreground is the origin of the “Sword in the Stone” legend
.

The council of Drumceatt was held outside Limavady near the north coast of Ireland. All the kings and great chiefs of Dalriada-Ireland and Dalriada-Scotland were there, including the mighty Aed Mac Ainmire of the Northern Ui Neill, one of Columba’s kinsmen.

The surviving sources are creations of Columba-Crimthann’s propagandists or have been filtered through the censorship of his partisans for more than a thousand years, and so they tend to present Columba-Crimthann as the most important person who traveled from Scotland to Ireland for this council, but this was Aedan’s expedition, arranged at his insistence, and Columba-Crimthann was only a useful fellow traveler.

Doubtless there were innumerable matters discussed at this meeting, but records of only three have come down to us: the freeing of a hostage called Scandlán More; the suppression of the bards of Ireland, and the relationship between Dalriada Scotland and Dalriada Ireland. The matter of Scandlán is not relevant to Arthur. As for the bards, unless all these people got together at Drumceatt and decided to come down hard on some popular entertainers, for bards we must read druids.

In
Finding Merlin
I argued that after the Christians suppressed the druids, they set about eradicating all memory of them by deleting direct references to them. For example, Jocelyn, Mungo Kentigern’s hagiographer, wrote of “certain wicked men” when he meant druids. In time it became standard practice to avoid the word
druids
and terms like
evil men
, because evil men suggested a threat. Instead, when druids were relevant, they were referred to as bards. Any threat the memory of Merlin-Lailoken might have presented was neutered when he was reinvented in the stories as an old wizard. Arthur too was tamed when he was made a Christian, English king and, just to be sure, a cuckold too. Nothing could have been less threatening to those in power than such a man.

The druids are best pictured not just as religious men; they were interested in far more than the supernatural. They were, in effect, a professional class; individual druids, both women and men, specialized in various fields, including law, agriculture, meteorology, history, and geography. Some composed and performed poems.

As the Middle Ages approached their high point, those who practiced in these various fields found they had to do so under the auspices of the Church, except women of course—women were no longer allowed to engage in such practices. Women, quite naturally, continued to use their intelligence and skills by providing medical services, especially midwifery, the one area the Church shied away from. Almost one thousand years after the age of Arthur, during the reign of James VI, thousands of women were tortured to death as witches in Scotland alone. These were women who would have been druids when there were druids.

The idea was that only those “in the know” would know the meaning of the code-word
bard
, although most people were not daft
and would have known exactly what was going on. Eventually, however, the true import of bardic references became blurred and was forgotten, until, for almost everyone, bard just meant bard.

The conventional line is that the authorities at Drumceatt were annoyed because bards were taking liberties and so had to be suppressed, but there had been bards since time immemorial, and there would be bards in one form or another for centuries to come without it ever again being felt necessary to curb them in such a drastic way. Bards taking liberties does not explain what happened.

It is no mere coincidence that this occurred at the same time that Christianity was ascendant in Ireland. Gildas himself had visited Ireland at the invitation of the recently deceased King Ainmire to promote his form of Christianity within the preceding decade. It seems likely that by the time of Drumceatt, the Christians had enough support to enable them to strike at the druids.

It is worth noting that no such agreement was reached regarding the “Bards” of Scottish-Dalriada, a clear indication that the balance of power between Aedan and Columba-Crimthann was weighted in Aedan’s favor. But the main subject of agreement as far as Aedan and Arthur were concerned was recognition of Dalriada Scotland as an independent kingdom, not as a sub-kingdom of Dalriada Ireland. This was achieved. When the Council of Drumceatt came to a close in 576 Aedan was secure at home and abroad.

It was probably about this time that Arthur was married. He was only in his mid- to late teens, but marriage at this age would have been the norm in the sixth century. Of course, as everyone knows, according to the legends Arthur married Guinevere and they did not live happily ever after. It was not quite like that in real life.

When the civil war was over and the negotiations at Drumceatt concluded, Aedan and Arthur turned their attention to the threat posed by the Miathi Picts. It may be that this threat was one of the reasons Aedan had Arthur marry a Pictish princess of Manau. Such a marriage would have helped secure his family’s position in the east, something that would have been especially important at a time when the Miathi Picts were threatening.

7

Camelot

T
HE STORY OF
A
RTHUR IS SO WELL KNOWN THAT IT IS NOT NECESSARY
to signal it with Arthur’s name—the names Merlin, Lancelot, or Guinevere will do. Even the name of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, will do, or the name of the place where he lived, Camelot. Excalibur is, without a doubt, the most famous sword there has ever been, and Camelot is, if not the most famous place there has ever been, certainly up there in the reckoning. The legendary Arthur had two swords: the sword he took from the stone and Excalibur, the sword given to him by the Lady of the Lake. This is counterintuitive. One warrior, one sword makes more sense. Rodrigo Diaz,
El Cid
, had two swords, Colada, a Spanish sword and Tizona, a Moorish sword, but then he led Spaniards and Moors and so this makes sense.

Perhaps there is some good reason why the legendary Arthur had two swords, but one reason is obvious. Malory had two good stories: the sword and the stone story and the Lady of the Lake story in which Arthur is given the magical sword Excalibur. These two stories required two different swords, and Malory was not prepared to leave either story untold. Of course Arthur could not take a sword from a stone and the same sword from a lady in a lake, and so two swords were necessary.

To begin with I dismissed both of these stories because they both involve the supernatural. There is no such thing as the divine right of kings and even if there was, it would be preposterous to suppose
that the choice of a king would be left to the whim of a supposedly magical stone. Neither are there such things as a magical swords and even if there were, to believe that one might appear out of a lake in the hands of a woman who lived under the water, would be absurd.

Malory’s stories are counterintuitive in one other way. It would make more sense if the sword used in the king-picking event was the most valued sword. Swords used at coronations and inaugurations are usually especially highly prized. Common sense dictates that this sword should be Excalibur. Common sense also dictates that this ceremonial sword would not be a fighting sword used day-to-day in battle.

Malory had a problem: how was he to keep both of his wonderful stories and still have the right sword in the right place at the right time? Unfortunately he did not have a wonderful solution. Malory’s solution was to make the sword Arthur took from a stone an ordinary sword and have it broken in battle soon thereafter, and to make the sword taken from the lake a special sword, indeed a magical sword, Excalibur. This had to be so because Bedevere would not have hesitated before throwing a workaday sword into the lake. The sword Bedevere threw into the lake had to be Excalibur. Only the return of Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake could have provided the Big Finish Malory wanted to end his fabulous tale.

Malory had to write his story the way he did because he wanted to end
Le Morte d’Arthur
with the famous scene in which, in the aftermath of the Battle of Camlann, the mortally wounded Arthur instructs Bedevere to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Arthur had come straight from the battlefield and so this sword had to be the sword Arthur had been using in the battle, that is, his fighting sword. This sword also had to be the sword given to him by the Lady of the Lake, because the Lady of the Lake would not have been happy if she was fobbed off with some other sword. This means Excalibur had to be Arthur’s fighting sword.

All that is necessary to work out what really happened is to delete the magic and look at the history that is left. Arthur is said to have taken
a sword from a stone. This is usually taken to be a purely magical and so fictional event but, if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan, Arthur taking a sword from a stone has a non-supernatural explanation. Arthur Mac Aedan took a sword from a stone when he stepped from the stone of Dunadd.

Arthur is said to have been given a sword by the Lady of the Lake and to have returned this sword to the Lady of the Lake, but, if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan, this too has a non-supernatural explanation. Throwing valuables such as swords into lochs, marshes, and rivers as tribute to the spirits some people thought lived in such waters, was a common Celtic custom that still echoes in the modern practice of throwing coins into fountains and wishing wells. It was probably this Celtic custom that inspired Malory to write the wonderful ending of
Le Morte d’Arthur
.

The only part of the two sword-stories that defies sensible explanation is the part where Arthur is given a sword by an underwater female armorer, the Lady of the Lake. This is purely magical and so just did not happen. It seems likely that Malory, having decided to write about Arthur’s sword being thrown into water, went too far and invented the wonderful passage that has Arthur’s sword coming out of water.

Arthur Mac Aedan took a sword from a stone at Dunadd in 574 without any supernatural input. This does not mean that this sword was not a special sword. Indeed, given that it was the sword used in inauguration ceremonies, it would be reasonable to believe that it was a very special sword. It is unlikely that this ceremonial sword was the fighting sword Arthur used in his last battle. This ceremonial sword was probably too important to be used in battle, and, in any event, it is impossible to believe that any one sword would have survived more than one or two, far less a dozen battles. It is more likely that the ceremonial sword Arthur took from a stone was kept safe to be used in the next ceremony.