Finding Arthur (9 page)

Identifiers of Welsh Camlanns are less picky about “cam” connections. Their Camlanns include the “Cam”-free Rhinog Mountains in northern Wales and Dolgellau in northwestern Wales.
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Wales, like England, lacks a historical Arthur who might have fought in these battles, whenever and wherever they may have been fought. Not one of these places stands within a sensible historical framework that might include someone who might have been Arthur; just like every one of the twelve Nennius-battles attributed to the legendary Arthur there is no convincing, far less conclusive evidence, as to where Camlann was fought and far, far less evidence that it was fought by an actual historical Arthur.

The date of the battle is an even bigger problem for those who believe in the traditional southern-British Arthur. Dr. John Morris says there is evidence to suggest Camlann was fought, “a year or two either side of 515,” beyond this, he says, “nothing …is known of the battle or its cause, or even of its whereabouts.”
³³
The
Annales Cambriae
disagree with Morris, putting the date at 537, but neither of these dates has a historical hinterland: no Arthur, no campaign; no
casus belli
, nothing to enable anyone to decide whether to favor circa 515 or circa 537 or to dismiss them both.

Almost everyone agrees that women took the dead or dying Arthur to the Isle of Avalon after the climactic Battle of Camlann, although the precise name of this island varies:
Insula Avallonis
,
Insula Avallonia
,
Ynys Avalon
,
Ynys Afallach
,
Avilion
,
Avilon
, and
Avallon
. This last alternative is the name of a town in Burgundy, France. This may seem preposterous but there is another, equally daft suggestion that is frequently trotted out as if it makes sense, because some people really want to believe it is true, because it is in southern Britain—Glastonbury.

The fact that Glastonbury is landlocked has not prevented it from being identified as Avalon. Glastonbury proponents, from Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century onwards, have claimed that in the middle of the first millennium the land about Glastonbury was not well-drained and that consequently the land about Glastonbury was often flooded, making the Tor, the hill near the town, stand up out of the water, island-like. This means that not only the high Tor but also the low-lying Abbey must have stuck up out of the water and been confused with an island, because it was in the low-lying Abbey that the monks said they found the grave of Arthur. Gerald should just have done what Malory did: delete the word
island
and inserted the word
vale
—it would have been simpler.

The real reason Arthur is said to be buried in Glastonbury is money. In 1184 a fire damaged Glastonbury Abbey and the monks needed funds to carry out repairs. Being enterprising monks they realized there was money to be made if they could attract pilgrims. They also knew that Geoffrey had associated Glastonbury with Arthur and that stories of Arthur were popular among the people of England at this time. Theirs was an age of relics, usually corpses or parts of corpses, and the monks concluded that if they were to bring in visitors, they needed a popular relic, ideally a corpse.

So it was that in 1191 the monks of Glastonbury said they had discovered Arthur’s grave in the Abbey grounds
³⁴
and, just in case there was any dispute, they also “discovered” a lead cross, upon which were written the words, “
Hic iacet sepultus inclytus rex Arthurius in insula Avalonia cum uxore sua secunda Gwenneveria
—Here lies the renowned King Arthur in the isle of Avalon with his second wife Guinevere.” (This cross had everything necessary to promote pilgrim-tourism but directions to and the opening hours of the medieval equivalent of a gift shop.)

In recent centuries it has been pointed out that the lettering on this cross, supposedly found in a sixth-century grave, was twelfth-century, the century in which it was “found.” This cross subsequently disappeared, although copies of it had been made. Later it was claimed it said only, “
Hic iacet sepultus inclytus rex Arthurius in insula Avalonia
.” Guinevere had been left lying on the cutting room floor.

It is now generally accepted that the Glastonbury grave was a hoax created to suck in gullible religious-tourists and make money from them, and it worked: from the twelfth century onward many credulous people flocked to Glastonbury and spent money there, thinking the place had something to do with the historical Arthur—some still do. Realizing they were on to a good thing the monks went on to “discover” and display the bodies of several Christian saints, including Gildas and, amazingly, St. Patrick (these monks had chutzpah). For good measure they also claimed that Joseph of Arimathea, said to be the great-uncle of Jesus of Nazareth, had visited Glastonbury. This too boosted the pilgrim-trade and the monks’ profits. Before the twelfth century, however, nothing linked Arthur with Glastonbury; indeed, several writers referred to Glastonbury in detail without reference to an Arthurian, far less an Avalonian, link.

Another favorite site for Avalon is in Wales—Bardsey Island, off the Ll
n Peninsula. Historians Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd, however, with reference to early Welsh manuscripts, have said Avalon was sited at a Bronze Age fortification in the Clwydian Mountains in Flintshire in Wales.
³⁵
They overcome the absence of an island in the Clwydian Mountains by reading
ynys
, which is usually read as “island,” as “realm,” and by taking
afallach
to be, not “apples” but a personal name. The result is
Ynys Afallach
, Realm of Afallach. Apples, however, have a recurring connection to Avalon, as further examples will show.

So why would anyone plump for locations like Glastonbury and the Clwydian Mountains when the island of Anglesey, off the coast of northwest Wales, is at least an island in the western sea, just as Avalon is said to be an island in the western sea? The answer is because Anglesey was the headquarters of the people of the Old Way of the druids. This made it a non-starter. Why did they not then go for the Isles of Scilly in the Atlantic? They too are at least islands and in
the western sea. The answer here is because the Scillies were inaccessible to pilgrim-tourists, and because no one would have thanked anyone for such an identification.

Looking for Avalon in the south of Britain is like looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn’t even there—the coasts of southern Britain have very few islands at all. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of islands off the west coast of Scotland; it’s near impossible to set out to sea from the Scottish mainland and avoid an island. Laurence Gardner suggested the Isle of Arran as a possible Avalon. He said the Fir Bolg, an early Irish people, installed their kings on an island, an “eternal paradise,” an “enchanted isle” called
Arúnmore
and that this enchanted isle lay where Arran lies, between Antrim in the northeast of Ireland, and Lethet, which, Laurence Gardner said, is the stretch of land between the Clyde and Forth. It has been said Arran was once called
Emain Ablach
, the place of apples, although the
Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology
says this connection cannot be correct.

Another Isle of Avalon was the “Island” of Invalone, an island it is said once lay between the Rivers Forth, Teith, and Allan, near Stirling.
³⁶
Besides Wales, England, and Scotland, Avalon has also been placed in Australasia, Sicily, India, and in the Mediterranean by writers from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. It is always possible that Avalon was an island in a lake or a loch, although by tradition the Avalon was “… an Island in the Western Sea.”
³⁷
This matter of the western sea is perhaps unsurprising given that almost all the offshore islands of Britain and Ireland lie off their western coasts. This also is in accord with the beliefs of many pre-Christian peoples, who pictured the souls of the dead being borne westward to “… an Island in the Western Sea …”
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This too is perhaps unsurprising, because the sun sets—that is, dies—in the west. The dead of the First World War were said to have “gone west.” Christians explained this by claiming “west” meant west from the battlefields of France, home to England, when in fact this saying is but one of many surviving folk-memories of the Old Way.

In the “Stanzas of the Graves” in the
Black Book of Carmarthen
is the line, “
Anoeth bid bet y Arthur
.” This has been translated in several ways: “a wonder of the world is the grave of Arthur”; “a difficult thing is the grave of Arthur”;
“a mystery to the world is the grave of Arthur”; “impossible to find in this world is the grave of Arthur”. All of these things are true except, perhaps, the last one.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the early twelfth century attributes the name Avalon to “a certain Avalloc, who is said to have lived there with his daughters because of the secrecy of the place.” This was probably inspired by a Welsh tradition at least as old as the twelfth century, which says that the name Avalon was derived from the name of a man called Avallach, the father of a woman called Morgan (from whom the legend of Arthur is said to have acquired Morgan le Fay, Morgan the Fairy). Place-names were often personalized and attributed to eponymous fictional figures; there probably never was an Avalloc.

In his
Vita Merlini
, Geoffrey describes Avalon as “
Insula pomorum quae fortunata uocatur
—The island of apples, which men call the fortunate isle.”

There [in Avalon] nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws those who come to them from our country. She who is first of them is more skilled in the healing art, and excels her sisters in the beauty of her person. Morgen [
sic
] is her name … Thither after the Battle of Camlann we took the wounded Arthur …

The Welsh poem
The Spoils of Annwn
says that after the Battle of Camlann the druid-bard Taliesin brought the wounded Arthur to the
Insula Pomorum
, Isle of Apples, and left him there under the care of Morgan, who was skilled in the arts of healing and who was the chief maiden of the nine maidens who lived on Avalon.

The Welsh for “apple” is
aval
or
afal
; in old Welsh it is
abal
or in the plural
aballon
.
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In Scottish Gaelic “apple” would be
abhall
,
⁴⁰
pronounced “aval.” The Avallon in Burgundy also has an apple meaning—one that springs from the ancient Celtic-Gaulish languages that once prevailed in France. The apple connections that work in the south of Britain work equally well in the north. Apples were said to be a magical fruit in the Celtic world; they evoked ideas of immortality spent in some heaven or paradise, “like those of the Hesperides, or of Celtic otherworld regions.”
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In the first few centuries after Arthur’s death the Church ignored
his memory, hoping it would just fade away. When this did not happen clerics tried to include Arthur in their Christian writings as a villain, in the hope that this would erode his heroic status. When this did not work they abandoned their negative tack, bit the bullet, and made Arthur a Christian, an Englishman, and, for good measure, a king.

By the time this change of tack was taken Arthur was already somewhat damaged goods. In contrast, the stock of the man who came to be called Lancelot was on the rise. Lancelot was said to be a better fighter, younger, better looking and an all-around more glamorous figure than Arthur, and, just in case this was not enough, Lancelot, the new up-and-coming Christian hero, was said to have cuckolded Arthur. The matter of sex suggests that if the legend of Lancelot had a foundation in history it lay in a time before Christianity controlled the written word. Lancelot also stands in stark contrast to that relatively late addition to the Arthurian cycle, Galahad, a true Christian hero and an all but sexless knight.

Despite the best efforts of the purported southern Arthur, whoever he was, the Anglo-Saxons conquered the south of Britain, created Angle-land or England, and pushed the native Celtic-British into what is now Wales.

The Anglo-Saxons had little interest in Arthur, because in the original stories they, or at least the Angles, were the enemy. In later centuries, after Arthur was presented as an English king, new enemies had to be found for him and so he ended up fighting in France (although this was probably to please Geoffrey’s French audience), before going on to fight a Roman Emperor (long after Roman Emperors had ceased to be).