The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (5 page)

In fact, Arthur is mentioned many times in various Welsh poems written within a century of his death. But the next major reference to him comes in a confused collection of historical material compiled by a monk named Nennius some time between
AD
800 and 820. The earliest material about Arthur that Nennius quotes is a collection of Welsh “Easter Annals”, tables of the dates of Easter (which is a movable feast) compiled by monks. These tables have wide margins, and in one of these – for the year
AD
518 – there is a jotting (in Latin): “Battle of Badon in which Arthur carried the cross of Our Lord Jesus on his shoulders for three days and three nights and the Britons were victors”. And another, for the year
AD
539 reads: “The strife of Camlann in which Arthur and
Modred [
sic
] perished”. So if we can believe the Easter Annals, Arthur ruled for twenty-one years after the Battle of Badon.

But the most dramatic incident in the story of Arthur occurred about thirty years after the death of Geoffrey of Monmouth (in
AD
1154), during the reign of Henry II – the king who is best remembered in connection with the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket. Henry was an indefatigable traveler, and on one of his trips to Wales he met a Welsh bard, a “singer of the past”, who told him that King Arthur was buried in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. To protect the body from the Saxons, said the bard, it had been buried sixteen feet deep. He even mentioned the exact location – between two “pyramids”.

The king was naturally delighted, for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History
had represented Arthur as one of the greatest conquerors since Julius Caesar. (According to Geoffrey, Arthur had conquered Ireland, Scandinavia, and France and was about to march on Rome when news of Mordred’s rebellion forced him to return to England.) He was also relieved to hear that Arthur
was
buried in Glastonbury. As the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, he was familiar with the legend that Arthur would return in England’s hour of need. If he could prove that Arthur was well and truly dead, the latter would cease to be a rallying cry for rebels like the men of Bodmin.

Besides, Henry had an affection for Glastonbury, because the abbot Henry of Blois had played a part in making him king. So Henry went to call on the abbot to tell him the good news.

Oddly enough, the abbot was not as pleased as he might have been. Glastonbury Abbey was already one of the richest in England; it didn’t need any more fame to attract pilgrims. And “between two pyramids” might mean anything.

Then the situation changed dramatically. On 25 May 1184, the abbey caught fire and was left in ruins. The encouraging thing about it was that the image of Our Lady of Glastonbury had survived undamaged, which suggested that God still had great things in store for the abbey. Henry II produced funds to start rebuilding; many nobles contributed. And in 1191 one of the monks died after expressing a wish to be buried on the grounds, between two crosses. These stood on two marble pillars that tapered toward the top and might have been described as tall pyramids. For some reason – perhaps because they remembered the words of the Welsh bard – the monks went on digging below six feet and at seven feet encountered a stone slab. They prized it up. On its underside was a leaden cross, with a Latin inscription that read:
Hic
jacet sepultus inclytus Rex Artorius in insula Avalonia
(“Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon”).

They went on digging – it probably took days to make a hole sixteen feet deep and wide enough to allow several diggers to operate. But at sixteen feet, just as the old bard had foretold, the mattocks struck wood. An enormous coffin, hollowed out of oak, was unearthed. Inside, they found the huge skeleton of a man, whose skull had been smashed by heavy blows. A monk saw a lock of yellow hair and leaned over to grab it. It dissolved in his fingers, and the monk fell into the coffin. Later, they identified fragments of a smaller skeleton and realized that the hair was that of Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. One chronicler, Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), who actually saw the bones and the cross in the following year, says the inscription on the cross also mentioned “Queen Wenneverla” (Guinevere).

From that moment on, the abbey became the most popular tourist site in England, if not in Europe. The abbey was soon rebuilt on a magnificent scale.

Scholars have accused the monks of Glastonbury of inventing the whole story, yet this seems unlikely. Giraldus Cambrensis seems to have been an honest man – he was one of the few to denounce Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History
as a pack of lies – and he specifically claims to have seen both skeletons and the leaden cross. This cross was still around for many centuries, and in 1607 an antiquarian named William Camden published a picture of it. His text spells Arthur
Arturius
, an ancient form that was in use in the time of King Arthur but had not been used since. (Even the Easter Annals spell his name
Arthur
.)

Moreover, a re-excavation of the site in 1963 by C. A. Radford showed that the monks were telling the truth about digging down sixteen feet. Besides, as the Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe has pointed out, Glastonbury is also supposed to be the burial site of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave Jesus a decent burial; if the monks faked the grave of Arthur, why did they not go on and fake Saint Joseph’s too?

So, on the whole, there can be no doubt that King Arthur – or rather, General Arturius – really existed and that he deserved his reputation as a great hero. Dozens of questions still remain, but some of these are slowly being answered. For example, many scholars believe that we now know the location of King Arthur’s court at Camelot. In 1542 a writer named John Leland wrote that a
fortified hill in South Cadbury, Somerset, was, in fact, “Camallate, sometime a famous town or castle . . . Arthur much resorted to Camallate”. In 1966 excavations were begun at Cadbury Castle (not a castle in the medieval sense, but a fortified hill). On top of Roman remains were found the foundations of impressive buildings that were clearly occupied, in Arthur’s period, by a chieftain of considerable power and authority.

Even Geoffrey of Monmouth’s absurd story about Tintagel Castle begins to look as if it has some foundation. The present Tintagel Castle was built around 1140, at the time of Geoffrey’s
History
. Historians have pointed out that in the time of King Arthur there was only a Celtic monastery on the site. In 1924 the “visionary” Rudolf Steiner visited Tintagel and devoted a lecture to it, identifying various places as the Hall of the Round Table, the sleeping place of the knights, and so on. It all sounded like pure fantasy.

But in the dry summer of 1983 a fire on the island destroyed the grass, and wind and rain went on to reveal the foundations of more than a hundred small rectangular buildings and of a hall more than eighty feet long. Down below, at the foot of the cliff, is a small natural harbor, and pottery discovered on the island indicated that large quantities of wine and oil were once imported. (There is more imported pottery on the site than on all the other British and Irish sites put together.) A stone “footprint” on the opposite side of the island looks out over old Celtic Christian burial mounds; such a “footprint” was often made by a chieftain who planted his foot and surveyed his kingdom. (In this case, he would have looked across to the graves of his ancestors.) All this sounds as if Tintagel were once the fortress of a considerable chieftain, not simply a monastery. The objection that Tintagel was essentially uninhabited in the time of Arthur cannot be sustained.

So the evidence for the real historical existence of King Arthur is very strong indeed. In a book entitled
Arthur: Roman Britain’s Last Champion
, Beram Saklatvala has even argued that there is evidence for the existence of the sword Excalibur and of the Holy Grail. The Latin word for stone is
saxo
, which is close to “Saxon”. If some early chronicle mentioned Arthur taking a sword from a Saxon – some warrior he had killed – then it could well have been the origin of the legend of the sword in the stone. Geoffrey of Monmouth calls Arthur’s sword
Caliburn
; and
Caliburn
is a combination of two words for “river” – the Celtic
cale
and the Saxon
burn
. Swords need, of course, to be tempered in cold water, and as the Anglo-Saxon word
cale
means “cold”,
caliburn
could be translated as “the cold stream”. So Arthur’s sword could have been named after the stream it was tempered in, the Cale, near Sturminster, in Dorset.

As to the Grail – the cup that Jesus was supposed to have used at the Last Supper and that Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought to
Glastonbury – this was probably a much larger vessel, too large for a drinking cup, that was used for ritual purposes. In 1959 a large marble urn was found during excavations of a Roman palace in North Africa; the palace dated from the same period as did Arthur. The urn had a cross carved on it, and the lid had rivet holes in the shape of a cross, indicating that it had once had a metal cross on it. The urn probably contained the bones of a saint and was almost certainly used for administering oaths, as we now swear on the Bible. A libation hole suggests that it was used in some special ritual. Arthur would fairly certainly have had a similar urn in his own chapel for the administering of oaths. If this sacred vessel had been captured during one of Arthur’s many wars, Saklatvala suggests, then the quest for the Grail could well have been based on fact.

But what of the magician Merlin? Surely
he
was an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth? In fact, Geoffrey followed up his successful
History
with a
Life of Merlin
, a poem written for a smaller audience. If Geoffrey had invented Merlin, we would expect the poet more or less to repeat the story as told in the
History
– or at least, not to contradict it. Merlin was obviously a great deal older than Arthur, for he was a boy when King Vortigern was alive – and the monk Gildas tells us that Vortigern made the fatal mistake of inviting the Saxons into England in
AD
443. Yet in the Merlin poem, Geoffrey has Merlin fighting with a king named Rodarcus against a Scottish king named Guennolous – and these real historical characters lived a century later,
after
the death of Arthur. Geoffrey is aware of this and explains it by saying that Merlin lived to a phenomenally old age – more than a century. But it looks as if Geoffrey has found material about Merlin that obliges him to try to explain why his original dates were wrong.

The explanation that is accepted by most scholars is that Merlin was based on a Welsh bard named Myrddin, who was alive after
AD
573. The Welsh language only came into existence after the death of Arthur, so Myrddin could not have been older than Arthur. This identification of Merlin with Myrddin is accepted by Robert Graves in his mythological study
The White Goddess
(1948) and by Nicolai Tolstoy in
The Quest for Merlin
(1985). But it is obviously a somewhat disappointing theory, for if it is correct, Merlin was not even called Merlin. (The usual view is that Geoffrey of Monmouth changed Myrddin to Merlin because
merde
in French means “shit”, and a magician named Myrddin would have invited ridicule in an age when England was ruled by the French.) Moreover, Myrddin cannot have known Arthur, for even if their lives overlapped, he would only have been a child at the time of Arthur’s
death. Geoffrey Ashe agrees that Merlin is Myrddin and that Geoffrey of Monmouth made him Arthur’s senior merely for the sake of a good story.

The American professor Norma Lorre Goodrich rejects this notion in her book
Merlin
(1988) and argues convincingly that Merlin
was
a real person who was about thirty years older than Arthur, although she agrees that some of the legends of Myrddin have been incorporated into the Merlin story. She suggests that Arthur’s Merlin was born in Wales and buried in Scotland. In fact, she ends by suggesting that “Merlin” was a title rather than a name (a merlin is a type of hawk) and that the original Merlin was a bishop named Dubricius, who crowned Arthur. Myrddin, on the other hand, was a “Wild Man of the Woods”, a poet who went mad, lived in the wilderness, and achieved certain magical powers.
This
Merlin is, in fact, the one Geoffrey of Monmouth learned about after writing his
History
. His
Life of Merlin
is, indeed, about a Welsh leader and prophet who went mad after fighting in a battle against a Scottish king and who became a wanderer in the wilderness, delivering a great many prophecies. The Merlin of the
History
is also, we may recall, a prophet: in fact, Geoffrey published a book of Merlin’s prophecies first, then incorporated them into the
History
. It sounds as if he learned about the Welsh prophet Myrddin after writing the
History
and decided that Myrddin and Merlin must be the same person. Nicolai Tolstoy agrees with this theory and devotes much of his
Quest for Merlin
to an analysis of various poems and legends that tell of the “Wild Man of the Woods”.

It would seem, then, that we have two contesting theories: that there were two Merlins, a view first suggested by Giraldus Cambrensis; and that there was only one Merlin, who was really called Myrddin and who was a Welsh bard and soothsayer. Yet Goodrich and Tolstoy both argue their theories so brilliantly that it seems a pity to have to choose one or the other. Goodrich is most convincing on the subject of the two Merlins and in her argument that the original Merlin
was
the counselor of King Arthur. But Tolstoy has some profoundly important things to say about Merlin the Wizard.