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Legends of King Arthur and Camelot
Literary and Cultural Connections
Introduction
The legends of King Arthur and Camelot must have been preserved and developed in song and story telling, finding their way into written works over the centuries. Some of those involved in that were propagandists who worked their own part of the country and their own culture into the legends. In this booklet I explain more about the sequence of development and related cultural matters.
From what was written in the Dictionary of National Biography on Arthur it was easy to see that the suggestion that Tintagel had a place in the legends stems from literary invention and Glastonbury's claim depends on statements of monks regarding their relics to which people do not give much credence in modern times. The stories concerning the legendary Arthur became more impressive with time until eventually he was said to have conquered much of western Europe. There was a strong desire to believe in such a person but the history of Celts in their opposition to the English was very much one of division which probably owed something to earlier Roman imperial policy. Much of the development of the legends was a series of propaganda exercises and the entries on Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth in the DNB underline that conclusion. I believe that in a court of law, if courts could deal with such matters, charged with deliberately deceiving people, Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the monks of Glastonbury would all be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
I have dealt with the more important aspects of the origins and development of these ever popular legends which concern a king about whom not one single historical fact has been agreed. I am certain that Offa and Cynethryth, the great king and queen of the early English peoples, have a place at their origin. Since there are coins with their names and images their existence is beyond doubt. On one coin Offa looks like the actor, Richard Todd - see Seaby's catalogue.
For a more thorough treatment of these matters called "In The Name Offa Arthur" please contact me at 26, Patrick St., Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 9HP. Tel. 01858 466790. The ISBN is 0 9536 579 0 6.
1 Arthurian Legends in Literature
It was Nennius who first wrote about a hero called Arthur, in or about 796, the year Offa of Angelland died (DNB). His Arthur fought 12 great battles and was killed at Camlan which was mentioned later in the Annales Cambriae. Much more has been added, the best-known parts of which link naturally to Offa and Cynethryth's life and times. Nennius said of his own work, "I made a heap of all I could find" and those battles could not all have been fought by one man so different regions have an equal claim on that basis. Camlan corresponds well to Gumley which was a famous place in Offa's day. Camlan became Camelot in Norman times when Lancelot was added. The legends were not Norman and so the French re-working with adulterous love as an important theme helped to justify the destruction of the fellowship of the Round Table which corresponds to the origins of the earliest system of authority at Clovesho - probably Lubenham - which the Normans replaced. Through Offa and Cynethryth the legends are connected to the finest ideals of the English peoples which is indicated by the reference to Offa and Queen Thryth in Beowulf. So it had to be said that Beowulf was set in Scandinavia to complete the destruction.
Welsh poetry was written down very late and a programme called Outside Time on Channel 4 TV in the early 1990s dealt dramatically with how a heroic Arthur was added. Arthur as "guardian of the wall" fits as Offa, who built the great dyke. There is a legend about Offa earning a great kingdom with his sword while still a boy.
The monks of Glastonbury said they found a cross with Arturius inscribed on it seven years after their monastery was burned down but it was a Roman cross. To say he was a Roman soldier compounds the error. The DNB dealt with that and with Geoffrey of Monmouth's work including Avalon which some linked to Tintagel. He earned a bishopric from the Norman Earl of what was then called Mercia, based at Gloucester, for his cultural reworking of the English tradition. His "history" which he said he obtained from Brittany was unknown among the Celts and it is known that the legends reached France through Wace of Jersey which Britannica says led to accentuation of the romantic theme. Chretien de Troyes added the Holy Grail and in time the legends even entered Italian and Jewish literature.
2 Beowulf and the Holy Grail
Beowulf consists of two main episodes, the struggles against Grendel and against the dragon. Grendel corresponds well to early Roman missionaries of Kent who perhaps used the spirit of the catacombs to ensnare people in their hurry to set up a system of their own and destroy earlier traditions there. Rome was under attack from the north and had no time for subtlety. The second episode corresponds to the continued resistance of the centre of England to the new political and religious force centred on southern England. So Beowulf and Wiglaf are from Beornwulf and Wiglaf, kings of Angelland. The work ends with Beowulf's death on a note of great sadness because the traditions of the English peoples were going to be overthrown.
Only one copy of Beowulf survived the destruction of English literature and that was partly burned. Church scholars managed the representation of English culture and had almost complete control of universities until quite recently. At UCL even in the mid-70s political cadres could construe disagreements over science as an attack on their authority and physics degrees could depend partly on church-going. It seems the study of history and literature has been influenced.
Early on the church's power centre was more in Wessex and is still in southern England. Wessex's battle standard was a golden dragon at the battle of Hastings - and probably earlier- so Beowulf's fight against the dragon fits well with the long struggle between central Angelland and Wessex which was brought to an end when more Danes came over with another wave of English culture and won control. Sigemund, son of Waels, fought the dragon so the church's scholars identified Wales as a dragon to counter that and the struggle also relates to an important theme which found its way into the legends as the quest for the Holy Grail. Beowulf and Wiglaf fought the dragon to regain the symbolic drinking vessel, one of which also appears in the first part where the queen takes it to each warrior in turn. This is like the Christian ceremony and may be earlier. It shows that Beowulf presents an alternative tradition to people so it was necessary for religious scholars to develop their own version. In Beowulf, Wiglaf was successful in the quest. He was king of Angelland at a time when the centre of power was more in the Wigston and Great Glen area.
3 Lords of the Ring
The realisation that the legends were from the English peoples led to a more fundamental consideration of their origins and an important characteristic is the symbolism inherent in rings. This seems to go back to a time before the separation of the Indo-European cultures, the earliest of which can be traced back to the Baltic Sea area in the late Stone Age. That has been summarised in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Unfortunately, for many centuries the church's scholars had to bend their scholarship to match the biblical account of a creation event in the Middle East several thousand years ago from which all known peoples were said to descend and so a compromise was reached for Indo-European origins - the Caucasus. Recent work on genetics at Oxford shows that northern peoples are descended from a northern population stretching back 50,000 years or so.
One link between languages of India and the European region is the word "ankh". It means eye in India and "anguthi" means ring. In the eye there is a coloured ring which shows a person's emotional state and it must play a role in human interactions, providing a stronger basis for trust. Some people have tried to make eye-colour hierarchical. The northern culture influenced Egypt early on where the ankh symbol represented life. It contains a ring and a ring was a magical protector. That led on to the symbolism in crosses although some consider it to be debased imagery.
Early peoples of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea area built platforms on which to site their homes while digging defensive rings sometimes reinforced with stakes. The name, Angle, seems to come partly from this and Dane corresponds to dune, in essence the same. Enbankments have a slope and eyes have a corner giving another meaning for angle. More than once the northern peoples have encircled continental Europe with trading stations and it seems that long ago observers of this process developed the legend of the Phoenix, a bird perhaps modelled partly on the flamingo. The trading peoples developed land at the water's edge and after becoming wealthy through trade they would be attacked. Their trading stations were burned down and they had to begin again as the legend says the Phoenix rose from the ashes. That fits for the Phoenicians.
4 The Men of Iron
Waves of conquest, triggered sometimes by climatic changes, swept periodically from the northern lands throughout Europe and the Near East during at least the last 3000 years including during the crusades and even the present century. It seems most likely that it was the shock-resistance of manganese steel which made it so easy around 1200 BC when Egypt came under attack from the north. The new thin blades which could cut through bronze armour must have been an advantage. It seems that later the quest for manganese for railway track junctions and for breech-loading guns is what led the British and French forces to attack Russia and cause the Crimean war since there is a great quantity of manganese in the area and it was scarce elsewhere until after the scramble for Africa. A pretext was an obscure disagreement over access to a church in Palestine.
The Hittites were peoples of European type in Anatolya and the Philistines were related peoples of the land which took their name, Palestine. In time they were made out to have been less developed than the tribes of the hinterland, Hebrews, who produced the Bible partly to convince people of how special they were.
One of the main items of trade long ago would have been weaponry, as it is today, because the Mediterranean is poor in iron. The Bible worked the struggle between the more sophisticated Philistines with their armour and the Hebrews with their slingshots, probably mechanical ones, into the legend of David and Goliath. It is much like Russia and Afghanistan - or Britain and Afghanistan in the 19th century. The Philistines needed shipping routes to be viable and it was possible for mariners to find the entry to the Mediterranean reliably when sailing between the northern lands and the Eastern Mediterranean with basic astronomy. Stonehenge and other sites of the northern lands must have had an astronomical purpose so the navigational skill required for such journeys was well within the northern peoples' capabilities. Aryan and Eireann (Ireland) both seem to relate to Orion, the hunter. Bauval and Gilbert have described how the configuration of the Nile and the pyramids at Giza correspond to Orion and the Milky Way.
5 Cultural Management
There are always factions in any government system which reach into different areas of life and secret services monitor people's activities. They have access to information from all branches of national and local government. They make tax-free payments for information and students are used to acquire new ideas from fellow students which is how University College, London obtained my first ideas for multi-mirror telescopes. There was a Celtic faction promoting the Arthurian Society even among Astronomy students. Prizes were given in London in 1993 for my ideas on adaptive optics and laser guide-stars according to a letter in New Scientist in 1995. Some of my later ideas - the basis for a lot of new business in southern England and abroad - have been credited to someone from South-West England according to information from the USA - like what happened with the tradition of Offa and Cynethryth.
Law and order is a favourite issue of politicians and historically law could easily be confused with the interests of the lord (political) and the Lord (spiritual) which is relevant to the House of Lords still. Also order means in part the social order and probably secret police promote people loyal to the government's and the church's home districts. Agents who reach powerful positions could help to provide increases in funding or powers in return.
Sexual abuse seems to be a religious technique which can give influence over people all their lives and Frank Beck, from Salisbury, abused many young people in Harborough and Leicester. He said he had been a spy and carried on a surprisingly long time after complaints were made. Perhaps others exploit that sort of situation later. Also it must be disturbing for people to hear that government critics meet unseemly deaths with secret service involvement.
Unusually, the British government grades citizens' identification numbers - on a scale of A to E – royal involvement with which was reported in the press. Perhaps the system has been used to draw wealth into the government's home district. The Department of Employment used them to manage people's employment opportunities. Their legality would be debatable now because of agreements on human rights.
6 Names
Religions often lead the way in assigning new names but different language groups tend to keep their own so there is correspondence between different names for gods - Tiw, Zeus, Dio, Dios, Dieu, and Deus. They connect to two, deuce and deux. Some words for god and one are connected - I, ich, ik, ek and the One. Ek means one in Indian languages and can mean god. It seems that two won out as a name for God. There is a degraded sense in it and contact with alienated people helps religions to establish secretive societies outside their home area. Expansion into new territory was called colon-isation from Greek and Roman times and the colon is the lower part of the intestinal tract. Saints with suitable names were sometimes invented to help in taking temple followers into the Christian religion which then may have preserved something of the spirit of ancient cults such as the cult of Dionysus.
Manipulation of names can be used to separate peoples. Croats and Serbs are so similar that the names probably diverged because of the great church division within the Roman empire. Ang and Dan also seem to be of shared origin and Angles and Danes were turned against each other in England. Michael Wood's book on the period shows the early administrational district was called saetan and it would not have had a bad sense. Later, Alfred of Wessex's scholars used the word to translate the biblical Satanas although the names of two districts of Alfred's kingdom, Somerset and Dorset, retain the word in abbreviated form up to the present. This suggests that the word was used in a demonic sense to break down the system of government ouside the church's home area.
Hellas, the name of Rome's neighbours, the Greeks, was used as the basis of Rome's name for its place of eternal damnation when it was driving the Orthodox tradition out of western Europe. Also Easter is associated with betrayal and suffering and it seems not to be coincidence that the word is Ostern in German which means eastern. Both names must serve to link the East to unpleasantness even if an earlier spring festival had a similar name. Use of names to manipulate peoples is a kind of cultural imperialism while association of a word for something good in one language with something bad in another tends to lead to mutual antagonism and ridicule.
7 Colours
Different cultures develop a positive view of their particular racial characteristics which can be seen from how gold and the golden hair of northern peoples have been given such valuable associations. Gold, yellow, Hell, Jul, Jew, Jute, Goth, God and good all seem to go back to a common origin. Hail and holy seem to be connected also.
Peoples of the northern lands tend to have a pale iris and it is interesting that green eyes were associated especially with Ireland because it was an important centre for copper which makes a beautiful green dome. Blue is associated with copper and also the heavens. Perhaps some people deliberately preserved chance occurrences of green and blue in eyes and preferred black hair which is like a patina of copper, valuable in antiquity. Many people from further east were grey-eyed with reddish beards which could be from an affinity for the grey of steel and the reddy-brown colour of iron ore. Some called it "ironic" that bronze was displaced by metal which rusts away.
An Indian word for colour, rang, can be connected to rank, as in the military sense and it seems to carry a value judgment. It must seem unfair to someone of dark complexion that proper and equitable treatment of people is called fair. Kala means good in modern Greek and in other Indo-European languages it can mean black which tends to counter the idea that only fair is good, although it is like gala - milk. People from Africa and Arabia must have felt left out of the system of values of people from further north and took it as a sign when the black rock now at Mecca fell from the sky that black was heavenly and good. Some say Jesus was black but pictures usually show a man of more northern type. Religions use appealing imagery to gain influence. Malak meant milk in many languages and was the word used originally for angel in Hebrew - angelos in Greek. Religious people must have ascribed to the northern peoples' seamen a seminal role which shows why rulers of Egypt could link the Milky Way and Orion with the Nile and the pyramids at Giza; it celebrated the fertilising of Egypt with a cultural strain from the northern lands, the lands of the huntsmen. That is supported by Plato's description of the founding of Egypt in his fabulous work on Atlantis.
8 In the Name of the King
Beowulf was said to be set in Denmark and literature supplied to universities through HMSO states that as fact, which serves to eliminate the tradition of Offa and Cynethryth from English culture leaving the field open for a Celtic Arthur. Similarly, Leire, which relates to a word for learning in German and means a military camp in Danish, fits as having been connected to the Danish control of eastern and northern England but was said to be in Denmark which worked toward eliminating that whole period of disagreement between the Christianised English and the followers of the earlier traditions from historical study. So Geoffrey of Monmouth deliberately misled people about Leire and Arthur/Offa. Dunstan trained the monks at Glastonbury in foundry work and in time they kept the royal treasure. It was easy for them to produce the cross with Arturius inscribed on it. Dunstan maddened his king and was saved from death by men from the "eastern kingdom" - perhaps a relatively stable eastern part of England although the church's scholars said it was Flanders.
Offa and Penda drew on culture common to different northern lands in taking their names. When the western powers were starting to gain control of the Far East with Portuguese missionaries active in Japan, a leader there adopted the name Ieyasu which, being very like the Portuguese, Jesu, helped to keep the missionaries at bay since it was difficult to preach in the name of a Japanese ruler. Apparently, English and Dutch advisers were involved, which forms the background of James Clavell's novel, Shogun. Later, Mao Tse-tung led his people on a long march and his name is very like Eastern Moses since tung means east. So it was not surprising to read in the Times of London that that was an adopted name. His little red book is like a bible. He seems to have used the same technique as earlier leaders to deal with foreign influence and he turned against Tibet where people worship images of a golden calf. So perhaps he used scripture and was led by it.
I hope that this enquiry into the legends of King Arthur and related matters may help to bring the different techniques of cultural management under more informed observation.
Copyright ã Andrew Burbidge 1996, 1999, 2002. All rights reserved.