The Isle of Avalon and Some Strange Tales from the Middle Ages: Investigating King Arthur, Medieval Romance and Echoes of Reincarnation

By R S Robinson

If you have ever stood amongst the barrows on a hilltop in England and wondered about the spirituality that existed in this land before the Romans brought Christianity to its shores, then this book will delight you and, perhaps, astonish you. It is widely known that the Iron Age druids in Britain believed in a form of reincarnation known as the transmigration of souls. What is less well-known, and what over twenty years of experience translating medieval Arthurian legend and romance into modern English prose has taught the author, is that the unwritten doctrine that the druids taught may have been preserved in the stories and legends of medieval France and England in the twelfth century, and then for two hundred years afterwards. Amongst them, the legends of King Arthur.

 

Don't look to an age of Saxon invasion for this controversial king. Such placement brings serious historians out in a rash. This book will demonstrate that the source of his power lies way further back, in the Iron Age and further back still, to an antique world of Bronze Age sword-making and priests defending sacred springs.

 

The Isle of Avalon interprets many of the medieval tales that have come down to us as allegories, carefully honed extended metaphors that were intended to reveal teachings that the Celtic druids would have recognised and embraced. Similarities and parallels are found in:

• The Breton lais of Marie de France
• The Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes
• Irish legend and mythology
• Welsh mythology
• Norse mythology
• Middle English legends of Sir Gawain
• Middle English romances
• Stories of Sir Lancelot of the Lake
• The legend of Tristan and Isolde
• Twelfth century Anglo-Norman romances
• Middle English Breton lais

In these tales there are giants in abundance, dragons, damsels in distress, but there is one theme especially that is endemic to them all. And a close reading of these stories, and of this ubiquitous theme in particular, may reveal the astonishing form in which the druidic belief in reincarnation was held.

 

The reader is guided through these medieval stories, shown the large number of parallels with European mythology, and may at last be able to stand on a hilltop in Britain and feel the spirit of the land once again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: River Yar Books
• Release date: Jun 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739402105

Book preview

The Isle of Avalon

and some Strange Tales from the Middle Ages

Investigating King Arthur, Medieval Romance and Echoes of Reincarnation

by

R S Robinson

River Yar Books logo

© Copyright 2023 by R S Robinson. All rights reserved.

No parts of this book may be copied, distributed, or published in any form without permission from the publisher. For permissions contact: [e-mail]

Published by River Yar Books, Freshwater, England.

The rights of Richard Alan Scott-Robinson as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN ebook: 978-1-7394021-0-5

Cover design by R S Robinson

For full translations and retellings in modern English of many of the Middle English stories and legends explored here, and others as well, visit: https://reflection.eleusinianm.co.uk

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction

2. King Arthur

3. The Otherworld

4. The Unknown Knight

5. The Isle of Ladies

6. Shades

7. Animals

8. Giants

9. Matriarchy

10. Sir Lancelot

11. Sir Tristrem

12. Sir Gawain

13. Sir Perceval and the Graal

14. The Fair Unknown

15. The Isle of Avalon

16. Sir Yvain

Notes

References and Further Reading

Translated Middle English Texts

Index

Landmarks

Cover

Preface

Reading Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances for the first time is an odd experience, if you have been brought up believing that King Arthur was a real king who fought Saxons in post-Roman Britain. Chrétien de Troyes wrote in France and possibly England in the second half of the twelfth century and his stories take place in an ethereal landscape with not a Saxon in sight. Rather than battling invaders, the reader follows his knights of the Round Table as they encounter some very curious adventures.

A growing acquaintance with the Arthurian literature of the succeeding two centuries of the late Middle Ages only heightens this sense of puzzlement. Some of these stories that come down to us, despite a dazzling Christian veneer, hint at the distant threat of a Rome that is advancing and demanding tribute from client kingdoms, not a fragmenting Rome beset by vandals. The Roman Republic that Julius Caesar would have recognised. And perhaps here is a clue. Scholars acknowledge that the many medieval French and English legends of King Arthur derive in large part from the ancient memories and storytelling traditions of Cornwall and Brittany. So is it not likely that the themes and allegories of a pre-Christian culture, intentionally or unintentionally, may have been preserved in these stories?

This is the idea that will be explored in this book. Medieval Arthurian literature as a window into a distant past and a lost spirituality. Caesar described in his history of the Gallic wars of the first century BC how the Celtic lands of Britain and Gaul held onto a belief in the transmigration of souls. In reincarnation. By comparing medieval tales of Arthur with Irish, Welsh and Norse mythology, and exploring other avenues as well, we may find that medieval writers were able to preserve what were essentially the religious stories of the druids of pre-Roman Britain, maintaining pagan allegories and ambiance right up until William Caxton printed the works of Sir Thomas Malory on his press in London, in 1485.

This work will look at Arthurian legend and more widely at medieval romance in general, and especially those stories that trace their written origin to the twelfth century courts of England and France. Similar ideas and extended metaphors will be found in both the Arthurian world and in the landscape of medieval romance more generally, and it all seems to have begun with the Breton lais of Marie de France, for whom King Arthur was no stranger, when the oral tales of Breton storytellers were set in writing for the first time. So what better than to have a look, first of all, at a particularly intriguing scene from one of Marie’s lais, the Breton lai of Guigemar:

Introduction

This passage is from a Breton tale of the twelfth century penned by Marie de France. Another of her tales, Lanval, is set at the court of King Arthur – King Arthur, who was himself taken away in a mysterious boat to the Isle of Avalon, to be healed of a mortal wound.

Here is another strange scene from a twelfth century romance, the Story of the Graal (Conte du Graal) by Chrétien de Troyes. The original story of the Grail. Perceval calls from the banks of a river to ask if there is a crossing place nearby and is told by a gentleman fishing in a boat that he can lodge with him for the night if he likes, since evening is drawing in. The fishing nobleman gives Perceval directions to his castle, but when Perceval climbs to the top of a ridge he sees – nothing. Nothing but an endless expanse of forest. But then, as though by magic, a castle appears amongst the trees below him. The Graal Castle.¹

That scene by Chrétien de Troyes was written in about 1180. In an earlier tale by the same author, Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion) Sir Yvain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, arrives at a spring. Beside this pristine pool grows a pine tree next to a chapel, and beside the water is a stone to which is attached a basin. Yvain fills the basin with water and pours it onto the stone. Immediately, and as a direct result of his actions, thunder crashes, lightening streaks, and rain descends in torrents. Then, when this violent squall has passed, the sky clears and the tree is suddenly alive with birds, the air is filled with glorious birdsong. Immediately, a mysterious Black Knight arrives, seeking to defend his spring by armed combat.

Sir James George Frazer, in the nineteenth century, wrote a huge work, The Golden Bough, seeking to explain the significance of a 'Priest of Nemi' in ancient Rome who guarded a tree beside a lake in the Alban Hills, thirty kilometres southeast of that city, near a wood that was sacred to the goddess Diana. This ‘priest’, like Sir Yvain, was required to defend his tree, just as his victim and assailant had done. Frazer was able to trace parallels back into prehistoric culture and belief, from a setting that seems almost identical to the one evoked in Yvain, the Knight of the Lion.² So perhaps there is something deeper-lying beneath all this medieval Arthurian chivalry, knights in shining armour and nostalgia for a lost king and a lost age. The tales of King Arthur include not only strange and supernatural happenings, they evoke a mysterious ambience and often a real sense of something undisclosed. Perhaps this is why they have remained so popular for so long.

Much of the historical material in the medieval legends of King Arthur is of the age in which it was written. Knights ride across a feudal landscape with lances feutred in the latest military fashion. Castles are stormed with the latest siege engines. Seas are crossed in contemporary, fourteenth century 'cogs'. But there are other things which do not sit comfortably with the age. Knights are required to defend sacred groves, as we have just seen. Supernatural happenings occur beside springs and lakes. Young knights are keen to fight for the hand of a maiden, for the control of a kingdom. It is she who will maintain the royal line. Omniscient damsels arrive on cue, knowing a knight’s intimate business. Giants are fought with, dwarves are encountered, dragons are slain. Human heads are taken as trophies. Mysterious Otherworlds are entered. Enchanted castles are liberated, castles which often house the dead and in one particular instance the grave, already, of its liberator. These and others, it will be argued, are the ancient elements, the themes and occurrences that pervade the Arthurian stories and which bear no relation to any post-Roman, fifth or sixth century character who fought Saxons and whom we may wish to put forward as the historical King Arthur. It is the echo of an age that was antique even in the sixth century AD.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's widely popular History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae), completed in AD 1136, introduced King Arthur to the medieval world.³ Five long verse romances by the Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes in the 1170s and 1180s injected much of the mythical element into the Arthurian legends, augmented by the Breton lais of Marie de France, which added greatly to the ambiance. Another two centuries of voluminous composition, often anonymous, always mysterious and exciting, testifies to the popularity, not to say fascination, found with the material. The spell culminated in England, before its nineteenth century revival, with the printing of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur on William Caxton's new printing press at Westminster in 1485; a work that remains in print to this day.

During this late medieval period, lost works of the Roman and Greek classical age were beginning to find their way back to Europe via the Arabs. The first stirrings of the European Renaissance took place in the twelfth century, awakenings that were much later to bloom into the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. Pagan authors became highly sought after. There was literary interest in the Roman goddesses Venus and Diana, and even in an Isle of Ladies. In our endeavour to shed light upon an ancient British belief system we will encounter this astonishing medieval tale by an anonymous poet and be briefly examining the creative stirrings of Geoffrey Chaucer and some other English poets as well, Edmund Spenser and William Blake, to show that the light has been kept alive, perhaps through the poetic intuition that William Blake considered to be the very source of religion. The Celtic druids, one feels sure, would have agreed. But the stronger thread will run through the Arthurian world and wind back into the depths of pre-Christian Britain to a world of Celtic chieftains, Iron Age druids and perhaps much earlier even than that. Along this umbilical cord will come ideas that fed the renaissance of Arthurian legend.⁴

One motif in particular is endemic in Arthurian romance, and in late medieval romance in general, so endemic that it seems often to be taken for granted and not given the attention it deserves. This is not because it is in any way obscure; although in Christian Europe of the late Middle Ages its possible meaning could not have been alluded to directly. Occurrences are so widespread in medieval literature, so ubiquitous in romance and in Arthurian legend in particular, that its significance is assured. This endemic motif and others in these stories obtain their power, it will be argued, from an underlying imperative, a need that fuelled the twelfth century literature from which they sprang and that goes a long way to explaining the popularity of these tales, and others derived from them, for many centuries afterwards. It was not so much the re-creation of an Iron Age world of warriors and sacred springs that these tales sought to achieve as a recasting of the ideas that underlay this world, ideas that were ancient, ideas that amongst other things sought to portray a belief in reincarnation.

There is no need to look to the east, to Hindu temples, Sri Lanka, Japan, Thailand or to the proud but exiled Tibetan monks to find this idea nurtured and cherished. Irish mythology is steeped in a metaphorical landscape that illustrates the ideas that have come down from a pagan European past in a beautiful and passionate way, if one has the imagination to see. Scottish folk tales tap into ancient ground and Scandinavian mythology emerges from a pre-Christian age through the literature of medieval Iceland, although written after the introduction of Christianity. There are clues to pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon beliefs. There exist books of ancient poems and tales in Old Welsh.⁵ And underlying the Arthurian stories and the weird but fascinating medieval romances in Old French and Middle English, are twelfth century tales told by Breton storytellers and recorded in Breton lais that claim ancestry in the distant Celtic past. The stories contained in the vast Arthurian corpus have the feel of a world long vanished, a vibrant antiquity that their medieval clothes were perhaps never fully intended to conceal.

2. King Arthur

To claim that the stories of Arthur can trace their origin to well before the fifth century AD needs some explaining. The popular perception is that the world of King Arthur is to be found in the British Dark Ages between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the early fifth century AD and the final establishment of the Saxon kingdoms and Anglian Northumbria about two hundred years later. The basis for such a post-Roman setting for King Arthur rests on the influential work of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century AD and appears to be corroborated by a much earlier historical treatise, the Historia Brittonum, or the History of the Britons, attributed to the monk Nennius in the ninth century AD. However, there are a number of problems with placing King Arthur in this period, many relating to the sort of document that the monk known to us as Nennius was creating, and which Geoffrey of Monmouth certainly knew, but also concerning the kind of world invoked in the subsequent legends about King Arthur and to the fact that our earliest sources for this period, which are admittedly few, make no mention of him at all. Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ('Ecclesiastical History of the English People' written in the 8th century AD) for example, De Excidio Conquesta Britanniae ('On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain')¹ by the sixth century monk Gildas, and the earliest references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; all these fail to make any mention of King Arthur, and modern historical scholarship is by no means convinced that he ever existed. In fact the very mention of King Arthur is apt to bring serious historians out in a rash. He is too mixed up with legend and literature.

There is mounting evidence that the monk Nennius created his warrior hero Arthur from the fifth century deeds of a Romano-British war leader named Ambrosius Aurelianus. He did this because he needed a British hero with a Welsh-sounding name to add focus to what was principally a political treatise that he was writing. There is very little reliable history in the Historia Brittonum, and there is no evidence for a historical war leader named Arthur in any document that dates to before this work. In essence, Nennius made him up.² But he did not make up the name Arthur. Arthur exists in Welsh poetry that dates to before the Historia Brittonum. But in these poems, Arthur is not a historical character at all, but clearly a mythological hero. In fact, even in the Historia Brittonum itself, there are references to natural features of the landscape attributed to the mythological and legendary feats of Arthur and those associated with him.³

Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae ('History of the Kings of Britain')⁴ was completed in about AD 1136, is a major source for the alleged 'historical' King Arthur. His work greatly expands upon Nennius's account, in ways that are widely considered to owe a great deal to Geoffrey's fertile imagination. He describes the abandonment of Britain by the Romans, an event which is known to have occurred around AD 410. He describes wars with the Picts and Scots and the invitation into Britain, by the British leader Vortigern, of Saxon mercenaries to help in this conflict, an event that is dated by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to AD 449. He describes a young man, Arthur, whose father had himself been a young bachelor when the Saxons had first arrived in Britain; a young man, Arthur, raised to kingship at the age of fifteen when the Saxons had already for a generation been harrying and settling in parts of the island, and when enemies were especially liable to issue forth from the rugged highlands to the north. When Arthur came to power, Geoffrey tells us, the Saxons occupied a portion of the country stretching from the River Humber to Caithness.

From the River Humber to Caithness! This statement implies that the Saxons had overrun hostile Pictish kingdoms in the far north, which in the light of what is known of the period seems very unlikely; in fact the statement flies in the face of all that is known about the pattern of Saxon settlement during the mid-to-late fifth century, focusing, as it did, upon the eastern and southern coastline of what is now England. In fact, archaeological research is increasingly questioning whether any such mass migration of Saxons and Angles ever took place at all, in any part of the British Isles. Continuity of settlement through the late Roman period and into Saxon times and beyond strongly suggests that although the culture of southern and eastern England changed, the people who now looked eastwards to Germany and Scandinavia for their fashion and ideas were for the most part direct descendants of those southern British who had been Roman citizens only a few generations before.⁵ Other fields of scientific enquiry support this emerging view of immigration and assimilation, rather than invasion and conquest.⁶ It seems that Geoffrey's Saxon invasions never took place, not even in Caithness! Like much in Geoffrey's work, the deeper one goes into it the less sense it seems to make. And this is very clearly illustrated by Arthur's subsequent career across Europe.

Geoffrey tells us that, in a number of glorious military engagements, King Arthur defeats the Saxons who had been the bane of his father's reign, together with their Pictish and Scottish allies to the north; then he subdues an Irish army, invades Ireland itself and then Iceland. For twelve years his fame spreads, and widespread fear of his might prompts him to conceive the idea of conquering the whole of Europe. He invades and subdues both Norway and Denmark, and attacks Gaul, which is under Roman jurisdiction. Over the space of the next nine years, Arthur campaigns to bring all of Gaul into his empire, and having secured his rule there, returns to Britain and to a lavish celebration of his own greatly extended kingship. At these festivities, he is interrupted by a delegation from Rome. They carry orders that he pay the tribute that is owed to Rome and that he take himself to that city in order to receive the punishment due to him for annexing Gaul. King Arthur crosses the water back into Gaul, but not as a man intent upon apology. A Roman army gathers to meet him, which he defeats in a glorious engagement, sending its commander back to Rome in a coffin. He and his forces are about to march upon Rome itself when insurrection at home forces him to abandon his advance and return to Britain. Here he meets his doom at the Battle of Camlann, against his nephew Mordred; and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is the story of King Arthur, as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth. But it has to be said that, leaving aside a lack of corroborating evidence in any continental annals for all this, which must itself be a cause for serious scepticism, it sits very uncomfortably with the general political landscape of fifth century western Europe.

So, what does Nennius say about Arthur? Nennius wrote in the ninth century AD⁷ and under instructions, apparently, from his ecclesiastical superiors to compile a history of Britain before the wholesale destruction of books in monastic libraries by Viking marauders made the material for such a work all but lost forever. So the passionately British cleric wrote a short work in sixty-six sections, each often of a single paragraph only,⁸ in which, in addition to much history that is now considered spurious, there is an account of a war leader who fought against Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries AD and was called Arthur. This Arthur, however, was not a king; in fact Nennius states categorically that there were many more noble than he. Yet he appears to have been a brilliant field commander of the British forces and twelve times conqueror over the Angles and Saxons. However, a close perusal of his twelve battles reveal some that are now known, from contemporary and even older Welsh poems, to have taken place not in real life but in an Otherworld of myth and folklore, against giants, werewolves and witches.⁹ And in the section of Nennius that makes this relatively brief mention of Arthur, a curious paragraph states, concerning a slightly earlier period, that: 'Gracian Aequantius was then the consul at Rome, for the entire world at that time was governed by the Roman consuls.' This is a curious statement to make in the context of Rome in the fifth century AD, whose Emperors had ruled for many centuries. But perhaps it is a clue to the antiquity of some of the garbled sources used by Nennius and by Geoffrey of Monmouth after him. That 'the entire world at that time was governed by the Roman consuls' would be a perfectly natural statement to make in the context of Republican Rome.

Before the arrival in Gaul of Julius Caesar in 58 BC, five hundred years before the age we have just been considering, Rome had for nearly five hundred years previously been governed by a senate headed by two consuls, elected annually from the ranks of the senators. This was the age of the Roman Republic. These consuls were expected to be active military leaders in a way that was not desirable in the bureaucratic late Empire. They often headed the army on campaign, as did A. Quintus Sulpicius in 390 BC when he met a large Celtic army led by a warrior named Brenos, twelve miles north of Rome itself. His own ranks were routed and the Celtic victory led to the burning of Rome and a six-month-long siege of the Capitoline hill, a siege which was broken, and the city of Rome returned to its inhabitants, only by the payment of a large quantity of gold. In 225 BC a large Celtic army arrived on the plains of northern Italy, its numbers swollen with allies from among the Celtic tribes living within this area of Cisalpine Gaul. Rome again sent one of her consuls, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, into the region with an army, while her other consul, Gaius Antilius Regulus, was recalled with his army from Sardinia. A third Roman army was mauled in central Italy in an engagement with these Celtic forces but, by a turn of fate that neither side had anticipated, the Celts subsequently found themselves trapped between the two consular Roman armies and were defeated.¹⁰

By 113 BC, Rome had occupied the whole of Cisalpine Gaul (the Celtic homelands of northern Italy), and extended her influence well into Gaul itself, annexing the modern French region of Provence as her own territory, as well as controlling regions of what are now Spain, Greece, Turkey and North Africa. In this year, she was faced by a Celtic army of Cimbri and Teutoni. These forces had been sweeping through northern and central Europe in an orgy of conquest for seven years, and inflicted a disastrous defeat on a Roman army sent to meet it.¹¹ However, these Celtic forces then moved westwards into Gaul. In 107 BC, trouble blew up again from the same quarter. In response, the Roman senate sent the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus in command of an army to confront the Celts. His forces were defeated and he himself was killed. A second Roman army managed to contain the situation, but two years later, with the Cimbri still posing a threat not only to Rome's territories and client states in Gaul but, it was perceived, to Rome herself, another army was dispatched. This army was routed by the Celtic forces and the terror of a Celtic invasion of the Roman heartland, just as had happened three hundred years earlier, loomed frighteningly large in the Roman mind.¹² Inexplicably, however, the way to Rome, which lay open and unopposed, went untrodden by the Celtic warriors. Barry Cunliffe, a respected archaeologist, has written: 'It is difficult to overestimate the effects of these traumatic years on the Roman psyche.'¹³ Perhaps they left some mark on Celtic tradition, as well.

Fifty years later, Gaul was conquered for Rome by Julius Caesar¹⁴ and a century after Caesar's Gallic campaign, Britain was added to the western Empire by the Emperor Claudius.

There are