Paul's comments (member since Jan 03, 2009)

Paul's comments from the Arthuriana -- all things King Arthur ! group.

Plus, in that time, most people were familiar with the sight of disembowelled bodies, and most had probably loosed arrows, swung swords or thrust spears at bandits, intruders, footpads, vagabonds and the like. There is no need to describe things the audience is intimately familiar with.

Barbarossa, it was a while ago, I'll see if I can dig up the sources - no pun intended :)

Yes, at the weekend I like to be called Nikki. During the week, Nikki likes to be called Paul.

Interesting though that Lllew Llau Gyffes is the Welsh equivalent of th Irish god Lugh? And from him springs Cu Chullainn (Welsh Culhwch) who eventually aids Arthur to get Caledfwlch (Excalibur).

Intertwining, or what?

I'm off to Wales tomorrow for a week - no phones, no Internet - but we do have electricity. So, I'll take the laptop and write a full-length film script in a week! Do some general building and gardening in the afternoons. And some reviewing as well.

Bliss! (But I'll miss you all.) I expect I'll have 9000 emails to page through when I get back ;)

I think the Norse earles of Orkney arrived circa 790 and left circa 1231 when the Scottish kings took over. Malory wrote Morte d'Arthur in 1490's approx.

However, given an earlier Celtic interpretation of Gawain, Mordred etc as Gwalchmai, Meddrod (choose your variant spelling) it is quite likely that the Celtic Orkadians where extant at the time of the original Celtic Arthurian mythos, and Chretien de Troyes and Malory just interpreted it with suitable chivalric flourishes for the Mediaeval period in which they set it.

I don't think my frantic pawing at the invisible aerial creatures that torment me is a sign of madness - they really are there. No, really...

Did you go to Glastonbury Tor and Tintagel as well? Could also mention Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, though that might well be a later addition to the legend - a bit like all the birthplaces of Zeus that one trips over everywhere in Greece.

One a more serious note, I think there are several ways to present the Arthurian legend - mystic, military, romantic - though being a man, I owuldn't know much about that last one :-) It is a dark legend involving conquest, betrayal, rape, incest, murder, magic, the Old Ones and the change from paganism to Christianity with all the concomitant butchery and wholesale adoption of pagan legend that implies.

Waves Hi back to Dee,

And the starnge thing is that I was born and spent quite a few years in Tywyn, Merioneth - which is just four miles up the coast from Aberdyfi, where Stephen Lawhead set much of Taliesin and early parts of Merlin. So I DO know the geography of that part of the world really well - including the story that if you spend a night on the summit of Cader Idris, you come down in the morning either mad or a bard. I've spent several nights up there...:-)

Yes, I had forgotten Eschenbach. You would also need an understanding of Germanic, Saxon and Nordic culture, for which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The Prose Edda and Beowulf might be useful. Know your enemy, you might say. I agree with Dee that Roman culture and history, particularly reading Tacitus, Agricola, Caesar and Suetonius is important to give added insight into the background of Roman abandonment. Also knowledge of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Prydein - Tuaatha de Danaan for example, and Brian Boru and the Kings of Tara. Raids from the Irish sea-wolves would have been just as annoying as the gradual arrival of Saxons, Angles and Jutes. There is a definite need to know about Picts and Scotia as well. A knowledge of Celtic mythology and culture - they reckoned calendars by moon and night-time for example - would be a huge advantage, as would a knowledge of agriculture in Celtic times.

Also some of the annals of the early Christian church, since conversion always seems to be one of the key facets of Arthurian legend - the hunt for the Grail and so on. Joseph of Armithea anyone?

When the dew of creation was fresh on the ground ...
And this was the way of it...