More than three years after The King Arthur Conspiracy was published, the British media have been all over this story (representative sample from The Guardian).
Apparently, a research team from the University of Reading have concluded that the monks of Glastonbury made up the story that King Arthur was buried there, and an awful lot more besides.
I said as much in The King Arthur Conspiracy (and, incidentally, in The Grail, published earlier this year). So - vindicated!
Wonder what else the media will suddenly discover in the coming months, that I also wrote about a few years back ...
(Watch this space)
Showing posts with label Glastonbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glastonbury. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
What do you think?
Here's the proposed blurb for "The King Arthur Conspiracy", just in from the publisher:
Most of what we know - or think we know - about King Arthur came from the pen of one Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1137. His account in a History of the Kings of Britain quickly became the accepted version of events. It was, however, extremely wide of the mark. With his story, Geoffrey created a myth and allowed the English to imagine that Arthur was one of their own. Indeed, to visit the grey ruins of Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall is to feel as though one has stepped into the world of Arthur. That feeling is illusory. The castle did not exist when Geoffrey wrote his account of Arthur's birth. It was built by the brother of Geoffrey's patron, who thereby created a sort of Arthurian theme-park in the wrong part of Britain.
A hero named Arthur undoubtedly existed, but his legend was stolen, uprooted from its proper place and time and transplanted to another country. The scam of Arthur's grave and the subsequent myth that Glastonbury was the Isle of Avalon formed a further part of the early Church's conspiracy to reinvent Arthur as an English paragon.
So where is Avalon - the blessed isle on which Arthur was buried? And who was the original King Arthur? Simon Andrew Stirling here draws on a vast range of sources and new translations of early British and Gaelic literature to identify history's true Arthur, and to pinpoint his precise burial location on Avalon.
Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.
Most of what we know - or think we know - about King Arthur came from the pen of one Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1137. His account in a History of the Kings of Britain quickly became the accepted version of events. It was, however, extremely wide of the mark. With his story, Geoffrey created a myth and allowed the English to imagine that Arthur was one of their own. Indeed, to visit the grey ruins of Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall is to feel as though one has stepped into the world of Arthur. That feeling is illusory. The castle did not exist when Geoffrey wrote his account of Arthur's birth. It was built by the brother of Geoffrey's patron, who thereby created a sort of Arthurian theme-park in the wrong part of Britain.
A hero named Arthur undoubtedly existed, but his legend was stolen, uprooted from its proper place and time and transplanted to another country. The scam of Arthur's grave and the subsequent myth that Glastonbury was the Isle of Avalon formed a further part of the early Church's conspiracy to reinvent Arthur as an English paragon.
So where is Avalon - the blessed isle on which Arthur was buried? And who was the original King Arthur? Simon Andrew Stirling here draws on a vast range of sources and new translations of early British and Gaelic literature to identify history's true Arthur, and to pinpoint his precise burial location on Avalon.
Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Trouble Ahead?
Apologies, good people, that the blogposts aren't coming thick and fast at the moment. There's a good reason for this. I'm just going through the publishing contract for the ARTHUR book (title to be determined), and there's a meeting with the publishers next week. Originally, the plan had been to self-publish. Now that The History Press have accepted the book for publication, the book won't be coming out until next year. So I have to be careful not to give away all the revelations in the book before then. So I'm having to rethink the blogspots.
It's only recently come to my attention that a minister in Ohio published a book a year or two ago. "The Revelation of Arthur" seems to argue that there is evidence in the Scriptures, of all places, for the existence of Arthur, and that Arthur was or is nothing less than the Anti-Christ.
Ooh. Oh dear. Looks like the greatest hero Britain has ever known might have been a baddie, folks.
Well, maybe not. As the song says, it ain't necessarily so. But the minister's book does raise an interesting issue: that of the Church and its attitudes towards Arthur.
The Church has long been ambivalent towards Arthur, to say the least. There's a charming story, first told early in the 1200s, of a preaching abbot who, realising that his flock wasn't really listening, suddenly said: "Listen! I have a strange and wonderful tale to tell. There was once a king called Arthur ..." And all his monks started paying attention.
The Church didn't like that sort of thing. Arthur, and the stories told about him, were just too popular. But the ecclesiastical antagonism towards Arthur and his fellows went back much further than that.
It was a senior missionary of the early Church in Britain who arranged the assassination of Arthur. The evidence for this is produced in the book (coming out next summer, all being well), and relies on contemporary poems of Arthur's last battle and his burial. Having killed him, the Church then did its best to forget all about him. If there is a supposed paucity of information available about the historical Arthur, the reason is because the medieval Church had a practical monopoly of writing, and anything that was not approved of by the Church was liable to be expunged from the records.
In fact, it's a miracle of sorts that any information survives about Arthur (although you wouldn't know it if you just followed the discussions of the Arthur 'experts', who often go out of their way to ignore what information there is). Arthur's popularity prevented him from disappearing altogether, and the best that the Church could do was to convert him into a Christian king. Oh, and also to pretend that he was buried at Glastonbury.
The discovery that Arthur's principal enemy was a churchman, and that this churchman betrayed Arthur and effectively handed Britain on a plate to Arthur's enemies, did not form part of any preconceived notion with which I approached the research. No - it emerged, painfully and reluctantly, during the course of the research. I read the contemporary sources and tried to figure out what they were saying.
The poem of Arthur's last battle, for example, makes no bones about it: Arthur and his men suffered a treacherous surprise attack at the hands of a "raucous pilgrim army", a "tempest of pilgrims". They were betrayed by a priest, who also happened to be one of Arthur's twenty-four 'Round Table' knights. But the real conspirator - the puppet-master, if you will - kept away from the scene of the final battle. He was present, however, at Arthur's burial. And the chief poet of the time makes his contempt for the famous saint all too apparent.
The minister in Ohio and his book, "The Revelation of Arthur", would appear to be taking the Church's fear and loathing of Arthur to a new level. In his eyes, evidently, Arthur was not just a British warlord who fell foul of an early saint: oh no, he was the Anti-Christ.
Perhaps, when the complicity of certain early saints in the death of Arthur and the betrayal of Britain becomes clear, the Church will actually have cause to proclaim Arthur as the antithesis of their own culture hero. Till then, it should be pretty obvious that there are no references to Arthur in the Scriptures. The Church is simply attacking Arthur as it has done so often in the past because he is popular.
I do, however, see the minister's crackpot theory as a bit of a warning. Since I pieced together the evidence surrounding Arthur's death I have been aware that some of this will not go down at all well in certain circles. It will be interesting to see how representatives of the Church - like the minister in Ohio - respond to the fact that the early Church was responsible for Arthur's death.
Even after fifteen hundred years, Arthur and the Church are still at loggerheads. And I can't wait to present the case for the defence. Anti-Christ? No. Victim of the Church? Yes.
The Church, I suspect, won't like that at all.
It's only recently come to my attention that a minister in Ohio published a book a year or two ago. "The Revelation of Arthur" seems to argue that there is evidence in the Scriptures, of all places, for the existence of Arthur, and that Arthur was or is nothing less than the Anti-Christ.
Ooh. Oh dear. Looks like the greatest hero Britain has ever known might have been a baddie, folks.
Well, maybe not. As the song says, it ain't necessarily so. But the minister's book does raise an interesting issue: that of the Church and its attitudes towards Arthur.
The Church has long been ambivalent towards Arthur, to say the least. There's a charming story, first told early in the 1200s, of a preaching abbot who, realising that his flock wasn't really listening, suddenly said: "Listen! I have a strange and wonderful tale to tell. There was once a king called Arthur ..." And all his monks started paying attention.
The Church didn't like that sort of thing. Arthur, and the stories told about him, were just too popular. But the ecclesiastical antagonism towards Arthur and his fellows went back much further than that.
It was a senior missionary of the early Church in Britain who arranged the assassination of Arthur. The evidence for this is produced in the book (coming out next summer, all being well), and relies on contemporary poems of Arthur's last battle and his burial. Having killed him, the Church then did its best to forget all about him. If there is a supposed paucity of information available about the historical Arthur, the reason is because the medieval Church had a practical monopoly of writing, and anything that was not approved of by the Church was liable to be expunged from the records.
In fact, it's a miracle of sorts that any information survives about Arthur (although you wouldn't know it if you just followed the discussions of the Arthur 'experts', who often go out of their way to ignore what information there is). Arthur's popularity prevented him from disappearing altogether, and the best that the Church could do was to convert him into a Christian king. Oh, and also to pretend that he was buried at Glastonbury.
The discovery that Arthur's principal enemy was a churchman, and that this churchman betrayed Arthur and effectively handed Britain on a plate to Arthur's enemies, did not form part of any preconceived notion with which I approached the research. No - it emerged, painfully and reluctantly, during the course of the research. I read the contemporary sources and tried to figure out what they were saying.
The poem of Arthur's last battle, for example, makes no bones about it: Arthur and his men suffered a treacherous surprise attack at the hands of a "raucous pilgrim army", a "tempest of pilgrims". They were betrayed by a priest, who also happened to be one of Arthur's twenty-four 'Round Table' knights. But the real conspirator - the puppet-master, if you will - kept away from the scene of the final battle. He was present, however, at Arthur's burial. And the chief poet of the time makes his contempt for the famous saint all too apparent.
The minister in Ohio and his book, "The Revelation of Arthur", would appear to be taking the Church's fear and loathing of Arthur to a new level. In his eyes, evidently, Arthur was not just a British warlord who fell foul of an early saint: oh no, he was the Anti-Christ.
Perhaps, when the complicity of certain early saints in the death of Arthur and the betrayal of Britain becomes clear, the Church will actually have cause to proclaim Arthur as the antithesis of their own culture hero. Till then, it should be pretty obvious that there are no references to Arthur in the Scriptures. The Church is simply attacking Arthur as it has done so often in the past because he is popular.
I do, however, see the minister's crackpot theory as a bit of a warning. Since I pieced together the evidence surrounding Arthur's death I have been aware that some of this will not go down at all well in certain circles. It will be interesting to see how representatives of the Church - like the minister in Ohio - respond to the fact that the early Church was responsible for Arthur's death.
Even after fifteen hundred years, Arthur and the Church are still at loggerheads. And I can't wait to present the case for the defence. Anti-Christ? No. Victim of the Church? Yes.
The Church, I suspect, won't like that at all.
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