anyway just a reminder for the myth lovers out there
king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.
on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.
i’m just saying in my experience a lot of these legends had been so anglo-fied in the past and it’s like, all this cool shit is celtic welsh legend.
Arthur’s wife was called Gwenhwyfar first.
Like the kraken I emerge, summoned by the English theft of Arthur
Arthur is a Welsh name. It means ‘bear’. He’s likely derived from a Gaulish bear god
In the form of King Arthur, he is an anti-Saxon mythological WELSH figure, representing the native Brythonic people of Britain against the Anglo-Saxon invaders, dating from the 500s AD
The version appropriated by the English in the 1100s is the shitty boring sanitised version - they did it because they were trying to compete with the romance tradition on the continent at the time but didn’t have anything of their own to romanticise
Merlin is called Myrddin
Percival is Peredur
Kay is Cei, and also was subject to enormous character assassination in the English version - in the Welsh version he’s much closer to Arthur’s right hand man
Guinevere is Gwenhwyfar
There is no Lancelot, no Galahad, no tedious affair story
There is no Camelot. Arthur’s seat was Caerllion - modern Caerleon, putting him into both the region of the Silures (one of the most fearsome and warlike of the British tribes, modern South East Wales) and the old Roman fortress, which would have been an impossibly huge Palace for a warlord at the time.
They all have super powers and get up to wacky hijinks involving hair care, giants, strange giant wildlife, spectral revolving/glass fortresses in the Celtic sea, and a really fucking weird chess match. Also a cloak made out of beards.
What the fuck is the round table
Anyway it’s particularly irritating because traditional Welsh culture and beliefs have been so thoroughly stripped away and destroyed by England over the centuries, and Arthurian legend is one of the few surviving fragments we have left to preserve. And he’s specifically an anti-English figure. So the ubiquity of the boring and appropriative English Arthur across the whole fucking world is… Well, it’s not great.
This is so interesting! Does anyone know a good source/reading material where one could get more of the original Welsh versions of the stories?
The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies is your best bet! It’s got a bunch of big-ass Welsh myths in, but most relevantly it includes Culhwch ac Olwen, which is a full-on Arthurian text (plus a couple of interesting ones).
There’s a whole bunch more that’s survived in fragments, but they’re all in Old Welsh - fully readable if you speak Welsh, but obviously not much use if you don’t (I don’t know if you do or not but from context I’m guessing not lol).
Trioedd Ynys Prydain (literally “the Triads of the Island of Britain”, though in English they’re usually called “the Welsh Triads”) are a huge collection of lists of three things from Welsh lore, including a lot of Arthurian lore. They’re not stories, but they contain fascinating allusions to stories, to whole strains of the Arthurian tradition, that we may or may not have elsewhere.
Keep reading
Okay, this is bothering me slightly
It’s almost impossible to say that Arthur ‘was’ anything, there have been so many legends around him that a ‘historical’ Arthur is completely lost behind them. It’s actually probable that he never existed.
The historical or legendary Arthur wasn’t Welsh, he was British, as in belonging to the Celtic people who were in Britain before the Germanic tribes invaded. These people ended up in what is now Wales and Cornwall, which is why some versions of the Arthurian legends survived in Welsh. It’s also why Welsh and Cornish are a different language group (Celtic) than English (Germanic). Some people think Arthur might have been Romano-British (because the Romans were in England before the Angles and Saxons).
It wasn’t (only) the English who drastically changed the legends, it was the French, who got hold of these stories and thought they would make great material for romances. It was the French writer Chrétien de Troyes who came up with the Lancelot and Guinevere story. It was also the French who changed Merlin’s name from Myrddin, because it sounded too much like merde (shit)
Saying the the English or French appropriated or ruined the ‘original’ legends isn’t really accurate, if they hadn’t taken up and expanded the legends, no one would remember these stories at all. It’s more helpful to think of two (or more) versions of Arthurian legends, both equally valid. There are the very early (no one’s actually sure how early) British legends, of which we only have scattered and sometimes conflicting fragments, and then there are the medieval romances (several centuries later), which are a completely different thing. They were basically historical fantasy for French aristocrats (which isn’t a bad thing). They were stories that the French made up about a mythical England, so it’s no surprise that geography, history, names, etc are all over the place. The authors of the medieval legends weren’t interested in being accurate, they were interested in creating a fun fantasy world. Which is fine, but over time, the two versions got all mixed up together (thanks in large part to Malory, who just threw everything he could find into Morte d’Arthur), and so now it’s hard to keep them apart and people keep looking for the ‘original’ Arthur
