[soljos-deactivated20211229]

When my family assume I’m lying in bed

I am stretched on your sweet tomb

From fall of darkness until morning

Weeping my torment eternally

And sobbing, howling, woundedly, unceasingly,

For my headstrong, fierce, intelligent girl

Who had been mine since childhood!

— Atáim Sínte Air do Thuamba / I Am Stretched On Your Grave, III

[the-evil-clergyman]

The Lady of ye Lake, from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle (1922)

[llannau]

Thin places are snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways. They are aha moments, beautiful realizations, when the Son of God bursts through the hazy fog of our monotony and shines on us afresh.

Mary E. DeMuth, Thin Places: A Memoir

[zaatanna-moved]

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.

[jackironsides]

Arthur’s wife was called Gwenhwyfar first.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

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.

[may-or-may-not-be-me]

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?

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

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).

[cythraul]

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

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Absolutely fantastic addition, yes, Rachel Bronwich’s Triads are glorious.

[alifeingrain]

Monmouthshire, Wales - September 2018

Rolleicord Vb on Kodak Portra 160

[yorksnapshots]

A Hackfall Folly, North Yorkshire, England.

[luthienne]

Lucille Clifton, from The Book of Light; “Here Yet Be Dragons”

[llannau]

R. Iestyn Daniel, Medieval Mysticism: An Example from Wales

[llannau]

Love is not so much a supernatural force that enters into us, with its origins in the Trinity, but rather a staged reflex of the human mind or soul responding to divine love. Love is a re-enacting of the structures of the Trinity within the human self by a gradual approximation of the self to God through infused grace; thus the pantheistic problem of using love univocally of human love and the essence or being of God is avoided. Love bridges and unites, but it does not eliminate difference. The thrust of our Welsh text however is subtly different. By explicitly identifying human love (that is love of our neighbour as well as love of God) with the love that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, our author is suggesting that there is an identity rather than a continuity between God, as love, and the self as loving act.

Oliver Davies, Celtic Christianity

[llannau]

Jane Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales

[llannau]

Maen Ceti, on Gower, south Wales. The massive capstone of this prehistoric burial chamber is known as Arthur's Stone. The king's ghost is said to emerge occasionally from beneath it. (Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales)

[llannau]

Place-names can be emblematic, compressed nuggets of forgotten history, and the mouth-filling sensuousness of Lindisfarne may have a tale to tell. It seems that the Romans knew it as Insula Medicata, and that may have referred to an island where plants grew that were useful for making balms, poultices or decoctions. Dialects of Old Welsh were spoken down the length of Britain before and after the Roman province of Britannia, and the native name of Ynys Medcaut derived directly from the Latin name.

Alistair Moffat, To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne

[llannau]

The Book of Aneirin, page from a 13th-century copy (Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales). 

[llannau]

Wales has generally been an intensely holy country, and its spiritually has been confused - the occult crossed with the intellectual, dogma reacting against ritual, and a rumour of mystery often hovering, as it hovered around the reputation of Owain, over its affairs and territories. 

Jan Morris, The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country

[rotgospels]

And I wandered on the mountain Under stars and by the fountain Saw your face in every flower Felt your presence every hour

[llannau]

Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages 

[wanderthewood]

Clogwyn Mawr, Snowdonia, Wales by Dan Thwaites