A Lot Of Camelot
During a brief letup in wholesale Austerity, we found ourselves the other day in 57th Street Books. mollpeartree coveted Jared Diamond's Third Chimpanzee, so I had an opening and took it, buying Mike Ashley's Mammoth Book of King Arthur for the amazingly low price (for a 670-page book) of $13.50. I've had spotty luck with the Mammoth series before; some are
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Cordelia, of the King Lear story, is probably the most promising example of this. While Geoffrey was writing the Historia, which is dated at circa 1138, civil war was really just getting started in England. In 1120, William, the heir to Henry I, drowns in the "White Ship." Henry is left with his daughter, Matilda, who had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. He had died, she had remarried Count Geoffrey of Anjou (aka "Plantagenet"). There's confusion about what Henry I did, each side has a different version. What we do know is that he required his vassals to swear loyalty to Matilda. What Stephen claims is that his uncle recanted on his deathbed, and made everybody in ( ... )
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The problem there is that so little of the relevant archaeological record has survived 1500 years of civilization, coal-mining, and Victorian archaeologists. Plus, my understanding is that there isn't a whole lot of reliable epigraphy for the era. Certainly we're not likely to find a marker labeled "Welcome to scenic Badon Hill. On this site, King Arthur, or as we liked to call him, Cadel Bright-Sword, handily defeated the Saxons in 497 A.D. We think it was cloudy, and a Tuesday."
I read Geoffrey in college as part of a linguistics project, and I'm quite inclined to think that a lot of the more popular figures are extremely heavily influenced by the politics of the day ( ... )
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