"King of the 'oo?" "The Britons!" "'Oo're the Britons?"

[bloodygranuaile]

This week I finished a book that had been sitting in my TBR pile for a whopping total of eleven years.

In 2000 I was given a copy of Marie Trevelyan's Arthurian Legends as a prize when I won the Marion J. Carpenter Award for Excellence in Social Studies, which I was pretty excited about at the time, although now I am like “Man, I had forgotten that when you're little they call it 'social studies,'” and I think in 2000 that would have been the end of sixth grade, and I was... twelve? Anyway, I never quite got around to reading the whole book, and I had totally forgotten why when I picked it up earlier this week after watching Camelot and laughing about it. I remembered the language looked a little denser than I was probably quite prepared for at twelve, although I couldn't remember why I didn't then just read it when I was reading, like, The Silmarillion and stuff two and three years later.

The reason is that I only ever picked up the book when I was somehow engaging with some other sort of adaptation or spinoff of the Arthurian legend cycle, like when I went to see Spamalot, and decided that I needed to go read a more basic account of the “canon” stories that Spamalot or whatever else was based on, perhaps because I was missing the jokes. And despite the title, this book is not a collection of King Arthur stories! So then my interest would wane.

What this book is, is a history of the mythology of Wales, and about a third is dedicated to historical Arthurian research, and the rest is dedicated to the history and legends of all these other Welsh heroes that I'd never heard of. I have recently become more aware of the existence of Wales as a separate cultural entity from “it's in Great Britain”, so I decided to keep reading. I really don't think whoever gave this book to me when I was in sixth grade had read it. The book was originally written in 1895, so the narrative voice is in that quaintly insufferable style of Victorian historians, but at least 60% of the book consists of quotations from other sources. Any of these sources written after the Battle of Hastings have not been translated, which means that there's a fair amount of Middle English that is modern enough that someone a bit familiar with Middle English can read it but old enough that it's still technically considered a different language for a reason, and is basically not that sixth-grader friendly, even for a hugely nerdy one like me. Also, Welsh names amuse me, but they are a mouthful. So a pretty good chunk of this book is all written like “And then Abergwygwygwygwygwyd, tho hee was butt younge, did lede a grete armie agaynst the Saxons, aund hee did nott onlie win a grete uictorye, butt he gaue thee Saxons such a Thoro Kickynge of thee Hinde-Quarteres, thatt hee was appelled thenceforth as Aberfwydfwydfwydgwyw, or Afydfydfwywywywywywywy, in the Brittish tongue, or Gluteus Kickius* in Latin, which means 'hee who hath giuen thee Saxons whatt forr,' aund each year ther is a grete feest in his honour at Cargwydgyllyllyllwll.”

Being now much more fluent in multiple out-of-date Englishes, I really liked this book this time around, and I learned a lot about ancient and medieval Wales, and all of their heroes whose names I can neither remember nor pronounce except for Owain Tewdwr, whose name I only remember because he was the founder of the Tudor dynasty. I kept trying to remember if any of the legends or place-names were mentioned in the Dark is Rising series I read earlier this year, but I was never entirely sure. There were a lot of pretty amusing stories about saints and bards and a warrior-poet named Merlyn who was probably not the same Merlyn as Merlyn the Seer, but has some pretty good stories about him all the same, mostly involving going mad. There were a couple King Arthur myth tidbits in there that I'd never heard of before, such as Merlyn the Seer's backstory, which apparently involves finding some dragons that an earlier Welsh hero had buried, so that was pretty badass. I still think I could have gotten more about of this story if I were reading it in front of a giant dry-erase map of Wales that I could have written on to keep it all straight, but alas, even if I had a giant dry-erase map of Wales, I read the whole book on the train.

Also, I am now afflicted with a perverse desire to learn Welsh, because I was just that impressed with how little I could make head or tale of a word of it.

Overall I would strongly recommend this book if you are at all interested in Welsh history and mythology (and the history of Welsh mythology), but I would caution against it if you just want to read a bunch of Arthurian Legends. Familiarity with reading Middle English might help too.

As a parting gift, here is a Cranky Wizard Face:

 

*Yes, I know there are no K's in Latin, but it's not Latin I'm trying to make fun of here.