Avalon

Intro 

This post covers five journeys around the legend and idea of Avalon. Shorter is better on a phone, so it comes in two parts. This one covers the Avalon of legend, and the second records the story of an ancient continent named after it. It’s a strange entanglement of old Brythonic myth and the volatile history of early Earth

1. A Journey to Glastonbury.

It takes a long day’s walk to cross the Somerset Levels in either direction. Wikipedia says they cover 650 sq km. Being near to the Bristol Channel and below sea level, they frequently flood, so you might sometimes need to swim or paddle as well. 

Link to Full Map 

At their heart is Glastonbury, a small town built on higher ground and overshadowed by the ‘Tor’, a wonderfully improbable hill, topped by a ruined church and visible from miles around. When the Levels are flooded, it is the highest of several islands. 

Flooded Levels, Tor in centre

The eponymous festival is actually held some 10km away, but the town itself is well worth a visit, not for the standard menu of visitor attractions, but more because it is a cabinet of human curiosities. Even the town’s website is in on the act, promoting the retail offerings at Ying Yang, Star Child, Stoneage, Goddess, and the Green Man. 

Glastonbury 

If shopping is not your bag (and I rather hope it is not), you could join in their Imbolc or Samhain festivals or watch the street parades of the goddesses from one of the several temples. Failing all that, you can just chill and admire the resident wildlife. I recall doing just that, while sharing a bench on Magdalene Street with an octogenarian hippie who was too arthritic to roll his own joints, a robed Goddess and a tarot card reader. 

Goddesses 

If you prefer something more active or cultural, and you do want to be a regular tourist, climb the Tor or Wearyall Hill, which is associated with Jesus himself. Or visit the Abbey, which has a legendary association with King Arthur as the final resting place of several real Saxon kings. It is at the Abbey that I will start these journeys.

2. King Arthur’s Last Journey

In the early 1100s, in an England still scarred by the Norman Conquest, a cleric called Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a history of the country. He identified with the Britons of Western England, who had for several centuries been pushed westward by Anglo-Saxon incomers who had taken their lands. Now, although they might have enjoyed momentary schadenfreude, they had to reach an accommodation with their new Norman rulers. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth 

In Geoffrey’s telling, the Britons could trace their origins to settlers from Troy and beyond. The recent Anglo-Saxon hegemony was an aberration in a much longer and more glorious history. At the heart of his book is the tale of King Arthur, who supposedly confronted the Saxon invaders after the Romans left Britain. In Bonnie Tyler’s immortal words (?) ‘he was holding out for a hero’, and found Arthur in the driftwood of earlier, muddled and often contradictory histories, myths and legends.

Arthur’s pre-eminence came to an end when he was supposedly mortally wounded while avenging an attempt to usurp him and marry his missus. A boat carries him from the battlefield to the Isles of Avalon, and into the healing hands of the sorceress Morgana Le Fey. Geoffrey’s account leaves it unclear whether Arthur died or lived on, an ambiguity which gave rise to his anointment as ‘the once and future king’. 

The Death of Arthur 

Geoffrey saw his Avalon as a mystical place, a British Elysian Fields or Tir na nóg. He did not locate it. The connection with the Somerset Levels was made by Gerald of Wales, a roughly contemporary and more credible historian. He suggested that, before the Levels were drained by medieval farmers, the Tor would often have been an island along with other patches of higher ground. 

If you see it today, when the area is flooded, that makes perfect sense. They were, and are, lonely and rather remote, and when the water levels rise, they are hard to cross. Several centuries later, King Alfred is supposed to have used another isolated island to hide from the Danes. 

Glastonbury Tor in the Levels

The name Avalon is a play on the old Brythonic (i.e. British) word for apples, which were then associated with magic, immortality and the afterlife. I wrote about these spirit worlds in my post here: Link. The History of Hell

Geoffrey’s narrative drew heavily on the stew of old texts and legends, seasoned with a few inventions of his own. We shouldn’t condemn his use of old stories as a starting point. Didn’t Shakespeare do the same? But it helped to legitimise the Norman suppression of the Saxons, a strategy of using invented histories for propaganda purposes that Putin or Hitler might recognise. In any event, it earned Geoffrey a bishopric. 

Geoffrey’s book itself, thankfully in a modern translation from the original Latin, is IMHO very readable. To summarise, the British line-up for his Glastonbury history festival kicks off with an appearance by the Trojans fronted by Brutus, the son of Aeneas, followed by Julius Caesar and the Romans, and then as the Grand Finalé, King Arthur with Merlin and his posse of Knights. (See my Geek Notes #1 & #2 at the end of the post). 

An edition from 1508 

Some fifty years after Geoffrey’s book, the Abbey burnt down, and the monks needed the wherewithal to repair it. They proved themselves to be cunning fundraisers by claiming to have found the grave of a large man and a woman together with a tablet declaring that this was Arthur. (In case anyone doubts this was a con, the Latin of the inscription would not actually have been recognised in Arthur’s time!)

This was very politically convenient for the reigning Norman monarch, Henry II, who was William the Conqueror’s great-grandson and who had a vested interest in seeing Arthur definitively deceased rather than contemplating a comeback to foment a Welsh rebellion! So it is no surprise that he honoured the grave with a visit. 

Modern signage at the
(supposed) grave.

To summarise, Avalon was an idyll promoted by Geoffrey and located in the Somerset Levels by Gerald. The monks seized upon this to justify Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon as Arthur’s resting place even though Geoffrey had left his demise an open question.

So was Arthur’s journey to the Isles of Avalon a one-way ticket? Legend has it that he hides beneath a mountain and, in a time of dire need, he will rise again to usher in a new golden age. It appears that, so far, he thinks that things have never been quite bad enough. 

3.  Joseph of Arimathea's Journey

 

Shortly afterwards, the monks got another opportunity to build on this dubious track record and capitalised on a story that seems to have started in France shortly after the discovery of Arthur’s grave. According to the Bible, Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy associate of Jesus who took responsibility for his corpse and entombment. The story goes beyond the biblical account, suggesting that Joseph then fled the Holy Land, taking with him the Holy Grail, the drinking vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper. 

Joseph of Arimathea

We are asked to believe that he eventually found his way to the Levels and Glastonbury, where he climbed Wearyall Hill near the town, where he shoved his staff into the ground. It sprouted as a thorn bush which magically flowered every winter. He then built England’s first Christian church. Remember this; it is key to what is to come. Note #3.

Glastonbury Thorn (Deceased) 

Later the whole tale was repeated and embellished by many authors. Thomas Mallory’s ‘Le Morte d’ Arthur’ is perhaps the best known. It promoted the story that Arthur’s finished his days in Avalon, neatly fusing Celtic myth with Christianity. But my favourite for wishful thinking is Tennyson’s description of the place as an"island-valley where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow”. He clearly hadn’t been there, as millions of visitors to the eponymous musical mud-fest can testify.

Glastonbury Festival 

4. Sir George Calvert’s Journey

In 1643 Sir George Calvert MP, Baron Baltimore (# 4)  ran into choppy waters in his political career after converting to Catholicism, so he sailed to Newfoundland and founded a Christian mission as a haven for spiritually downtrodden Catholics, on its south-east tip. He called it Avalon, in homage to the legend that Glastonbury, and thus Avalon, was the first port of call for the first Christians in Britain. 

Sir George Calvert

It didn't go well. Poor George found it a bit chilly, a tad windy and invariably damp. Scurvy didn't help. So shortly afterwards he set off south and founded Maryland. 

Scroll forward even further to the 1970s. For a long time it had been recognised that West Africa and eastern South America were an eerily good jigsaw fit. Now, it seems to me surprising how little idea there was of how and why the continents drifted around the planet through time. The science of plate tectonics was in its infancy. 

One of the geologists at the forefront of the research was a Newfoundlander, Harold (‘Hank’) Williams. He noticed that the rocks in Newfoundland were nothing like those elsewhere in North America, but matched those in Britain and parts of Northern Europe. He reasoned that this was because they had once been joined together. As time went on, the idea grew that they had once been part of a separate and substantial subcontinental landmass dating back 500 million years.

The land needed a name, and Harold was in the vanguard, so he took the naming rights and called it Avalonia after the Newfoundland peninsula where he did much of his work. It turned out to be more apposite than he thought. (The suffix ‘ia’ merely turns ‘Avalon’ into the ‘land of Avalon’). Now, Hank is in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. What an honour! 

The final journey, Avalonia’s, is the next post.

GEEK NOTES

#1 Aeneas crops up in the origin story of many places at the time, Rome amongst them. 

#2 If you are interested in Arthurian legend, the definitive tome on its status as history or myth is Richard White’s ‘King Arthur in Legend and History’. It’s out of print, so I bought a used second-hand copy for £4, but am daunted by its 550 pages and transcriptions of old romances. Too much, too much, so you won’t get a lot of it here.

#3 The thorn bush has been vandalised many times over the centuries. Notable occasions have been by the Parliamentary Roundheads in the English Civil War, and more recently by the landowner who had eyes on planning permission to build housing on the land! 

# 4  Not that Baltimore. This one is near Longford in Ireland