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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Hatty wrote: | | I must pick you up on a technical point, Hatty, Gildas doesn't say that Ambrosius is the leader at Badon, but that he led the British forces "up until" the battle of Badon, which could be interpreted either way |
You're right, Tel. Doesn't it strike you as odd though that Gildas omits important data, such as
a) the name of the British leader
b) where the battle was fought
c) when it took place
| I don't buy that Arthur was merely invented as I said before, his name was not common anywhere and sounds very un-welsh to me. if I was the inventor, I would have chosen something that sounded altogether more "patriotic". |
I agree but this un-Welshness makes it even more likely that Arthur was imported (from the Continent) and rather less likely that there was a "general" called Arthur at Badon. It also makes it easier for someone with a pronounceable name to be accepted by people who may not necessarily be fluent Welsh-speakers. |
The Wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mons_Badonicus
mentions all the usual suspects, but doesn't mention Baydon.
Baydon is right on Ermin Street, it's also a very short way from Membury Hill Fort, which is even bigger than the nearby Uffington Castle, Liddington Hill, or Alfred's Castle.
http://ashdownhouse.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/king-arthurs-castle.html
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=30302
Anyway, it's all Vortigern's fault. If he hadn't invited a few Saxon merceneries over to start with, we'd never have been in this Anglo-Saxon mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortigern
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| You need to watch a few more films with Cockney Geezers in them. It's pronounced Lundin. |
Well actually Lun'n. And even that is more usually Lun in everyday speech.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Ishmael wrote: | | I wonder which landmass has more placenames with evident connections to Greek mythology: Greece or Britain? |
France, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway - Take your pick. Why does everything have to be so Anglocentric?
A little less Brito-vision would help.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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This ought by rights be in the Astrophysics section, but the implications for British history, and especially Arthurian legend, are so profound I'm including it here.
Victor Clube, an astrophysicist, has been looking into the cyclic nature of the Taurid-Arietid meteor showers that arrive in Britain in late June and November.
He hypothethises that these are remnants of a much bigger meteor cluster on an orbit that intercepts with Earth every c.500 years, and have had bigger impacts with Earth in the past.
Like the Tunguska event in Siberia.
Clube says that dendochronology in Britain says there was a major event c.540AD.
Many of the fabled histories of Britain mention a terrible plague that swept through Britain, with years of famine. It was called the Yellow Pestilence. Britons left the country and emigrated to Brittany to escape.
If it was an astronomical event, for the Britons of the time it might have been like being bombed back into the stone age. Leaving a barren and deserted country. Like the wasteland of Arthurian legend..
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Not to be outdone in the passing-references-to-Arthurian legend, David Keys also cites Our Arfur.
See especially c. 35 minutes. King Arthur’s Wasteland, Ancient Brits emigrating to Brittany, etc.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The Wasteland and the British Exodus
The Wasteland is a vaguely mentioned (and little explored) part of Arthurian myth. In the legends, Britain has become a wasteland where nothing much can grow and people are ill and dying. A sorry state of affairs, but is there any substance to this legend? Can we find any objective scientific evidence that a wasteland ever existed?
To be credible with a modern skeptical audience (like AEL), it would have to be material that is not tainted with the allegations of "forgery" that are thrown at the famous early and middle-ages authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, Gildas, etc.
Dendrochronology might be a useful place to start...
| Professor Mike Baillie of Queen’s University ... has helped to develop the science of dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. This relatively accurate means to gauge the growth conditions of trees from many thousands of years ago shows that — to quote Baillie and his co-author — “from European oaks, through pine chronologies from Sweden, across to Mongolia, and from California to Chile, dramatic effects in trees have been observed across the years from 536 to 545 AD.” |
Something had happened to seriously stunt the growth of trees over large parts of Europe. The two main suggestions are a meteor or a volcano.
Was it caused by a comet/meteor?
Like the Tunguska event perhaps?
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| In 538, a comet was sighted according to the historian Edward Gibbon. The comet “appeared to follow the Sagittary: the size was gradually increasing; the head was in the east, the tail in the west, and it remained visible above 40 days. The nations who gazed with astonishment, expected wars and calamities from their baleful influence; and these expectations were abundantly fulfilled.” |
It's coming our way!
| Zachariah of Mitylene recorded that in around 538/9, “a great and terrible comet appeared in the sky at evening-time for 100 days.” Similarly, medieval historian Roger of Wendover stated that, “in the year of grace AD 541, there appeared a comet in Gaul, so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire. In the same year, there dropped real blood from the clouds, and a dreadful mortality ensued.” |
Iron-rich comets would have an especially bloody appearance.
| The monk, Gildas, writing around AD 540, recorded that “the island of Britain was on fire from sea to sea … until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue.” |
(Some) think this is why the Saxons had such an easy time settling in Britain — there weren’t many surviving Britons to stop them.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The most recent volcanic evidence is from a team at the University of Maine (UM) in Orono.
| ... the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640 |
Regardless of whether it was meteors or volcanoes, it seems Britain was no longer a healthy place to live in at the time. In the South West, especially Devon and Cornwall, this triggered a mass migration of Britons southwards across the Channel.
- from Dumnonia (Devon) to Domnonea
- from Kernow (Cornwall) to Cornouaille
Both of which eventually became part of Armorica (Brittany).
| Domnonée retained close political links between the Brythonic (Celtic) territories in Britain (Wales, Cornwall, Devon), and the newly created Armorican Britain (Brittany), and it hosted many kings, princes, clerics and other leaders who came over from Celtic Britain. The sea was a unifying rather than divisive factor. In the traditions relating to the settlement of Brittany by the Bretons there are several kingdoms of this kind. |
Ref : Wiki Domnonea
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The same Wikipedia source is curiously insistent about something else:
| At the time of the Roman conquest of Gaul, the rough area of later Domnonée was held by the pagan Curiosolite Gauls. Domnonée is said to have been founded in the 4th century by Christian Briton immigrants |
Which then skips an explanation of how Christianity was spreading southwards into Brittany, not northwards into Britain. Or how it had previously got to Britain and passed-by Brittany.
Either way, the Bretons took with them their own beliefs, stories and legends which in time became part of the heritage of the French language and literature, curiously and persistently based on British origins.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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How can this be? Surely French is an ancient language?
Actually no.
As Graham Robb has eloquently explained in "The Discovery of France", France (as we know it now) is a recent invention. By recent, I mean from the French Revolution onwards. Only after that was French imposed as a single language on the region. It had not always been one country, and for many centuries had existed with several different languages and many different dialects.
This helps make sense of what at first glance appears to be a baffling and exceedingly daft idea - that French was invented in England. According to David Howlett, the author of "The English origins of Old French literature " :
| Dramatic differences between Latin texts written before and after the settlement of the Normans in England imply that the conquerors inherited from the conquered a tradition of Anglo-Latin composition. They also derived from a 500-year-old tradition of Old English literature the idea and the formal, generic, and thematic models of Old French literature. |
Mange tout, Rodney!
| The earliest examples of nearly every genre of Old French verse and prose were composed in the Anglo-Norman dialect or written by continental authors working in England or preserved in English manuscripts. These, with the Insular heroes and stories of Brendan, Havelock, Horn, Arthur and Tristan, suggest that for the first century of its existence most French literature was English in origin and execution. | |
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Similarly, in "Language Made Visible: The Invention of French in England After the Norman Conquest" by David Georgi,
| The English origins of French literature remain something of an open secret, backed by impressive evidence, but known only to a relatively small audience. |
How come?
| In 1992, Ian Short lamented that "standard histories of medieval French literature persist in ignoring the fact that French Literature begins, to all intents and purposes, in 12th century Anglo-Norman England". Many years later, this fact is still not universally recognised, even among Anglo-Norman specialists. |
The French folk would sure like to ignore it.
| A recent book devoted entirely to post-conquest England remarks "in the twelfth century England seems to have been a key region for the production of French writing, in some ways ahead of French-speaking areas on the continent." |
And we've forgotten it.
| As late as 2005, the team of eminent scholars who prepared the chapter on "Vernacular Literary Consciousness" in the Middle Ages volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, called the development of French literature in England "curiously precocious" and don't seem to know what to make of it. |
It's French, but not as we know it (Jim).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A most interesting thesis, Borry. Before (or instead of) a detailed critique, my most generalised criticism is an AE one. When specialists from one field are seeking to justify their specialism, they have a tendency to seize on apparently supportive findings from other fields. By academic rule, they have to accept them as presented, and so do academic commentators of the thesis.
Hence, as you yourself point out, the reality of written sources about anything from the sixth and seventh centuries AD is questionable (including whether there were sixth and seventh centuries AD). But it is different with tree rings, ice core samples et al because these are not questionable.
But they are subject to over-interpretation. If people are seeking to show the value of, say, dendrochronology and core sampling, then knowledge of Justinian plagues, little Ice Ages, population wanderungens and the rest will be hurled into the mix when we know these kinds of causes-and-effects don't occur during eras we know all about.
This brings us on to an even more important AE matter...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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... the bogus list. If we are to accept the Taurid Visitation Theory, then we need a five hundred year cycle of visitations. As far as I can make out from your account, we have
(1) Some kind of biggie c 600 AD
(2) The Tunguska Event c 1900 AD
(3) And that's it.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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You might be assuming the list should be more like this.
1) Some kind of biggie c 600 AD
2) Something else c.1150AD
3) The Tunguska Event c 1900 AD
The Taurid meteor shower is actually a bi-annual event.
| The Taurid meteor stream is composed of two branches: the Southern Taurids and the Northern Taurids. The Southern Taurids are active from September 10th to November 20th, while the Northern Taurids are active from October 20th to December 10th. The peak of the Taurid meteor shower usually occurs around November 5th |
With no known connection to Guy Fawkes.
It's more of a random chance whether "this time round" our cosmic position coincides with one of the biggest lumps still in the Taurid debris stream.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Look, I know everything there is to know about Taurid meteor showers (potentially) because we can observe them both in detail and serially. They do not appear to have any adverse effects for life on earth. You have brought to our attention--apparently with some approval on your part--a hypothesis that this might not always be so. Have the courtesy to treat this with a modicum of seriousness. If
| It's more of a random chance whether "this time round" our cosmic position coincides with one of the biggest lumps still in the Taurid debris stream. |
then the whole theory, based as it is on cyclical occurrences, falls apart immediately.
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