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COMMENT PAGE FOR: |
| King Arthur's ancient trail across Britain |
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rnhmjoj wrote 31 min ago:
If you're interested in tracing the origin of the Arthurian legends I
recommend you watch this video[1] by Cambrian Chronicles.
[1]
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| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs |
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shakna wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
This article brought some serious ragebait for anyone with an inkling
of the myth and history of that particular figure. Stating outright
"He's the mythical Celtic warlord who held out against the Anglo Saxon
invasion of what would come to be called England" ignores about half of
the possible stories. One of the more popular threads is that he was a
Roman general. Neither Saxon nor Norman, and certainly not Celtic.
The stories around King Arthur are not confined in that way. Heck,
Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a renaissance around
the myths. He came a few hundred years after the mythos was
established.
The historians try to point out that things are as about in-flux as
possible, but the author misses it. They do end on a line reflecting
the meaning, and explore some of the various aspects, but... they tend
to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the fanfic of the world
since Medieval times, over and over, and over again. You can be certain
of exactly nothing when it comes to those myths.
Excalibur? Not in the earliest stories. No sword in stone, no Lady in
the Lake. Caliburnus and Excalibur might be the same sword, in which
case Caliburn is noted in an early piece of Celtic origin, but just as
a sword belonging to a warlord (Bram). Nothing much special about it.
(Wikipedia's page on the sword is... Painful. Most of the focus is on
the latter adaptions, of course. But the origin is not clearly Welsh.
There is... Debate.)
Merlin? There's a possibility that Merlin and Arthur were the same
person at one point. Artr Myrrdin Gwyls is one of the earlier mythical
names for the magical bard. (Where Robert Jordan pulled a lot of his
inspiration for Artur Hawkwing, rather than more modern tales.)
Guinevere? Didn't exist until seven hundred years after the original
tales became widespread. Part of the romantic movement.
Arthur fought the Saxons, right? Sometimes it's the Saxons. Sometimes
the Romans. Sometimes the French. Whoever the writer felt it in-vogue
to fight, pretty much.
Rant over... They got close to the point, but missed it. Arthur is a
story without grounding. It's supposed to be something you can take,
shape, and tell a moral about your own culture. And we do. The TV
shows, movies, and constant reinventions, are what the character has
been for most of its existence. A tale, waiting to be told.
A tale that many of us will read, and watch, and listen to, time and
time again, for when the next author finds something to be inspired
for.
52-6F-62 wrote 3 min ago:
It certainly is a Celtic tale. Not in its present form. Most tellings
are derived from later medieval retellings.
Arthur and graal cycle are in turn composed from even older
Indo-European mythical elements.
You should dive deeper into the underlying themes.
The graal is derived, almost certainly, from elements like Celtic
sacred cauldrons which also offered bounty in exchange for service.
The sacred spear and an element of the cuckoo king ritualistic
sacrificing murder of the king against a âgawk stoneâ on whom the
communities ails are offloaded.
In the same turn the fisher king and wasteland are elements that lie
at the core of Celtic belief systems and are again overloaded on the
backdrop of the saxon invasion of the isles.
Myths are composed of and yes archetypes to get at the heart of the
matter close to a people by dressing it up in the trappings of their
culture. To that end, Arthur is and always has been a Celtic cultural
hero (with arguable, and improvable to date, roman connections).
Read the Mabinogion and Y Gododdin. And Iâd also recommend the
Ulster Cycle as it also contains references to the Calad Bolg.
This is why studies in humanities matter. People read too literally.
Everything valuable in myth will be lost on young minds otherwise.
pfdietz wrote 30 min ago:
What seems like a good video about this:
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| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs |
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jajko wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
You can say that about literally any mythos/origin story, including
bible and probably old hebraic stuff too.
The problem is when... maybe not so smart or experienced in life
people come, and desperately need things to be clear and simple for
them. Clear yes and no, good and evil, good wins, just tell me what
to think and what is the right way. People don't want to hear about
boring life facts or how life is infinitely complex and everything
and everybody is some form of shade of grey. I can see it well and
alive these times too so additional education ain't gonna save us.
The only difference with say bible is that nobody sat for a while few
centuries after (if anything actually happened at all, pretty
skeptical here) and wrote it down clearly enough so that major
deviations from that point were hard to justify. Until of course new
canon is written and everything old is thrown out of window... would
love to see how original biblical verses read compared to
over-translation that happened 1500 years later, given what was left
in mostly old testament I'd say it would read pretty horribly and be
completely incompatible with our modern values and ways of life. I'd
even say Vatican would rather destroy such evidence, no sense keeping
such an atomic bomb around in vaults.
Maybe archaeology will eventually shed some objective light on this.
Dalewyn wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
>Heck, Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a
renaissance around the myths.
The way I understand it, the French also loved the tale(s) of King
Arthur but hated that they didn't have a role in it because
Anglo/French rivalry is like that. So they wrote fanfiction
(Lancelot), which eventually became part of canon.
throwup238 wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
> they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the fanfic
of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and over again. You
can be certain of exactly nothing when it comes to those myths.
This is super important to emphasize. In its first hundred years, the
printing industry made much (if not most) of its profit off of what
were essentially trashy paperbacks, pumped out as fast as they could
acquire them because there was no concept of copyright yet. The
authors tasked with writing that content took all the old history
books - most of dubious historicity to begin with - and wrote wild
fantasies based around them. The King Arthur legend is one of the
most popular ones, probably as widely read as the flood of
translations of the classics.
Since this coincided with a large increase in literacy, these fiction
books calcified the fiction into legend and pop culture.
TeMPOraL wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
That's a sobering thought right there: that one people's mythos,
the foundations of their culture, could trace back to... a bunch of
randos in the early printing era, who figured out they can get rich
quick by flooding the world with slop.
globalnode wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
change "printing era" to "ai era" and you might be onto
something!
TeMPOraL wrote 12 min ago:
Not really. "AI era" is adding a flood of new crap to the world
already drowned in slop. The last couple decades marked the
time where everyone could publish books, videos and music, and
a lot of people did, creating more content every day than any
human could consume in a lifetime. And that's discounting the
orders of magnitude more useless garbage that advertising
industry has been mass-producing for like a century now.
Adding AI to the mix makes zero actual difference at this
point.
PrismCrystal wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
I wouldnât expect any mythos to be perfect, because they have
often been constructed quickly and hastily due to external
pressures for national unity. Various countries that saw a surge
for independence during the 19th century age of nationalism,
often based their mythos on Romantic-era poetry that sometimes
has aged well (e.g. the Kalevala), and sometimes has aged quite
badly (a few Eastern European countries).
JPLeRouzic wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
I guess your main reference is Historia Brittonum, the oldest source
about Arthur's myth:
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| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum |
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Mistletoe wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Change the Wikipedia page for Excalibur if you have better info.
shakna wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
That was rejected a few years back for using written references
that weren't digitised as they're hundreds of years old. Wiki
couldn't validate them.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
Yeah sadly you need an academic paper on the written reference
and then a WP:RS on the paper to make a definitive statement on
Wikipedia survive.
card_zero wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
"Definitive statement", what? If an old manuscript says
something about excalibur (or Caliburc or whatever), you can
say the old manuscript says it. This is not a problem. If
instead you want to say "Excalibur definitely was of Irish
origin because this old manuscript said so", you're using
Wikipedia to promote your own original research, which will
conflict with the next wingnut's original research about how
Excalibur was in the Old Testament ... and doing that would
obviously be a problem. There's no "sadly" about this. "Sadly,
guidelines discourage the cranks from fighting over fringe
theories in article space".
card_zero wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Hmm? Nah, you can do that, references that only exist on paper
and have to be sought in physical libraries are perfectly fine.
What edit do you refer to that was rejected?
Steko wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
I thought the article was fine, historically, as a pop travel
article. You seem to have hate-read it because it wasn't
encyoclopedic enough and left out some of your favorite bits of
Arthurian trivia.
shakna wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
You seem to have missed my final point - it isn't about the trivia.
The reason that Arthurian legend is so broad and encompassing, is
because it's all fiction. That people should write new stories with
it.
It isn't about what my favourite trivia is. It's that everyone can
have their favourite bits.
0xDEADFED5 wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
What's your favorite film or book on the topic?
heresie-dabord wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
Given the usual vainglorious soup of mythical names, claims, swains
and dames, I think the one film to recommend remains... Monty
Python and the Holy Grail.
âI mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor, just because
some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me
away!â [1]
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| [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/ |
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Gr... |
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rwmj wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
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| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Gr... |
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heresie-dabord wrote 56 min ago:
Now with extra oppression of the masses by supreme executive
power derived from a farcical electoral ceremony.
shakna wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
If I have a comfy chair, nice music, and an afternoon to relax,
probably Le Morte d'Arthur. Or if I'm looking to forget the world,
Mists of Avalon.
For more historical diving, Oxford maintains a list of books and
papers written on the matter.
emmelaich wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
[1] is funny and serious in the right moments.
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| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_and_Future_King |
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billfruit wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex is even more wittier.
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