Description
The British Isles have a long tradition of tales of gods, heroes and marvels. Like a coat of many colours, the bright fragments hint at a mythology once as relevant to the races which settled the islands as classical mythology was to the Greeks and Romans. Richard Barber has drawn together the stories presented here from a wide range of medieval sources, from the dawn of Christianity to the twelfth century. They come cloaked in seeming history, but they bring with them intimations of folk migrations and shadows of an unrecoverable pagan past. There are few echoes of the Norse gods which peopled the Anglo-Saxon past; only Beowulf survives in its entirety to show a spare, realistic world in which the warrior ethos is the driving force. By contrast, Celtic myth has left more traces, in Cuchulainn, and in Taliesin and Merlin, the latter two crossing the boundaries of the real and the unreal hero, for Taliesin was very probably a sixth-century poet and Merlin, magician and shape-shifter extraordinary, a contemporary king. Saints too punctuate the story of Britain: George, now disowned by the Vatican, Helena who brought a bit of the True Cross to Britain, and Joseph of Arimathea, whose staff, struck into the ground at Glastonbury, grew into the Glastonbury thorn. Glastonbury is the focus of the Arthurian legends, but the Arthurian stories appearing here are those of the Arthur known in Britain rather than the versions from the French romances. The later tales mix real events and fabulous heroes, recording the fortunes of Harold (who in this version was not killed at Hastings), 1ereward and Godiva, as well as the adventures of Havelock, Sir Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick, slayers of dragons and giants. These figures and many others were part of a familiar national mythology for the Elizabethans; Shakespeare drew on them for Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet, and created the famous versions that are known today; here the original stories are presented again.
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