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Camelot
(Page 2)
To say that this place or
any other is Camelot invites the question, what meaning can be attached to such an
identification?
Crucial to the Camelot problem are the proofs
that about the first quarter of the 6th century AD, Arthur's presumed
period, the hill-fort beside South Cadbury (Cadbury Castle) was in fact the stronghold of a wealthy and powerful
British ruler, who imported luxuries from the eastern Mediterranean, put up at least one
substantial building on the piece of ground called King Arthur's Palace, and refurbished
the defenses by superimposing a huge dry stone rampart of
Celtic type, for which there are
no known contemporary parallels anywhere else in Britain.
Interpreted in the light
of other archeological findings, these results at least suggest an acceptable meaning for
the phrase 'Arthurian Britain', and for Camelot as a reality around which legends have
grown, as they did around the considerably smaller citadel of Troy.
Whatever the precise truth
about the real Arthur, he symbolizes an historical fact which is no longer disputed. The
British Celts, having lived under the rule of Rome and received a degree of Roman
civilization, rallied against the first Anglo-Saxon invaders and threw them back. During
the first half of the 6th century, the Britons were generally in the ascendant throughout
most of what is now England, and in the Scottish Lowlands. During a large part of this
time they enjoyed relative peace and prosperity. Arthur appears to have been the British
commander to whom the main credit was due. He may or may not have had some royal title,
but his legendary reign is based far more on his exploits as a war-leader and on the
period of peace which his victories secured.
Cadbury Castle, easily the
largest and most formidable of the known British strongholds of that period,
as pointed before fits
logically into the picture as the headquarters of the greatest British leader. In that
sense it could be the 'real Camelot' of the 'real Arthur'. Furthermore, its archeological
context includes other places that figure in the Arthurian legend. But,
according to some scholars,
at
Cadbury Castle there can never have been a medieval city of the kind
imagined by
Sir Thomas Mallory. Here, the issue has been raised more insistently by the work of the
Camelot Research Committee, which in 1966 began to excavate the hill. Since then traces
have been found of several human occupations extending over a long time. Thus at
Tintagel in
Cornwall, while there is no sign of the pre-Norman castle where Arthur was allegedly born,
the famous headland is now known to have been inhabited in his time. Its occupants were
British monks, and the imported pottery used by their community has supplied key clues to
the dating and interpretation of other sites, including Cadbury itself.
At a second Iron Age
hill-fort,
Castle Dore in
Cornwall, traces have been found of 6th century resettlement by
a west country chieftain. He built a timber hall, and may have been the original of King
Mark in the Tristan romance. Further hill-top dwellings have been discovered in Wales, and
also on
Glastonbury Tor. The Tor seems to have been the home of a certain Melwas, who
appears in an early tale of Arthur and later becomes 'Meleagant' or 'Mellyagraunce'.
The story of King Arthur
was not born as a single cohesive narrative, but began life as a scattered
collection of tales that originally probably had nothing to do with any
discernible historical figure. Camelot, in the same manner, probably never
was a single specific city or place, but probably a symbol created to
represent the home fortress of an archetypical heroic war lord.
See
Avalon,
King Arthur,
Merlin,
Camelot,
Lyonesse,
Casting Black Magic Spells,
Commanding Spirits,
The Tarot Store and
Divination & Scrying Tools and
Supplies.
Sources: (1) Spence, Lewis,
An Encyclopedia of
Occultism, Carol Publishing Group;
(2)
Lacy, Norris J.,
The New Arthurian Encyclopedia,
Routledge
Publishing; (3)
Steiger, Brad and Sherry
Hansen,
The Gale Encyclopedia of
the Unusual and Unexplained,
Thomson Gale
Publishing; (4) Coghlan, Ronan,
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Arthurian
Legends, Houghton Mifflin
Publishing.
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