The Druids and King Arthur: A New View of Early Britain

221 Pages·2010·2.09 MB·English

by  Robin Melrose

The Druids
and King Arthur
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The Druids and
King Arthur
A New View of Early Britain
R M
OBIN ELROSE
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Illustrations by Diana Gardner
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Melrose, Robin.
The Druids and King Arthur : a new view of early Britain /
Robin Melrose.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-5890-5
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Druids and Druidism. 2. Arthur, King. 3. Great
Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period, 449–1066. I. Title.
BL910.M45 2011
942.01'4—dc22 2010043915
British Library cataloguing data are available
© 2011Robin Melrose. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: The rider-god known as the Thracian Horseman,
found on the Lincolnshire/Nottinghamshire border, near the
village of Brough (Roman Crocolana). British Museum.
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 • The Dragon Star 5
Chapter 2 • The Severed Head and the Bone Cave:
Religion in Roman Britain 18
Chapter 3 • Arthur’s Voyage: The Spoils of Annwn 42
Chapter 4 • Magic Mounds, Sea People and Shape-Shifters:
The Wonderful World of the Mabinogion 66
Chapter 5 • Mounds, Mounds, Mounds: Rubbish Heaps,
Hillforts and the Prehistory of Southern England 86
Chapter 6 • Visitors from the East 114
Chapter 7 • Brutus of Troy Town 155
Chapter 8 • Arthur, King of Wessex? 168
Chapter Notes 193
Bibliography 203
Index 211
v
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Introduction
Many books have been written about the Druids, and even more have
been written about King Arthur. However, this book is not really about
the Druids or King Arthur, but about where the people we call the Druids
came from, where the story of Arthur came from, and the role played by
the Druids and Arthur in the creation of a new order after the end of Roman
rule. To understand the beliefs of the Druids, we will be looking at the reli-
gion of Roman Britain, an Old Welsh poem called The Spoils of Annwn,
and four medieval Welsh tales known as the Mabinogion. To understand
where the Druids originated, we will be investigating the archeology and
history of Salisbury Plain, the site of Stonehenge, and surrounding areas
from 2300 B.C.until the arrival of the Celts; and we will be exploring leg-
ends of the foundation of Britain, the cult of the Thracian Horseman, the
oracle of Dodona who listened to the rustling of oak leaves, the lore and
legends surrounding the star Arcturus and Arcas the mythical founder of
Arcadia, and some basic principles of prehistoric astronomy. From this rich
brew we will demonstrate that the Druids originated from central or eastern
Europe in around 850 B.C., bringing with them the cult of an underworld
deity, a belief in reincarnation, and a keen interest in astronomy. In the
final chapter we will show that while the Druids tried to protect the people
of Britain from the comet that appeared in A.D. 539 and the outbreak of
plague that followed it with the monster-slaying Arcturus/Arthur, at the
same time a descendant of the families that had ruled Salisbury Plain for
so long joined forces with another Briton to establish the Kingdom of Wes-
sex and so maintain a continuity that was only broken by the Norman Con-
quest in 1066. The Druids are usually interpreted as “oak-seers,” but I will
argue that they were in fact “doorkeepers” who, with their knowledge of
the doors to the underworld and the celestial realms, ruled over the people
of southern England for over a thousand years and guided them through
the transition from Roman Britain to Saxon England.
1
2 Introduction
In researching this book, I have drawn on the works of a large number
of writers and scholars from the dawn of European literature to the present
day. As far as primary sources go, I have relied on numerous classical Greek
and Roman authors, from Homer and Hesiod to Julius Caesar, Pliny the
Elder and Tacitus, for their insights into the Druids, the Celts and a host of
other subjects. For insights into early British religion, mythology and history,
I have consulted works in Latin, including Nennius’s History of the Britons
and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and works in
Welsh, including the mysterious and haunting poem The Spoils of Annwn,
which has an early mention of Arthur, and the mythological tales of the
medieval Welsh Mabinogion, which may provide the key to early British his-
tory as well as further information on the Druids and Arthur.
As for secondary sources, I am indebted to the work of the archeologist
Barry Cunliffe, who has not only carried out excavations of important sites
like the hillfort of Danebury in Hampshire, but has in all his writings
tried to put a human face to the people whose dwelling-places he has exca-
vated, and brought alive the prehistory of southern England. Another
scholar whose work has contributed to this book is Miranda Green: her
output on the Celts has been prodigious, and I have frequently turned to
her two books on Celtic art and the role of animals in Celtic life and myth
for guidance. I have also made considerable use of John Koch’s Celtic Cul-
ture: A Historical Encyclopedia, an indispensable work for someone with
an interest in the Celts.
But this book is not only about the Celts, and The All-Knowing God,
by the Italian scholar Raffaele Pettazzoni, first published in 1955, has proved
an invaluable resource in understanding the religion of the Thracians and
the Thracian Horseman. Graham Anderson’s King Arthur in Antiquityhas
proposed a number of Greek, Macedonian and Scythian sources for the
mythology of Arthur and opened up some novel lines of research; Thomas
McEvilley, in The Shape of Ancient Thought, has provided a plausible frame-
work for the Druid belief in reincarnation; and both Richard Hinckley
Allen (Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning) and F. Graham Millar (“The
Celestial David and Goliath”) have made me understand how the Druids
and the prehistoric people of southern England may have viewed the heav-
ens. Finally, in the Arthurian sections I have relied on the work of Frank
D. Reno (Historic Figures of the Arthurian Era) for the historical background
to Arthur, Thomas Green (Concepts of Arthur) for the mythological Arthur,
and Barbara Yorke (Wessex in the Early Middle Ages) for the early history
of Wessex.
Introduction 3
Ultimately I have used all these writers and scholars very much in my
own way, drawing conclusions that those among them who are still alive
might well disagree with. In coming to these conclusions, I had a number
of eureka moments: one when I read in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire about the comets in the 530s and the ensuing plague, and
linked that to the story of how Uther Pendragon got his name; another
when I read in Cunliffe’s Iron Age Communitiesthat the All Cannings Cross
pottery of Wiltshire could have been brought there by people from eastern
France about 800 B.C.; and a third when I read in Cunliffe about the horse-
and-dog burials at Danebury and discovered they might have a Druid con-
nection. The conclusions I have drawn may well be wrong, but I have
tried to provide solid evidence for them wherever that was possible, and
weave all the disparate elements into a coherent narrative that tells the
story of southern England from the time of Stonehenge to the founding
of the kingdom of Wessex in the 6th century A.D., accounting for the
Druids and the story of Arthur. At times I have resorted to etymology (the
history of the origins of words) to prove a point—I have a professional
interest in language—using the Indo-European Etymological Dictionaryof
the great German philologist Julius Pokorny, and Ranko Matasovic’s Ety-
mological Lexicon of Proto-Celtic, as well as Koch’s excellent etymological
notes. Sometimes when history, literature and archeology are silent on a
particular point, language is the only resource we have for peering into the
past. Words have a story to tell, if only we can find a way of making them
talk, and I am always happy to hear any story that will unlock the secrets
of the distant past. My greatest regret, as a student of language, is that, as
languages have disappeared from southern England, so many stories have
been lost, so many ways of understanding the world have vanished. This
book has been written in an attempt to recover these lost stories, these
vanished ways of viewing the world. If I have succeeded in this endeavor,
then it has all been worthwhile.