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From: friedman@h-sc1.UUCP (dawn friedman)
Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Subject: Re: King Arthur
Message-ID: <432@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jul-85 17:17:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.432
Posted: Tue Jul  9 17:17:29 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jul-85 04:29:09 EDT
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Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
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> >
> >I hadn't thought that King Arthur was a 'Celtic legend', but that Camelot,
> >et al, was somewhere in the middle or south of England. I could be wrong..
> >
> 
> They were everywhere. But they were particularly in England/Scotland area.
> -- 
  
Rank amateur with as much Celtic blood as Haile Selassie will now 
attempt answer:
  
I've been plowing through a small percentage of the various versions
of the Arthur legend(s) from Malory on -- say, about twenty books in
the past couple of months.  One idea that modern writers have picked
up on is that Arthur may have been an actual king of the Celts in 
England, around the time that Rome gave up on maintaining a presence
in Britain and the Saxons were able to move in (the Celts having
leaned on Roman protection too long) -- that would be around 400 AD,
I think?  But I don't know anything about the evidence they used; the
Arthur stories were pretty well scattered around long before any 
written record shows up.  What about the monk Gildas?  Did he say
anything about Arthur, or am I imagining things?  
The LEGEND can't really be called Celtic in its current multiplicity
of forms, can it?  Certainly the Angles and Saxons took it up 
cheerfully enough.  When the author of _Pearl_ made his attempt at
bringing back alliterative verse (around Chaucer's time) what did
he write about?  _Gawain and the Green Knight_!  
But then again... there isn't much trace of Germanic heroic tradition
in the legend either, is there?  No ring-giving, and not the same 
relationship of lord to heroes, I think.  Although the final battle
with its efficient clearing of the scene does remind me of the 
Nibelungenlied: no population problem in this literature!
People who know, please give information.  And does anyone know where
I can find a textbook in some Celtic language?  Somehow there don't
seem to be any handy guides in Wordsworth.
  
                                    dsf
                             (tisri chema)
                           and (dawn sharon/the Speaker)