4

Avalon

After Excalibur is thrown to the Lady of the Lake, the mortally wounded King Arthur sails away to Avalon, an enchanted island of healing and eternal youth, accompanied by three mysterious maidens. This is the story familiar throughout the world today. When I first began researching the Avalon legend, I regarded it as the least likely of the Arthurian themes to be rooted in any kind of real Dark Age history: magical swords, water nymphs, enchanted islands, mystic cures, and immortality. No way! Astonishingly, I was very much mistaken.

Initially, when I examined the medieval accounts of the episode, it all seemed little more than a fairy tale. Nevertheless, I examined them thoroughly as I wanted to find out how, when, and particularly where the legend started. It might, I hoped, provide clues to a historical Arthur’s origins and where he might in reality have been laid to rest. The oldest use of the name Avalon is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Written in Latin around 1136, he calls it Insula Avallonis—the Isle of Avalon. Geoffrey was from Britain, and the Roman Empire had long since collapsed, so why Latin? During the early medieval period, following the conquest of England by the Normans from northern France in 1066, Britain had three separate languages: English, French, and Welsh. To complicate matters English was a collection of distinct regional dialects, meaning that someone from one part of the country could barely understand someone from somewhere else. So for convenience many authors of the time wrote in Latin—the language used by the church and understood by the educated classes—and Geoffrey of Monmouth was no exception. He mentions Avalon twice. First, telling us simply, without elaboration, that the king’s famous sword was forged there and again later when referring to Arthur’s demise.¹ Translated into English, he writes: “And the famous King Arthur was himself mortally wounded, and carried to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds.” And that’s it. He tells us nothing whatsoever about the place: not where it was, who lived there, and what relevance it had in the overall narrative. However, in a further Latin work on the Arthurian legend, titled the Life of Merlin, written around 1150, he does say more.² In this, he refers to the island as Insula Pomorum (Isle of Apples) and reveals who dwelt there:

There, nine sisters rule. . . . She who is chief among them is the most skilled of healers, excelling her sisters in beauty. Her name is Morgan, and she knows the properties of herbs to cure the sick.³

Arthur is taken to Avalon to be healed by Morgan:

[On the island] Morgan received [Arthur] with honor, and placed him [Arthur] on a golden bed in her chamber. . . . After some time, she told him that his health could be restored only if he stayed with her.⁴

So, according to Geoffrey, Avalon is an island ruled by a sisterhood of nine female mystics, the leader of whom is a healer called Morgan who attempts to cure Arthur with her abilities. He fails to say whether Arthur lived or died, but the Jersey poet Wace, in his French poem the Romance of Brutus of 1155, implies the island gave Arthur immortality.⁵ He tells us that:

Arthur himself was mortally wounded. . . . [He was] taken to Avalon in the hope that he might be healed. [And] he is still there, awaited by the Britons, for they say that he will return to live again.⁶

(You may be wondering why, if this was a poem, it fails to rhyme. It does—sort of—in the original French.) Strictly speaking, Wace suggests that Arthur is not exactly immortal but rather that he is dead and awaiting rebirth at a time of his country’s greatest need. According to Wace, therefore, it would appear that Arthur’s preserved body was entombed somewhere on the Isle of Avalon.

Wace came from the island of Jersey off the northern coast of France. At the time the north of France was ruled by the English kings following the Norman conquest of England; consequently the Arthurian story became as popular in France as it was in Britain. Many early Arthurian romances were composed by other French authors; a number of these were by the poet Chrétien de Troyes, and one includes the next surviving reference to Avalon. In his long poem Erec and Enide, composed around 1170, Chrétien speaks of a banquet held by King Arthur where one of the guests is described as coming from the Isle of Avalon.⁷ Like Geoffrey, he also refers to Morgan in association with Avalon, calling her Morgan le Fey,⁸ a name used by many of the subsequent romancers, although one of them, the English poet Layamon, calls her Argante, which appears to derive from Old Gaelic meaning simply “the Queen.” Around the year 1200 Layamon composed a reworking of Wace’s poem, a Middle English work called simply Brut (“Brutus,” a mythical founder of Britain), in which Arthur is sailed to the enchanted Isle of Avalon by two mysterious women, where the isle’s queen, called Argante, tends to Arthur’s wounds.⁹ (Middle English was one of three developing forms of the English language, coming after Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, and before Early Modern English as spoken by William Shakespeare. To be accurate Layamon wrote in the Midland [central] dialect of Middle English.) About the same time Robert de Boron wrote his Latin Joseph of Arimathea. Robert’s tale does not include an account of Arthur’s demise, but it does incorporate the Holy Grail into the Arthurian saga, which he tells us was ultimately hidden in the “Vales of Avalon.”¹⁰ The Vulgate Mort Artu (see chapter 3), written in French prose around 1230, is the oldest known inclusion of the Lady of the Lake and the episode where the knight Girflet throws her Excalibur.¹¹ In this rendition, after he has cast the sword into the lake, Girflet sees a barge approach a nearby shore in which there are a number of women, one identified as Morgan le Fey, who takes the dying Arthur aboard and sails him off to Avalon. Ultimately, Thomas Malory in the late 1400s, writing in Late Middle English, describes how the knight Bedivere carries Arthur to a barge, after he has returned the sword to the Lady of the Lake.¹² In the barge are Morgan le Fey and three other women described as “three queens,” one of whom is the Lady of the Lake herself, and they sail Arthur away to the “Vale of Avalon.”

So where exactly was Avalon supposed to be? The mysterious island where Arthur is either entombed, buried, or in a state of suspended animation. The place where, if the legend was based on some semblance of truth, I might find the famous king’s grave. Sadly, as was becoming all too familiar, none of these authors reveal where it actually is. The only one to give even an approximate location is Robert de Boron, who says that it is somewhere in the west of Britain. Britain has hundreds of offshore islands, which is why it’s called the British Isles, and nearly all of them are off the west coast, so this was of little help. Geoffrey of Monmouth does suggest that it may be off the coast of Cornwall, as this is where he locates Arthur’s final battle, but I had already come to view Geoffrey’s Cornish Arthurian connections with some suspicion (see chapter 2). One possibility that seemed more reasonable was that the island might be off the coast of Wales. In chapter 1 I mentioned how works predating Geoffrey of Monmouth referred to an enchanted island in association with King Arthur, which was called Annwn. These works were all early Welsh stories.

Annwn, as a mysterious, magical land, is mentioned in a number of anonymous old Welsh tales, such as Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees) and Pwyll (named after a Welsh prince), and specifically in association with King Arthur in Culhwch and Olwen, written in the eleventh century.¹³ There are remarkable similarities between the legends of Annwn and Avalon. In an even earlier tale, Preiddeu Annwfn (Spoils of Annwn), Arthur actually sails to the island of Annwn in search of a magic cauldron, said to have supernatural powers.¹⁴ (The oldest surviving copy of The Spoils of Annwn is found in a fourteenth-century manuscript known as The Book of Taliesin, in the National Library of Wales, but it is believed by literary scholars to be a copy of a much earlier poem, as its language and syntax date from around the year 900, predating the earliest Arthurian romance by well over two centuries.) In this tale Annwn is specifically depicted as an island, said to be the home of nine saintly maidens who guard a magic cauldron, a metal cooking vessel.¹⁵ The medieval Robert de Boron tells us that the Holy Grail (which in many Arthurian tales Arthur’s knights go in search of and ultimately return to their king) is a sacred drinking vessel, hidden on Avalon, and subsequent Arthurian romancers include a community of so-called Grail Maidens as its guardians. Geoffrey of Monmouth even has Avalon ruled by the same number of nine sisters. The Welsh tales also include a mythological figure called Bran: he was said to have been a onetime ruler of Annwn and the first guardian of the magic cauldron.¹⁶ In Robert de Boron’s story, the man who took the Grail to Avalon was a follower of Joseph of Arimathea, called the very similar Bron. In the Welsh version Bran is a demigod who lives the duration of many lifetimes and ultimately suffers with a wounded foot, while in Robert’s account Bron survives for centuries as the first guardian of the Grail, permanently troubled by a wounded leg.¹⁷ Bran’s potential links with the Holy Grail go even deeper.

The Welsh tales say that after Bran died his severed head was preserved as a kind of oracle—it speaks and gives valuable advice to those who possess it. This “talking head” idea is thought to have derived from the pre-Christian Celtic practice of preserving the head of a high-status individual, such as a priest or king, in the belief that it could communicate with the living.¹⁸ (In reality, a seer, or trance medium, would most likely get high on some plant extract or other in the presence of the skull and commune with whatever came into his or her own head.) Bran’s head is said to have been the greatest of such relics, and in an early Welsh poem called the Three Unfortunate Disclosures, King Arthur himself is said to have acquired it.¹⁹ In an early Welsh tale called Peredur (author unknown), the hero Peredur, one of Arthur’s courtiers, bears a striking resemblance to King Arthur’s knight Sir Perceval as he appears in the medieval romances.²⁰ The oldest known inclusion of Perceval in the Arthurian saga is found in a work by Chrétien de Troyes known as Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail) completed around 1190.²¹ In this, Perceval is the knight who searches for and eventually finds the Grail, first seeing it during a strange banquet held in the great hall of a mysterious castle:

A squire entered [the hall] from a chamber, holding a white lance . . . and from its point there dripped red blood . . . Perceval watched but he refrained from asking its meaning. . . . A damsel [then] came in with three more squires, holding in her hands a graal [Chrétien’s spelling of “grail”].²²

Now compare this to the Peredur narrative, where the hero attends a banquet in a Welsh castle in an almost identical setting:

And he [Peredur] saw two young men enter the hall . . . bearing a long spear with blood flowing from the point. . . . And as he [Peredur’s host] did not explain the meaning of what he saw, Peredur refrained from asking. . . . [And] then two maidens entered, holding a large salver between them, upon which was the head of a man.²³

It is patently clear that with a few minor variations, these are both the same story, one taken from the other, or both taken from some earlier source. Although Peredur now survives only in a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript, like the other Welsh Arthurian tales, it probably originated with a much older rendition. In fact, the character of Peredur appears in a Welsh genealogy (family tree) dating from 988, preserved in the British Library, and going by this he was considered to have lived around the same time as King Arthur.²⁴ So the most likely scenario would place the Welsh tale well before the time of Chrétien de Troyes. Either way there is an intriguing disparity between the two accounts: whereas Chrétien has his damsel holding the Grail, the Peredur author’s two maidens are bearing a severed head. Although, as we have seen, Robert de Boron, around the year 1200, is the oldest known author to depict the Grail as the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, he is not the earliest writer to name the relic and to include it in the King Arthur story; Chrétien de Troyes did so some ten years earlier. The origin of the word grail, or graal in Chrétien’s original, is hotly disputed. Interestingly, Chrétien describes it not as a chalice, as Robert does, but as a golden platter or large serving dish. We shall be examining the Grail legend later, but for now the important point to bear in mind is that the sacred item was originally a large plate and not a drinking vessel. (As we shall see, subsequent authors portrayed the Grail in many different guises: it was depicted as a holy relic, such as a mystical chalice, sacred jar, or a magic stone; or as an allegorical concept, such as immortality, mother nature, or a royal bloodline; and even as a representation of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, or Jesus himself.) In Chrétien’s version, on this plate is the sacramental bread of the Catholic Mass, representing the body of Christ, whereas in the Peredur narrative, on the salver—a large serving platter—there is a severed head. The Peredur author does not explain its meaning, suggesting it would have been familiar to his readership, but it was almost certainly one of the “talking heads” of early Celtic religion. In the Welsh tales Bran’s head is the most sought after of these talking heads, leading most literary scholars to conclude that it was meant to be his. The demigod Bran was the original guardian of the magic cauldron, and in the Arthurian romances the original guardian of the Grail is the semi-immortal Bron. The head of Bran and the Holy Grail are therefore undoubtedly connected, and as the Welsh King Arthur tales appear to predate the medieval Arthurian romances, then it is reasonable to conclude that the Grail, bearing the symbolic “body of Christ,” is a Christianization of the original magic cauldron combined with the sacred head of Bran theme. (It’s not important whether or not the magic cauldron or Bran’s head was based on real or imaginary relics—something we’ll return to later—the point is that the literary evidence indicates that they were associated with the story of King Arthur well before the Middle Ages.)

So the Isle of Avalon and its Holy Grail portrayed in the medieval Arthurian romances appear to be themes both taken from earlier, Welsh King Arthur tales. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first author to include Avalon in the Arthurian saga, and he claims he took his account of Arthur’s life from “a certain very ancient book written in the British language,” which presumably meant Welsh.²⁵ (Geoffrey was from Monmouth in Wales, so he was presumably fluent in the language and could translate such works.) What the book was called he fails to say, but it could have been a work containing Welsh tales concerning the Isle of Annwn. (It is thought that there were probably many such Welsh Arthurian stories in existence during Geoffrey’s time, which no longer survive; indeed, it is astonishing that without modern methods of document preservation, any have survived at all.) Many subsequent Arthurian romancers, such as Wace, also claimed to have had access to earlier “British” tales and chronicles, and so they too might have taken their various themes from similar narratives.²⁶ As these early references to Annwn were all in Welsh tales, I decided that Wales might be the best place to search for where the enchanted island was originally thought to be. I noted that certain modern authors contended that Annwn was simply a name for the Celtic otherworld, the spirit realm of mythical beings, but in the Welsh tales I examined, it was certainly regarded as a physical place, and in The Spoils of Annwn, it was clearly an island. The problem was—as ever—none of them say exactly where it is. There was, though, an intriguing account written during Geoffrey’s lifetime that could point to one particular island. I found it in the medieval work of William of Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury is considered by modern scholars to have been a particularly reliable chronicler for his time and has been described as the foremost English historian of the twelfth century. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that he was the most learned man in Europe. While a monk at Malmesbury Abbey in the county of Wiltshire in southern England, William wrote his Latin Deeds of the English Kings, completed in 1125 (a few years before Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works), in which he talks about King Arthur in some detail.²⁷ William explains that many fanciful legends had built up around Arthur, although he is certain that the fabled king had been a genuine historical figure who fought the Anglo-Saxons around the year 500. In fact, he tells us quite a lot about the Arthurian legend as it existed at the time (which we will return to in chapter 13, see here), but unfortunately he does not refer directly to Avalon. However, in another of his works, the Ecclesiastical History of Glastonbury, completed in 1130, he does mention an island that appears to be it.²⁸ (Not Glastonbury. As we have seen, that was added into copies of the monograph by later monks.) In the work William makes reference to the travels of Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury in the late sixth century, and includes a copy of a letter Augustine wrote to the Pope. It reads:

In the western part of Britain there is a large royal island . . . abounding in the beauties of nature and providing all the necessities of life. Upon it, the first neophytes of Catholic law founded a church.²⁹

This appears to be the same place that Robert de Boron later mentions when he says that Joseph of Arimathea’s followers brought the Grail to Britain and took it to the Vales of Avalon, where, he tells us, these early Christians, the first to land in Britain, founded a church. They were indeed some of the “first neophytes of Catholic law.” In the sixth century the term Catholic was synonymous with Christianity, as there were to be no Protestant sects for another nine centuries. Neophyte means a new religious convert, and first neophytes was Church terminology for the original followers of Christ, such as Joseph of Arimathea, whom the Bible says had known Jesus personally, and his companions. It might seem unlikely that Christians would have come to Britain as early as the mid-first century AD, but there were regular shipping routes to Britain, where merchants came to trade for tin and copper, and as the country had not yet been invaded by the Romans, it was a safe haven for a persecuted faction such as the Christians to settle.³⁰ In fact, the Roman author Quintus Tertullianus (also known as Tertullian), writing in the second century, expressly makes reference to such early Christians settling in Britain,³¹ while Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers in France in the mid-fourth century, specifically states that disciples of Jesus had built a church here.³² There was only one island immediately off the Welsh coast that fitted Augustine’s description: the Isle of Anglesey in northwest Wales. It was a large island, some 276 square miles, the largest in England and Wales, and it was a royal island. In Augustine’s time it was the seat of the kings of the Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd in northwest Wales. It was not only an extremely fertile region, the grain basket of Wales, but was famous for growing apples. Remember, Geoffrey of Monmouth refers to Avalon as the “Isle of Apples.” Moreover, in the first century it had the largest copper mines in Europe, was visited regularly by Roman merchants, and so was a relatively easy destination for early Christians to secure passage.

Anglesey is the English name for the island, coming from Ongullsey, meaning “Hook Island,” which it was called by the Vikings when they invaded parts of Britain in the ninth century. The Romans called the island Mona, from where the modern Welsh derived their name for it: Môn. What the original Britons called the island is unknown. It might even have been Annwn, who knows? It was something of a long shot, but I decided to visit Anglesey as a possible site for Avalon. It was easy enough to get to, as it is only about a quarter of a mile from the mainland, separated by the Menai Strait, which is spanned by a road bridge. Although, on my first visit to Anglesey, I failed to uncover any further evidence for it being the location the earliest Arthurian authors had in mind when writing of Annwn or Avalon, an archaeological site on the island did provide me with a completely new perspective on the story of the Lady of the Lake.

When I arrived on Anglesey, I made for the island museum in the town of Llangefni. Called Oriel Ynys Môn (Isle of Môn Gallery), it was a new building only recently opened by the queen. It housed displays of many historical artifacts found on the island, and one particular exhibit had me transfixed. It was an archaic iron sword blade, unearthed from the bed of one of Anglesey’s dried-up lakes, which the museum guidebook said was believed to have been cast into the water centuries ago as an offering to an ancient water goddess. Excalibur had been thrown into a lake, to a mystical water nymph! Could there be a connection? Hurriedly, I asked a staff member about the find and was told that it was just one of hundreds of ancient Celtic treasures uncovered from the bed of the now dry lake of Llyn Cerrig Bach (Lake of Small Stones) in the northwest of the island in the 1940s. Archaeologists believed that these artifacts had been deliberately thrown into the lake as tributes to a water deity around two thousand years ago. The museum attendant told me how archaeologists across Europe had found many such artifacts that had been cast into pools, rivers, and lakes by the Celtic peoples of northwest Europe—before, throughout, and even after the Roman era. Known as votive offerings, the consensus was that they were precious gifts to various water goddesses, as the Romans actually made reference to the practice.³³ The Romans even adopted the custom themselves, by throwing their own valuables, often coins, into sacred pools in the hope that the resident goddess would heal their afflictions or grant their wishes. It is generally thought that such traditions gave rise to the custom of wishing wells, into which we throw money even today. The Celtic peoples, of which the Britons were one, together with the Romans, regarded these water deities as goddesses of healing.³⁴ All this put what had seemed nothing more than a medieval fairy tale into a realistic historical context, consistent with post-Roman Britain, the period in which Arthur is said to have lived. Could the story of the wounded Arthur’s sword being thrown to the Lady of Lake, I wondered, have emerged from this custom of votive offerings? Was it originally perceived to be a tribute to a water goddess in the hope of healing the king? Indeed, such votive offerings often included swords—I’d actually seen one of them in the museum.

Today the site of Llyn Cerrig Bach is at the end of Anglesey Airport runway, but when I was there in 1991, it was a largely disused Royal Air Force base. However, much of the old dried-up lake was outside the base perimeter on common land, so I could freely wander around. The first pieces from the Celtic hoard were unearthed here in 1942, when ground was being cleared for a runway extension. After World War II archaeologists found more than 150 artifacts, including seven swords, six spearheads, cauldrons, a shield, a bronze trumpet, horse gear, and iron bars that were used as currency by the ancient Britons. (These days most of the finds are housed in the British Museum in London, including the sword that was once on display in Anglesey.) Dating the artifacts, archaeologists determined that they had not been cast into the lake all at one time but over a period of some four hundred years between around 300 BC and the late first century AD.³⁵ In fact, the final dating corresponds with a known historical event. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the early second century, says that Anglesey had been an important center of learning for the druids, the Celtic priesthood, and when the island was conquered by the Romans around AD 60, they slaughtered or enslaved the population, destroying their places of worship.³⁶ This was probably when the lake ceased to be used as a place of votive offering.

After visiting the museum I drove to Llyn Cerrig Bach, near the village of Llanfair-yn-Neubwll. Here a local farmer showed me where many of the items had been discovered, in what is now a peat bog. It was, he told me, because they had been preserved in peat that the finds had not rusted away. He also explained that the original lake had once been much larger than the peat bog that now survives and included three smaller lakes to the immediate southeast. Evidently the area had been drained for farmland years ago, but it was still low-lying land, except for a small hillock in the middle, on which now stood a radar mast for the airfield. It was when he told me that this hillock had once been an island in the center of the lake that I was struck by another epiphany. Everyone always seemed to assume that the island in the King Arthur story lay across the sea. But what if it was a lake island? Although, in the Arthurian romances, the vessel that transports Arthur to Avalon is not described in any detail, it is usually said to be a “barge.” (Malory, in his original Late Middle English, for example, describes it as “a lytyl barge,” a little barge.) A barge is not a seafaring boat but one used for inland travel on rivers or across lakes. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Avalon was originally considered a lake island. Just before Arthur is carried off to Avalon, he gets his knight to cast Excalibur into a lake where the Lady of the Lake retrieves the weapon; then, immediately afterward, Arthur is put into the barge. Reading between the lines, it would seem that Arthur is taken across the very same lake, particularly as the Lady of the Lake is one of the three women awaiting him on the boat. Were lake islands considered sacred in Celtic times?

Before continuing I should perhaps explain a little about the Celts. The Celts came originally from Austria around 800 BC and were able to settle much of what are now France, Britain, and Ireland by about 500 BC. They did this virtually unopposed because of their superior weaponry. Their weapons were made from iron, while the native inhabitants had only softer bronze. Celtic swords could easily bend or even slice through those of their enemies. The Celts were, therefore, the chief Iron Age inhabitants of northwestern Europe, supplanting the earlier Bronze Age peoples. (The Bronze Age refers to the period in which implements were made from bronze, and in Britain it dates from around 2000 BC, although it was not extensively used until about 1200 BC, while the British Iron Age dates from the seventh century BC until the coming of the Romans in the late first century AD.) The Celts shared a common culture, artwork, and religion and a collective group of regional dialects of the language we now call Gaelic. The problem facing modern historians is that until the Romans conquered the Celts, they had no form of written language, leaving us with Greek and Roman writers to tell us much of what we know of them. One aspect of the culture the Romans considered particularly odd was that in Celtic society men and women enjoyed equal status. In fact, women accompanied men into battle, and there were even warrior queens, such as the famous Queen Boudicca who fought the Romans in Britain. The Romans also regarded as peculiar that the Celts, in the countries they inhabited, lacked an overall state. Instead, they were organized around smaller tribal kingdoms.³⁷ However, they did have a kind of ruling elite, a priesthood known as druids, probably derived from the Celtic word dryw, meaning “seer,” who lived above and beyond tribal society. The druids traveled where they liked and were welcomed and revered in each kingdom they visited. The Greek historians Diodorus Siculus, writing around 36 BC, and the Roman historian Strabo, writing about the time of Christ, say that the druids acted not only as priests but also, because they were held in such high regard, intervened to stop tribal wars. (In effect, they were somewhat similar to Buddhist lamas of old Tibet.) They lived outside the tribal villages, in the countryside, in simple settlements of round, wood and thatch huts that we might today call monasteries. However, unlike later Christian monks and nuns, the druids were not usually bound by an oath of celibacy; both male and female druids often lived togetherin a sort of commune. Exceptionally esteemed druids, though, did seem to have refrained from sexual relationships and lived either alone or in small communities in remote or relatively inaccessible locations.³⁸

Fig. 4.1. Map of Europe, showing locations discussed in this chapter.

Much of Celtic Europe was eventually occupied by the Romans. France was successfully conquered by Julius Caesar in 51 BC, and Britain was invaded by the Emperor Claudius in AD 43. France became part of the Roman province of Gaul, and what is now England and Wales became the Roman province of Britannia. The Romans, however, failed to conquer Scotland and Ireland, where a Celtic way of life continued until well after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Although the Romans allowed the conquered Celts to continue some of their religious practices, and to venerate their own gods, they ruthlessly suppressed the druids, whom they regarded as a threat to their authority. As part of this policy, they destroyed the druid sanctuaries. However, in the mountainous regions of Scotland and across the sea in Ireland, they survived for many more centuries, and it is here that archaeology has revealed much about druid settlements. When Scotland and Ireland were gradually Christianized, during the late fifth and early sixth centuries, these sanctuaries were not obliterated; rather, they were replaced with churches, shrines, and monasteries. In fact, in these countries there developed a strange hybrid of paganism and Christianity known as the Celtic Church, an institution that the Catholic Church later did its best to eradicate. ³⁹

Returning to my question: Were lake islands considered sacred in Celtic times? The answer is yes. Remember how the Romans recorded that certain esteemed druids would live in small, remote communities. Well, these were very often said to have been on islands in lakes or rivers. There are many examples throughout the Celtic world, recorded by early Christian missionaries and investigated by archaeologists. For instance, in Ireland there was one on Lough Derg (Island of the Red Eye) in Country Donegal. On an island now called Station Island, there is a monastery known as Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, dating from the fifth century, which stands on the site of an ancient druid settlement. Early monks from the monastery record that it had been the last druid sanctuary in Ireland. In Scotland there is Loch Maree, in which there stands the Isle of Maree where, in the year 672, the Christian missionary Saint Maelrubba converted a community of druids who lived there in seclusion. There still survives a ring of standing stones on the Isle of Maree, some thirty feet in diameter, which has long been known as the Druid Circle. Archaeologists have excavated the site and dated it to around 100 BC, indicating that it had been erected, presumably for ceremonial purposes, by the ancient Celts.⁴⁰ I already knew of these islands from research into druidism I had carried out for a previous book, but it had never occurred to me that the Arthurian Avalon might have been based on such a place. But now, standing in the dried-up lake of Llyn Cerrig Bach, staring over to the hillock at its heart, I felt sure I should be looking for an island in a lake. The original Avalon could perhaps have been this very site, but I hoped not. It had never been excavated, and there was no way it would be in the foreseeable future; I could not even visit the hillock, as it was now home to a military radar mast. I decided, however, that I didn’t need to worry too much. There would probably have been many, perhaps hundreds, of sacred druid lake islands in Britain, any of which may have inspired the legend of Annwn or Avalon. The statistical chances of Llyn Cerrig Bach being the location of the mystic isle were remote. Nevertheless, I still had to decide on the best candidate among what I assumed would be dozens of potential contenders, which would no doubt take some considerable doing. As I was already in Wales, I decided my next stop should be the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, on the coast some eighty miles to the south. It has one of the best collections of ancient Welsh and early British manuscripts in the world.

A somewhat austere, white-stone building, overlooking the sea beside the campus of Aberystwyth University, the National Library of Wales houses over four million printed volumes. Hidden among them, there might lie vital clues to solving the Avalon mystery. Arthur is professed to have lived around AD 500, and so if the story of Avalon was based on a real location, it would presumably have been an island with sacred associations during this time. Arthur’s Britain had consisted of what is now England and Wales, or at least parts of them, so I was presumably looking for a lake island in either of these two countries. For the Avalon theme to relate to an actual site, it would have to have been somewhere still considered hallowed by the Britons of the late fifth or early sixth centuries. I already knew that there had been sacred lake islands in pre-Roman Britain and probably during the Roman era; my first task at the library, however, was to decide if such ancient pagan sites would still have been venerated by the Britons around AD 500.

Many pagan Celtic practices, I discovered, had endured the Roman occupation of Britain and had enjoyed something of a revival when the Romans departed. Soon after the Roman legions left in AD 410, law and order rapidly collapsed, and Britain fragmented into its pre-Roman tribal kingdoms, of which there were dozens. Although many of the town-dwelling Britons had adopted Christianity by this time, paganism still thrived in the countryside. The word pagan actually comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning “country dweller,” and referred to those living outside the towns that refused to convert to Christianity and continued to worship their old gods. (The word heathen, incidentally, has a similar origin; it means “heath dweller,” a heath being an area of wild countryside.) Without the presence of the imperial army, many Roman towns were sacked and plundered by the “country dwellers,” whose leaders had assumed control of the various new kingdoms, and paganism reasserted itself—something that greatly concerned the Catholic Church. Even after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, the empire struggled on for a few more decades until Italy was invaded by the Germans and the last western emperor was deposed in AD 476. (It was not actually the end of the entire Roman Empire; it continued in the East, in places like Turkey, as we shall see later.) Remarkably, the German conquerors of Italy converted to Christianity, allowing the Church in Rome to survive. Learning of Britain’s slide into idolatry, the pope (or Bishop of Rome, as he was known at the time) sent various missionaries to reconvert the Britons. One of these was Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerre in France, who had remarkable success around the year 429.⁴¹ However, the efforts of Germanus soon resulted in unwelcome consequences for the Roman Church. What ensued was a hybrid style of British Christianity, heavily influenced by paganism, which flourished over the rest of that century and was prevalent in Britain at the very time Arthur is said to have lived. It was not until the pope’s envoy Augustine came to Britain in 597 that the Roman Catholic Church reasserted itself.⁴² Although few written records survive from Britain during this period, archaeology has shown that many pagan conventions continued alongside, and also as a part of, British Christianity as practiced at the time. For example, archaeologists have found depictions of Celtic goddesses alongside contemporary images of the Virgin Mary, inscriptions to honor pagan deities appear beside the name of Christ, and stone circles, used by the pagans as places of worship, were simultaneously being utilized for Christian services, as demonstrated by Mass chalices being discovered, deposited alongside Celtic pots decorated with images of ancient gods.⁴³ It was, I concluded, very possible that the old druid lake islands were indeed being used again as sacred sites around AD 500. What I needed next was to find firm historical or archaeological evidence to establish the precise locations of such sites.

I discovered that the National Library of Wales had a dedicated archaeology section, so that’s where I concentrated my research. Did anyone working there have knowledge of lake islands being occupied for religious or ceremonial purposes in post-Roman Britain? A member of the department was particularly helpful, explaining how a team from the University of Wales was excavating a potential site at that very time. The dig was taking place at Ynys Bwlc (Stockade Island), which stands in Llangorse Lake in the Brecon Beacons (hills), about sixty miles to the southeast of Aberystwyth. The excavation had been inspired by a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the late 800s, which records that the island was still being used as a royal residence by a Welsh chieftain in the ninth century. Artifacts unearthed at the site, such as jewelry and pottery fragments, revealed that the site had been occupied as early as the sixth century, well before it had been used as a palace. The problem was that no clues survived indicating the island’s function at that time; a platform of rocks and earth had been erected across the small island as foundations for the palace in the 800s, destroying vital evidence concerning its earlier occupation.⁴⁴ When I asked about archaeological excavations on other British lake islands occupied in the post-Roman era, I received a disappointing reply. Evidently, there had been none (at least, that they knew of). Unlike the later Dark Age era, virtually no written manuscripts from the post-Roman period survive to lead archaeologists to promising locations to excavate. With the limited resources available to British archaeology, potential dig sites from the period around AD 500 were just too uncertain a venture. In fact, I was told, specifically excavating lake islands was prohibitively expensive. Just getting the equipment and personnel to and from Ynys Bwlc, for example, was proving so costly that the dig was threatened with closure.

Fig. 4.2. Map of southern Britain, showing locations discussed in this chapter.

Archaeology has always been grossly underfunded, and there are thousands of British sites, from every period of time, crying out to be excavated. Only the most promising locations warrant the attention of archaeologists: sites for which there is ample historical documentation to support the notion that there is something worth uncovering. Almost no historical records whatsoever survive from Britain dating from the period after the Romans left in the year 410 until the Anglo-Saxon era from around AD 700. During this post-Roman era, life was just too turbulent: buildings and places of learning, such as monasteries, were continually being looted, pillaged, and burnt. Moreover, with the break from continental Europe, Britain found itself starved of parchment—there was nothing to write on. Even records that were kept had little chance of long-term survival in Britain’s damp, rainy climate.⁴⁵ By the eighth century some semblance of civilization had returned, and new monasteries were built in which documents could be kept dry, but the period of interest to me was a very different matter. Bad news all round. I had just about resigned myself to the fact that my Avalon search would be just another dead end when the librarian told me something that put an exciting new complexion on my entire lake island theory. He cited examples of sacred islands recorded by ancient Greek and Roman authors in Celtic Gaul. The Greek historian Strabo, in his Geographica (Geography) written around AD 7, describes an island on the River Loire, near the town of Nantes in northwestern France, that was occupied exclusively by a community of Celtic priestesses.⁴⁶ Such priestesses are again mentioned by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, some four decades later, in his De Situ Orbis (A Description of the World), where he describes a similar island, this one at the mouth of the River Elorn, some 180 miles farther northwest. Once again it was inhabited only by priestesses, one of them an oracle (a medium) for a Celtic deity.⁴⁷ When the librarian read from a copy of Pomponius Mela’s work, I was pretty much bowled over: “Its priestesses, holy in perpetual virginity, are said to be nine in number.” Additionally, Mela says that they had the power to “cure wounds and diseases incurable by others.”⁴⁸ Nine island-dwelling holy women led by a female oracle who heal the sick! He might as well have been describing Avalon with its nine venerated women led by the healer Morgan le Fey. Such island communities, I was told, seem to have been common throughout the Celtic world, and they almost certainly existed in Britain. I was convinced that sacred lake islands, such as Avalon is portrayed in the Arthurian saga, had existed during Celtic times, although I still lacked firm evidence for that particular convention enduring in Britain itself into the period Arthur apparently lived. However, I did have a new line of inquiry that might lead me in that direction: the nine priestesses. In the Arthurian tale Avalon and its nine mystic women are associated with healing, and the enchantress Morgan is their leader. It was time to turn my attentions to Morgan le Fey and Avalon’s mysterious maidens.