ARTHUR LEGEND

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 January 1934, Page 3

ARTHUR LEGEND

ITS HOME AT TINTAGEL. The Office of Works has issued recently its preliminary account of the excavations carried out by its.repiesentative on the “island” of Tintagel during the last part of July. The results of the excavations of necessity bring, the hard light of facts to beai on the controversy which has in the last, few years raged about the story of King Arthur and his connection with Tintagel, says the “Manchester Guardian.”

Recent research, before the excavations. in which the Cornish scholar Mr Henry Jenner, has been prominent. has led to the following conclusions. While Cornish knowledge of and legends about King Arthur can he pushed back to the tenth century and even earlier, there is no authority who associates Arthur with Tintagel before the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. But Geoffrey states definitely that when Gorlois fled from the Court of Uther with his Wife Igraine. he placed himself and his forces in the stronghold of Damelioc and Igraine in the Castle of Tintagel. Now Damelioc has been certainly identified with the great Iron Age camp of Castle-an-Dinas, near St. Golumb, some twenty miles away from Tintagel. Mr. Jenner pertinently points out that it would be absurd for Gorlois to put himself twenty miles distant from his wife if his main object was to save his wife from the unwelcome attentions of Uther Pendragon, and he assumes therefore that Gorlois and his wife were at Damelioc —Gorlois deployed in front of the castle, his wife safely behind the fortifications. Tintagel thus falls out of the story, and the romantic tale of the arrival of Uther at the castle in the absence of Gorlois and of the birth'of Arthur that resulted from Uther’s deception of Igraine (Merlin mad£ him into the semblance of her missing husbann) can no longer be attributed to the romantic setting of Tintagel. A CELTIC MONASTERY Mr. Jenner went farther still and suggested that if excavations on the “island” took place they would reveal nothing of military importance othei than the medieval castle, and would probably throw light more on monastic life tliaii on Arthurian legend. This has, in fact, happened, and the excavations have, produced proof that long before the medieval castle was built there was a Celtic monastery on Tintagel “island,” comparable to the monasteries of Celtic origin at Lindisfarne or lona. , j I have recently made a close exam-| ination of the ruins thus excavate!. They consist for the most part of rectangular buildings of humble type >-atuated on the north face of the stionghold. facing the Welsh and Irish coasts. On the summit, near the Celtic chapel of St. Julitta, which were rebuilt in Norman times, are foundations which the excavator identifies as an unroofed annex of the chapel for some unspecified use by the monks. The great headland promontory of Tintagel tus takes on some semblance of the sacred mountain of Mount Athos, which still to-day has the humble cells of monks perched precariously on its steep face in proximity to the monas-

teries and chapels. The Tintagel monastery thus revealed has close affinities with Irish monasteries, a fact which harmonises well with philogical evidence recently adduced which sees in the name Tintagel an Irish Gaelic, name of a type known in North Cornwall, but of extreme rarity. The monastery is tentatively attributed to the ninth century, and it seems to have fallen into ruins by the time of the Norman control of the district. So far the excavations outside the medieval castle have uncovered only a tiny fraction of the total excavable area, perhaps a fiftieth part of the whole. Nor were the excavations either extensive or deep; they go down to a maximum of about 3ft. Nothing in the nature of a large deposit or a building of a date earlier than the ninth century has been found. Yet the excavator states categorically that the discovery of the monastery “is twofold. It enables the story of Tintagel to be carried back into the Dark Ages, and, by revealing the true nature of the site, it confirms the dissociation from the Arthurian cycle which had already been proposed on historical and philological grounds.” Now this is an important conclusion, indeed a conclusion of the first order. But after looking at the site and examining the controvery I am inclined to think that the excavators are pressing their evidence, which is scanty, much too hard. For admittedly the excavations have not even begun to approach the period in . which King Arthur must be placed—say, roughly, A.D. 450-500. The archaeological level of that period has been neither excavated nor identified. If, as the excavations proceed, it is found that between the prehistoric or the Roman period and the ninth century, let us say, there is definite proof that the site was uninhabited and abandoned until the foundation of the monastery in the ninth century, then, on strictly archaeological evidence, we can conclude that in the Arthurian period nobody was there and, in particular, that King Arthur was not there. NOT JUSTIFIED If, on the other hand, remains of the Arthurian period (hard to identify though they may be) are found on the “island,” then, it. will be impossible to assert with categorical certainty that Arthur was never at Tintagel. In any case, to have assumed from the discovery of a ninth-century monastery that a sixth-century Arthur was never there seems to be a conclusion based on inadequate premises. Tintagel Head is the ideal natural fortress. There is no • place like it along the whole south-west coastline of Britain. It is unassailable . and could be captured only by besiegers who had control of the sea. The Celtic monks who settled there, probably from Ireland, saw the strength and safety of their refuge, like the monks of Lindisfarne or Athos. Before them, I have little doubt, Iron Age Celts, Romans, and Romano-Celts of the Arthurian age realised the strength of the position. In this light the behaviour of Gorlois would not have seemed so ridiculous. At least he chose the strongest place in Cornwall. I am no enthusiast for Arthurian romance. Still less do I wMh to see its overpowering sentimentality perpetuated in the Tintagel area. But so far I feel that Arthur has not yet been successfully dislodged from his hoine.