Bring On The Barbarians

-Depicting The Picts Onscreen

Having recently been travelling around Scotland, which is currently launching its national independence campaign, I thought it might be an appropriate time to have another look at the recent big-screen depictions of early Scotland and its earliest-known native people, whom the Romans loosely referred to as Caledonians and then a confederation called Picti, Picts.

As I write, Pixar has just released its animated feature Brave, and Scotland’s First Minister has just been on a tie-in junket to California to promote Scotland to American investors. I haven’t seen Brave, but given the characters have cod-names like Lord Dingwall and Lord MacGuffin, it doesn’t seem to be based on anything authentic. (Dingwall is a later Norse name for a town outside Inverness, while MacGuffin is a made-up joke name Hitchcock famously adopted as a term for any film’s central plot device.) The title of course evokes Braveheart, a film which though historically inaccurate connected with modern audiences by means of a simplistic portrayal of history. There, the Scots are freedom fighters (complete with blue-painted ‘Pictish’ faces) and the English are cruel oppressors exercising droit-de-seigneur ‘first night’ (jus primae noctis) conjugal rights over any bride in the vicinity. ( “We’ll breed them out,” as the smirking English king puts it.)

I say ‘another look’ as in an earlier post (Those Pictish Blues Again), I commented on how unenlightened screen depictions of the Picts generally were, and noted that, from their advance publicity, the recent round of big-budget feature films set in Pictland sounded no better. Now that these films are all out on DVD, complete with director’s commentary or behind-the-scenes docu, we can look at their actual depictions of this obscure Celtic domain, portrayals which I now reckon to be at least an improvement on earlier ones.

The one thing the films I’ve seen have in common is that the natives tend to be Fanatical Barbarians while Rome or Roman Britain is the Civilising Influence. Their citizens get to speak modern English while the natives at best are subtitled, and often just scream for blood, including human sacrifice. That is such a travesty of history (even using the history written by the Romans themselves) that I’m pleased to say that this hard-line approach is starting to melt away. However this thaw has been a long time coming.

The Picts were not a tribe of bloodthirsty savages who fought the Romans and then disappeared as the Irish Scots took over. They were not a tribe but an inter-tribal alliance of ‘free’ Britons, who survived the incursions of the Romans, English and Vikings to amalgamate peacefully with the Scots (Irish colonists) in the 9th C. under King Kenneth MacAlpin (Alpin is a Pict royal name). Though the Pictish language is lost and only a couple of codex manuscripts have survived, their artwork, including contributions to illuminated manuscripts, shows them to have been a creative, sophisticated society.

The murderous-northern-barbarians depiction goes all the way back to Shakespeare (who had the excuse of catering to a narrow-minded Scots king), with his unhistorical Macbeth, depicting a king (Mac Bethad mac Findlaích) who actually had a fairly peaceful 17-year reign and his wife as self-destructing murderers who didn’t last out the year. The Scots king presumably did not object to this depiction on the basis the real Macbeths were more Pictish than Scots. (Lady Macbeth’s real name was Gruoch, a Pictish name, and Pict noblewomen held real power, their royal succession being matrilinear. Macbeth’s crowned successor Lulach was in fact her son, but not his. See Macbeth: A True Story by Fiona Watson, 2010; there is also a 2010 RSC-stage and Radio-3 radio sequel play, Dunsinane, by David Greig, on Gruach and son’s continuing claim to the throne.) In 2004, the Scottish Parliament debated a motion to have 2005 declared the ‘Year Of Macbeth’ to redress this misrepresentation. The debate may have been prompted by the then latest portrayal of the Picts as howling barbarians (cf “Picts wrongly painted as a race of barbarians,” Glasgow Herald 20 Sept 2004) - the 2004 film King Arthur, of which more anon.

The ‘Pictish problem’ is also part of a larger tendency to see heroism as imposing an authoritarian ‘order’ on those deemed barbarians or savages. This is an atttitude that has pervaded western thinking and arguably led to much worse problems (such as war and colonialism). Filmically, it’s not limited to making the Picts the barbarians the forces of law and order must fight. The Arthurian equivalent of the American western would on occasion use other tribes, such as Boudicca’s Iceni-led alliance, as almost interchangeable barbarians. “Bring on the Barbarians,” was the command that went back to Roman-arena times. Filmically, the approach flourished in the postwar era when Hollywood was making Technicolor historical adventure films in Britain for tax reasons: in the early 1950s, the Government's blocking export of sterling revenues from Hollywood box office takings in England led to a cycle of costume adventure-dramas set here. The Picts made their big-screen debut then, along with various other unkempt and uncouth native ‘barbarian’ tribes in films like Knights Of The Round Table (1953), The Black Knight (1954) and Prince Valiant (1954), where the Scottish picture-postcard castle Eilean Donan made its first screen appearance as Prince Val' s home castle, while nearby Dornie became a Viking village.

These costume dramas had a certain comic-book sweep, but no real feeling or even respect for period, applying an American moral code alien to the period depicted. The use of British scriptwriters to create authenticity did not, under such circumstances, help. In his autobiography Notes For A Life British film industry veteran (actor, writer, director) Bryan Forbes tells of being hired by telephone out of the blue, as a “fast rewrite man,” for Warwick Films' Arthurian adventure film The Black Knight, starring Alan Ladd, scripted by the award-winning multi-talented Australian-expat writer Alec Coppel, directed by Hollywood veteran Tay Garnett and produced by Irving Allen and Cubby Broccoli (who would become famous as producers of, respectively, disaster films like Earthquake and the James Bond films). The project sounded interesting, though he was quickly disillusioned.

Forbes: “What's the film about?”

Broccoli: “What do you care what the film' s about? Can you start work today, this afternoon?”

On arrival, Broccoli told Forbes they had shot action exteriors in Spain (a then-popular cost-saving practise) and had begun filming around Pinewood, where they had built a fake Stonehenge (whose megaliths all get pulled down in the climax) where the Druids could burn prisoners alive in a wicker cage, as was their wont. However the producer had belatedly realised they needed some dialogue to explain the plot to the audience, which in summary was that Alan Ladd, as a village smith named John, saves England from invasion.

He then proceeded to detail one of the most unlikely plots in the history of motion pictures... England had been invaded by Saracens disguised as Vikings. Against these improbable forces King Arthur had given battle on a Spanish field. The said bogus Vikings had sacked Camelot and now convention demanded that Alan Ladd somehow become a Knight Of The Round Table and single-handed achieve final victory.... In addition ... the Druids at Stonehenge ... had somehow imported a bevy of Vestal Virgins ... and were intent on sacrificing them as the sun came up over Pinewood Studios, thus posing yet another problem for King Arthur and Alan Ladd. And just in case the audience might feel it wan't getting value for money, the Christian 'Bishop' of Stonehenge (one of the more inspired and endearing conventions of the script) was scheduled to consecrate a new abbey to replace the edifice destroyed by the aforementioned Saracens inadequately disguised as Vikings… it was at this cliff-hanging point that the existing script came to a full stop. Irving finished his digest of notable events. He seemed remarkably calm for a men in the process of changing film and constitutional history on such a heroic scale. There was no real problem in his view. My task, for which I was being suitably rewarded [fast-rewrite-man fee of £600], was to resolve all the loose ends by Monday morning...

Forbes then discovered script approval was in the hands of the star’s wife. Mrs Ladd at once rejected Forbes's first idea for Ladd' s escaping captivity by grabbing a horse from his guards: “This Limey writer you got here, he's got Alan Ladd stealing a horse. He steals a horse, we lose the Boy Scouts Association of America. So unless you change it we're catching the next plane out of here.” A line was duly added to Forbes' s script, of Ladd saying 'Is this the horse I ordered?' Explained Mrs Ladd later to Forbes, “It's never a waste of time to get things right.” When the climax at Stonehenge was finally shot with the entire Westminster Choir singing a Te Deum and the Abbot reading from the King James Bible [pub. c1610], Forbes told Allen that “within this hallowed scene he had brilliantly encompassed six hundred years of history and managed to get every single detail wrong.” Riposted Allen, “So who cares? They won't know the difference in Little Rock, and that's where it's going to take the money.”

Says it all, really.

Anyway, as a starting point, we can compare the recent films (four made in the last five years) with the last big-budget feature that had a north-of-Hadrian’s-Wall setting, King Arthur (2004), since issued on DVD in a longer ‘Director's Cut’ version together with making-of documentary.

Although there are indications the Arthur of native tradition fought north of the Wall (references to battles in the Caledonian Wood and at Din Eidyn, Edinburgh), the setting north of the Wall may seem surprising, partly because Arthur’s floruit - however you measure it exactly - was in the Dark Ages after Roman Britain (and the Wall) fell into ruin. It may be that Spielberg’s announcement in 2002 he was making a £85m, 8-hour Arthurian miniseries for American audiences, using key personnel from his HBO Band Of Brothers series, caused King Arthur producer Jerry Bruckheimer to look elsewhere for a differentiated approach. Spielberg’s HBO project was to be set in Somerset, and was to “de-evolve” the legend, making Arthur into Artos, a humble Romano-British blacksmith (shades of Alan Ladd in 1954’s The Black Knight) at a ‘Roman’ fort around AD 500, who discovers the steel-forging secret behind Excalibur. Spielberg’s plan was criticised for its English-Arthur setting by Welsh Arthurian proponents, including a Welsh MP, after a dozen English MPs had welcomed his project in Parliament when it was announced as to be shot in the West Country. Unfortunately the Treasury tax breaks that attracted Band Of Brothers had already been withdrawn, making filming in Britain unlikely - more probably in Ireland like Saving Private Ryan and Bruckheimer’s rival project; the upshot was Spielberg shelved his plan (which sounded desperately unimaginative in any case).

King Arthur went ahead, with an American scriptwriter (who also co-wrote Gladiator) and director, based on a theory that would put the setting north of the Wall, something that had been done in novels, but not Arthurian films. The theory was one formulated by anthropologists the Arthurian legend was based on campfire tales of a Sarmatian contingent of 5,500 heavy cavalry patrolling Hadrian’s Wall, led by a Roman officer whose middle name was (wait for it) Artorius. The anthropologists observed the Sarmatians had folktales of warriors called narts, a magic sword thrown in the water as the hero lies dying, and a few other evocative details [summary here]. The thesis was the leader’s name transmuted from the Batradz of Sarmatian folktale into Arthur (somehow with the un-Roman ‘th’ dipthong) after Lucius Artorius Castus their onetime officer. It’s just as likely the Celtic Iron Age inherited it from an earlier substratum of Indo-European legend and folktale, but English historians and novelists have always been keen on any theory that makes Arthur a Roman-trained cavalryman, and in this scenario he is also an ‘ethnic’ figure, which gives the theory appeal to both authoritarian and liberal sensibilities. There has long been a notion among English historians and novelists that Arthur’s association with knights means he could not simply be a British warrior, but had at least to have been Roman-trained to use cavalry tactics. Various Arthurian novels make Ambrosius, a historical figure, Arthur’s mentor. 

Of course it’s not true the Celts or Britons did not know how to use horses in battle; they did not have stirrups for a medieval-style ‘jousting’ type of battle-charge, which you need for true cavalry. (The stirrups are adjustable so you can stand rather than sit in the saddle, which, believe me, is a lot less bumpy when cantering etc; the setup is still used with western-style or ‘cowboy’ saddles, which when properly adjusted will have one handspan of free space between your crotch and the saddle.) But neither in the main did the Romans. Their forte was heavily armoured infantry in shield-wall formations (seen in all the recent Romans-in-Pictland films). I’ve previously characterised this notion as like creating a western-genre scenario where kindly old patrician General Custer trains Crazy Horse and his Sioux warband how to use horses as a military tactic, so that they can then go off and defeat their mutual enemies. (On the natives’ use of cavalry, one of the Vindolanda inked-wooden-leaf tablets recovered in the 70s from a fort near the Wall has a 2nd C. description of their mixed cavalry / mounted infantry / infantry tactics: "The British are unprotected by armour. There are lots of cavalry. They don't use swords nor do these dreadful British people mount their horses to throw javelins at us.”) Note that the Britons here would be Caledonians or Britons from lowland provinces based around Edinburgh or Strathclyde rather than the later Picts.

The film opens with a prologue saying that recent archeo discoveries have shed light on Arthur’s true identity. This is incorrect: the basis of the scenario is in folklore studies, not archaeology; nor is the theory recent. I recall reading an article in a folklore journal in the early 1980s on this theorised Sarmatian source. Sarmatia was a sub-division of Scythia, which was a general-purpose Greek and Roman name for Eastern Europe, in this case the more open lands north of the Black Sea – horse country. Hadrian’s Wall figures in the story, though it is set well after the fall of Rome. The film introduces Clive Owen in the lead role of weary Romano-British cavalry commander Artorius Castus, here also given a Sarmatian heritage like his troop of 6 survivors; this contradicts the historical background - the Romans didn’t trust such colonial contingents without a proper Roman officer, rather like the British Indian Army with its British officers and native troops; Lucius Artorius Castus is not a Sarmatian name, but a Roman one. To add to the confusion, producer Jerry Bruckheimer announced the concept was that "Arthur was really Roman and the Knights of the Round Table were Russian and great horsemen." Although the film claims a respectable academic theory setup as its starting point, it’s already getting muddled, and soon only serves to demonstrate how unwieldy this approach is, either as history or an Arthurian realist scenario showing how the legend might have come about.

For decades, historians and authors tried to come with a Dark Ages historical basis for the later elaborate mediaeval legend we read in the Arthurian romances, but these draw on so many traditions, from ancient folk-tales onward, that the reality is obscured and the romances appeal because they are a synthesis of western heroic and fabulous traditions, not because they dramatise some obscure Dark Ages source. It’s just a wish-fulfilling academic fantasy to try and reconcile the vast Arthurian mythos with a single piece of history. I’ve sometimes been impressed by the sheer ingenuity of novelists (both English and American) who have imposed Roman place names and practices onto a Dark Ages Britain to come up with a credible prototype framework for the legend, so that you could see the kernel from which the mighty Romance legends would grow. But King Arthur, with its awkwardly over-reaching title, is proof how clunky the process of rationalising legends can quickly become, and soon makes little sense as either realist tale or as legend prototype: it simply falls down between the two.

Apart from a battle on the ice which has more to do with 13C Russian (cf Alexander Nevsky) than Arthurian legend, the battles, the tactics, the leadership depicted are nothing special, certainly not convincing as a shining inspiration. The story setup has a small troop of Sarmatian youth impressed into the Roman Army, 452-467 AD, in order to better fit the chronicle dates of the First Saxon War. The problem is Rome fell in 405 AD, the Western Empire and Roman Britannia collapsing soon after. Hadrian’s Wall, built around 120-133 AD and abandoned soon afterwards, belongs to a much earlier era, and the 5,000 Sarmatians who patrolled the border there in the 2nd C would have been reassigned long before Rome fell. What these 7 unkempt-looking lone survivors are still doing there centuries later is not explained.

The other problem is there is a set of native-British legends about Arthur, preserved in Welsh, which are different from the Breton-French ones; in the former he is not a king at all, but a huntsman or warband leader (or to use the English historians’ favourite disdainful expression, a warlord) who is not the least interested in waging war as an extension of Roman empire building. Of course, one could argue the native version is the ‘vulgar’ form which developed among the common people, while the Breton-French one was developed at court into something aspirational, with moral lessons for the aristocracy of the mediaeval era. Then there is also a bare-bones chronicle version listing some of his battles, like Badon (which is dramatised in at least two of the recent films), in the monkish historical records of west Britain. But there seems no way to reconcile the three strands of folk-hero, romance, and chronicle, and that remains the essential problem for Arthurian adaptors who want to have their cake and eat it.

The action begins with our Artorius (who calls himself “Arthur Castus”) and his troop of 6 Sarmatian cavalry foiling an ambush by those nasty howling natives the Picts, here referred to throughout by the contemptuous name Woads. (One of the music tracks is named ‘Woad To Ruin’.) I suppose the scriptwriters got the idea from American natives being called Redskins originally after the red-ochre paint they marked their bodies with. Woad however is probably not the dye used for Pictish tattoing - tests have shown it is impractical. Although not visibly dyed, the Woads are described as blue demons that eat Christians alive. The 7 defeat the Woads by shooting arrows from horseback like Parthians (as in ‘Parthian shot,’ modernised as ‘parting shot’), and then, in an unconvincing fight scene, defeat the more numerous Woads in hand to hand combat. The long-haired wild-eyed Woad leader turns out to be Merlin, and the story now also quickly works in Excalibur. The 7 arrive at Hadrian’s Wall, which is somehow still being maintained and even has a Round Table in the officers mess. Arthur’s 6 ‘knights’ for reasons unexplained (beyond more legend-stuffing) have proto-Arthurian French or Welsh rather than Sarmatian names: Lancelot, Gawain, Galahad, Tristan, Bors etc. They remain completely undeveloped characters, there to provide Arthur with a trio of sidekicks on each side of his horse every time he poses on some vantage point. (Though the actors playing the six are somewhat more lively in demeanour than Clive Owen as Arthur, who looks glum throughout.)

Some real figures from history are now introduced, in ways that contradict what is known about them. Bishop Germanus (an actual Gaulish bishop who visited Britannia in 429 and 445 AD), arrives - here somehow a Roman military commander in AD 467. Arthur claims he is a Pelagian (a ‘heretical’ largely British school of Christianity), though nothing further is made of this. (There is vague talk in a cut final scene about making your own fate.) Germanus tells him the north ie Scotland is to be taken over in “a massive incursion” by the Saxons, led by Cerdic (the 5th-6th C founder of Wessex according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). It’s implied this has been authorised by the Pope, though why he would want to give land to pagans is unexplained, and why the Saxons would want to invade from the wrong end of the country is also not explained. (In one early source, the Saxons were brought in and given land to fight the Picts raiding from the far north, and the land the Saxons were given was in the south.) Arthur and his 6 knights are told to head north, instead of going home to Sarmatia (having finished their 15 years indentured military service), to rescue a Roman official from the Saxons, by order of the Pope. (My viewing notes may have got slightly muddled here, as having the Pope in charge of ‘papal armies’ conflates the Roman Empire with the Holy Roman Empire not founded until the 10th C AD.)

The less-than-magnificent 7 ride north and are ambushed by the cunning Woads who have set the usual fallen-tree traps on the road, but they are spared by Merlin for some reason. Arthur turns on the Bishop’s protege as a tyrant when he discovers he has imprisoned Guinevere, here a Pictish warrior-princess in a fetching leather-and-wickerwork bikini outfit. She lectures Arthur about being a Roman collaborator killing Britons. They pass a massacred Roman unit (”Saxons!”), whose presence so far north of the Wall - and so many decades after the Romans abandoned Britain - is also unexplained. Soon they must do battle with the Saxon army, on a frozen lake (guess who falls through the ice in great numbers). Back at the Wall, with the help of Merlin’s Woads, they wipe out the Saxon army at a spot which turns out to be called Badon Hill (the famous Arthurian victory dated in the chronicles to AD 495 or later). Arthur slays Cerdic (who presumably never gets to found Wessex in this alternate reality - or is he meant to be a different Cerdic?). Lancelot is also killed in battle, and as this is before he can have his famous affair with Guinevere, the legend as well as history is being confounded. Luckily Guinevere has turned out to be not just a wilful queen (as in the romances) but an expert archer who leads the Woads, now also painted blue like Braveheart, using longbows, mediaeval crossbows and giant catapults. (There is no record the Picts ever used these.) Afterwards, Arthur and Guinevere wed as the Woads shoot flaming arrows over the sea and all hail him as ‘King Arthur.’ (On the commentary, the director laments that this was a new ending to satisfy complaints from a preview audience; the original ending included on the DVD has Arthur involved in an awkward legend-stuffing talk about Fate, with a boy who is presumably the next-generation Arthur figure.) Merlin hails Arthur as he announces that from now on, all Britons will be united in one common cause. Even the most idealistic mediaeval romance was never that politically naive. The ‘Britannia’ that a ‘Roman’ Arthur represents of course was ruined and split into provinces (the only near-contemporary source is Gildas’s 6C tract titled “The Division And Conquest of ‘Britannia’”); these were overrun one by one until they all became part of a new German state called Angle-land - England. There is also an epilogue narrated by someone with a RADA accent, who according to the commentary is (the already-dead) Lancelot. “There’s a King Arthur in all of us,” lamely concludes the director’s commentary, as the moral of the tale.

King Arthur is really the nadir of this pretentious have-your-cake-and-eat-it school of attempting to rationalise mythmaking, a production that would have likely attracted no interest had it not been backed by such a big-money producer as Jerry Bruckheimer. As in that witless 1950s Alan Ladd film, the main story elements belong to different time periods; centuries of history and legend are opportunistically ransacked for dramatic elements in a way that CB DeMille would have found cynical. (See Scots author/scriptwriter George Macdonald Fraser’s Hollywood History Of The World, on how they did try in the old days to work from source materials and research.) Both history and the legend are confounded by an approach that continually shoots itself in the foot. Even the standard Hollywood defence “it’s only entertainment” would be misapplied here, due to the film in its publicity and prologue insisting this is the true story, finally told. This attempt to capture the high ground falls flat due to an inability to combine history and legend in any convincing way.

Next time, we’ll look at the 4 more recent film productions set north of Hadrian’s Wall, wherein a certain disillusion with the simplistic and prejudiced depiction of the Romans as heroes and the Picts and Scots as scary shouty hairy barbarians is finally manifesting itself.

Arthur Rides Again

- King Arthur On Screen
Just as Robin Hood is associated with May Day revels, King Arthur in the early manuscripts is associated with the feast of Pentecost, better known in Britain as Whitsuntide. Several mediaeval romances have Arthur holding a special court where in exchange for the feast, he expects to be entertained by a tale of some wonder or marvel.


Pentecost, still a public holiday in many European states, was also when people set off on pilgrimages, so the timing of the entertainment may have been to inspire them just before setting off. We ourselves are approaching Pentecost [7th Sunday after Easter] and the (perhaps older) British holiday of Whitsuntide (basis of the official Spring Bank Holiday = last Monday in May). As knights riding out on quest is such a cinematic image, it seems a good time to take a look at what Arthurian screen entertainments await us in 2010.

Currently, there seem to be up to half a dozen Arthurian films in the works.
One is Galahad, alias Mortal Armor: The Legend Of Galahad. It was announced as due to start filming in Britain in 2007, but didn’t. It has since got a new director, Mikael Salomon. He is the twice Oscar-nominated Danish filmmaker who has worked on Hollywood productions as a cinematographer (The Abyss etc) and director (Band of Brothers). It’s synopsized as “A coming-of-age take on Sir Galahad's quest for the Holy Grail.” This one, from Seven Arts Pictures, however seems to have stalled in pre-production again as it has recently disappeared off the britfilms.com “British films in production” list.
The second is an announced remake of the 1981 John Boorman film Excalibur, usually considered the most intelligent of Arthurian films. It’s being produced by ‘X-Men’ director Bryan Singer, who spent years getting the rights. The original 1981 script, by Rospo Pallenberg, focussed for the first time in Arthurian screen drama on the mythic rather than the dubious “historical” side of the legend. Boorman had wanted to make Lord Of The Rings, but couldn’t get the rights. (Boorman and Pallenberg are currently working together again, on an adaption of leading French author Marguerite Yourcenar's much-admired 1951 Memoirs Of Hadrian, so it looks like we’ll soon be back to Hadrian’s Wall, setting of the last major Arthurian screen drama, the 2004 King Arthur starring Clive Owen, which we discussed earlier.) This remake is also in pre-production, though given the director and source, perhaps I shouldn’t say remake, but re-imagining. Another project inspired by Boorman’s Excalibur, from the British outfit Pendragon, was put on hold when the 2004 King Arthur film was announced; since revived by writer-director Alan Campbell in 2006 “as an attempt to put Arthur into a historical setting,” this ‘Pendragon’ is still awaiting funding.

Another project is sometimes confused with the above, as it’s another Arthurian drama from the same studio, Warner Bros. Some press sources even refer to it by the same working title, Excalibur. (The Boorman film was only called Excalibur when the producers were told their original – less dynamic - choice, Merlin, was likely to lead to what English lawyers call a “passing-off” action due to the Robert Nye novel. The retitling ironically helped sell it as a sword-n-sorcery action drama abroad. Merlin itself of course is now also taken as a title, first by a 1998 TV miniseries starring Sam Neill, and a 1998 tv movie starring Jason Connery as young Merlin, and then a 2008-9 three-season BBC children’s series, which depicts Merlin, Arthur, and Guenevere Harry Potter style as teenagers developing their professional and interpersonal skills.)
The current director assigned to this new WB film is Guy Ritchie, best known for several violent gangster films and his recent bare-knuckle Sherlock Holmes re-working. The Arthurian legend is again to be “reimagined for a modern audience,” focusses on the Round Table knights gathering, and is being described as "The Magnificent Seven in armour," but “in the tone of Star Wars.” (Whew.) It’s being scripted by John Hodge, who adapted Trainspotting and The Beach, supposedly using Sir Thomas Malory’s 1470s mediaeval-romance compilation Le Morte d’Arthur. (Malory’s in 1485 became the first printed version, has remained in print ever since, and is the standard reference for scriptwriters, so this means little.) This is being scripted by British graphic-novel author Warren Ellis. His earlier Marvel comic-book series of the same title was otherwise unrelated, but he has done a historical graphic novel, Crecy, on the 100 Hundred Years battle which was won largely by English archery.

The final project was only announced in March, and so is still at the scripting stage, though shooting is due to start in June. (Typical.) This is Camelot, a US-financed “five-season” TV miniseries to be made over a 5-year period in Ireland, with production based at Ardmore Studios in Wicklow (where Boorman’s Excalibur was made). The producer was also involved with the 2004 Clive Owen film King Arthur and made the recent BBC miniseries The Tudors, both based at Ardmore, just outside Dublin. Scripted largely by The Tudors series head writer, Michael Hirst, this will “centre on the fellowship of the knights of Camelot. While it will feature King Arthur, it will not follow The Tudors style of focusing on one person. Scriptwriters will flesh out the characters of Sir Galahad, Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot.” The producer says the concept is “to make the past seem relative and contemporary. That’s what we did for the Tudors.” (This caused press comment by historians about anachronisms.) Co-produced by British quality tv drama production co. Ecosse Films, it seems to have been presold to the Starz pay-cable channel in the States, which suggests it is not for children. (That's the channel that bought the Spartacus: Blood And Sand TV series, which has gory violence as well as explicit sex.) Ecosse’s Douglas Rae told trade paper Variety it would be a drama of “genuine ambition on the scale of Rome and Band of Brothers.”

A producer of one of the above projects made a crack about his being different from “the 751” earlier Arthurian screen dramas. I don’t know about the total, but I find difficult to come up with a listing of ten Arthurian films or TV dramas I would recommend to a friend. There is a book on earlier Arthurian films, though it’s an academic tome priced for the institutional market. This is Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, edited by Kevin J. Harty, author of the 2006 The Reel Middle Ages. Cinema Arthuriana has been updated since 1991 not only to cover new releases, but to reflect the changing nature of Arthurian media studies. (I gather in the 2002 2nd edition only 4 of the 20 essays were straight reprints.) I haven’t ordered it due to its price, but apparently Arthurian films go back to 1904, so 751 may well approximate the actual total. The book’s editor has a partial filmography online here, up to 1997.

Unlike with Robin Hood, Hollywood seems to have become interested in Arthur only after WWII, when they needed to free up moneys held in Britain under postwar currency export restrictions as well as to find suitable subjects for historical epic, the genre they built up to promote the new widescreen and single-strip Technicolor filming processes as production values. MGM led the way. They had done well out of a 1952 film of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which is itself a reworking by Scott of the original French mediaeval romance Lancelot, The Knight Of The Cart into an historical setting contemporary to Robin Hood, who has a cameo part in it. So for their first big-screen colour location adaptation, MGM made Knights Of The Round Table, 1953, in Devon (on Dartmoor), Cornwall (at Tintagel) and Ireland, with Robert Taylor as Lancelot. We meet him singing along with his troop as he searches out Arthur to serve him, though when they meet they challenge-fight in the woods a la Robin and Little John. At ‘the Ring Of Stones,’ a replica Stonehenge set, where a council of war inevitably turns into treachery, Arthur's men push over a sarsen to make good their escape, and L jumps off the fallen sarsen onto his trained horse Beric, just like in a 50s western. The following pitched battle is won Agincourt style, recreating Olivier's 1944 Henry V quite openly with longbow volleys. (To be fair, the same director’s Ivanhoe had showers of arrows in the scene where Robin Hood also appears.)
Camelot itself appears later on, when Lancelot returns after fighting the usual badly-dressed Picts and dallying with Elaine the lady of Astolat, a magnificent stone castle with courtyard and lawns for jousting. Then as L dallies with Guenevere, treachery by Modred (Stanley Baker) who schemes to wreck the chance of a truce, leading to a climatic battle largely offscreen on a fogbound field, precipitated by an adder bite. (I should add the scriptwriters got this touch from the original 12th-C sources, or it might easily have been a rattlesnake.) L fights Modred to the death on a rocky headland, and is saved from the Dartmoor quicksand quagmire (you know, the ones in The Hound Of The Baskervilles) by whistling up his trusty steed Beric. After a quick visit to a now-penitent Guenevere in a nunnery (in the sources, it’s at Amesbury near Stonehenge), finally we’re back to Tintagel, whose monastic ruins represent ‘the Chapel of the Sword,’ where L casts Excalibur into the sea, and presumably casts himself into exile for his sins, the film indicating L's unborn son Galahad will carry on the Round Table tradition. The Grail manifests itself to L’s successor Percival, with a voice-over, apparently from God, as a grand finale.

One way or another, KOTRT seems to have discouraged Hollywood from doing anything more than action programmers until they decided to film the Lerner & Loewe stage musical Camelot, as a 3-hour production starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave (and David Hemmings as Arthur’s bastard son Mordred). This was a promising idea, because the Arthurian mythos emerged largely from a bardic tradition which demonstrated the power of verse and song in regard to reputation. (It was said even kings feared bards lampooning them.) Lerner & Loewe had already built a musical around the theme of language with their 1956 My Fair Lady, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion.
Ostensibly based on T.H. White’s novel-sequence The Once And Future King (which Disney based their 1963 animated version The Sword in the Stone on), this 1967 production, shot mainly on a soundstage (with a few exteriors shot in California and Spain), has an odd narrative framework. It opens with Arthur musing on his life on the eve of his fateful final battle, setting up the main story as an flashback. This done, it ends with an inept finale with a CU of Richard Harris shouting "Run" at the boy Young Tom he has been telling his story to. Tom is meant to be the future author Sir Thomas Malory, who Arthur tells to flee so he can write this up as a memoir later. (It’s actually some 8 centuries later, from time-setting to Malory’s era.)
White’s approach is entirely whimsical and eccentric, which is not such a problem for a stylised stage musical, but Hollywood’s treatment of it leads to unintended absurdities. For instance, Arthur refers to the other two as 'Jenny' and 'Lance.' The songs don’t deal with Shavian themes, of the power of language etc. even though this was a natural. (The words glamour – originally meaning fairy enchantment and grammar are anciently related, and White even calls Britain the Isle of Grammarye.) Here’s a paragraph from a recent piece by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian [“Camelot: what a castleful of crock,” 1 Oct 2009] on how Arthur

… sets up a Round Table, and advertises for knights. Thousands of written manuscripts are scattered out of towers and from horseback, all across the land. Yes, thousands. The printing press did not arrive in Britain for another millennium, so Arthur's monks must have been slaving round the clock to illuminate all those. As they are strewn, the toiling peasants of the fields pick them up and give them a good read. So very literate, these sixth-century farmhands. It's amazing they didn't leave more written sources. Over in France, Lancelot (Franco Nero) catches one manuscript. This prompts him to take a short break from striding around his battlements showing everyone how great he is, in order to sing a song telling everyone how great he is. He's French, so it's called C'est Moi.

I’m sure there’s an interesting film in the idea of a French knight going to a British court, but no-one seems to have picked up on that yet. (In Camelot, Guenevere seems to fall in love with L because he apparently brings a dead knight back to life!) The Sixties did however produce a less overblown version with Cornel Wilde directing and starring as the French knight, together with his wife Jean as Guenevere: Lancelot And Guinevere (1963), released in the US as Sword Of Lancelot. This was one of the first period action films shot in Yugoslavia, where thousands of horsemen were available at discount prices, though it seems to have been a tough shoot, and the first to show real violence, with men having limbs lopped off. This is not gratuitous but in the context of the story shows how foolish dalliance which violates a strict social code leads to grim consequences for everyone.

However it was only in the Seventies that such more thoughtful adaptations started to appear. There were a couple of films by the French filmmakers Bresson and Rohmer (which I haven’t yet managed to view), plus the first film version of Gawain And The Green Knight – (starring pop singer Murray Head) which seems to have sunk without trace. The same director would be hired to remake the film in the 80s as a comic-bookish version, Sword Of The Valiant, with then-Tarzan star Miles O’Keeffe as Gawain and Sean Connery as the Green Knight. The first major British cinema version was actually the 1975 spoof Monty Python And The Holy Grail, shot in Scotland, which made fun of the Arthurian genre’s tropes:
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
PEASANT: Listen - strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!

British tv had just graduated by then beyond innocuous kiddie adventures like The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot to the more realist Arthur Of The Britons (1972), which even gained a potted-feature release under its international syndication title King Arthur, The Young Warlord. This Welsh ITV production shows, in 24 half-hours, Arthur as an up-and-coming Dark Ages war leader, with famous motifs like the sword in the stone given a ‘rationalised’ depiction. (He demonstrates the importance of tribes working together by piling a boulder atop a sword – only together can the chiefs dislodge it so he can raise the sword.)

On the other hand, Boorman and Pallenberg’s Excalibur in 1981 was the first to focus on the purely mythic aspects. It made no attempt to work in any Dark Ages background history. This had Shakespearean actors to keep the intense, poetic dialogue from becoming risible, and wild Irish countryside to give it the look of a heavily wooded Dark ages landscape, contrasting with the glittering silvery armour of the knights.


Since then, nothing has really rivalled it. American productions tend to be family friendly - indeed, many are cartoons. Hallmark’s 1998 $30-million live-action 2-part mini-series Merlin for NBC-TV, starring Sam Neill, Isabella Rossellini as Nimue, Rutger Hauer as Vortigern, Helena Bonham-Carter as Morgan le Fay etc., is perhaps the most familiar example of this ‘inclusive’ family-oriented approach, though shot authentically in Wales. The director, Steve Baron, claimed at the time it was based on "lost sources". However, a viewing of even the longer 2006 DVD version (much re-edited from the TV presentation) suggests these new sources were not anywhere within the Arthurian mythos, but found in other fantasy works such as Tolkien or Ridley Scott’s Legend.
Thus, we get cute Disneyesque characters put in for young children, such as an elf called Frick as comic relief, a talking horse, Miranda Richardson from Blackadder playing Queen Mab (basically a Shakespearean poetic figure) as a croaky-voiced panto villainess, and a dragon done by the Jim Henson muppets workshop, plus plenty of first-generation CGI effects. As far as Arthurian legend goes, it doesn’t try to dramatize this either, just takes characters like old Merlin’s young nemesis Nimue and turns the pair into lifelong lovers. Supposedly the story is about Mab trying to block the advent of Christianity, so that witches like her will not lose their power. Arthur, Guenevere et al are pallid characters with merely incidental roles.

Even when filmmakers adopt a more realist approach, this tends to flounder trying to bridge the gap between explaining the story in terms of Dark Ages political history and the motifs of a familiar, popular but mediaeval and artificial legend. While many postwar novels seem to be able to reconcile the two aspects, this is through a careful use of point-of-view (often the stories are told in the first person). American-financed films need to be understandable to a mass audience, so in films like Merlin you get an Arthur who is inevitably 'King of all England' – something that is more than just an anachronism, since any Arthur figure worth his salt would have been fighting to stop the new Germanic nation state of ‘Angle-land’ coming into being.

Even the more sophisticated recent screen drama Tristan & Isolde (2005) falls prey to this confusion. The story is an Arthurian spinoff (Arthur himself is not a character in the T&I legend), so it has no need to work in any familiar motif, the film takes pains to create a Dark Ages west country rife with inter-tribal politics, with a script development period that was a good two decades. (Producer Ridley Scott was going to make it as his 2nd film in 1979, but went to Hollywood instead.) Despite this, none of the geopolitical background the story is built around (here, King Mark rather than Arthur wants to build a tribally united ‘England’) really makes much sense on reflection, and there are other touches indicating a ‘grab-bag’ approach. Mark’s Cornish stronghold is built in Norman style (atop a Roman dungeon the builders did not notice), the poison that paralyses Tristan is from a puffer fish [Japanese], there is the inevitable talk of the English and England as well (more interestingly) of one of their more obscure tribal components, the Jutes, and so on.

It makes one wonder if the genre is so inherently confused between the legend’s Dark Ages settings, and the need to serve the familiar mediaeval motifs in a contemporary populist way that it’s simply beyond the reach of popular cinema (though not of the popular novel) to reconcile. The romantic version of the Arthurian story is one of a short-lived golden age of political unity. This probably never happened, but in terms of an artistic golden age, we had the flourishing of the Arthurian cycle as the most popular subject matter in British literature before the printing press was invented. And its legacy has continued into the modern era with a series of Arthurian novels which satisfy both realist and romantic sensibilities, something that flourished soon after WWII and still continues. (This is perhaps the topic of another post.)
However, in terms of screen drama, we definitely haven’t had our golden age yet.

MacCamelot Revisited

As indicated last time, the ‘MacCamelot’ theory that Arthur was mainly active in what is now Scotland is currently topical again. The theory dates back at least to the work of antiquarian WF Skene in 1876, and in the later 20C was supported by Dr Rachel Bromwich (translator of the Triads Of Britain etc), and others like the influential US scholar Norma Lorre Goodrich, who in the 1980s put ‘Camelot’ in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, arguing from mediaeval manuscript evidence that Arthur’s wife Guinevere was really a Pictish queen, Lancelot a rival Scottish king etc. Scots nationalist Adam Ardrey’s just-out Finding Arthur (a sequel to his 2007 book placing Merlin in Glasgow) is merely the latest in a long line of ‘MacCamelot’ books, given topicality by the growth of the nationalist cause. 2009 being Scotland’s official Year Of Homecoming, this is the year such theories can expect maximum press coverage.
But if Arthur was a Scot or Pict or North Briton (take your pick from the available theories), where would his ‘Camelot’ or main court be located? If he was a Scot, i.e. from NE Ireland, it would be somewhere in the Scots colony of Dál Riada on the west coast, perhaps at the hillfort at Dunadd, when the Scots first took it over from the Picts, or at Dunstaffnage, which a 1612 account claims was once home to the Coronation Stone known as the Stone of Destiny; or on Iona, where St Columba set up his base to convert the Picts and Scots. If he was a North Briton, it could be at Dun Edin (Edinburgh) or Alt Clud (Dumbarton Rock), both capitals of then Brittonic kingdoms which stretched between the Firths of Forth and Clyde and across Southern Scotland down to the Borders. And if our northern King Arthur was a Pict, it could be up near Inverness, or perhaps over at Scone on the east coast, or Dunadd (see above) on the west coast, for Highland topography split the Pictish confederation into two or more separate kingdoms.
Each site (there are other nominees) has its champions: for instance, Edinburgh has a hill overlooking the country’s present capital palace at Holyrood, called Arthur's Seat; near Stirling was an ex-Roman fort with a similar-sounding name to the Romances’ “Camelot” (which in French had a silent “t”): Camelon; Alt-clud, alias Dumbarton (“Fortress of the Britons”) on the Clyde below Loch Lomond, was referred to as Castello Arturius, or Arthur's Castle, in an 11C document, while some locals claim Loch Lomond was formerly called “The Lake" (as in Lancelot of ~).
But the site that became the coronation centre of the amalgamated Celtic (Scots-Pict-North Brittonic) kingdom of Alba (Scotland) was Scone (rhymes with “boon”), just outside the city of Perth on the east coast. There from the 9th C AD stood the original coronation throne where the kings of this amalgamated kingdom were crowned. It held the fabled Stone Of Scone, alias the Stone Of Destiny. Today at Scone there is only a replica to satisfy the visitor, for the whereabouts of the original is uncertain. (As the Palace of Scone’s advertising puts it, “Here you can see where the Stone of Scone once stood and ponder on the tantalising mystery of where it might be today.”)
Here we run into a centuries-old mystery that remains unsolved perhaps because none of the major vested interests wants it solved, publicly anyway, in case the verdict goes against them. Officially, the Stone Of Scone or Stone Of Destiny, is on view in Edinburgh Castle, having been returned there in 1996 to end Scots nationalist agitation over this hijacked coronation relic. (As it is used in coronations, it is officially just on loan; the plan is to return it to Westminster for the next one, when the Queen dies.) This 26” x 10” x 16” sandstone block sat under the coronation chair when every English monarch was crowned from the time of Edward I, who ordered it taken south in 1296 to discourage the Scots from the idea they could crown their own kings. (That didn’t stop them, of course.)
It was briefly returned to Scotland when 4 nationalist students took it from Westminster Abbey at Xmas 1950. They were never prosecuted for fear of stirring up even more anti-English feeling and public demonstrations – and of having the Crown’s claim to own the Stone Of Destiny challenged in open court. The story of the 1950 escapade is told by the coup’s original Ian Hamilton, then a law student in Glasgow, who went on to become a QC or Queen’s Counsel – though he refused to take the oath of allegiance in its original form on the grounds it was historically dishonest. His 1952 book has just been reissued to tie in with the release of the film Stone Of Destiny last year, just out on DVD.

Our northern King Arthur sat here? Not very likely. The chair itself is only 13C, and the stone it holds may not be what it seems. This is the same image used in the film Stone Of Destiny.

A final mystery remains, however: as there in fact more than one stone? If so, is the official stone a substitute? For some time, rumours have been circulating this is the case. This is the suspicion (or claim) that Edward I was given a substitute, i.e. the unprepossessing slab of sandstone you can see in Edinburgh Castle was simply a lavatory cesspit or cistern cover – a great joke on the English monarchy. A secondary issue re the stone’s identity has also been raised: the thesis here is that the stone returned to Westminster by the police after the Xmas 1950 escapade was a 20C manufactured substitute. This has been the claim of several people who were on the periphery of the 1950 incident, that one of the replicas that were being fashioned around this time was sent back to London. One of the items of evidence cited is a considerable weight discrepancy between the present, official 336 lb stone, and the c450 lbs referred to in Hamilton’s memoir and an Abbey account from when it was cleaned earlier the same year.
Ian Hamilton himself still says the same stone was returned, and that he’s sick of these stories. As it has long been argued that an earlier substitution was made, this would have meant one fake was replaced with another, i.e. a real, monastic-era cesspit cover was replaced with a 20C replica of one. Such a modern substitution of one fake for another would have made little sense for anyone who knew the story - as I believe nationalists would. Of course, it may be a simple intended nationalist PR coup, to get around the fact that the fake, the cesspit cover taken to England in 1296 is claimed as the real Stone. Revealing that a substitution was made in 1950 would overcome this, and thereby promulgate the idea that if the present Queen, or perhaps her successor, was not crowned on the authentic Stone, then she or he cannot legally be the monarch.
Shortly after the Stone Of Destiny DVD arrived in the post, I flew up to Scotland to check out a few things. One was to see what was claimed about the stone in the various editions of the book itself, which gives its known back history. Geological testing of the red sandstone block doesn’t show much, and for answers we have to rely on references in historical sources – which is of course our metier here. Mediaeval codex manuscript accounts from around the time of its move south do describe its existence and function, and sometimes its appearance, e.g. “Apud Monasterium de Scone positus eat lapis pergrandis in ecclesia Dei, juxta manum altare, concavus quidam ad modum rotundae catherdeaie confectus, in quo future reges loco quasi coronatis” (“In the monastery of Scone, in the church of God, near to the high altar, is kept a large stone, hollowed out concave as a round chair, on which their kings were placed for their ordination, according to custom.” - Walter, Canon of Guisborough Priory, Yorkshire, early 14C). Note the use of the present tense here in describing the stone as being kept at Scone, implying Canon Walter is reproducing an earlier account from before 1296. The chronicler, sometimes known as Walter De Hemingford, reportedly had been present at the coronation of John Balliol at Scone in 1292, so the description would date from then.
The antiquarians who flourished from the 18C onward also tended to claim this was the same ritual stone that had been used for similar purposes by Irish kings crowned at Tara. They called it the Lia Fáil, which was in legend brought to Eire by a ‘fairy’ people, the Tuatha Dé Danann ('people of divine Ana'). Lia Fáil is usually translated as The Speaking Stone. This is in support of a myth that it would roar or scream when the rightful new king stood or sat on it. But I can’t find any stories in the ancient Irish tales where this miracle actually happens as it should. (Also, the replica seems to be a pillar stone, rather like a modern Ordnance Survey trig point marker.) What happens in one tale I’ve come across is that it doesn’t speak, and the proposed king’s foster-father, the champion Cúchulainn, angrily splits it (almost a variation on the Arthurian “sword in the stone” motif). In another tale, the hero Conn of the Hundred Battles hears it roaring, but this is when he treads on the forgotten half-buried stone, and a druid tells him the number of roars is the number of kings who will succeed him at Tara. But when the Irish set up their colony in the Inner Hebrides, they took the Lia Fáil Stone to ratify their separate kingdom there.
Lia means stone (there is a similar word in geology, lias) but the translation of fáil as ‘speaking’ doesn’t feel right to me – more like a back-explanation based on the context being misconstrued. Ireland as the home of the Lia Fáil is sometimes given the poetic name in Gaelic of Inis Fáil, translated as Isle Of Destiny. The same stem also seems to occur in Gaelic Fáilte, which you can see all around Scotland (and Ireland) as the tourist organisations use it, for it means Welcome[s] . This would make more sense if it was meant to be an inaugural stone welcoming the new king, and he could speak his oath standing on or holding it, and so take up his “destiny.”
If we also consider tales promoted by the 19C British Israelite Movement (which claimed the Celts were one of the Bible’s 10 Lost Tribes), there’s also a Biblical tiein legend the Lia Fáil was originally Jacob’s Pillow stone, mentioned in Genesis, where Jacob dreamt his vision of a ladder to heaven. Like Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob’s Pillow became a symbol of inspiration and blessing, and it was used as a politico-religious token in establishing the original nation-state named Israel, after Jacob’s second, “divine” name. Supposedly the stone then became the pedestal stone of the Ark (as in Raiders Of The Lost ~), and went to Egypt, then Spain, then Eire.
Founding legends cited in Hector Boece’s 16C Chronicles of Scotland name Egypt and Spain as where key founders came from, with Scotia supposedly named after a Pharaoh’s daughter named Scota. But how or why the stone would’ve ended up at Tara is not really explained in the legend beyond a tale of Scota and her husband fleeing from the Egyptian Plagues. It sounds like another attempt by Irish monastic writers to depict a pagan relic as a Christian one via a vague Biblical link. The Lia Fáil also was alternatively identified as St Columba’s altar stone, but this is equally unsourced and unprovable. The sandstone block now in Westminster is similar to the sandstone still found locally around Scone Abbey, which gives the cesspit-cover theory the edge. That would also explain why Edward’s men returned in 1298 to ransack Scone, and why the Scots declined later English offers to return the Stone. (Both sides have remained tight-lipped about this.)
The current film tie-in edition of Ian Hamilton’s account of taking the Stone Of Destiny in 1950 has an intro by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, who as might be expected, does not advance any controversial theories about rival Stones there. But around the same time [June 2008], Salmond (who studied mediaeval history) publicly announced he believed the original Stone was switched in 1296 - that the Westminster Stone is a fake. (In an online readers’ poll in The Times, more than half agreed with the First Minister.) The original 1952 edition of the Hamilton book, which I found in the library up there, No Stone Unturned, has a different foreword, by Sir Compton Mackenzie. (If you don’t know who he was, he was a Scots writer best known for Whisky Galore, who also liked to snipe at officialdom. He also wrote a 1940s novel, The North Wind Of Love, on an unsuccessful 1932 attempt to recover the Stone Of Destiny to bury it in Scotland.) He comments that the stone we know was probably part of ‘the red sandstone used for the gateway of Dunstaffnage Castle’.
But if the official one is indeed a substitute, what happened to the original one, the stone alluded to in the earlier references - the one on which early princes like our putative northern Arthur would have sworn their oath? There are a couple of anecdotes in the Scottish press of people stumbling into caves in eastern Scotland and seeing a stone throne with carvings on it. The odd thing is that in a couple of old accounts (which I haven’t seen myself directly yet) the Stone described is quite dissimilar in appearance to the familiar sandstone block. This is odd, because if you want to fob someone like a victorious king (Edward I) off with a replica trophy, it should at least resemble the original. For Edward and his staff would have been sure to have heard descriptions of it.
But the rival mediaeval codex accounts give the ‘authentic’ Stone as respectively [1] made of black stone (basalt) and [2] made of white marble! Seemingly we have three Stones Of Destiny. Besides the fake discussed, perhaps one was the Irish Lia Fáil, and the other the coronation stone of the Picts? Ian Hamilton QC has also written two volumes of memoirs, and the Foreword to the first, A Touch Of Treason, by the Scots historian and novelist Nigel Tranter (who helped return the Stone in 1951) says he has no doubt the Westminster stone is a fake, as the real Stone, the Lia Fáil, is described as a marble chair. (Presumably he got this from mentions of it in mediaeval codexes like the 14C chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which has it as being of “whyte marble ston”.) That would leave the black basalt stone as the Pictish one.
Nationalist groups (including a modern Scottish Knights Templar organisation) have hinted in the past that they still possess the “original” (whatever that means), and that will surface at the appropriate moment in Scotland’s history, when it is about to take up its own destiny as an independent modern nation. (I met someone who was told as much when visiting Roslyn Chapel for a seminar.) This being Scotland’s Homecoming Year, hopefully more news of this long sought-after talisman will surface.

Tintagel's "Arthurian Graffiti" Controversy, 10 Years On

While we’re in the vicinity of Tintagel [see previous post], I thought we might take a look at the Tintagel ‘Arthur’ inscription ten years on to see if anything more can be learned. For mysteries remain surrounding English Heritage's "find of a lifetime" a decade ago, of some 6th-century quasi-Arthurian graffiti at their prime Arthurian-tourism location, Tintagel.
That spring of 1998, I had intended staying in Cornwall at Easter, but it was bitterly cold, too cold to stay in the damp, windswept mountaintop 18th-C. tin-miner’s cottage I had used as a base of exploration the two previous years. Thus, I didn’t get to re-visit Tintagel and see the dig in progress. The following spring, I did an online search of the British and US press to see if there had been any additional developments beyond the near identical clutch of stories of the previous summer; but there was nothing. The story seemed to have stalemated between excitement and scepticism. However we can try and take the mystery further now. And I thought it worthwhile to give the account of the controversy in some detail here, as a linked feature, since the Glasgow U. archaeology department pages cited by Wikipedia as their source have for some reason been taken down.
Though the writing found in 1998 was not an ancient manuscript, but carved on stone, it is still of interest here. This is the first known example of Dark Ages literacy outside of Church and court documents: as the man running the dig, Prof Chris Morris of Glasgow U., put it, "the first evidence we have that the skills of reading and writing were handed down in a non-religious context".
The use of Latin was common on the Continent, where the native Gaulish was extinguished and replaced by Vulgate Latin, from which the Romance languages (literally, Roman-ish) such as French, Spanish etc are derived. Despite English historians' claims England was thoroughly Romanised, there is no evidence Vulgate Latin ever caught on in Britain or the Britons ever spoke a Romance language. English historians also earlier suggested Britons were illiterate, with no written language of their own. It has also been suggested the controversial ART- inscription found in 1998 was a Gallic rather than local dialect of Latin. The Continental connection is also worth exploring here as the Arthurian legend was nurtured in France by British exiles who fled across the Channel, so that it reappeared in French Romances. And this avenue of exploration turns up a surprising link. Could more than a tradition of swordsmanship connect the legendary wielder of Excalibur with the Finest Swordsman In All France?
[read feature ‘Tintagel And The Arthurian Controversy’ ]