Enemy of God

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Cauldron stories are common in Celtic folk-tales, and their quest was liable to send bands of warriors to dark and dangerous places. Ciichulain, that great Irish hero, is said to have stolen a magic cauldron from a mighty fortress, and similar themes recur in Welsh myth. The source of those myths is now quite impossible to disentangle, but we can be fairly certain that the popular medieval tales of the search for the Holy Grail were merely a Christianized re-working of the much older cauldron myths. One such tale involves the cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn, which was one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Those treasures have disappeared from the modern re-tellings of the Arthurian saga, but they were firmly there in earlier times. The list of the Treasures varies from source to source, so I compiled a fairly representative sample, though Nimue’s explanation of their origins on page 100 is entirely an invention. Cauldrons and magical treasures tell us that we are in pagan territory, which makes it odd that the later Arthur tales are so heavily Christianized. Was Arthur the ‘enemy of God’? Some early tales do indeed suggest that the Celtic church was hostile to Arthur; thus in the Life of St Padarn Arthur is said to have stolen the saint’s red tunic and only agreed to return it after the saint had buried him up to the neck. Arthur is similarly supposed to have stolen St Carannog’s altar to use as a dining table; indeed, in many saints’ lives, Arthur is depicted as a tyrant who is only thwarted by the holy man’s piety or prayers. St Cadoc was evidently a famous opponent whose Life boasts of the number of times he defeated Arthur, including one fairly distasteful story in which Arthur, interrupted during a game of dice by fleeing lovers, attempts to rape the girl. This Arthur, a thief, liar, and would-be rapist, is clearly not the Arthur of modern legend, but the stones do suggest that Arthur had somehow earned the strong dislike of the early church and the simplest explanation of that dislike is that Arthur was a pagan. We cannot be sure of that, any more than we can guess what kind of pagan he was. The native British religion, Druidism, had been so abraded by four centuries of Roman rule that it was a mere husk by the late fifth century, though doubtless it clung on in the rural parts of Britain. Druidism’s ‘dolorous blow’ was the black year of ad6o, when the Romans stormed Ynys Mon (Anglesey) and so destroyed the faith’s cultic centre. Llyn Cerrig Bach, the Lake of Little Stones, existed, and archaeology has suggested it was an important place for Druidic rituals, but alas, the lake and its surrounding features were all obliterated during the Second World War when the Valley Airfield was extended.

Druidism’s rival faiths were all introduced by the Romans, and for a time Mithraism was a genuine threat to Christianity, while other Gods, like Mercury and Isis, also continued to be worshipped, but Christianity was by far the most successful of the imports. It had even swept through Ireland, carried there by Patrick (Padraig) a British Christian who was supposed to have used the clover-leaf to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. The Saxons extirpated Christianity from the parts of Britain they captured, so the English had to wait another hundred years for St Augustine of Canterbury to reintroduce the faith into Lloegyr (now England). That Augustinian Christianity was different from the earlier Celtic forms; Easter was celebrated on a different day and, instead of using the Druidic tonsure that shaved the front part of the head, the new Christians made the more familiar bald circle on the crown of the head. As in The Winter King I have deliberately introduced some anachronisms. The Arthurian legends are fiendishly complex, mainly because they include all kinds of different stories, many of which, like the tale of Tristan and Iseult, started as quite independent tales and only slowly became incorporated in the much larger Arthurian saga. I did once intend to leave out all the later accretions, but that would have denied me, among many other things, Merlin and Lancelot, so I allowed romanticism to prevail over pedantry. I confess that my inclusion of the word Camelot is a complete historical nonsense, for that name was not invented until the twelfth century so Derfel would never have heard it. Some characters, like Derfel, Ceinwyn, Culhwch, Gwenhwyvach, Gwydre, Amhar, Loholt, Dinas and Lavaine, dropped out of the stories over the centuries, to be replaced by new characters like Lancelot. Other names changed over the years; Nimue became Vivien, Cei became Kay, and Peredur Perceval. The earliest names are Welsh and they can be difficult, but, with the exceptions of Excalibur (for Caledfwlch) and Guinevere (for Gwenhwyfar), I have largely preferred them because they reflect the milieu of fifth-century Britain. The Arthurian legends are Welsh tales and Arthur is an ancestor of the Welsh, while his enemies, like Cerdic and Aelle, were the people who would come to be known as the English, and it seemed right to stress the Welsh origins of the stories. Not that I can pretend that the Warlord trilogy is in any way an accurate history of those years; it is not even an attempt at such a history, merely another variation on a fantastic and complicated saga that has come to us from a barbaric age, yet it still enthralls us because it is so replete with heroism, romance and tragedy.