The Quest for King Arthur with Peter Chesbrough - Snake Brothers - Fringe Radio Network

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, everybody, It's me Cinderoa Acts. I'm just listening to
the Fringe Radio Network while I clean these chimneys with
my cass livers. Anyway, so Chad White, the fringe cowboy,
I mean, he's like he took a leave of absence
or whatever, and so the guys asked me to do

(00:27):
the network. I D So you're listening to the Fringe
Radio Network. I know, I was gonna say it, Fringe
Radio Network dot com? What oh chat? Oh yeah? Do
you have the app? It's the best way to listen
to the Fringe Radio Network. I mean it's so great.

(00:49):
I mean it's clean and simple, and you have all
the shows, all the episodes, and you have the live chat,
and it's it's safe and it won't hurt your phone
and it sounds beautiful and it won't track you or
trace you and you don't have to log in to
use it. How do you get it fringeradionetwork dot com

(01:13):
right at the top of the page. So anyway, so
we're just gonna go back to cleaning these chimneys and
listening to the Fringe Radio Network. And so I guess
you know, I mean, I guess we're listening together, So
I mean, I know, I mean well, I mean, I
guess you might be listening to a different episode or whatever,

(01:33):
or or maybe maybe you're listening maybe you're listening to it,
like at a different time than we are. But I mean, well,
I mean, if you accidentally just downloaded this, no, I
guess you'd be Okay, I'm rambling. Okay, Okay, you're listening
to the Fringe Radio Network Fringe radionetwork dot com. There

(01:57):
are you happy? Okay, let's clean these chimneys.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, angels
and demons.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
And monsters and serpents.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
This is the Brothers of the Serpent podcast that we
are coming to you not live from the ten by
ten by ten tangent cube of science, where we are
nestled amongst the dusty bones of an ancient seabed high
atop of the Evers Plateau in the midst of harvest.

Speaker 5 (02:48):
We're actually going to process grapes tomorrow. They're picking them tonight.

Speaker 6 (02:52):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
But we're still podcasting, and uh, we have actually been
I've been talking.

Speaker 5 (02:58):
We've been working on this for a while. So we
have Peter joining us from across the Pondo in UK. Yes,
how you going, Peter?

Speaker 3 (03:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (03:08):
Good, welcome?

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I wish I was from the
lone star state, but I'm from jolly old England. You know,
we can't all be that cool, can we? Really?

Speaker 2 (03:22):
So this is so Peter is in the discord and
if you guys remember we had Trevor on who wrote
the book God's I View, and Trevor and Peter have
been talking. They've been working together on some stuff and
I've had a bunch of people in the discord telling
me for a while, including Martin was also like you
got to get this guy on. And I'm like, okay,
because if we're going to talk Arthur, they were like,

(03:44):
this is the guy we got to talk, we got
to talk to. And I'm like, I'm all about the
arthury and legends, you know that.

Speaker 5 (03:50):
So well, welcome buddy.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
How how anyone interested in the things that we're I
guess we're all interested in. Can't be not interesting, right,
you know you should be it should be interested in. Yeah,
if you.

Speaker 5 (04:01):
Aren't, hopefully this episode will change there.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
So how did you like give people a brief explanation,
Like how did you get into this.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
You know, what is your what sparked your interest? So
where are we going?

Speaker 3 (04:15):
I mean, like in terms of how I think about things.
All my education further education was in cinema and film.
When it comes to film theory, film criticism, stuff like that.
There weren't people studying film thirty forty years ago, but

(04:36):
they studied English and they did it with an emphasis
in film. So all of my lecturers were basically English doctors.
And what you do in literature is study texts, and
that's basically how we worked with films. You treat it

(04:56):
like a text. You you know, what is it trying
to say, how is it doing, what's the style, what's
the author's intention, what's the author's context, what other influences like,
for instance, the money, the economics they drive, how the
film looks, what the film says. So when it came

(05:17):
to history, looking at text was just already something that
my brain did and I didn't. I don't think I
fell into certain traps that other people might do used
to really really wind me up sometimes, where you'd be
looking at a medieval text that says something about Arthur
and someone will say, well, be careful of the propaganda.

(05:39):
It's propaganda in that and I'm thinking, yeah, it's a text.
Tests are imbued with the ideology of the author. I mean,
it's inescapable like nothing that Clai. You know, anything that
claims to be objective is you know, maybe lists of
data is objective. But even then someone selected what data
you're looking at, right, they leave out So so yeah,

(06:03):
you know when people say, oh, be careful of that Mentiona,
I just think, fuck off, you know, like let me,
let me, let me deal with the text. And you know,
because that stuff's obvious, like especially when you look at
that text all the time. But really it it started
with Egypt and megaliths, you know, with a lot of
stuff like this. I just love I loved Egypt everyone

(06:26):
when you're a little kid, Egypt is fascinating. And I
think probably, uh, I think I talking of people's roots.
I think I did Ben to Randall to you or
something like that. But I remember I started out with Ben,
and I think one of the first things I wanted
was just I just wanted to see a beautiful steady
cam photography of pyramids and things like that, which you would.

Speaker 5 (06:51):
Ben get do steady gam.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
He has a steady cam or he had some technol,
which is meant we're always ragging each other on how
terrible we are taking video. But I mean, I don't
know if you guys remember up until, like I mean,
before twenty twenty, especially if you wanted to look at
photos of an ancient site and you googled it, you

(07:17):
get the same five photos taking it different times a day,
but all you know, maybe slightly a bit further out,
slightly closer in, but it would just be the same
thing all the time.

Speaker 5 (07:27):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
So it was all tourist photos, nothing of anybody who
was there with the with the purpose of researching cal
and I discussed this like long before we started the podcast.
I had this idea of like, can we go to
these places and get good footage for people who want
to do research, not just oh look at this pretty place.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Absolutely yeah, And I think you know that was the
first thing that blew me away with Ben's stuff, and
Hugh Newman's a good one for that as well. It's
just like really good quality images of the interesting things
that we want to see at the site, not just
that's not just totally like and and that really you
know that it just got me really excited, especially because

(08:05):
I mean, as I've said to you guys before, I
come from an area where there's there's granite everywhere, and
there's there's five thousand years of granite working history that
you can go and look at. And I think the
first thing that got me was Usef saying you can't
make a serapean box out of surface granite. And I

(08:30):
was like, oh, yeah, whatever, And then I started looking
around and even the biggest chunks of granite lying on
the surface, you would probably just maybe fit a box
in there. But then of course it's surface granite. It's
gonna flake away, you're gonna lose bits, it's going to crack,
you know, you need that solid granite. And I remember

(08:53):
just walking around some of the outcrops and thinking, God,
he's right, you know, like you know, okay, straight away,
this is something introing. And then it just went went
from there really And then.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
I also thought of Yusuf when you were talking about
propaganda in texts like he's he often reminds us when
we're looking at the stuff in the temples and everything,
He's like, it's propaganda. Yeah, yeah, you know, you're looking
at this massive relief with the Pharaohs and all this
stuff that's happening in the battle and all the gods
and everything in music is like this is Remember, it's
all propaganda.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Which is why I think that the general populace in
Egypt could read hieroglyphs. Probably, Yeah, I don't think it
was the language of the scribes, because else you just
have a wall of propaganda and gibberish doesn't make sense
to me. I don't know, maybe I don't, you know,
good point. So yeah, and then I was, you know,

(09:46):
I thought, well, I want to look at, you know,
what's around me, you know, because I can't go to
Egypt or Peru or something like that, so you know
what we've got around this, there should be some good
stuff to see. And then I came across a video
and I just I think it got to that point
in lockdowns where I was just watching stuff on YouTube
because it had a funny title, like, you know, like, oh,

(10:09):
this will take up thirty minutes of me sitting down
doing nothing. Yeah, And I watched one it was called
the King Arthur Conspiracy, and I thought that just sounds hilarious, like,
you know, and I watched it and I started listening
to what these guys were saying, and I started sort
of doing a bit of googling, and you know, some

(10:29):
of it kind of checked out in a way, and
they got you, they got me. Yeah, And they were
talking about texts and characters and places from this British
tradition which I'd never heard of. Like, I just didn't

(10:49):
get it. And so when I talked to Trevor, I
call the King Arthur like a cherry on the icing
on the cake, Like everyone goes in for Arthur, but
then you find the beautiful cake beneath it. Right. My
friend Adam, who I do some recording with, He's says
it might much clever, and he calls him a psychopomp,

(11:10):
a demon that leads you to greater, greater knowledge.

Speaker 6 (11:13):
Right, And.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
That's what we have in Britain is we have a
culture which is kind of split east west rather than
north south or by our modern borders and the western
side of Britain, which we call the sort of the
Celtic fringe today. This was inhabited by people we call

(11:40):
the Britons. So you've heard of Arthur, King of the Britons,
but it's kind of a meaningless phrase today. Because the
whole island is called Britain. But if you go back
to say the sixteen hundreds, you wouldn't call an English
person in Britain. You wouldn't call a Scottish person in
Britain like they would say, no, I'm not well. Welsh
people of Britain. Wales is that bulge on the left

(12:04):
hand side of Britain, with its own separate language and
separate history. One very famous Welshman made the word Britain
applicable to the whole nation, shall we say, the whole island,
And that man's name was John d You may have

(12:26):
heard of him. In fact, hiss an incredibly brilliant piece
of propaganda. He is. Once they were calling England Britain
at the same time they were trying to ban the
Welsh language and bring English laws into Wales. And you
get this over and over again because essentially Britain is

(12:48):
ruled from London today and the British Empire started as
as England and its powerhouse as it slowly took over
the various nations of the island and then spread out
from there. So the propaganda of that nation has been
very important for a very long time. I mean, it

(13:09):
became the most powerful empire in the world. So how
these people styled themselves and how they claimed their history
was very important. So when John D claimed Britain for England,
he was then claiming all of the other prophecy that
went alongside all the history, all the right to rule.

(13:35):
So for instance, Arthur, Arthur is the king who's meant
to return, who's sleeping an avalon, and then he is
said to come back and rule the Britons and then
leader Britain to a time where it had an empire
that spanned the world. I mean that's written six hundred
years before the British Empire was formed, right but John D.

(14:01):
Then John D manages to capture that and then make
that about English power by making the whole place Britain.
So it's a brilliant piece of work. John D is
a genius in lots of ways, and not a very
nice one as well.

Speaker 6 (14:18):
An evil magician.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, and there's a lot of interesting stuff that comes
out around that period, particularly to do with Joseph of
Avara Mathea as well. There's a fantastic letter from Queen
Elizabeth the First to the Pope saying, you know your
religion's younger than mine. We had Joseph of Avara Matha
founding our Christianity in Britain. You have Peter turn up

(14:42):
decades later. How can you tell me what to do? Wow? Right,
So this is why it's really important for people over
the time in this country to assume this history, to
make it theirs, to buy into it in some way,
because it's all wrapped up with the with the power,

(15:02):
the right and the power to rule in Britain. Okay,
that and that, as I say, that comes from the
western side of Britain, the Welsh, because it was them
who dominated this island for five hundred years before the
Romans even turned up. So that was when Britain was

(15:23):
they call it Brythonic. Now is the word Celtic is
the general term used, but Celtic's Celtic can be a
bit of a minefield word to use in this topic.
You know, if you start going online and say, yeah,
King Arthur was a king of Celts or something like that,
someone that might tear you and you are even you

(15:43):
can go back to Tolkien. Tolkien wrote a really interesting
speech for the British Celtic Association which was in part
of the un University of Oxford's English department, and he did,
he did a keynote speech for them after the success
of Lord of Rings and that, and he said he
described the word Celtic as a magic bag into which

(16:07):
anything can be put and that anything can be taken
out of. So it supports my argument that I call
this Celtic, therefore it's Celtic. Doesn't support my argument that
it's Celtic therefore it's not Celtic anymore. Okay, So that's
an issue with Celtic right. This is we long called

(16:28):
the church in the time of Arthur, the British Church
of that period, they used to call Celtic Christianity, associated
with Saint Patrick in Ireland, you know, not work crosses,
all that sort of stuff was used to be called
Celtic Christianity. But that formed hundreds of years, arguably hundreds
of years after the Romans showed up and Britain was

(16:52):
Romanized in whatever that word means. So how can we
use the word Celtics to which is a prehistoric, pre
Roman term, and then apply that to something post Roman
and Christian. You know, it's a very as I say,
the word was just used however they wanted it to

(17:14):
be used. You know, they just throw it out that
this is Celtic, this isn't blah blah blah. So Brythonic
is a bit more of an appropriate word, but it's
Can I get a little picture up? Actually?

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Is that all right?

Speaker 6 (17:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (17:29):
I'm just going to say just so we can understand
the geography a bit better.

Speaker 5 (17:36):
While you're pulling that up. Did you ever watch the
show The Last Kingdom? The Last Kingdom is that it's
basically about the the formation or the sort of the
formation of the British Empire. Yeah, where they took all
the different kingdoms and made them into one.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
So the formation of England. Yeah, so there was a
formation of English Saxon state were called the heptarchy seven
Saxon Kingdoms. The Saxons sort of started arriving after the
end of the Roman period and about four to TEND
and yeah, they formed, They formed the England and that
took about five hundred years. So this is the really

(18:17):
interesting thing. Saxon England wasn't really fully complete and set
up and organized until about nine hundred AD, which is
about five hundred years after the Saxons started arriving. So
we're talking about a really slow grinding war essentially that

(18:40):
I mean, we can't really call it one war. It
would have had vast periods of peace and cultural exchange
and genetic exchange, which is a polite way of saying sex.
They been a lot of a lot of things happen

(19:02):
in that period. But but but this is this is
the this is the the context of Arthur is that
Arthur is a king that fights the Saxons, right, So
this is why it's silly when some people say, oh,
Arthur was a king of England because he was fighting
the English, so we can't really call him call him
a king of England, right, although they weren't really the English,
there were Saxons. I mean, there's there's such a there's

(19:25):
such a huge, like a temporal issue here when people
start talking about trying to claim where someone is from
or who they were fighting. Is that you know, you
can't say King Arthur is Scottish because Scotland didn't exist
in the time of King Arthur. England didn't exist in
the time of King Arthur.

Speaker 5 (19:45):
So this reminds me, I mean, that's that's like that's
brilliant politics. Really, Like like what you were saying that
John D did is just you just take control of
the meaning of one word. Yeah, and you can totally
changed the way the entire population thinks about themselves, you know,
or thinks about others.

Speaker 6 (20:05):
Absolutely, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
Yeah. Hm, So can you see this? Yeah, yeah, So,
as you can see, the west of Britain and the
north of Britain is uplands and southeast is really the
good flatter farming land and this is the west and

(20:28):
the north is good for your mining, grazing, cattle, stuff
like that. When the Romans came, they this is the
sort of area they wanted because this is at a time,
so Britain was quite far Britain is quite far north.

(20:48):
But you can get two crops in a in a season,
and obviously now that's a great thing, but in the
first entry a d that was a a very enticing
thing for Romans. You know, that's a good way of
feeding a military, having two crops a year. And there's
a massive canal system that goes through Holland and down

(21:10):
through Germany to northern Italy which would carry food around
and various other things. Britain was a huge producer of
cattle as well. As I was saying, but they moved
into this area, and then the western uplands they're a
lot harder to control. So it took the Romans about
probably about one hundred years really to make their way
up to the north and to conquer Wales and Western Britain.

(21:32):
It took them a long time, a lot of time
of hiding in forts, essentially building relationships with the southern kingdoms,
and then slowly making advances of various campaigns into the
North and into Wales. What's really interesting about that is
then that these western uplands, although they had that Roman influence,

(21:57):
they really we call them sort of unromanized. They don't
have the big Roman cities, they don't have all the
Roman coins. You know, you do find the coin finds
and things like that, but in lots smaller concentrations, these

(22:19):
these you know, to the point where archaeologists in the
past would say, yeah, the Romans came here, you know,
swung their deck around of it, and then left and
didn't touch Britain for the next four and didn't touch
those parts of Britain for the next four hundred years.
Now the view is changing a bit. But what's curious

(22:39):
is about when the Roman power fell in Britain, it's
those western upland those least Romanized parts which maintained Roman culture.
So in the Saxons that came in were not Romanized
at all, they weren't Christian and they didn't maintain You know,

(23:01):
this is why we don't speak a Romance language is
because the Saxons invaded Britain. Essentially, that's why we have
this weird Bastard Germanic language that we speak. Whereas the
Franks and the Goths and that, which were also on
the borders of Roman territory, they started speaking Latin. They

(23:22):
started practicing Christianity really early, which is why France and
Spain and Italy will still speak that Romance Romance language.
In Britain, they maintained the use of Latin, they maintained
building in Roman cities. They continued Christianity as well, which

(23:43):
is something you don't often hear. In fact, that's actually
a really good one to do, is you just go
on Google and google when did Christianity come to Britain
and it will probably give you the wrong date straight away.
They'll give you a date like will probably give you
five line seven AD. But you know, you can you
can see Christians on Roman mosaics in the fourth century

(24:05):
a d. And there's a propaganda element to that we
can go into. But it was this and it's this area,
this sort of Roman maintained but also least Roman part
of Britain where Arthur comes from. So the archaeology is

(24:26):
really interesting from the period. Their their monuments, like their
their grave monuments. They use Latin lettering, they use Latin inscriptions.
Some of them have Brythonic names, some of them have
Latin names, but they're carved onto standing stones. Right. Oh,

(24:46):
you know, they reinhabited Roman cities, you know, refortified the walls.
I say reinhabited. It was probably continually inhabited, but they
you know, renovated them and kept them, you know, kept
them going. Sometimes they built evil style wooden halls in
the center rather than the crumbling Roman buildings that would
have been there. But not only did they inhabit these

(25:07):
Roman buildings, but they also reinhabited the Iron Age hill
forts and refortified them. So you get this really interesting
mix of archaeology which is on the one hand pre
Roman and very Brythonic, and then on the other hand,
very Roman, and more Roman than was happening in a

(25:27):
lot of northern Europe at the time because of the
Germanic invasions. This, as I say, poses an interesting problem
for Rome because at this point in European history, the
Roman churches in shambles. It's all over the place. It's
been you know, it's been taken apart by the Germanics.

(25:51):
They're slowly reorganizing it and incorporating themselves into it. But
you know, church buildings have been burned, documents have been burned,
and yet in this edge of Britain there's people who've
been practicing Christianity continually for up to five hundred and

(26:11):
six hundred years.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
Was it were they doing it openly or was it practices?

Speaker 3 (26:20):
But building churches the problem comes. So the problem comes
with that date five nine seven where a guy called
Augustine or Austin arrives in Britain and there is a
there's a problem between Catholic practices and British practices. The

(26:43):
ones they talk about mainly is how when they celebrate Easter,
so how you but how you calculate the date? So
the British Church used an old Jewish calculation for Easter,
and the Roman Church used a Roman one and the
other one was how to cut the tonsure. So obviously
the classic Roman one is with the bold pate, yeah,

(27:06):
and the head rest of the hair, and the Celtic
one is kind of like everything cut off except for
a strip right at the front.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
All right, Okay, the head mustache my favorite haircuts in
medieval video games.

Speaker 5 (27:20):
It's called the It just makes you want to punch
those guys in the face.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Interestingly, they call it the tauntry Simon Majus Simon may
just being a very influential Gnostic character. So and is
there a I hate church. Yeah, I don't know, other
than that they wore the Britons wore their hair long.
There's a lot of a lot of talking if they

(27:44):
if they went into the church, they'd have their haircut,
and then when they left the church they grow their
hair long. Again. There's a sign of pride.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
And I'm just saying, I can see why you would
fight a war with those guys.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
So yeah, I mean, and they're the things they talk
about openly, you know, is you calculate Easter wrong and
you do your hair wrong. But there's there's definitely other
things undercurrent spoiling.

Speaker 5 (28:08):
They didn't need any other reason.

Speaker 6 (28:10):
I didn't like their hair.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Is Listen, there's a whole lot of political stuff going on,
but the main problem from Easter is your.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
A lot of the problems also seem to come with
in Britain. The priests can marry and they could also
live and practice their religion with their wives, is something
that the Catholic priests thought was abominable. Yeah, so this
could be a In fact, recently there's been a a

(28:43):
discovery in Whales of what looks like a sixth century nunnery.
They've got really fine crockery and glassware, and lots of
female burials which are in really nice rock cut graves,
and they've got quite nice goods and things like that,
so which is very very early for nunnerys. So it's

(29:05):
pretty interesting stuff. But five nine seven is a bit
ahead of Arthur, just a little bit. It's Arthur is
seen as either a fifth or sixth century character, so
the five hundreds, four hundreds, five hundreds right, or the
cusp in between the two. Really, the problem with Arthurian

(29:27):
material is that it's late, so most of it dates
from the tenth or eleventh century. Onwards. So that's five
hundred years after our time with Arthur.

Speaker 5 (29:40):
You mean the storytelling starts.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Okay. The documents that we have now that we can
date the earliest period.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
The physical the physical evidence and documents you have now
years after he was supposed to be around.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Yeah, and some of that, I mean, some of that
you can judge by the con you can say there's
definitely like by the language used. You can say, oh,
this is a say, a thirteenth century manuscript, but because
of the language used, they're probably copying from something which
is a lot older than that.

Speaker 5 (30:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
The thing is about this Arthur. These documents though, is
that they don't just talk about the time of Arthur
the sixth century, which which British historians and archaeologists essentially
treat as prehistoric today, because we'll get into the fact
that they don't like these sources at all. Now, Uh, the.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Real quick I was going to ask the other question.
I was going to ask about these like still Roman
non Roman places in the uplands that we were talking about,
are there documents from there?

Speaker 5 (30:53):
Is it or is it only architecture and there's no
writing for the creatives and things.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
The memorial stones they are the most documents we have.
So the problem with us in Britain as well is
that it's not a good place to keep paper.

Speaker 5 (31:11):
But yeah, yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Or animal skins or all the other things that they
recorded on in that period. Two wet too wet, too damp. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's a big problem.

Speaker 5 (31:23):
Ice just stored in ice.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah. I mean.

Speaker 5 (31:30):
We don't have caves or dry place, but we can
freeze it.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
I mean it's interesting because a lot of people will say, oh,
there's there's no written sources from the period and completely
ignore the inscribed stones. And in fact, this is a
big mission of mine, is the inscribed stones, because they
are they are awesome things, like some of them are massive.
They have these fascinating inscriptions on them which date to
the time of King Arthur possibly if you believe that,

(31:55):
you know, and they are you know, like tucked in
behind a church, like with the inscription fading in the rain,
or stuffed in the back of somewhere with chairs stacked
against it, and you know, people don't even know what
they are or where they're from.

Speaker 5 (32:15):
I mean, I need to scan them.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
It is happening. Fortunately, it's wrning.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
It kind of reminds me that the church that Hugh
Newman took us to and we like opened the trap
door and there's like a standing stone beneath the floor
of the church.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah, we've got one nearby where there's it's like holding
up the lintle of a pub. It's just a standing
stone in the middle of the bar, holding up the.

Speaker 6 (32:42):
Roof, preserved forever.

Speaker 5 (32:44):
We've been drinking it for thousands of years.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
They just went, they were like, well, the stone's in
the way, and the pub out of it. Just build
around it like.

Speaker 5 (32:59):
It sucks in the rain.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
But yeah, they're they're amazing things, and they're so undervalued.
They they're absolutely I got some lovely pictures of some,
but some of them are really interesting actually because they
not a lot of them have obviously recognizable names from
from the period, but some of them do, and some
of them link very interestingly with the history, and a

(33:26):
lot of mainstream scholars are quite abby to jump on
and say, no, no, it's nothing to do with it,
it's just a coincident. I'll run through one quickly actually,
because it's my favorite. Have you heard Have you heard
if I say Tristan and is old? Do you know
what I'm talking about.

Speaker 5 (33:41):
I think, yeah, Tristan sounds Tristan.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Yeah. It's a very famous romance. It was one of
the Arthurian romances, and but it's the love story was
particularly popular. So I think there's a Wagner opera Tristan
is Old it it features these two lovers. Tristan is

(34:03):
sent by his guardian or uncle, King Mark of Cornwall
to go and pick up a new wife for him,
who is old. When he goes to meet as old,
they fall in love and then have to deal with
the fact that King Mark is not going to be
very happy about this. Essentially, so they run away together.
There's various versions and things like that. So in a

(34:28):
ninth century life of a guy called Paul Aurelian, the
author talks about a very much historical character in Brittany
in northern France called Conmore now Conmore, as I say,
he is quite happily historical. He appears in lots of
different documents and from different countries as well, so he's

(34:51):
quite well attested. And the writer of this life says
King Mark and Conmore are the same person, right, He
just says, says it straight out, they are the same person.

Speaker 6 (35:02):
Right.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
A lot of people don't agree with this. They're like, no, no,
he's got that wrong. They can't possibly be the same people.
It's two separate traditions from two separate places. But in Cornwall,
where king Mark is from, by the way, not where
Conwall's from. Where king Mark is from, there's an inscribed
stone that says Justina's Trust, which is an accepted Latin

(35:27):
version of Tristan, son of or successor to Connor Marius. Right,
so we have a tradition that links Tristan and Mark,
a document that leaves links Mark and Conmore, and a
stone that says Tristan son of Conwore. How much more

(35:48):
attestation do you.

Speaker 5 (35:49):
Need and cure coincidence?

Speaker 3 (35:52):
This is a very it's ace.

Speaker 5 (35:55):
But Tristan is supposed to be one of the Nates, isn't. Yeah, yeah,
that's where I recognize the name.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Mark is said to be a He's described in some
places as him and Arthur are sons of two sisters.
So so first cousins through their mothers, which is possible
some people now, because there aren't early stories that directly
link Arthur and Mark, people will now go, oh no,

(36:23):
it's two separate additions which have just come together in
the romances and they're not related at all, although you
find people related to both of them, you know, round
and about, like Tristan's real father and his other uncle.
So yeah, so that's interesting. You've got you you've basically
got this stone which says this, but no, it's a coincidence.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
There's another guy, So why do they want it to
be a coincidence instead of I think this comes from
the driving reason.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
I think this comes from the change in academic outlook.
So up until the nineteen sixties, saying that you thought
that Arthur was a historical character was pretty much the
mainstream idea. They might have put some conditions to that, saying, oh,
he was maybe just the local king and it's been

(37:14):
blown out of proportion a bit, or something like that.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
Like with the floods, there's a local flood proportion.

Speaker 3 (37:22):
And then in nineteen sixty, well in nineteen sixties ish
a track called David Dunville, who's still basically the leading authority,
announced that all of the earliest evidence about Arthur is inadmissible,
and everyone just went along with it. So now if

(37:45):
you are say, someone getting this into this today and
you start reading through what the antiquarians have to say,
and you think, oh, this is exciting. Yeah, this could
be this place, this person could be this person. I
can make these connections. You go and look at modern scholarship,
there'll be none of that because they don't make arguments
about Arthur anymore, because they don't have to, because it's

(38:05):
a load of rubbish. They don't have to deal with
any of the evidence because it's not evidence to them.

Speaker 6 (38:12):
Ah hmm.

Speaker 5 (38:15):
Did he give like a reason for it being inadmissible?

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Well, I'm reading one book at the moment, which was
published a few years ago, but the author of that,
Christopher Gidlow, was basically saying that at the time of
writing that book, David Dunfell's work was still unpublished, so
we just had to take his word on it. I

(38:40):
don't even know if he's published now, I honestly don't.
But it's some of the arguments. You get to see
some of the arguments presented, and they're not they're not brilliant.

Speaker 5 (38:51):
But doesn't that sound like there's something else going on?

Speaker 2 (38:57):
I mean, I know, you know, you don't want to
get too conspiratorial, but like you already talked about like
how they John d takes command of this one word
and changes all this stuff. So it's like it's almost like, Okay,
we need to erase this whole, this entire saga.

Speaker 5 (39:13):
And get rid of it for some other reason.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Yeah, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
So you just have some respected academic announced that all
this evidence is inadmissible in modern academia and doesn't fit
their strenuous absolutely whatever, and everyone's.

Speaker 5 (39:31):
Like, oh, okay, well crap, and then you just accept it.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
And it's interesting because it is almost directly targeted at Arthur.
So what's really interesting is that the earliest sources we
have for Arthur, although they're quite late, there's also some
of the earliest sources we have for some other people.
A really good example is character called Ambrosius so in
Jeffrey of Monmouth's Historia Region brittanny I, which is basically

(39:57):
the first narrative story we get about our There are
earlier sources, but they're kind of little snippets and bits
and bobs, you know, little little mentions and things like that.
Historia Region Brittannia gives us the first like narrative of
his life. And this book is hated, by the way
by academics. They hate Jeffrey of Monmouth. It's the spot

(40:20):
and Jeffrey of Monmouth is full of a lot of fantasy,
I'll give you that. But there are in that book anyway,
Ambrosius is described as Arthur's uncle. But in the earlier
sources where we find Ambrosius and Arthur as well, you'll
find so for instance, in the Historia Brittonum, this is

(40:40):
probably one of the first mentions of Arthur. It's a
ninth century annals sort of thing. It's not really an annals,
it's not like a list of years, but it's you know,
like a series of short sections roughly in chronological order.
Ambrosia is a figure who is a prophetic child who

(41:06):
sees that there's some dragons fighting under a castle and
gets the king to release them in order to solve
the problems that this king is having building his castle.
King Vautigan, who's very important in the Arthur story as well,
whereas Arthur just appears as a king who fights twelve battles. However,

(41:28):
Ambrosius is considered historical and Arthur is fictional. So Ambrosius
has this really wild, crazy introduction to the histories of
doing this crazy stuff. But he's considered historical Arthur, who
just fought twelve battles against the Saxons. That's fictional and

(41:50):
essentially what you.

Speaker 5 (41:51):
Find Ambrosia is a common name.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
No, no, not at all. It's he's probably one of
the and he's the only character in Welsh tradition with
that name.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Remind you you know Ambrosia, yeah, the food regards.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
Yeah, so that the Greek. It's a Greek name. I
think the Latin. The Latin version is not far off though.
I think it's pretty much the same. In Welsh it's
embers or embolise, but it means the same thing, which
is eternal or divine.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
He's also the genesis of the Merlin character Ambrosius. So
when Jeffrey first mentions Merlin, he calls him Merlin Ambrosius
and kind of conflates him like almost he almost makes
one character out of two.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, and that makes sense, like giving Arthur, I mean,
like you know how many ancient heroes had one parent
who was a god and another who was a human.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Right, so there are.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Always the half breeds, the Gilga measures and the ambros is.

Speaker 5 (43:07):
A real person rock right, It's totally real.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Yeah, it wasn't. It was just a bloke, but his
nephew was fictional. And this is why what's fascinating about
the the the whole uber of Welsh tradition, this whole
you know, we're talking about thousands and thousands of manuscripts,

(43:32):
stories that go back what we call prehistoric in Britain.
We've got thousands of documents in Britain which pertained to
the period that we call prehistoric.

Speaker 6 (43:46):
That is weird.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
I associate prehistoric with like before documents, I guess before writing.

Speaker 5 (43:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
Yeah, So how how we were sort of generally taught
it in this country is that you you have your
pre street up till about fifty five BC, when Julius
Caesar made his first attempt conquering Britain. The great brilliant
joke is that that Julius Caesar was so successful that

(44:14):
first year that he had to come back the next
year and do it again. And then he was so
successful the second time that not a Roman soldier stepped
foot on Britain again for another hundred years.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
Right, They're like, well, we we got history going.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Julius, like I did, I did so well there that
I'm running away. In fact, there's a. There's a famous
Latin poem actually which which takes the piss out of
Caesar and it says that the end line is something
like to the Britons, who he bravely showed his back. Yeah, yeah,

(44:57):
so we get so we get a bit a start
there with Caesar, and then one hundred years later we
get the Claudian invasion in forty three AD, and then
we have some records which are the Roman records up
until about four hundred AD. Then it goes black again
and then things start to generally start to accumulate again
around eight nine hundred, one thousand eight and then one thousand,

(45:22):
ten sixty six is the big important date in British history,
which was the Norman Conquest, where essentially our ruling class
was replaced by some by the Normans, and they are
still essentially the aristocrats who own most of the land
in this country today, or their descendants are anyway. So

(45:45):
and this was a big change in things like taxation
and land ownership. So suddenly we get loads of documents
which are listing out places, how many people live there,
you know, how many animals are there, basically how much
money it generates. That really starts in that eight period.
But as I say, we've got thousands of thousands and

(46:07):
thousands of documents which pertain to the periods that they
now call prehistoric or the Dark Ages. So yeah, so
there's a really interesting there's a really great book. Actually
it's a classical dictionary. So it's a dictionary of names
and places from Welsh tradition up to one thousand AD.

(46:30):
And it's by a guy called Peter Bartram. And you basically,
you know, you can go through it like a dictionary.
I'll send you a link to it. It's great, and
you go through, look at the names, and it will
show you all the references to where these names are.
As I say, that book goes up to one thousand
a D. But all the information comes from documents written
after a thousand a D. They can feel a huge

(46:52):
book full of these people who weren't recorded until after
they were meant to have lived. There are exceptions to
get me wrong, but this is the case when you
get to something like Jeffrey of Momma's Historia Region Brittanny,
I is that you have a book that is full
of names, dates, events, and you could get ten different

(47:16):
scholars to go through it. And each one could pick
out a different character, a different name, and a different
event and say historical, fictional, historical, fictional, historical, fictional, and
they willn't all line up. You know, one guy would
say yeah, he's historical, and the next guy come along
and say, no, no, that's an historical. You know, it

(47:38):
happens time and time and again, to the point where
you've essentially got this whole chronology essentially, and a whole
selection of interrelated people who you can't who is almost
impossible to separate out what's real and what's not, and

(48:03):
no academic, no two academics, can agree on it. So
when it comes to ideas of like pseudohistory or pseudo archaeology,
one thing that archaeologists like to say is that when
the public encounterhistory, they see it in snapshots and they
don't see that behind the scenes, we've got a really

(48:24):
carefully worked out chronology with evidence, blah blah blah blah blah.
Well that's just not true. In the Dark Ages or
the early Medieval period as we call it, there is
no consensus, it doesn't exist. You can't call someone disagree,
you can't say that someone is a pseudohistory or pseudo

(48:45):
archaeologist for disagreeing with a consensus, because there is no
consensus really medieval, especially in the Western areas.

Speaker 6 (48:56):
So do they still call people pseudo archaeologists for.

Speaker 5 (49:00):
Do people still get called that?

Speaker 3 (49:02):
Oh yeah?

Speaker 6 (49:03):
For their views?

Speaker 3 (49:04):
Oh yeah, especially enough. Yeah, Okay, believing in Arthur is
akin to UFOs and Bigfoot.

Speaker 5 (49:10):
That's why I'm here, all right, that's why. So I
I should probably take a break. It just started raining
at the vineyard and they're supposed to start pulling fruit,
so I got to make a call. But we got
a great set up here for all the historical you know,

(49:32):
the the purpose of controversy and all that. But I
want to hear the story because I'm not really familiar
with like why is this so significant?

Speaker 6 (49:42):
You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 (49:42):
I like, tell me the story of Arthur as you think,
you as you see it from your research for sure.

Speaker 6 (49:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, when we'll come back, I'll talk
about the early sources and then that the narrative story
that we get from that.

Speaker 5 (49:56):
Excellent sounds good, awesome.

Speaker 7 (50:00):
Thank you, Okay, we're back at all Yeah, I uh,

(50:36):
Crisis of Christ.

Speaker 5 (50:37):
Well, I mean, no, that we just called I had
on going crisis ongoing, called off harvest for tonight. Uh
so yeah, so I can stay up late video games. Yeah,
I'll test the fruit tomorrow in the morning. I mean,
we could stand to lose some bricks, Like the percentage
of sugar could go down a little bit because we're
making rose. So it's like it's okay. It was a

(51:00):
little high, honestly, So maybe the rain will bring it
down slightly and it'll still be good and we can
harvest tomorrow night. I don't know what the rain does.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
Is it the heat?

Speaker 5 (51:11):
Yeah, we do it at night because it's so hot
during the day, too hot, and really you prefer the
fruit to be cool so that the fermentation or well
for whites and rose is we actually we actually once
we press the juice, we chill the juice to settle
out the you know, the particulates and stuff the ledge
before you start the fermentation. So it's better when it's cold.

(51:33):
I mean, if if it comes in hot, we just
it just takes longer to get it cold, you know,
and the crew is working out there. You don't want
to you don't want to be picking grapes.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
It's terrible.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Yea, So we we did day we did day harvest
it first and we just found out, like now doing
it at night is so much better.

Speaker 6 (51:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
So we're gonna with some sources, Yeah, sources, and we
want to hear the story.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
Like tell us the okay, okay, go through some sources
and hopefully we'll build up a bit of a story. Earliest,
the earliest one I mentioned it was called Historia Brattona,
and this is the ninth century history, and it's a
very short entry for Arthur and it basically lists him

(52:26):
as a very successful leader of battles. They use the
term dux belorum forum not necessarily king, but dux belorum,
and he fights, sorry, not ten battles, twelve battles. He
fights these twelve battles and he's incredibly successful one of them.
He's definitely recorded as a Christian king. They talk about

(52:49):
him wearing an image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders,
and there's lots of different interpretations about what that can mean,
whether he had it on a shield or whether he
had it on a cape or something like that. A
lot of ink has been spilled over that question. I
don't know why it's so important to some people, but
I think it's just essential to say that he was

(53:09):
definitely a Christian king, and he was very successful, and
he seems to be very successful against the Saxons in
a time where we see sort of a stop as
cessation in Saxon activity. So the Saxons have come into
the east of the island really and first established themselves there,
and then there's sort of this westward movement of them,

(53:31):
and it gets to this point around five hundred AD
where suddenly they kind of just stop, right, They grind
to a halt, and Saxon victory suddenly become very quiet
in the records. You know, up to this point they
were going, yeah, we won this battle, and we won
this battle. And then it just goes very quiet for
a bit, right, and then six hundred AD it kind

(53:55):
of starts again. So the next entry we get is
from an Annals. It's called the Animal's Cambria, I Annals
of Whales. Actually, this is cool one. I did this
with Treasure Trevor. You know, if I say Cornubian, Devonian, Silurian, Cambrian, Ordervisian,

(54:18):
you know I'm talking about geological ages. So they all
come from the literary names for parts of Britain where
the rock types of those ages were first identified, and
a lot of them are from the Britain side. So
the historical Arthur that I favor, that theory is called

(54:39):
the Silurian Arthur hypothesis, which is kind of snaky because
it links it back into the Silurian hypothesis. Yeah, Cambria
is a name for greater whales they called themselves the
Cumbery Whales, and Welsh being possibly later terms that just

(55:01):
mean like Romanized foreigner, and you get it in other
parts of the world as well, like Galicia in Spain.
Maybe that's not the right word, not Galicia. Sorry, So
my brain did two different things there. Yeah, we'll go

(55:21):
to Wales later anyway. So we get the Annals canbry
Eye and we get two mentions for Arthur. What's interesting
is they're the first non religious mentions in this in
this the first secular mentions in this annals. Up to
that point they're talking about churchmen and when they were
born and when they did important things and things like that,

(55:41):
and then suddenly we've got a king there. And the
two mentions they talk about the Battle of Baden Baden
is also the twelfth battle on the previous battle list
that we saw, and then the next entry is about
the back of Camlan where Arthur and Mordred fell, right,

(56:05):
so this is Arthur's death. We get a couple of.

Speaker 5 (56:10):
Money die in the twelfth battle or after.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Well, Camlan isn't listed in the twelfth Battle twelve battles.
This is an extra one. It's the thirteenth battle. You
never have a thirteenth one. You're gonna You're gonna go. Yeah,
you probably had some more. So there's ideas possibly either
the twelve battles were recorded before and written down and
that tradition survives before Camlan even took place, or possibly

(56:35):
Camlan is very much seen as a as a civil war,
so the twelve battles are twelve battles against the Saxons.
In particular, Camlan might not have been included because it's
a civil war because Mordred is Arthur's nephew, so and
it was him that seemed to raise a rebellion against Arthur.

Speaker 5 (56:57):
Yeah, I was gonna say, he's like the bad guy.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
In the Yeaholutely story. Some of the earliest reverences to
Medrawd as he's called in Wales are actually quite flattering though.
I mean, he was clearly a high born and very
important person before he gained this reputation as Arthur's evil
nephew essentially. So I'm going to skip forward a couple

(57:22):
of bits and bobs that we have of mentions of
Arthur and go to Jeffrey of Monmouth. Jeffrey is the
first one, as I say, to present an entire story
of Arthur's life. And what's really fascinating is, despite the
fact that Jeffrey is absolutely torn apart as ficture, fiction
and legendary and all this sort of stuff, is that

(57:45):
his account of Arthur is pretty just like the account
in Neneus in Historia Brittona. It's pretty plain. You know,
he does stuff that's fairly reasonable for an early medieval
king to do. You know, he fights battles and yeah, yeah,
not fantastical. So so his life starts fairly fantastically, let's

(58:07):
go with that. So, so it all starts with Uther Pendragon.
Uther Pendragon has had lots of success against the Saxons,
and he has set himself up and they have a
bit of a celebration because they've just defeated. They've they've
driven the Picks. The Picts are in what we call

(58:28):
Scotland now, right in the top of Scotland, and he's
they've had some success against the Picks and the Saxons,
and so they're having a bit of a get together.
And his right hand man, who's called Gorlois, Earl of Cornwall,
he's got his he's got his wife a gear there
with him, and Uther Pendragon is absolutely smitten. He wants

(58:52):
a gear badly, and he wants it so badly that
he goes to war with his chief advisor, right Ruth
Pandragon does not come out well at all in in
Jeffrey of Mormon, or at least in this section anyway.
So he takes his army down to Cornwall. This is
where all the tim comes from I was talking about earlier,

(59:16):
and he gets Merlin to create some drugs as the
word they use, and that those drugs are meant to
give him give Uther the appearance of Gorlois, right, so
we can break into to Tintagel Castle and he then
sleeps with a gear in the in the disguise of Gorlois,
and that's how Arthur is fathered. So Arthur is a

(59:37):
bastard straight off and he then Arthur gets basically taken
away and and secreted again with one of his advisers.
So in the later tradition he's called Sir Ector or
Sir Antor that becomes Arthur's advisor who's the father of

(59:57):
Sir Kay and in Welsh tradition he's called.

Speaker 8 (01:00:02):
Connor of care Goch, and Arthur basically sort of stays
in the wings until he's fifteen.

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
A couple of other people have served as hiking in between,
one in particular, who's called lof Or in Welsh tradition
he's called Clay or Lou and Arthur then basically Lot
isn't doing too well, he doesn't have the confidence of

(01:00:34):
the soldiers. So Arthur, at a very young age of fifteen,
basically gets elected to be a general and a leader
of battles. It's old in Jeffrey is that Arthur seems
to have like two coronations. He has one at this
very young age, and then he has another one later

(01:00:54):
on when he's much more established. And this is really
interesting because one of the criticisms people have of the
Arthur myth is that in a lot of the early sources,
Arthur is not called King Arthur at all. He's called
Arthur the Soldier, and it is even quite a suggestion
that he is not as high born as some of

(01:01:14):
the kings, or not as important. So the idea that
he has two coronations is quite interesting. One is first
just becoming this general, this battle leader, and then one
later on when he's actually established himself properly and he's going, no,
I am in charge now. Basically, so Arthur then say,

(01:01:36):
he ascends to being the king, or at least the
general of the armies of the Kings of Britain.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
And.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
He goes on a spree. He's incredibly successful, basically conquers
all of Britain. He then goes on to conquer Iceland, Scandinavia, Sweden, Norway,
you know, the whole lot. Denmark. There's, of course Arthur's
European campaign. And this gets to the bit where it
starts to stretch credulity and a lot of people get

(01:02:06):
very critical of Jeffrey. Is that Arthur just basically goes
on and conquers all of Europe. This is something that
John Dee loved because then he could say that Iceland
and Norway and Sweden belong to the British crown. You know,
we can you know, there's all sorts of things, all
sorts of propaganda that sort of wound up in this

(01:02:29):
and would have served also even earlier medieval kings. I mean,
already in the ninth century you had Knute, who was
a Viking king, and he was king of an empire
which included like Sweden, Denmark and Britain. Right, So this
idea of basically being kings of large areas of northwestern

(01:02:50):
Europe is not impossible or ridiculous, but it is generally
seen as something that couldn't happen in Arthur's time, but
did happen only a couple of hundred years later.

Speaker 6 (01:03:01):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
It's again one of these funny things of academia.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Yeah, I mean, and like Alexander is famous for exactly,
you know, taking over an enormous amount it's not impossible, right,
And Britain's small one extraordinary battle leader goes out and yeah,
it's like all of this will be mine.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
It's getting better, tracts of land, it's getting it's getting better.
But there is this really odd like a cognitive dissonance
in British history and archaeology, whereas they can talk about
the Roman period and go, yeah, we had these generals
who are campaigning in Turkey, North Africa and then coming
to Britain and campaign as soon as the Romans leave.

(01:03:46):
You know, they'll be talking about you know, a document
will talk about a king in one part of the
country and then they'll have a similar name with the
king and another part of the country, and the academics
will go, well, it can't be the same person. They're
in a completely different region. Too far apart, Yeah, too
far apart, And you think, what do you mean too
far apart, like two hundred miles away from each other. Hmm,
on an island which you can sail around and you

(01:04:10):
can sail up the rivers, and had loads of Roman
roads by then and all this sorts of stuff, if
not pre Roman roads. So yeah, So so Arthur has
this goes on then to conquer Europe as well, so
he calcus France and Rome as well. And that's what's

(01:04:35):
recorded on the Medina Cathedral archivolt which has Arthur and
his knights and this beautiful display in tiles basically sieging
Rome I believe it is, and it's got several other
Arthur's knights and named on it. It's really interesting. So

(01:04:58):
in medieval Europe they were quite happy with accepting that
Arthur conquered in Europe, but now we've got to this
stage they're not happy with it. So then what happens.
Arthur gets a callback his nephew's rebelling in Britain. He's
met up with a load of picts and saxons and

(01:05:18):
he's bringing an army south. So Arthur then has to
sail back from France and he meets Mordred at Camlan
and they both die, or at least Arthur suffers a
mortal wound, which he then goes to get treated at
Avalon afterwards. But the emphasis is on mortal wound. So

(01:05:43):
what treatment they did, you know? And that's essentially the story.
There's no Grail, there's no Lady in the Lake, there's no.

Speaker 6 (01:05:56):
I kind of think Marylin knows.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
Well, Merlin's in it, but he he's kind of there before.
He's not really there during Arthur's life. He's only there
right at the beginning. And as I say, he's kind
of confused with this, with this ambrosious character as well.
So there's not a lot of it's not not a logic.
I speaking to Trevor, and I'd say that.

Speaker 6 (01:06:17):
He's just there.

Speaker 5 (01:06:18):
Yeah, he's just they're giving him the drugs at the beginning.

Speaker 3 (01:06:20):
Given the drugs. Yeah, that's right, I was saying to Trevor,
like all of Merlin's magic is prophetic. Essentially, he has
the drugs, he moves, he moves stonehenge. So Merlin's credited
with building Stonehenge in Jeffrey of Monmouth. But even then
he describes some people say, I've said this before, and

(01:06:41):
maybe it's in different versions of the manuscripts. Maybe it
does say this, but people talk about him levitating the
stones on but in versions I've read they talk about
him using mechanisms, levers, pulleys, you know, which isn't magic,
it's it's science. Right, I'd like to see the lever
yeah hell yeah, right, especially form Sassin's I.

Speaker 5 (01:07:07):
Was next to those done.

Speaker 3 (01:07:09):
Yeah. What's interesting is that the quarry site for the
smaller stones, the bluestones, is in a part of West
Wales that was known as Ireland or known as Irish
for quite a long time, and Merlin was said to
have got the stones from Ireland. So is there buried

(01:07:29):
in that not real story an actual, real, five thousand
year old truth.

Speaker 5 (01:07:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:07:36):
Wow, that's cool.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
So one of the most famous pilgrim roots in Europe
is Saint David's Pilgrimage. It was in the medieval in
the twelve hundreds. It was on a par with the
San Compostella, which is a very famous pilgrim route in Spain.
If you did Saint David's or San Compostella, it was
worth twice going to Rome, right in terms of what

(01:08:01):
the reward you've got in heaven. The Saint David's pilgrim
way walks past the Bluestone Quarry, and when I say
past it, I mean like it's there, wow, as well
as several other ancient megalithic monuments before you then eventually
get to Saint David's.

Speaker 5 (01:08:22):
Does it imply why he built it?

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
In the just say yeah, it's a monument to the dead.
To the dead of the Saxon Wars, in particular, there's
said to be a peace conference which Vortigan and the
Saxons organized. They invite three hundred of the cream of
the crop of the British Royalty. There's meant to be
no weapons there, and then an order the Saxons draw

(01:08:45):
out their knives and basically executed three hundred Britons. This
is fictional according to modern academics, although it's repeated time
and time again. Is like a big thing which seem
to affect the psyche of the people at the time.
You know, it seemed to be a serious thing and
now it's like, oh no, it never happened from you know, yeah,

(01:09:09):
we didn't do that. Yeah, but yeah, the monument was
Sometimes people say for the war dead generally, but sometimes
it's specified for this the people who died at this
peace conference. And if you know, like Stonehenge does have
that that feel of a memorial, a memorial, yeah, you know,

(01:09:31):
it looks like like modern Second World warmer memorials or something,
but without the names on it, you know, right. But
I there's plenty of evidence that suggests Stonehenge is much
older than that. There's plenty of science. But it's really
interesting because Stonehenge is completely unique as a stone monument

(01:09:53):
in Britain. There isn't anything else like Stonehenge in Britain.
There's other big stone monuments, there's other big stone stuf,
but that style of worked stones with carpentry joint masonry
attached there's nothing else like that. It's it's completely anomalous.
So that's why I kind of like the story, because

(01:10:14):
there's kind of a suggestion that it is something different,
you know, it's not just this part of all our
other megal ethic monuments, that it's something kind of exceptional.

Speaker 5 (01:10:24):
The other thing that it makes me think of, though,
is that you've got this one plane version of the
Arthurian legend where it's just it's simple, like he's just
a he's a soldier, he's very successful, he gets you know,
he moves up the ranks, obviously wins these twelve battles.

(01:10:49):
But then perhaps later someone took that story in that
character and turned it into something else, turn it into
something that also contained other hidden information. So then you
tie in stone Hinge that now can be dated to

(01:11:11):
much earlier than that. Maybe part of the real fantastical
aspects of the Arthurian legends are actually talking about something
much older, like encoding a much much older story, I think,
into a modern version, right, like we kind of see
this happen over and over again in the in the myths.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
Yeah, you've got a bang on there. So Jeffrey of
Monmouth's account that's a whole although it's got the story
of Arthur that goes back to the founding of Britain.
So Britain was founded by the Trojans. Did you know that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:49):
Everyone in Britain?

Speaker 3 (01:11:49):
You it for a thousand years now no one knows it.
That's a long story we won't necessarily get into now,
but that's why the book starts. And you know, Arthur
is basically towards the end of the book and there's
a lot of fantastical stuff in it, but for some reason,
the Arthur bit that's it's it's Jeffrey's account, which then

(01:12:12):
spawns every single romantic tale of Arthur afterwards. So cretiend'toire
is that is the kind of person first cited as
being the first romance writer, but he was written writing
after Jeffrey about about fifty two hundred years afterwards. But

(01:12:35):
then from then on these things exploded all over Europe. Italy, France, Germany, Spain,
Scandinavia all have their Arthury and romances.

Speaker 5 (01:12:46):
Right see the technology, But we totally didn't go and
take over others.

Speaker 3 (01:12:50):
But yeah, but that's funny actually because the countries which
are known for producing Arthur romances fit really well with
what his European conquests were.

Speaker 5 (01:13:00):
Definitely wasn't there.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
I mean, I'm not sold on it, but I do
think that's very interesting as well.

Speaker 5 (01:13:06):
But it's also suggestive that the like what we talk
about is this technology of creating mythology, h like creating
that story that just spreads and in the story has
contained this hidden information Like obviously it worked, like you
have the first romanticizing of the story and then like.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
Yeah, but that's say, the Welsh legend and Welsh myth
isn't full of fantastical stuff. And there's some very interesting
set of stories. They're called the Mabinogion, right and the
mabinogy on the first four stories are called the mabinogy
right now. This is interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:13:48):
Because supposed to be isn't a mabinogie like.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
A like a what would you call it, like a
first level druid or something.

Speaker 5 (01:13:57):
Uh, there were the students of the druids.

Speaker 3 (01:13:59):
You get the but you get bards, Ovates and druids
are the three sections of but you might have read.
The thing is Russ is that this stuff is so
accessible to some people that you may have read some
fantasy where someone uses that word in order to Okay,
because you will find this so much. The matter of

(01:14:22):
Britain has kind of fallen out of favor consciously but
subconsciously it's just bubbling under the surface, right, Okay, So
take Conan the Barbarian, right, the guy who wrote that.
All of the names and ideas from Conan the Barbarian
come from one very short paragraph on an introduction to
the matter of Britain. So the name Conan comes from

(01:14:45):
a guy called Connan Meriadoc. And you might know the
name Merriadoc from Lord of the Rings as well. What
else about Conan? So Conan was a Hyperborean. Hyperborea is
meant to be the the mythical Greek cold continent in
the North, which obviously Britain has long been associated with.

(01:15:10):
He also gets associated with a group called the Chimerians. Now,
the Chimerians are like Scythians from like Turkey area, and
you think, well, how the hell is it that name's
got nothing to do with with British history. That's so
you know what you're talking about, Peter, You're talking about shit, right,
But a lot of antiquarians associated the Chimerians with the

(01:15:31):
Coomery of Wales and traced the Chimerians from the Middle
East to Wales. So you'll find a lot of antiquarian
writings where they'll talk about the Welsh and the Chimerians
as one so Conan the Chimerian from Hyperborea. All of
that comes from one small paragraph on an introduction to

(01:15:52):
the matter of Britain that that guy had in a book.
And that's what I mean. It's just you'll know so
much about this these stories, but you don't even know
you know it. You've heard a King Lear the Shakespeare story.
King Lear is a pre Roman king of Britain, and
that whole story comes from our ancient chronicles. And now

(01:16:16):
people only know it as a Shakespeare story because Shakespeare. Yeah,
people know Shakespeare is accepted great, but they won't talk
about the source material because our source material is about
Iron Age or Bronze Age Britain, which we don't have
history for. Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:16:36):
Okay, so it's very pervasive.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
Yeah. Gea, the mother of Arthur who Uther Pendragon fell
in love with her father, is said to be a
guy called Amlord or Amblood, and that name is the
Welsh version of Amleth or Hamlet.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Ah.

Speaker 5 (01:16:56):
Right, Shakespeare is involved really there's no.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Oh yeah, Shakespeare you a lot. Definitely. He favored a
collection of histories called Holland's Head's Chronicles, which was composed
in the Tudor period. A lot of his stuff came
from that. But Holland Sad's Chronicles is fascinating and goes
right back into the prehistoric period. So, yeah, I don't

(01:17:23):
know where we were going now.

Speaker 5 (01:17:26):
Tract with maberin Ag, Yeah, you're talking about that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
So it's got these two names. You've got the Mabinogion
and the Malbnog. Mabinogion means so loose translations. I think
this one illustrates it the best. Mabinogion means children's stories.
Mabinogi means creation stories. Okay, so you've got two very

(01:17:53):
there's a lot of implications in the words creation stories
and a lot of implications in children's stories. Children's stories
you can you can ignore, you don't have to worry
about it. Maybe it's you know, it's just something lighthearted
for the children, whereas creation stories can hold very important
mythical and you know, they're they're full of potential, political potential,

(01:18:14):
religious potential. And the interesting thing about the mabinogy On
and the mabinogie that's inside it is that it seems
to contain the British pre Christian pantheon. So all the
Roman and Greek gods that you see reoccur in Egypt, Scandinavia,

(01:18:36):
the Middle East and all this stuff, there's this whole
set for Britain as well, which again you don't really
hear very often. Yeah. Uh. And these stories, these are
full of full of mythical I m I say, mythical information,
very odd information. Some of it is definitely cosmic. So

(01:18:56):
you'll have a knight will say, well, let's meet again
here in a year in a day, and everything's always
like in a year in a day, you know, when
meet here. Yeah, there's a really famous story about Rhiannon,
who's who. She's riding on a horse and the knights
try to catch her, but they they can't no matter
how fast they ride, they can't quite catch up with her. Right,

(01:19:18):
And there's this there's this idea of stars that are
moving but moving together and can't.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
Yeah, you know, they don't always chasing, never catch up,
you know, when people are.

Speaker 5 (01:19:29):
Well, I was thinking that the Twelve Battles were I
mean yeah, right, So this is one thing that comes
up is the twelve is as.

Speaker 3 (01:19:39):
A it's a bell ringing number, isn't it?

Speaker 5 (01:19:41):
And he has two coronations also, which I was trying
to figure out what those could possibly be, but I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:19:47):
Waiting, But keep going the reference where the book where
we've got the twelve battles in there's lots of recordings
of kings who have lots of battles, and some of
them have eight battles or nine battles, two battles, four battles.
So I'm not sure how much the twelve is in
this case an odd number mm hmm some of the battle.

Speaker 5 (01:20:08):
But it could be a reason for the for the
source of the fantastical version.

Speaker 3 (01:20:13):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean there's as I say, this is
the cosmic element of Arthur is is definitely there. The
name Arth relates to this proto Indo European arts or Arth,
which means the bear and is very closely associated with

(01:20:34):
with ursa major, the Big Dipper, and therefore also Polaris
as well, because you know the Big Dipper points to Polaris,
so that there is undoubtedly a cosmic element to Arthur.
But I think this is something that is that is
older and then has been accreted onto him afterwards. Yeah,

(01:20:56):
so the information probably predates him, and this will happen
in the malbnogie is it's Arthur and his Knights who
play out the roles in the stories. But I think
that before Arthur and his Knights did that, there was
probably some other characters who did that.

Speaker 5 (01:21:11):
Other characters the same stories. But now we've got so
you've got you've got the round Table, which is the
sky absolutely, and then you have the Knights of the
round Table.

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
Yeah. Yeah, And in fact, this is what you find
with a lot of the romances. They're not about Arthur
and what he does. They're about his knights, yeah, which
is interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:21:33):
Stories are about the knights and braves Robin.

Speaker 3 (01:21:38):
But you know, we can talk about the knights as well,
because so these are people you can link to historical
characters and like, okay, So one academic might say, well,
they're they're legendary rather than historical, like we only know
them from written sources. We don't have any archaeology to
prove them. Another academic might say, oh, no, they're purely fictional,

(01:22:00):
you know, but we can we can, you know, you
can go through them and look at them. What's a
good one is loth For instance, so Lof who so
Arthur actually fights a little civil war with Loft because
Loft doesn't want to doesn't think that this fifteen year
old should should take over. Basically, Loft's sons actually side

(01:22:22):
with Arthur against their father. But Loth is in the
Welsh versions called Clay and he is called clay up Kunvarch,
and you can link these to the Kings of the North.
His brother is called Urian Regad. He's very much a
historical character in the King of Northern Britain. In the

(01:22:44):
Arthurian romances, he's called Sir Urians. Urian's son is called Awayne,
He's Sir Owen, Sir Bedevere. He's called bed Weir in
the Welsh tradition. Sometimes he's called bed were At Petroc
and Pedroc is a very historical saint in my local area.

(01:23:06):
There's about thirty churches dedicated to him in the local area.
Sir kay I mentioned earlier, he is imaginatively called k
in the Welsh tradition. There's not a lot of change there.
Gawayne is said to be a son of Loth In
the Welsh region, he's called Gwalkmei, which means something like

(01:23:28):
the hawk of may or maybe the hawk of the plains.
With gualk this word means hawk or falcon, something like that.
That one's really interesting actually, because he's he's called Gwalkmi
in the Welsh tradition. Almost immediately afterwards he's called something

(01:23:48):
like Walwyn or Gawayne, right, And it's this second element
of his name, this one element doesn't fit with the
Welsh Mare's something. There's a disconnect there, right, And this
is something they'd normally blame on Jeffrey of Monmouth. They say, Look,
Jeffrey was the first person who have this version. We

(01:24:09):
can see the Welsh traditions different. He's buggered it up,
and now everyone's followed him since and picked a name
that's very similar to his version. But the problem is,
just before that Jeffrey was writing another English historian called
William of Malmesbury records Walwyn. He talks about the grave

(01:24:29):
of Walwyn, talks about him being the nephew of Arthur. Right,
So we can't blame this on Jeffrey of Monmouth. But
the problem is William of Malmesbury is a golden boy
of history. He's known for his great historiography. He's a
Saxon Englishman. We love William of Malmsbury, so we can't
not harim as a purveyor of misinformation about Arthurian information

(01:24:52):
because he's liked. You know. Now, I'm not writing on
William of Marlsbury. I think he's great. But William also
said the Britons take a lot say a lot about Arthur.
A lot of it's fantastical, but it's based in real history.
And he's not covering Arthur. So he doesn't say any

(01:25:13):
more than that about that. But he is, as I say,
a very well respected historian, and he says, this isn't
just nonsense, it's history. So you know, there's all these
all these threads you know, where people say, so you
might spread someone say, oh, Geoffrey of Monmouth invented the
Trojan founding story. Well, no, it appeared in Historia Brittonum

(01:25:34):
two hundred years before that. You know, Geoffrey of Monmouth
invented the name Utha Pendragon. No, it's it's found in
Welsh tradition and Welsh poetry before him. You know, time
and time again. These things are just sort of like
just slung around like oh no, this is fictional. Just
started here, this is this, But when you start looking

(01:25:55):
closer and closer and looking at the details, you find
there's a lot more complex picture going on, so much
intertwined elements that are almost impossible to separate, you know.
And the easiest way for the academics to dismiss it
all is it's basically just take away the foundation it's on.

(01:26:17):
Just say well, it's it's just all nonsense, and then
they don't have to deal with it. Then they don't
have to pick it apart. Then they don't have to
explain why they think what is fictional and what is historical.

Speaker 5 (01:26:30):
So do you think that the reason that they're doing
this is purely academic or is there some other reason,
like what Russ was asking before, why they would choose
to get away from it? Does it just make their
job easier?

Speaker 6 (01:26:47):
That just seems so weird.

Speaker 5 (01:26:49):
I mean, like it reminds me a little bit of
like Herodotus, because historians like love him and also hate
him because they're like, he's writing all this stuff and
adding like dialogue that he couldn't possibly have known, you know,
like the general and this guy have this yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
little chat real quick before saying it, and it's like

(01:27:10):
this pivotal point in the story and they're like, they
he made that up. Yeah, but he's their only source
for anything going on pretty much. He paid you know,
he So it's like they, I see, you see this
struggle with historians dealing with Herodotus where they want to
dismiss so much of what he says, but they they

(01:27:30):
keep referring to him because he's right. He's a prolific writer,
and it's like the only picture that they have of
what's going on. Yeah, what is it possible that this
situation with Arthur is something like that where they're just
like this is just can't be real. So they're getting
rid of it and they're trying to find some other
thing or is.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
It Absolutely So it's much easier in the past to
nail down reasons for why this sort of thing might
be happening. So you could say that one person has
used one part of the Arthururian story and not used
another part because it serves their propaganda. So we can
look at medieval kings like Henry the Second who did
something like that. Henry Tudor as well in fifteen sixteenth

(01:28:14):
century with his son and his son. He called his
son Arthur, and he said his son Arthur would be
the reincarnation.

Speaker 5 (01:28:22):
Of our return, the brain's return.

Speaker 3 (01:28:24):
Right, he flew the Welsh dragon and stuff. Tudor is
a Welsh name. But when it gets to like the sixties,
it's a lot harder to nail down. You can get
your what's the word, like, confirmation bias because the English academics,

(01:28:45):
you know, they can read someone say oh, look it's
all crap, and then you can go and look at
back at Anglo Norman historians who say the same thing
because it served their propaganda to do so. So maybe
there's a bit of confirmation bias that way. But you're
absolutely right, Kyle, that there's there's people who are there
is history that is so flaky. Egypt actually is a

(01:29:07):
really good example. Egyptian history, like even the you know,
we're not talking about ten thousand years ago, just Egyptian history,
the Middle Kingdom or whatever. It's flaky as hell.

Speaker 5 (01:29:17):
It's flaky.

Speaker 3 (01:29:18):
You know, it's based on tatters of papyri and and
propaganda that's written on walls and things like that. It's
it's not scientific at all, but it's well accepted.

Speaker 5 (01:29:32):
Yeah, so Old Kingdom too. I mean it's like there's
almost nothing.

Speaker 3 (01:29:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's you know, you've got like the
Scorpion King and the Old Kingdom. I mean, it's like,
what the hell's going on there? But yeah, it's just
it's just really odd that I don't know. I mean,
I don't want again, I'm not trying to necessarily avoid
politics or anything, but why in the nineteen sixties there

(01:29:58):
may have been some.

Speaker 2 (01:30:02):
I don't know, like a purposeful disconnect. I mean from
a long established.

Speaker 5 (01:30:09):
There is something prehistoric story.

Speaker 3 (01:30:11):
There could be a political element in as much as
after the Second World War there's a lot of national pride,
and there was a big investigation into Arthurian sites Tintagil,
where Arthur was said to be confirmed. Can that's what
I'm looking for. Coronated, No, not born, but before you're

(01:30:36):
born or conceived.

Speaker 5 (01:30:38):
Yeah, where you're said to be conceived also confirmed by nature.

Speaker 6 (01:30:46):
It's like a.

Speaker 3 (01:30:47):
Late medieval castle there, right, And people would say, look
it was it was. They used to say in the
past that it probably doesn't have anything to do with
Arthur because that castle is late. It's got nothing to
do with the period that I was talking about. After
the Second World War did a lot of archaeology there
and they found a massive sixth century establishment, you know,

(01:31:09):
lots of small buildings filled with like the most Mediterranean
pottery they've ever found in one place in Britain from
that period, you know, really nice stuff as well, and
four eye and Byzantine stuff, really good quality things, all
on this little spot which they just thought was a
later medieval site. Cabri Castle was also investigated as a

(01:31:36):
suggestion for Camelot, and again they found a sixth century
hall there, which is pretty amazing. It's not big and
grand and what you'd expect from a description place in Camelot,
but the archaeology is from the right period in the
right place. Yeah, And there was no doubt a reaction

(01:31:57):
to this sort of nationalist endeavor of looking for the
kings of Britain, archaeology moved to be more interested in
normal people and what they do in their lives, and
you know, what they ate and how they lived and

(01:32:17):
things like that. And maybe that ideological swing possibly also
affected how the sources were viewed. But again people still say, oh, yeah,
Ambrosius is historical, but he comes from exactly the same
sources as Arthur. Yeah, so it's a real mess.

Speaker 6 (01:32:39):
Of ignorance job.

Speaker 2 (01:32:40):
Like yeah, like like Kyle was saying, there's there's tons
of that where they they're they're like, we're accepting this
part from this source because it already agrees with what
we already believe, but this other part of this source
is total bullshit, right, And they do that all the time. Yeah,
And often you try to find out, well, why why

(01:33:02):
is this part crap and this part is good?

Speaker 5 (01:33:04):
Because that there's there's no.

Speaker 2 (01:33:06):
I mean that happens obviously, right, there's you can say,
like he has this like Pliny does this too. You know,
he's documenting all this stuff and you're like, yep, this
is and then and then he says that he'll just
state something that's completely ridiculous. Yeah, you know, and he's like, Okay,
that part seems like total crap.

Speaker 5 (01:33:25):
But he's also just recording what he was told. People
think at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:33:30):
Strabo did this, Herodotus is like also risk recounting things
he was told.

Speaker 3 (01:33:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:38):
Yeah, but sometimes it looks extremely arbitrary in terms of
what modern academia has decided is true and has decided
is false.

Speaker 3 (01:33:48):
It's such a such a community of repetition as well.

Speaker 5 (01:33:52):
Right. But I also, like.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
I tried to keep in mind that when something looks
totally arbitrary or like it doesn't make sense, it's because
you don't know their reasons. Somebody had a reason for this,
and just because it looks like it makes no sense
to me, it just means to me that I don't
know their motivations that somewhere in this is some kind
of hidden agenda. It may not be a nefarious one,

(01:34:18):
but there's something that I'm not aware of that has
made them completely discard this part for you know, I mean,
and it may not be academic at all.

Speaker 3 (01:34:26):
Me and Trevor have talked about the idea of things
that you know, like like say crop marks. The study
of crop marks, up to a certain point in time
was a very serious thing done by very serious people
with you know, with a special name and things to study,
and then suddenly it became a silly thing. You know,

(01:34:49):
it was great, It was just totally turned on and
now if you mentioned crop circles, you're immediately seen as
a as an idiot, right, yeah, And it seems to
have had and with Arthur to some degree, there was
a time when people go, look, this is the this
is the serious stuff. This is just records a king
from Britain. Yeah, we can separate it out from the

(01:35:11):
fantastical stuff. And then suddenly it came to a point
where they could no longer do that for some reason.
It was like, what you're talking about King Arthur? King,
Arthur's ridiculous. Do you believe in fairies and goblins and
stuff like that as well?

Speaker 5 (01:35:26):
Yeah? Yes, and the association with other fantastical stuff. Yeah,
and tell us the fairy and goblins the story of Arthur.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
Well, well, actually, do you know what you did a
lot in LP's episode on little people. It's interesting you
mentioned the picts. Yeah, where they used to think the
picts were little people, right, the Picts were just they
were either a Scandinavian influence on Britain's or they were

(01:35:55):
just completely unromanized Britain's one or the other. They're not
really sure you know what it was. But yeah, it's
quite funny that they just thought they were little people
living in living in like gray bounds and firing their
tiny arrows and stuff like that. That's funny. Or we
could talk about giants. I mean, giants is interesting because

(01:36:18):
so when Brutus the Trojan arrived in Britain, the place
was just populated with giants, and they had a Coronaeus
who was his like his chief lieutenant, had to have
a wrestling match with a giant in order to in
order to win the conquest of Britain essentially, and he

(01:36:38):
threw him off the side of a cliff. It's fascinating,
but there's a lot of the problems might come from.
There's a word in Welsh which is maur is perhaps
m a w r. Sometimes it's soft mutates to vour,
but the Welsh word for giant is gower. Right, So
if you have someone, say someone called Hoyle the Great,

(01:37:01):
he'd be called Hoil vouer, but that could be very
easily read as Hoyle Gower, Hoil the.

Speaker 5 (01:37:07):
Giant, oil the giant, right. So yeah, it's like you're saying,
it's somewhat like a whisper game.

Speaker 3 (01:37:16):
Then yeah, it could be. That's what That's one one
thing to say. But so for instance, a Gildas, who's
a worth mentioning because he is basically our one written
sixth century source, but he doesn't mention Arthur, which is
kind of annoying because and people go, well, Gilders didn't
mention Arthur. But Gildess is writing a sermon, right, that's

(01:37:40):
what he's doing. He's writing a piece of propaganda about
how he feels like the British Kings are being Unchristian
and because they're being Unchristian, it means that they are
infighting and falling to the Saxons. Basically, ah, and that's
what the whole the whole piece is about, is basically
him criticizing these five kings there for their un Christian behavior.

(01:38:02):
And yeah, it's polemic, it's it's it's not a piece
of history, but he he uses historical elements to demonstrate
his point. So some people read it as like a
as a straight history, but it's not at all. It's
it serves his it serves his purpose. But he his

(01:38:23):
father's called Cor. And there's a story of Saint Kadok,
who's a very famous saint, very much associated with Arthur
as well, who goes to the north where Kaor lives,
and he digs up these huge bones, right, which are
said to be cause cause bones. But Kor is again

(01:38:44):
one letter off Cower, which is giant.

Speaker 5 (01:38:48):
So but they probably did dig up huge butts. Yeah
I won't.

Speaker 3 (01:38:58):
Yeah, I mean Britain was Covid mammoths at one.

Speaker 5 (01:39:00):
Point, so yeah, exactly, no, no command, bro, that's you
sound like an academic. Now, oh, it's just mammoth, memoth.
I've heard the same thing about my cyclops.

Speaker 3 (01:39:15):
I mean there's definitely been some very big skeletons still
go up here.

Speaker 5 (01:39:18):
So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:39:23):
It was mammoths with one eye. Yeah, exactly, the cyclops clubs, yeah, yeah,
you do get. And also how they held the Neolithic
people built you know, they move massive stones. I mean
it's just amazing. Yeah, mammoths, mammoths, Yeah, that's how you

(01:39:45):
do it. I think they're still recording, like all rock
which are the massive oh like creature. You know there's
one was spotted in the forest in Germany and like
fift or something like that. So you know, lot of
our estimates of when these things died out. I think
it's really skewed sometimes.

Speaker 2 (01:40:04):
Sure, I mean it is an all modern cattle basically
descended from one small group of orus, and they do some.

Speaker 3 (01:40:11):
I won't be surprised, but it gets ridiculous when they're
talking when they're talking about Stonehenge stones, and they showed
people pulling the rock on a sled. Yeah, and why
don't they use a cow?

Speaker 2 (01:40:24):
Yeah, they had beasts of burden but yeah, yeah, they
definitely did.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):
So I don't know, well how do so how do
the grail legends get mixed in with the ar theory
and stuff like?

Speaker 3 (01:40:37):
Okay, So there's two things to talk about. One of
them is a the first native Grail story. It's called
easan Greal or the Welsh Holy Grail. It's known as
it's a very early text and it's very much on
the same line of the as the romantic message romantic

(01:41:00):
texts Night's going Out, having very strange experiences a lot
of cosmic symbolism in there. I was mentioned to Trevor
about also the grail. One description in the well Showy Grail,
the grail sounds like a a ufo. It's like a

(01:41:21):
little ball of light that flies into the the chamber
they're sitting in, and it like flies around the chamber
and then flies out again. It's oh wow, really odd.

Speaker 5 (01:41:31):
But yeah, like a like some ball lightning or something.

Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:41:34):
Yeah, my wife saw but ball lighting when she was
a real teenager. Yeah, she had no idea what it
was at the time. Man, that's amazing. It's really rare.

Speaker 2 (01:41:45):
Yeah, I think somebody was supposed to have just recently
gotten some video of one.

Speaker 3 (01:41:51):
Yeah, I've seen some like AI stuff. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (01:41:54):
Yeah, I can't tell is it real or not it. Yeah,
by the time we get good enough video footage, now
there's AI and we can't tell video right to the
universe is keeping us from discovering Bigfoot on purpose? That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
Pictures and video used to be the holy Grail for
this kind of stuff, and now.

Speaker 5 (01:42:20):
Now it doesn't matter. It looks too real.

Speaker 3 (01:42:22):
Yeah, it's got to be a I. The other things
suggested in the in text, like the Mabinogion as well,
is the is a pre Roman and Celtic idea of
the cauldron, the cauldron that can raise people from the dead.
So it could be a very non Christian route to
the grail. Essentially. It's really fun about that.

Speaker 6 (01:42:47):
Where was the story? Come tell us the story?

Speaker 3 (01:42:49):
So the cauldron of Dawn, So you get one of
the in the British pantheon, there's someone as a goddess
called down She he's got another name as well, escapes
in at the minute. It's the red wine Don. So
there's a really interesting story. We'll talk about it in
terms of tali Essen because tali Essen's fascinating. Tallyasen is

(01:43:13):
a sixth century poet from the time of Arthur. He's
considered historical, and we even have several poems that are
at least attributed to him, even if they aren't necessarily
written by him, they're attributed to him. And there's a
story about tali Essen's creation rather than birth. He was

(01:43:34):
born to don Or he was rescued by Don I
can't remember which one is, and he was the baby
was called Elfin or Elfin right, and Don was brewing
up a cauldron of Arwen, and Arwen is really fascinating.
Arwen in Welsh poetry is the creative force. So you'll

(01:43:56):
see some people describe it as inspiration, but I don't
think inspiration is a full translation for what they're talking about. Yes,
it includes create, you know, cretic creativity, But when they
say the creative force, I think it's something much more
powerful and important than just just poetic inspiration. I think

(01:44:16):
it has a lot more of a deeper significance than that. Anyway,
Elphin just like just like Obelix, do you an Asterix?
And Obelis did you read those cartoons when you're a kid.
They're French cartoons. I'm quite popular here. But Elfin falls
into the cauldron of Arwen, right, oh, the cauldron of

(01:44:38):
Don as well. We can also we can also associate
with a a constellation and the milky Way is the
Arwen flowing out of the of the cauldron of Don. Right.
So anyway, so so Elfin falls in and he comes
out again, and Don's like, ah, if he strangol the potion,

(01:44:58):
he's going to be really powerful and really annoying. Right,
And the baby child that's been considerably changed by this
experience sort of realizes and goes right, I'm off right,
and he charges off at full speed, and the story
goes through several different you know, it depends on which

(01:45:18):
version of the story, but he basically turns into a
hair and then turns into an otter, and then turns
into a salmon, which you know, in his way to
try and escape, and then eventually he gets caught up
in a salmon net and he's a human again, but
he's got all of his knowledge shining out of his face.

(01:45:38):
Basically like it's just so obvious that this guy is,
you know, fully one with everything. And they call him
tali Esen, which means shining brow, which is very interesting
if you're thinking about Western traditions of a third eye
or something like that. Tali Essen's literally described as shining brow.
And then from then on he then comes he's listed

(01:46:02):
as ben Baird, which means chief Bard of Arthur. But
that in a way that gives you a little brief
idea of what the Grail could be in as much
as this this pre Christian idea of a of a
cauldron of creative energy.

Speaker 5 (01:46:22):
How do you spell the word down?

Speaker 3 (01:46:25):
Literally?

Speaker 5 (01:46:26):
D o N What is the meaning of it?

Speaker 3 (01:46:29):
So it's just her name. I mean, I haven't looked
the thing is. There probably isn't a meaning to it, but.

Speaker 2 (01:46:39):
I don't know had I was talking about the sunrise?

Speaker 5 (01:46:43):
Yeah, rebirth, right like the rebirth.

Speaker 3 (01:46:47):
I'm trying to find out what her actual moment.

Speaker 5 (01:46:51):
But it's all good, keep going.

Speaker 6 (01:46:53):
This is great.

Speaker 3 (01:46:54):
So yeah, Owen is really important, uh in terms of
Welsh poetry. But it's really interesting that you get these
really pre Christian ideas start to get incorporated in Welsh
Bardic poetry. Of the medieval era, which is very thoroughly Christian.

(01:47:14):
You have bards doing things where they'll they'll talk about
almost like necromancy. They'll talk about raising the spirits of
dead bards to inhabit them so that they can then
perform like tali us In is one in particular who
gets picked out. I'm going to let talias In possess
me and then perform a poem through me yea. And

(01:47:40):
they would say this in Christian courts in medieval Europe,
I mean, and get away with it like it was
part of the It's amazing. There's also the idea of
the grave. Taliusen's graves comes up, and essentially what the
practice seems to be with bards is that they would,

(01:48:00):
you know, someone would reach the end of their training,
they would have learned, you know, all their master's work,
so they should be able to reel it off without
you know, without reading it. Wales is very much an
oral tradition in their country, which is possibly why we
don't have a lot of written down stuff until later on.
Is because of the reliance on oral tradition. So you

(01:48:25):
get you get your you get your new bard, and
you take them off and you'd get them hopped up
on whatever you've got, right, magic mushrooms, booze probably something
you know, maybe even like you something we'd think of
poisonous today, but which can you know, create dreamlike effects
and things like that. And then what seems to be

(01:48:46):
and you know this isn't interpretation, but what seems to
be done is they'd take them to something like a
so we get these like kissed burials, which is sort
of like a Dolman that's sunk into the ground. So
you've got like a coffin in the ground and then
a massive capstone over the top. And what it seems
like they did was they then took these bards, these initiates,

(01:49:09):
and they put them in and put the capstone on,
and they'd let them have their death and then hate
the capstone up, you know, which is something we see
again and again and again in various cultures of giving
someone a symbolic death and then raising them again. And
I'm sure it's something that people have suggested for like

(01:49:29):
Egyptian boxes and things like that, as well as to
produce you know, mind changing and life changing effects, especially
if you think you're going to die in there. But
you know, once you die, you don't die ever again,
because you're already dead. This is a really important part

(01:49:49):
of a lot of people's mythology. Once you've died, once
you don't, you don't die again, And that seems to
be in this We find it, you know, in the
Middle East, in Egypt, in Greece maybe, and then we
find it in medieval Western Britain. Suddenly just pops up,

(01:50:10):
like where does this come from? It's so weird. It's
such a the Brythonic tradition Wales and Cornwall and Scotland.
It's so complex and so vast, and it stretches back
into prehistory and basically all most people know about it

(01:50:30):
is Arthur.

Speaker 6 (01:50:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:50:32):
It's just full of these, say, all these interconnected threads
which just take us over all of the snaky topics
which you guys discuss all the time. You know, I
sent you a flood myth as well. Recently Russ recorded
in the Triads. So the Welsh flood myth is about

(01:50:54):
a great beast called a fank, which seems to be
like some cat emerges from a lake and the like
lake floods the world. And then a character called Navid
nav Nevion builds a boat for Douvan and Douvach, which
is a male and female character which are then carried
away on the boat and then they get carried to Britain.

(01:51:19):
So yeah, there's there's a there's a flood myth which
is recorded from Christian Wales, but it isn't the Christian
blood myth.

Speaker 5 (01:51:27):
Hmmm, yes, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:51:29):
And when I and when I remember you sent me
this to me and I looked at it and it's
very similar to a Native American one. Yeah, they have
one where basically a.

Speaker 5 (01:51:39):
A kind of cosmic serpent.

Speaker 2 (01:51:46):
Either goes into or comes out of a spirit lake
and causes it to flood the world and it's actually
fleeing from something else.

Speaker 5 (01:51:54):
It's a really strange story.

Speaker 6 (01:51:55):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:51:57):
Yeah, that's fascinating. We get really similar labyrinths, which is
similar to Hopie ones in Britain as well. Ah, I mean,
we could go into King Arthur in America, but it's uh,
he also conquer so it's it's it's not like it's

(01:52:17):
not one of my as. But one thing that John
Dee Are particularly brought into the into the Forefront was
a story about Prince Maddock who sailed from Britain in
the sixth century. According to D's story, it's in the
tenth century and Prince Maddock discovered America. But you do

(01:52:41):
also find a Maddock recording as a son of Uther. Oh,
so therefore a brother or half brother of Arthur. So
it's it's interesting and there's lots of stories, you know,
it's all all wrapped up with all the sort of
Ben Franklin myths as well about trying to discover a

(01:53:03):
Bible in the native peoples in the West. So what
they called Lewis and Clark, Yeah, all the research they
had was from other people who'd been west, and they'd
gone west because they were looking for Welsh speaking Native
Americans and that's where Lewis and Clark got most of

(01:53:25):
their information from.

Speaker 6 (01:53:29):
HM.

Speaker 2 (01:53:31):
Yes, I okay, I have to say with the Loser,
I have not gone down that rabbit hole, but I
know that there's really strange stuff with the.

Speaker 3 (01:53:38):
Loser, loads of strange stuff Lose.

Speaker 2 (01:53:41):
Yeah, I haven't gotten down it, but I know that
there's lots of strange ship.

Speaker 3 (01:53:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:53:48):
Why did the Spanish think, you know, when.

Speaker 5 (01:53:52):
Cortez got there or not the Spanish, but the natives
they when Cortez shut up, They're like, oh yeah, you're
the guy.

Speaker 2 (01:53:58):
Who Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the return.

Speaker 6 (01:54:03):
You're the return.

Speaker 2 (01:54:04):
And then there's you know, the all the expeditions looking
for a fountain of youth in Florida. I mean, you know,
there's just and you know, a fountain of youth is
greyly gray realisque. Yeah, yeah, I think it's It's fascinating
they think they have found Avalon.

Speaker 5 (01:54:22):
You know, this must be where he is.

Speaker 3 (01:54:26):
Looking in Florida if it don't sink again, I mean, so.

Speaker 5 (01:54:30):
What are the so Okay, so we've got the source
possibly of the grail, which is this cauldron thing of rebirth.
What about the sword.

Speaker 6 (01:54:38):
In the lake?

Speaker 3 (01:54:39):
Sword in the lake, I don't know, but Excalibur is
very old and very Welsh. All of Arthur's spear, dagger, shield, sorry, sword, spear, shield, dagger,
and horse are all named in pretty old Welsh literature.
Excalibur is called Caliburn by Jeffrey of Monmouth, and in

(01:55:03):
Wealsh it's something like kaled fault or something like that.
The best my preferred translation is something like hard cleft.
And again, talking about swords again seems to be implying
that it would cleft holes in other people's swords. That
seems to be the thing. A greater deal is actually
made of Arthur's spear, and really, if he's fighting on

(01:55:26):
a horse, he probably would have been fighting with the
spear a bit more. How that then, I don't know
how the Lady of the Lake comes about.

Speaker 6 (01:55:34):
But.

Speaker 3 (01:55:36):
Things like water spirits and stuff like that are very
important in Brythonic tradition and religious sites here are pretty
much always accompanied by springs, wells or something some other
water fresh water source.

Speaker 2 (01:55:53):
Essentially, there's also the thing with the sword and the stone,
which is not it's like a different sword, right does
not except well.

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):
I mean if you again, if you look at those
the earliest references that those things that maybe the difference
isn't so cut and dry between the two. But people
do like to separate out Excalibur and the sword and
the stone, that they do do that. But the sword
of the Stone doesn't feature in Jeffrey. That comes later.
So there is another thing about the Lady in the Lake,

(01:56:22):
sorry sorry, Cryle, and that is that in Britain, and
actually in a lot of places in Europe, but in
Britain we see this loads that from the Bronze Age onwards,
people would cast weapons into marshes, bogs, lakes as a

(01:56:42):
as a some sort of and they did that for
a long time in Britain. It happened for a long time.
So maybe not getting a sword back, but throwing a
sword to the lake, that is, that could be talking
about a very old tradition which has.

Speaker 5 (01:56:57):
Then been so then the lady of the lake would
be basicallying Arthur a very old and a relic, a
very ancient piece of technology that was better than everything
at the time.

Speaker 3 (01:57:07):
But they might have also been still doing that practice
of casting swords in the sixth century. There's definitely been
even later medieval swords found in deposits like in marshlands
and things like that and other parts of Britain.

Speaker 5 (01:57:24):
So you know, I always get really mad when I
see those stories of like kid in River ancient, perfectly
preserved and.

Speaker 3 (01:57:32):
Like I know, right, and the sword in the stone.
So bronze swords were cast, they weren't hammered, mm hmm.
So they would literally create a wooden or soft stone
mold and then pour the metal in and then so

(01:57:57):
one suggestion, one theory, one hypothesis is that the Sword
in the Stone story is recording the idea about when
people who could metal work with with thought of His
powerful and important people, right, and they almost drawing the
sword from the stone, drawing the metal out of the

(01:58:17):
aar for starters, and then casting a sword in the stone.

Speaker 2 (01:58:23):
Yeah, I had, I had, I think way earlier in
the podcast, I talked about this concept because so, you know,
Randall's some of Randall's interpretation of yeah that the you know,
the grail may be a crater yep. And it's like
it's it's symbolizing a rebirth because possibly a chunk of

(01:58:44):
a comet that comes down causes massive devastation.

Speaker 5 (01:58:47):
Uh you know.

Speaker 2 (01:58:49):
Like the whole turns the land and turn into a wasteland.
But also it contains within it the seeds of rebirth.

Speaker 3 (01:58:55):
Yes, yeah, Well.

Speaker 2 (01:58:59):
There's also this interesting thing about you know, like, so
you have Merlin in the Magic and then you have
this this the Sword in the lake, and if the
lake is a cauldron.

Speaker 3 (01:59:10):
Yeah crt. Yeah, so the.

Speaker 5 (01:59:11):
Lake itself is a crater full of water.

Speaker 2 (01:59:14):
So down in the lake is a stone containing space steel,
you know, and Merlin knows like, okay, here's the lake.
I know, because of the shape of this lake, that
it's cosmic. If we can find a stone in here,
I know how to get metal out of this that
will make a sword that will defeat any other. And
then they draw the sword from the stone, which is

(01:59:36):
the whole lake. You're smelting the steel out of the Anyway,
it's a complicated idea, but like these these metaphors being
mixed is really interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:59:45):
But then also that lake, the the the crater is
could is the grail?

Speaker 3 (01:59:50):
Right? Is that what you're saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
a little of crates is now off. Yeah, I mean
what I think is interesting about So there's a lot
of should we say, mainstream support for this idea of
Bronze Age sword casting possibly being the origin of this
sword of the Stone story. I don't necessarily have a
problem with that. What I have a problem with is

(02:00:12):
the idea that these medieval historians could not accurately record
something that happened six hundred years before them, but they
could accurately record something that happened two thousand years before them. Right.

Speaker 6 (02:00:30):
Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 (02:00:31):
And I think there's a bit of dissonance. And as
I say, I don't I don't mind them being able
to do both. But oh no, they didn't know anything
about early medieval Britain, but they have recorded genuine tradition
from the Bronze Age.

Speaker 5 (02:00:44):
Like what, yeah, what there's a and would they go
on I mean maybe this is I don't know, but
but would they not be a little bit more upfront
about or just detail about the smelting process or the
process of making swords. Why would they make it so poetic?

Speaker 3 (02:01:09):
I mean it could have been like that. But also
if there was some secret to metallurgy, you know, it's
just something that was passed down father to son and
not something that was generally known about. You know that
that but.

Speaker 5 (02:01:28):
Like every able bodied male needed one. Yeah yeah, and
it was like a well kept secret that like nobody
could figure out, Like I don't know about that.

Speaker 3 (02:01:37):
Yeah maybe yeah, yeah, I mean you know that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:40):
That the actual the actual art of making it was
a well kept secret. But yes, they made a bunch
I think if you're if that's what you're saying, yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:01:49):
I'm trying to say that like a lot of people
had to make swords for like everybody to have one.
Oh yeah, yeah, well a secret Tori Hanzo one guy.

Speaker 3 (02:02:00):
The only thing that draw like a similarity to and
they don't need as many of them, is like when
they used to cast bells for churches. This would be
something that would be passed down father to son, and
if a son died and hand passed it on, then
you'd have to go looking somewhere else to find someone
who could cast bells because it was such a complicated

(02:02:23):
and it was a secret process, you know. So, but
you don't need as many church bells as you need sorts,
I'll give you that.

Speaker 2 (02:02:34):
And that's also why I mean we you know, many
of the smelting techniques are preserved today, but there's plenty
that we don't know.

Speaker 5 (02:02:44):
What I mean, there's metals that are named.

Speaker 2 (02:02:46):
That no one knows, yeah, absolutely what they were made of.
The old Damascus steel, we know it existed. We don't
know how they made it, but we know it was
coveted by people during that period because it was so strong.

Speaker 3 (02:02:59):
You know, they'd say about the Isle of Avalon that
it was a place known for casting really good weapons,
which is kind of interesting because you get some really
good iron in Britain as well, really good quality iron
and coal as well. The Romans didn't use coal until
they came to Britain.

Speaker 5 (02:03:18):
So I guess what I'm asking is more particularly about
this point about the drawing the sword from the stone.
Are there any of these older sources that talk about
the casting of weapons, like anybody talk about it clearly
or plainly? No? No, okay, so it is it was.

(02:03:39):
I mean that supports your the the idea that it
was a well kept secret if it's not talked about
by anybody.

Speaker 3 (02:03:44):
Yeah. And also it's kind of like the you know,
when you go back to a certain time, people are
only really really interested in recording the deeds of the
big wigs, you know, unless you have just like one
really good historian. All you have, you know that like paperwork,
you know, like that we have from say Babylon and stuff.

(02:04:05):
We've also got you know, we've got all these letters
between merchants and things like that. That's great that that, yeah,
your cos exactly, But you know, we don't really have
that for the other period. For a lot of periods
in a lot of places, we only have this king
did that, and this king did that, you know, or
this this bishop did that or you know, we don't

(02:04:28):
have the day to day activities as such.

Speaker 5 (02:04:31):
So what do you think the significance of the focus
on the sword in the sort of in this part
of the tale is why why would somebody even bring
this up?

Speaker 3 (02:04:42):
Well, I mean, if you're Sigmund Freud, you'd say it
was because it was a cigar, you know, and they
like smoking cigars.

Speaker 5 (02:05:00):
I love swords too, Like a legendary powerful sword is
always a great topic. It's like, yes, I'll.

Speaker 3 (02:05:07):
Tell you about another sword. Can we move away from Excalibur? Yeah.
In the in the British versions of Caesar's invasion, he's
wielding a sword that they call yellow Death or Mare's Crockier, right,
And the historian I think it's Jeffrey says they called

(02:05:28):
it that because whoever it touched it killed, because the
yellow Death was a name they used for plagues and
things like that. He Caesar's fighting and then suddenly his
his like retinue gets sort of separated from him, and
Caesar comes into single combat with a British prince called Nenius,

(02:05:50):
and Caesar's sword gets stuck in Nenius's shield, right, but
only after Nenius has received a pretty horrible blow to
the head as well. But then Nennis takes Caesar's sword
out of a shield and then kills off a load
of Caesar's retinue doesn't manage to get to Caesar, but
he's got his sword right, And this sword then gets

(02:06:14):
secreted away, and then there's a few records throughout history
of it being brought out at certain events where they'd
be like, oh, yeah, and then we got this sword
out because we were having a big feast and it
was like, yeah, let's celebrate the fact that we've got
Caesars sword. But it's interested this word krokier, they call
it Moore's krokier. Krokia doesn't really mean yellow. It means

(02:06:34):
it means off the crocus, so it means saffron colored,
which is like a ready gold color. So, in my opinion,
I think Mao's krokier was a bronze sword, not an
iron sword, which is interesting because even there's records of
this I think in Horossis actually so it could be
a load of shite, But the suggestion is that a

(02:06:59):
lot of important people would continue using bronze swords for
quite a long time because you're less likely to get
an infection from a sword from a from a wound
from a bronze sword, iron sword, you'd get a horrible
infection in your wound, but for some reason, with the
bronze ones you wouldn't. So I like the idea that
Caesar had a bronze sword. So this is kind of interesting.

(02:07:22):
When you then come into the all the.

Speaker 5 (02:07:24):
Well copper is copper is an anti fungal. Yeah, yeah, excellent.

Speaker 3 (02:07:31):
So you then come forward several thousand years and you
come to the city of London, which is Britain's most
powerful and I don't know how to put it. It's
the banking establishment, it's the merchant establishment, the square mile

(02:07:53):
inside the Roman medieval.

Speaker 6 (02:07:55):
Of antibacterial and anti fungal.

Speaker 3 (02:07:57):
Oh, fantastic, yeah, double, it's interesting. Wow, the City of London.
If you want to find stuff from the matter of Britain,
if you go into the City of London, that's where
you'll find it. Loads of interesting things. The giants Gog
and Magog represented as two great statues in the Guildhall.

(02:08:19):
The other thing is what I'm getting at, is the
badge of the City of London. It's like a shield
with classics Saint George's crossing it in the top left
hand corner there's a red sword and I think this
is representing Caesar's sword.

Speaker 5 (02:08:34):
Do you think it's caesar sword?

Speaker 3 (02:08:35):
Yeah? Wow, but they're not that anyone will ever talk
about it or.

Speaker 5 (02:08:41):
Right, Yeah, that's all that stuff is sub rosa.

Speaker 3 (02:08:44):
Right, Yeah, it is interesting. Say this stuff just bubbles
under the surfaces. It's everywhere. Really, you just don't you
just kind of don't know it.

Speaker 5 (02:08:57):
We may lose power. Just got a yeah, oh you've
got some role.

Speaker 2 (02:09:01):
We have a thunderstorm here and it's where our lights
are flickering.

Speaker 3 (02:09:06):
Well, what happens just in case we lose it?

Speaker 6 (02:09:08):
It's been a great show.

Speaker 3 (02:09:09):
Yeah, I mean we should we wrap up on something,
or we can wrap up.

Speaker 2 (02:09:16):
I had other questions about like the Stone of Tara
and this other stuff, like do they connect?

Speaker 5 (02:09:23):
Is this part of all this stuff? But yeah, I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:09:26):
I mean I think we can. It's it's it, I mean,
just as a brief one. It's really interesting stuff like
that to lump in as the myth offs of Britain
and Ireland, right, which is generally completely dismissed US fiction
straight out of hand by most academics today. And I
think it's worth a second look, I think it's worth

(02:09:48):
a deeper investigation, especially with the technology which is now
available to us today, not just the technology of being
able to test the stone or whatever, but also you know,
having all these resource is right here in front of
us on a computer screen, you know. Yeah, you know
historians in the past can't cann't just double check that
quickly and go and you can do that sort of thing.

(02:10:09):
We can check it against the geography, we can check
it against place names, we can you know, the Internet
is an amazing tool like that, and like my own
personal I mean, we've barely touched on my my own
our theory and investigations. But I couldn't have been able
to do what I feel like I've done, if what
I've done is worthwhile without the Internet, essentially, Yeah, and

(02:10:32):
I don't think I would have discovered the things I
feel like I've discovered without without having those tools available
to me. And that's what we have now, which not
even people fifty years ago had or even twenty years
ago had.

Speaker 5 (02:10:44):
Yeah, all right, yeah, I can.

Speaker 2 (02:10:47):
I can hear the storm coming, so we should wrap
it up.

Speaker 5 (02:10:50):
So, okay, we're gonna have part two. No, clearly, because
we didn't even we didn't.

Speaker 2 (02:10:54):
Even get into your ar theory and your own they
I want to hear it.

Speaker 5 (02:11:04):
Thank you so much, man, it's been great.

Speaker 3 (02:11:06):
It's all right, my pleasure.

Speaker 5 (02:11:07):
Now you've laid the groundwork to do the actual show.

Speaker 3 (02:11:09):
Hopefully I can just confused the shit out of everyone.
That's what I feel. I feel.

Speaker 5 (02:11:15):
I feel educated on the topic, definitely, more.

Speaker 3 (02:11:20):
Like I don't like going in and saying like, I
think Arthur is this guy, and I think it because
of this, this and this and this, because one that's
not my thing. I actually ascribe to other people's theories.
But the other thing is that that's just not a
good way to go about it. I want you to
I'd rather you came out of it knowing a bit
more about the sources, knowing a bit more about the context,
knowing a bit more about the archaeology, than just going, hey,

(02:11:43):
I think Arthur's this guy, because that would just you
just didn't you wouldn't know what to do with that, Like.

Speaker 6 (02:11:48):
You know, that's cool.

Speaker 5 (02:11:49):
Yeah, I appreciate the context. Yes, yeah, the fane and
the sources were great.

Speaker 3 (02:11:54):
Cool, all right, nice, And we'll look at some Timmung
them as well.

Speaker 5 (02:11:57):
At some point yeah, we'll look at tim oh.

Speaker 2 (02:12:00):
Yeah, and the patrons will get a little Yeah, the
patrons have a pre show discussion.

Speaker 5 (02:12:06):
Which I'll proast, which we'll get some little little teasers
on the bronze age stuff.

Speaker 6 (02:12:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:12:10):
Yeah, it's nice, cool man.

Speaker 6 (02:12:13):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (02:12:14):
Yeah, cheers, good harvest.

Speaker 6 (02:12:17):
Cheers.

Speaker 5 (02:12:17):
Yeah, good night, get back to work. We appreciate all
of you guys listening and supporting the show. Thank you
so much.

Speaker 3 (02:12:25):
We're out of here before.

Speaker 5 (02:12:27):
We lose power.

Speaker 1 (02:12:42):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. I'm just listening to
the Fringe Radio Network while I clean these chimneys with
my cast livers. Anyway, So Chad White, the Fringe chowboy,
I mean he's it's like he took a leave of
absence or whatever, and so the guys asked me to

(02:13:05):
do the network ID. So you're listening to the Fringe
Radio Network. I know I was gonna say it, Fringe
radionetwork dot com what oh jat Oh yeah, do you
have the app. It's the best way to listen to

(02:13:25):
the Fringe Radio Network. I mean it's so great. I
mean it's clean and simple and you have all the shows,
all the episodes and you have the live chat and
it's it's safe, and it won't hurt your phone, and
it sounds beautiful, and it won't track you or trace you,

(02:13:45):
and you don't have to log in to use it.
How do you get it fringeradionetwork dot com right at
the top of the page. So anyway, so we're just
gonna go back to cleaning these chimneys and listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. And so I guess you know,
I mean, I guess we're listening together. So I mean,

(02:14:06):
I know, I mean well, I mean, I guess you
might be listening to a different episode or whatever, or
or maybe maybe you're listening maybe you're listening to it,
like at a different time than we are. But I mean, well,
I mean, if you accidentally just downloaded this, no, I
guess you'd be Okay, I'm rambling. Okay, Okay, you're listening

(02:14:30):
to the Fringe Radio Network fringeradionetwork dot com. There are
you happy? Okay, let's clean these chimneys.

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The Quest for King Arthur with Peter Chesbrough - Snake Brothers

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Quest for King Arthur with Peter Chesbrough - Snake Brothers