Crusader Gold: King Arthur and the Holy Isle of Iona
La
Mort d’Arthur,
painted in 1860 by James Archer, a Scottish follower of the
pre-Raphaelites. Here we see the King in his final moments, attended by
three queens with the ‘Lady of the Lake’ at his feet, and the ship
waiting offshore to take him to Avalon. When this painting – now in the
Manchester Art Gallery in England – was first displayed, a critic
complained that the angel beside the tree to the right was ‘too much
like the clever effect by which a ghost is seen in a stereoscope.’ She
holds the Holy Grail, the
Sangreal, a central part of the Arthur legend. But did the story of the
Grail conceal an extraordinary truth, about another, more opulent treasure
that accompanied a different king, a real king from history, on his final
voyage?
In my novel Crusader
Gold, Jack is on the holy isle of Iona and looks out across
the Atlantic, towards the western horizon. He has a sudden revelation, and
remembers a poem that has beguiled him since childhood – Tennyson’s Mort
d’Arthur. The king lies gravely wounded after his last battle, and
contemplates the voyage ahead:
‘But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst – if indeed I go –
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’
So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.
This famous poem with its beautiful imagery was
published in 1842, and was reworked into Idylls
of the King in 1869. The huge interest in King Arthur by the
Victorians owed much to the republication of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century romance, Le Mort d’Arthur,
which inspired writers from Tennyson to Sir Walter Scott as well as the
pre-Raphaelite painters and their followers. Much in the Victorian version
was fanciful, but the essential elements were taken from Malory, who in
turn derived them from the creator of Arthur as a romantic hero, the 12th century monk and historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. One of these elements,
the return of Arthur’s sword Excalibur, was surely in Jack’s mind as
he stood at the stern of the ship later in my novel, weighing the great
war axe in his hands:
Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutched the sword,
And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.
And lightly went the other to the King.
This photograph of the Abbey on the isle of Iona off western Scotland was taken by my father when he stayed there in 1990. When I went fifteen years later with my daughter it was wreathed in sea mist and swirling rain, not so good for photography but powerfully atmospheric. My father was standing on the rocky knoll of Tòrr an Aba, where St Columba was believed to have had his writing hut. The hole in the ground is the socket for a stone cross, and in front of the Abbey you can see St Martin’s Cross, the greatest of the 9th century crosses that marked the pilgrim route to the shrine of the saint. Leading away from the Abbey past the cross is Sràid nam Marbh, the ‘street of the dead’, where kings were brought for burial; in my novel, Father O’Connor takes the others from here across the island to Camus Cùl an t-Saimh, ‘bay at the back of the ocean’, where Jack remembers his Tennyson. When my daughter and I walked on Sràid nam Marbh that day, the mist snaked through the high crosses like the writhing serpents that decorated them, and for a moment the Christianity that so infuses this place seeming a veneer, the grave slabs of kings only one step from the barrows and ship burials of their forefathers. Iona had been sacked by Vikings in the late 8th and 9th centuries, but then they came to settle, and their kings – the ‘Lords of the Isles’ – were buried in this place. Where better for a grievously wounded Norse king to seek sanctuary, to find succor and prepare for his last great sea voyage to the west?
Excerpts from Morte
d’Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), reproduced in The
Oxford Anthology of English Poetry, Vol II, Blake to Heaney (edited by
John Wain, Oxford University Press, 1990).