King Arthur for the day

Time has an article by Amanda Ruggeri about the supposed birthplace of King Arthur:

Myth holds that Cornwall’s Tintagel Castle (photo) was the birthplace of King Arthur. He may be a legend but, it turns out that, in the Dark Ages the island may, in fact, have been a power center. 

For sheer romance, few castles can compete with Britain’s Tintagel, located on the west coast of Cornwall. When the castle was built in the thirteenth century, the headland, as you approach from the south via the South West Coast Path, had a more substantial natural bridge to the mainland. But over time, more of the narrow, rocky isthmus has collapsed into the sea. Today, it can only be safely accessed by bridge; from afar, it looks like a wild, abandoned island.
But it wasn’t always this way. In the fifth or sixth centuries, it seems this island may have been one of Britain’s centers of power, a hypothesis that archaeological excavations this summer will test. “It’s probably the most important site of that period in western Britain. Really, what’s going on there is quite different than in the rest of the country,” said Susan Greaney, the head properties historian at English Heritage, who works closely with Tintagel. Of course, most visitors aren’t drawn here by Tintagel’s striking views or by its early history. They come in search of King Arthur.
Myth has it that Tintagel is where King Arthur was conceived, if not born. Local features in the landscape reflect those legends: the sandy beach, for example, has been named Merlin’s Cove. This tiny, rugged headland has become one of the most visited sites in Cornwall, pulling in nearly two hundred thousand visitors per year. “You’ve got that combination of the mythical-historical kings of Britain, plus the dramatic scenery. That’s a heady mix for anyone with a romantic bent,” said Inga Bryden, the University of Winchester cultural history professor and author of the book Reinventing King Arthur. Tintagel’s Arthurian associations go back to the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who described the headland as the site of King Arthur’s conception in his 1138 work The History of the Kings of Britain. Despite the academic-sounding title, Geoffrey’s work was highly fictionalized and today is considered more myth than historic chronology. But, at the time, King Arthur was thought to be a real-life ancestor of the kings, and the book sparked major interest both in the legends and in Tintagel.
In the 1230s, Richard, the Earl of Cornwall and brother of King Henry III, built a castle here that would be enlarged and repaired by Prince Edward a hundred years later. Richard picked the spot more to burnish his image, than for purposes of military strategy. “It seems like he was building the castle there, in particular, because it was traditionally the seat of Cornish kings, or the seat of Cornish power,” said Greaney. “So he’s making a statement about him coming in and being in charge of the Cornish, which were notoriously rebellious and not very well controlled by the Crown at that time.” But that’s not to say the castle wasn’t fully functional. The projection from the building on the right was a latrine that, conveniently, opened up right over the cliff. At the time, the story of Tristan and Isolde was just as well-known as that of King Arthur. And the first written accounts of the tale, which date to the twelfth century, place the entire romance on the island of Tintagel. Some of the odder features built on the estate, including the tunnel, could be explained if Richard had been inspired by the romantic legend. (Historians can pinpoint no practical reason for Tintagel’s tunnel, which was natural but deliberately enlarged by chiseling, except that when the fictional lovers escape into the wilderness together, they sleep in a tunnel-like cave). “It’s like he’s building a literary landscape there, reflecting the stories,” Greaney said. Since Richard also had a Cornish mistress, this could have been where he escaped to with her, a romantic gesture indeed, given the tale’s popularity at the time.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with travel becoming easier and Victorian fascination with chivalry and medievalism on the rise, visitors began to flock to Tintagel . These visitors included Romantic poets and painters like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who used the setting in his Idylls of the King, published as a serial from 1859 to 1885. The continued tide of visitors is part of the reason why English Heritage, which manages the site, has unveiled several developments in recent months. One of these new developments is a bridge that will replace the one seen here. In Richard’s time, the isthmus, which you would have been able to walk across in the fifth and sixth centuries, was already so eroded that the castle had a drawbridge going across it. The present bridge was built far lower down the slopes in the 1970s, meaning steep stairs are necessary to access it.
Designed to be sleek and unobtrusive, the new bridge, due to be completed in 2019, will make the island more accessible. “A lot of people can’t get across that chasm, particularly older people. There are a lot of local people, for example, who have never visited, because they just can’t make it up those steps,” said Win Scutt, the English Heritage property curator for the west. “It also will unite the mainland ward with the island ward; they used to be connected, back in the medieval period.”
One of the controversial changes has been this bronze of a Cornish chieftain on Tintagel Island by local artist Rubin Eynon. Standing three meters tall and seeming to guard the island, the sculpture is called Galos, meaning “power’’ in Cornish but, even if he’s not officially identified as King Arthur, the parallel to visitors is clear.
That question of how much King Arthur should be emphasized at Tintagel speaks to the heart of the Disneyfication controversy. After all, it remains unclear whether he was really a historical figure at all. Mentions of a military leader in Britain named Arthur first appear in a Welsh poem composed around 600. But these mentions are fragmentary, and to make it more confusing, they don’t refer to Arthur as a prince. Several academics have argued that the historical Arthur, if he existed, may actually have been a general in the Roman army.
In other words, as David Matthews writes in his book Medievalism: A Critical History, “it seems safe to say that Arthur was not conceived at Tintagel, not born there, did not die there and, in any case, did not rule a united Britain. As the ruins of a castle that has nothing to do with Arthur crumble away, it becomes more evident that Tintagel is a site where nothing happened and there is almost nothing to see.” Those facts, though, seem powerless against the legend’s romantic sway.
Even if it was not the home of King Arthur, Tintagel seems to have had outsized importance in the Arthurian era, the so-called Dark Ages of the fifth to seventh centuries (also known as the Early Medieval Period, after the Romans left, but before clear written records were kept). The structures on the top of the island may not look like much, but this is one of the places where excavations in the 1930s turned up several thousand pottery fragments dating from the fifth to seventh centuries, including oil amphorae from Tunisia, glass from Bordeaux, and wine jars from Turkey. No other site from the period in north-western Europe had as much imported pottery as Tintagel.
“We do get exotic pottery from the Mediterranean turning up at other sites. But Tintagel has vast quantities,” Scutt said. “It has to be explained as a center of power of some sort. But why? Why are ships making their way here? Is it something to do with trading metals; the tin trade for example? Or other metals? Is it agricultural?”
One hypothesis has been that this was the site of a fortress of the chiefs of Dumnonia, a Celtic kingdom that encompassed Cornwall, Devon, and some of Dorset and Somerset, but which collapsed in the early eighth century. That’s at the same time, it’s thought, that Tintagel, too, was abandoned. This is when the pottery fragments and other types of archaeological evidence peter out.
The finds mean that the hundred or so structures themselves, like the rectangular, grass-covered ruins on the southern slopes of the island, may also date from the same period. But without being able to apply techniques like radio carbon dating in the 1930s digs, no one has been able to say that with certainty. Another theory has been that they were constructed for the castle’s builders in the thirteenthe century instead.
Now, we may get closer to finding out: Scutt and other archaeologists with the Cornwall Archaeological Unit are starting an excavation on the island in July of 2016. One of the two sites will focus on the spot shown here. “This will be the first scientific study of those enigmatic structures ever, really. It’s the first excavation in over twenty years, and the first really big excavation since the 1930s,” Scutt said. “I’m not sure if we can answer the big why, but we’ll get closer.”

Rico says it, like the King himself, is mythical, but there are a lot of nice photos there...