Avalon

← Encyclopedia

A sword was forged there, and a king was carried there to be healed; everything else about the place is consequence. When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae about 1136 he gave Arthur’s blade a birthplace and gave Arthur a destination, and named both with one Latin word. Caliburnus — the sword later English would call Excalibur — was beaten out in insula Avallonis, in the Isle of Avalon. And at the last, mortally wounded at the river Camlann where his nephew Mordred fell against him, Arthur is borne off to that same island so his wounds might be tended. Geoffrey does not say he died there. The omission is the whole legend in miniature: a place where a sword is made and a wound is taken to be cured, withholding the one thing every other king’s story supplies — a grave.

A word that means apples

Avalon is built from a root that grew on the ground. The name descends from the British and Welsh word for apple — Old Welsh aball, Middle Welsh afall, beside the Gaulish element aballo- that survives in the place-name Avallon in Burgundy, all from the same Proto-Indo-European stem that gives English its own apple. When Geoffrey returned to the island in his later poem he translated the name outright and called it Insula Pomorum, the Isle of Apples, as if glossing the etymology for readers who had missed it. The apple is not decoration. In the older Celtic imagination the apple is the Otherworld’s fruit: an orchard out at sea, beyond the reach of death and season, where the fortunate go and do not age. The Irish told of Emain Ablach, the apple-bearing stronghold of the sea-god Manannán mac Lir; Welsh tradition kept a figure called Afallach, a son of the underworld whose name is the apple again, and whom one Welsh tale makes a king of Annwn, the British Otherworld. Geoffrey did not invent the island so much as find a Latin name for a country his sources already half-remembered — the blessed isle of the western sea, drawn up out of older Celtic matter and fitted to a king.

The Isle of Apples and its nine queens

It is the second telling, not the first, that gives Avalon its furniture. Around 1150 Geoffrey wrote the Vita Merlini, a Latin hexameter poem in which the bard Taliesin describes the island to the wild prophet Merlin, and the passing mention of the Historia opens into a whole geography. The Isle of Apples, Taliesin says, men also call the Fortunate Isle, and it earns the name: it produces all things of itself, the fields needing no plow, grain and grapes coming unbidden, apple trees rising from the close-clipped grass, and people living there a hundred years and more. Nine sisters rule it under a gentle law. The first of them surpasses the others in healing and in beauty; her name is Morgen, and she knows the property of every herb that can mend a sick body. She can change her shape and fly on new wings through the air like Daedalus; she has taught mathematics to her sisters — Moronoe, Mazoe, Gliten, Glitonea, Gliton, Tyronoe, and the two named Thiten, the elder a master of the cithara. To this island, Taliesin recounts, they brought Arthur after the battle: Barinthus, to whom the seas and the stars of heaven were known, steered the ship, and Morgen received the prince with honor, laid him on a golden bed, uncovered the wound with her own hand, and said at last that health could return to him if only he stayed with her a long while and submitted to her healing. There the poem leaves him — not dead, not cured, but in the keeping of the enchantress and her sisters, somewhere off the edge of the known sea.

Morgen is not yet the malign sorceress later romance would make of Morgan le Fay; here she is a healer and a benign queen, closer to a goddess of the Otherworld than to a villain, and the nine sisters are kin to the priestly colleges of women that classical writers placed on islands off the Gaulish coast — and to the fays and unseen neighbors of insular fairy lore, the people of the hollow hills who steal the living away to a country where time runs differently. The whole apparatus — the self-yielding land, the company of fays, the herb-wise queen, the wounded man laid on the golden bed — is the architecture of the Celtic immram, the voyage to the blessed island, given a king to receive and a Latinist to record it.

The king who is not dead

Geoffrey’s reticence about Arthur’s death was load-bearing, because it left room for a hope the Britons had carried for centuries: that their king had not died but withdrawn, and would come again. The expectation was old and stubborn. The clerical world found it an irritant — a Norman cleric writing about 1125 complains that the Bretons will brawl with anyone who tells them Arthur is dead, so fierce is their faith that he lives and will return. Geoffrey’s Avalon gave that conviction a destination: an island of healing from which a healed king might one day sail back. By the time the legend was fixed for English readers in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur of 1485, the hope had hardened into an epitaph. Malory reports that some men say there is written upon Arthur’s tomb the line Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus — here lies Arthur, the once and future king — and the contradiction is deliberate: a grave that announces the man in it will rise. The motif outran Arthur. The returning hero who sleeps in a hidden place against his nation’s hour belongs to a whole family of folklore — the king in the mountain, the warrior under the hill — but in Britain it fastened to Arthur and to Avalon, and the two became inseparable. The island is not merely where Arthur went; it is the reason he can come back.

Avaron, and the cup carried west

Avalon entered the orbit of the Grail through a single poet. Around the year 1200 the Burgundian Robert de Boron, in his verse Joseph of Arimathea, sent the keepers of the holy vessel westward to a region he called the vaus d’Avaron — the valleys of Avaron — a name later copyists and continuators slid toward Avalon. The Grail thus arrives in the same western country to which Geoffrey had sent Arthur, and the two legends, distinct in origin, are stitched together by geography and a near-homophone. From Robert’s Avaron it was a short step to a real place. The valleys of the west became one valley in particular; the apple-island became a hill above the Somerset marshes; and the Otherworld isle acquired a postal address.

The grave in the abbey

That address was Glastonbury. The fusion of the imagined island with the Somerset abbey is one of the cleanest cases on record of a legend grafted onto ground, and it can be dated. In 1191 the monks of Glastonbury, their church burned in the great fire of 1184 and their rebuilding hungry for pilgrims, dug between two ancient cross-shafts in their cemetery and announced that they had found King Arthur and Guinevere. Gerald of Wales examined the find about 1193 and set it down: a hollowed oak deep in the earth, bones of giant size, a leaden cross inscribed — in the words Gerald records — to the effect that here lay buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon, in insula Avallonia. With that cross the floating island was nailed to a real hill. Glastonbury Tor stands up out of moors that flood back to water each wet winter, an island in all but name, and the British called the near-island Ynys Witrin, the isle of glass; the identification of glass-isle with apple-isle did the rest. The discovery served everyone at once — the abbey wanted silver, and the Plantagenet kings wanted the once-and-future hope of the conquered Welsh certifiably dead and lying in English keeping. The find is a medieval claim, made by interested parties at a useful moment, and the scholarship of Antonia Gransden has anatomized how the twelfth-century house assembled its traditions; one thing is certain regardless, that after 1191 Avalon had a map reference, and the legend and the place have not since come apart. The physical site — the Tor, the abbey ruins, the red-running Chalice Well, the grave between the pyramids and its later excavations — belongs with Glastonbury; what belongs to Avalon is the prior thing, the island the grave was dug to claim.

The isle of the heart

The modern esoteric reception of Avalon is the story of that claim made inward — the move from an island on the map to an island of the soul, anchored at the same Somerset hill. Its strangest chapter was archaeological. Frederick Bligh Bond, the ecclesiastical architect who directed the abbey excavations from 1908, disclosed in The Gate of Remembrance (1918) that his trenches had been guided by automatic writing — scripts taken with a collaborator and attributed to a fellowship of the abbey’s long-dead monks, the Company of Avalon, who directed the spade. That a respected antiquary should treat the dead of Avalon as living informants, and dig where they told him, made the island a meeting-place of psychical research and medieval ground; the disclosure cost Bond the excavation. The most influential restatement came from the occultist Dion Fortune, who built one pole of her magical Britain on the same earth. Her Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart (1934) reads the place along three converging approaches — its legend, its documented history, and its mystical path — and names the hill the holiest soil in England, an inner Avalon reachable by the contemplative as the medieval Avalon was reachable only by ship. Around her the broader currents of the occult revival found the island congenial: the Theosophical imagination of Helena Blavatsky had taught a generation to read landscapes as repositories of vanished wisdom; the Druid revival claimed Glastonbury as a center of native British mystery; William Blake, a century earlier, had already set Jerusalem’s foundations among England’s hills and given the country a visionary geography for these later readers to inherit; and figures across the magical world, Aleister Crowley among the names of the age, moved through the same revival that made the apple-island a working symbol again. Avalon, in this reception, is not a destination but a state — a healing country entered by the imagination rather than the keel.

Kindred geographies

Avalon belongs to a wider family of countries that exist on no chart and yet exert a steady pull on those who map them. The blessed isle of the western sea is a cousin to the lost continents and hidden kingdoms that the same esoteric centuries elaborated — Atlantis sunk beneath the Atlantic, Lemuria under the Indian Ocean, the northern paradise of Hyperborea, the Tibetan hidden kingdom of Shambhala, the subterranean realm of Agartha. The kinship is one of imaginative function, not of kind, and the difference is worth holding. Those are continents and underworlds, asserted as physical places drowned or buried or concealed; Avalon makes no such claim. It is an Otherworld isle of romance, a literary country with a known author and a datable first appearance, and its power was never that it might be found but that it could not be — an island defined by its withdrawal. It survives because a poet declined to kill a king there, and because the apple has always grown on the far side of the water.

Texts and scholarship

The two foundational texts are Geoffrey of Monmouth’s. The Historia Regum Britanniae — which names insula Avallonis and the forging of Caliburnus and sends the wounded Arthur there after Camlann — is now read in the critical edition by Michael D. Reeve with Neil Wright’s facing translation, The History of the Kings of Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). The fuller account, with Morgen and the nine sisters and the golden bed, is in the Vita Merlini; the standard scholarly edition with translation is Basil Clarke, Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), and the John J. Parry translation of 1925 is widely available online (Mary Jones, Celtic Literature Collective). For the Celtic substratum of the apple-island and the Otherworld voyage, the fullest case remains Roger Sherman Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963; repr. Princeton, 1991) (Project MUSE). The fastening of the legend to Somerset is dissected by Antonia Gransden, “The Growth of the Glastonbury Traditions and Legends in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976) (Cambridge Core), which reads the 1191 discovery as a piece of monastic enterprise. The twentieth-century esoteric reading is set out in its own voice in Dion Fortune, Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart (1934), the book that turned the apple-island into a country of the heart and gave the modern pilgrimage its scripture.

→ Related: Glastonbury · Merlin · The Holy Grail · Druidism · Celtic Rite · Scottish Fairy And Apparition Lore · William Blake · Theosophy · Helena Blavatsky · Aleister Crowley