Camelot Legend

[Disruptor]

I haven't read Gurps Camelot, but I have a friend who delved into the orignal story. I can't recall it all, but I do remeber the highlights
I'm not sure how close GURPS Camelot is to this.
BTW if you don't want the legend of Camelot to be ruined for you, read no further.

Here we go:
First off there was no round table or table round. The French mistranslated a word. The proper translation is Knights of the Tower Round.
The knights stood in these small round towers dotting the countryside and watched for trouble.
King Artus(not Arthur) Pendragon was a loyal vassal king to the Roman Empire. When the call went out to the various kings, he was the only one who responded. Camelot is where the Roman Empire stored knowledge. Any stories saying that Artus/Arthur fought the Roman Empire is about as trustworthy as Cary Sherman saying that musicians are getting paid fairly for their work. I THINK Camelot was in southern England(I'm not sure)
The Dryad legend and how it relates to Camelot. There was a Celtic cult(members included Nimue, Morgan Le Fay, Merlin) that had a nasty punishment for women who broke the rules. The cultists would go to a tree and remove a part of the trunk. They would hollow the tree out, without killing the tree and then put the criminal(woman) inside the hollow(still alive). They then put the piece of trunk back on and sealed it up. A living prision. Easy to see where the Dryad legend comes from. This was usually reserved for women. Merlin is the only man that it was used upon.
The Weapons of the Armada: The Stone, The Sword, The Cauldron, The Spear
Like the Ark of the Covenant, they did exist. Where they came from is up for debate. Merlin took/stole the Sword of the Armada and gave it to King Artus. Stealing one of the major holy artifacts of your own cult is a no-no.
The Cauldron of the Armada is a bowl, a cup, a grail. A holy grail. I think you can get what's going on with this.
The Spear of the Armada has been called the Lance of Longlius or Spear of Destiny
What is a Frenchman doing in a Celtic war story? Lancelot du Lac the first Self Insert Character. ^_^
Let's kick the name out and put the guy back together. Lancelot du Lac and King Pellinor: Knight of the Questing Beast is the same person. His castle is on the shores of Loch Ness.
The Warrior Queen Gwenwyfar who pretty much ruled most of England at the time. The so-called love affair between Pellinor and Gwynwyfar wasn't for love. It was a political move on Pellinor's part. Celtic rule: Whoever sleeps in her bed, rules her land.
So much for French Romanticism.
I should have asked about Modred and Morgan Le Faye and confirmed or denied my hunch about the real reason they were invading Camelot. Not to conquer the lands but to get the Cauldron and the Sword back
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Tom Mathews aka Disruptor

[Bob Schroeck]

GURPS Camelot covered medieval, cinematic and historical versions of the Arthurian myth; our version of historical was strongly influced by Geoffrey Ashe's work, and overlaps with your friend's view somewhat.
Just a couple points from our research:
The best candidate for a historical Arthur is a war leader called "Riothamus", whose career (as documented by continental historians) parallels that of the earliest accounts of Arthur; Riothamus also has the virtue of having disappeared from the historical record while on a retreat to the French city of Avallon...
The location that seems best suited to have been the "real" Camelot is a hill fort in Southwest England not too far from Cornwall, but it's always been obvious to me that the name itself came from the Roman settlement at Camulodinum. (I think that's the spelling; I'm at work and can't consult my sources.) "Merlin" appears to have been a title, not a name -- and there may have been more than one bearer of the title conflated into a single character in the stories.
I'm out of time. More later.


-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.

[mephron]

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The Weapons of the Armada: The Stone, The Sword, The Cauldron, The Spear

---

I should note that, in certain Irish legends, these are the four key items of Ireland, and each of them can only be made to either, depending on the legend in question, work by or work for the True Ruler of each of the four historical divisions of Ireland.
One of the elder celtic legends include that the reason the Fomor were driven away was the capture of the Four Treasures from them by the Tuatha, and then the Four Treasures were captured by the Milesians (the first men to live in Ireland), which brought the Tuatha into decline and send them into exile, as happened to the Fomor.
There are some interesting Irish/Scottish/Welsh/Manx legends which, after some research, you can see where they were borrowed from and put into the Arthurian legends.
And as Bob noted, 'Merlin' appears to be some kind of title. Most of the Druidic teachings are lost, because the Druids were a deliberately aliterate association, and what was written down has some notes in it that indicate that the writers were courting death, but they would choose their own death over the death of their knowledge. (It's quite sad, really, how much was lost by the forced conversions, both societal and religious, of the later Roman Empire and the Church that was highly influenced by it.)Brazil has decided you're cute.

[Lord Svengali]

This is all fascinating and -- much to the delighted annoyance of my players -- is providing plenty of grist for the adventure mill. I already use the
"Historical Arthur" chapter from GURPS Camelot as "historical canon" in my campaigns...but I have an upcoming adventure series (cribbed
from an old Timemaster module) for an existing campaign which will take the PCs back in time to that of the "historical" Arthur. Anything that makes
the setting more "realistic" is greatly appreciated...particularly since one of my players is an Arthurian lore nut, another specializes in Dark Ages
Britain and Western Europe, a third has a degree in History, and two more are SCA members with persona derived from the Dark Ages.

[Lord Svengali]

My daughter is currently a Senior in high school, and in her English Literature class the teacher offered the comment that King Arthur was a Celt. She mentioned this to me, which I rebutted with a comment of my own that he was likely a Romanized Briton. This went back to her teacher...
...and now there is a strong possibility that I will be invited to her class to debate the issue.
This should prove interesting, since I derive a lot of what I "know" about Arthur from GURPS Camelot. I'm going to have to do some reading...

[robkelk]

Luckily, Bob and Peggy put a good bibliography in the back of GURPS Camelot.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

Of course, that bibliography is now almost 20 years out of date; and we haven't kept up with the latest developments.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

Since we mentioned it on the call the other day, I thought I'd share a research candidate from a historical blog I've been reading:

Finally, for our book recommendation, in keeping with our discussion of late antiquity and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, I want to recommend R. Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070 (2010). In the first post, I noted at several points that the experience from the fourth through the sixth century of Roman Britain was differently timed and in some ways substantially more severe than that on the continent and this led a few people to ask for more details, so it seemed fair to offer a focused treatment.
The thrust of the book fits its title: the fall and then rise of Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire. One happy structural element here is that every chapter is date-bracketed in its title, nailing down the exact when to which it applies, which matters a lot in a book that is all about change but also features chapters focused on themes as well as specific periods. Using a mix of literary sources and quite a bit of archaeology, Fleming presents a narrative that begins in the second century with the emergence of a Roman urban culture in Britain powered by trade which was in turn motivated substantially by the Roman military presence. Importantly, the decline of that urban culture begins well before the collapse of the empire: already in the 360s it begins to falter as the declining security situation in the rest of the empire steadily denudes Britain of troops and administrators and as a result the urban centers their economic impact sustained first faded and then vanished entirely with nary an Angle or Saxon yet in sight.
From there, Fleming documents the reconstruction of Britain and this narrative is even more important than that of decline, cutting directly against the idea of the early medieval period as one of stagnation or grim darkness. Instead what follows is the establishment of new polities, the reemergence of trading communities, new towns beginning in earnest in the ninth century, steadily increasing economic activity and also increasingly flourishing religious life. Throughout, Fleming’s focus on archaeological evidence roots the discussion in the lives of actual people, often well below the elite, and how their conditions and ways of living changed over the period from the fourth century to the eleventh.
Now it should be noted that Fleming’s book is written for a general audience, which comes with both advantages and disadvantages. The main loss is that of notes: there are no foot- or endnotes here. Instead, the book comes with a selected bibliography, chapter by chapter. This is enough for the general reader to go on, but it may frustrate the reader who wants to track down specific claims or examples. Nevertheless, the great advantage of this book in this regard is that it is accessibly written for a general audience, eschewing academic jargon and written in engaging prose. Well worth a read.

This was something of an aside in his series on the Decline and Fall of Rome -- or is it really a "change and continuation" of the Roman Empire?  The answer depends rather on how you look at it, but based on the scant evidence of that period it seems things were significantly worse in Britain.

No specific notes on the Matter of Britain as a whole, which still lurks on the fringes of history, because there really isn't any historical evidence from that period.