Even in this debased age, many people still know who King Arthur and his trusty advisor, Merlin, were. Arthur was the legendary King of Camelot, that misty ancient British kingdom, with his honorable knights of the Round Table, and the wife who cheated on him with one of those same honorable knights. Meanwhile, Merlin was the magician who was Arthur’s wise counselor and the man who created many of the symbolic icons of the Arthurian legends (the Round Table, the sword in the stone, the search for the Holy Grail, etc.). Ironically, it emerged this week that, even as England is denying much of its history, archeology may have found Merlin’s grave.
The woke rot has been affecting British education for a long time. Almost 20 years ago, the government’s updated school curriculum excised Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Given Churchill’s huge importance to England in the middle of the 20th century, not to mention the damage Hitler caused, you might think that these are grave omissions, but British history must yield to wokism.
Of course, wokeness never stops. So, in addition to doing without Churchill, the University of Nottingham (land of Robin Hood’s sheriff) recently has announced that it’s removing the word “Anglo-Saxon” from its academic lexicon, claiming that doing so “decolonizes” the curriculum so that the UK’s history isn’t just a sea of white faces. This allows them to ignore things such as the 9th-century written history of the Anglo-Saxons in Great Britain, a collection that has long been denominated as the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.”
Indeed, in the pursuit of “decolonization,” scholars are also claiming that the indigenous British population was black—which is true if you accept possibly dark-skinned prehistoric people about 12,000 years ago. Of course, these vanished people had nothing to do with British history—a white phenomenon—and no relationship to anyone from Africa today. The fact that 99.9% of British history was by, for, and about white people is evil and unacceptable.
Another piece of British history that’s been picked at for a long time is the Legend of King Arthur. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, different chroniclers began to tell the tale of the legendary King Arthur, stories that became tightly woven into the British psyche. For hundreds of years, people looked to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) as a reliable source proving Arthur’s existence. In that same century, Chrétien de Troyes had added the romantic elements that kept the tale firmly fixed in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to stories and films based upon the Arthurian legends, with many of these made in our own lifetimes—and, indeed, quite recently. Arthur and his court were a seminal part of British identity for centuries.
Now, though, the theory is that there was never a 6th- or 7th-century British king named Arthur. Certainly, it’s true that that era truly is a “dark age.” By the 6th century, the Romans were gone, tribal lords were fighting for regional control, and Northern European raiders—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Vikings, etc.—viewed the British Isles as rich hunting grounds. Aside from a few outskirt lands where monks worked (see, e.g., Lindisfarne), Britain no longer kept written records and had no kingdom stable enough to leave behind a coherent history.
The current theory now is that there was never a King Arthur with a court. Instead, the early medieval stories represented the amalgam of a few tribal leaders with Welsh mythology.
However, it now turns out that there may have been an Arthur or, at least, a Merlin:
On Tuesday, archeologists in Scotland revealed evidence of the legendary wizard’s death in Drumelzier between the 6th and 7th centuries — and the findings could change the way we tell Merlin’s tale.
Merlin was said to have been a loyal advisor to King Arthur amid the Dark Ages before being imprisoned, killed and buried along the river Tweed, according to Vita Merlini Sylvestris (the Life of Merlin of the Forest), a medieval manuscript of his life which is currently held at the British Library.
The possible evidence of a grave that could be that of the historical Merlin is that the grave site is in the middle of nowhere, very prominent (something unexpected in the middle of nowhere), and dates to the time period that most historians believe a King Arthur, if he had existed, would have existed—that is, the 6th to 7th centuries. So, maybe Arthur and Merlin aren’t just dim memories of multiple tribal lords. Maybe they were real memories of very specific tribal lords from that misty era.
And maybe there really is a British history that shouldn’t be erased because a people without a history isn’t a people at all. The only things at the end of the day that bind people together are the belief that they share a past (regardless of skin color) and have common values.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/have_archaeologists_found_merlin_s_grave.html