Citadels of mystery by De Camp L. Sprague & De Camp Catherine Crook

Author:De Camp, L. Sprague & De Camp, Catherine Crook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: New York : Ballantine Books
Published: 1964-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

What facts, if any, underlie all this mass of fiction? For, as you can easily see, the Arthurian stories are mostiy fairy tale. Spells like Merlin's do not work in real life, nor can real men perform the feats that Arthur and his knights are said to have done.

For example, in the Welsh versions of the cycle, Arthur's seneschal, Cei or Kay, can hold his breath for nine days and nights under water, stretch himself to the height of the tallest tree, and evaporate rain by his body heat before it touches him. Perhaps Kay is a kind of Celtic Vulcan, shrunken from a pagan god to a mortal in order to avoid the hostility of the Christian Church towards relics of heathen days.

However, as we have seen, there is a real Tintagel Castle. And there was a real Tristram who lived in ComwalL

Most of Cornwall is a flattish, gently rolling land, cut up by stone walls into countless irregular green fields, variegated by an occasional patch of woodland. The narrow, winding roads are bordered by stone walls heaped over with earthen banks and covered by brush to a height of six or eight feet, so that the motorist in Cornwall gets the claustrophobic feeling of driving through an endless tunnel.

A mile and a half inland from the southern coast, near Fowey, stands a weathered seven-foot stone pillar. This shaft has been moved from where it was found lying and set up on a plinth in a grassy plot at the crossing of two busy roads, A3802 and B3269. On the north side of the pillar, a cross is rudely sculptured in relief. On the south side, a set of irregularly placed and barely discernible letters make the following sentence, in half-illiterate Latin:

DRVSTAHS HIC IACIT CVNOWORI FILIVS

or, "Here lies Drustans, son of Cunomorus."

Now, Drustans is one form of the name Tristram.14 From the life of a Dark Age saint named Paul Aurelius, we learn that tliere was a king of Cornwall named Marcus Quonomorius. Evidently this Marcus Quonomorius or Cunomorus was the real-life original of the Arthurian King Mark, while his son Drustans was the original of Mark's nephew Tristram.

A couple of miles north of Drustans' gravestone is a set of circular ditches and ramparts, overgrown with trees and brush, called Castle Dor or Dore. To reach it, you have to set out from Tristram's stone with a British ordnance map and proceed by dead reckoning, because the ruin is not marked in any way. If you persist, you will find, opening on Road B3269, a one-lane dirt road. A few score feet along this track, you pass a gate in the wall. You enter this gate, cross a field (taking care not to damage the wheat) and there is Castle Dor, thought to have been Cunomorus' capital of Lancien. It fits what we know of the typical fifth-century European "castle," which was merely a stout stone house on a mound, surrounded by a ditch and a stockade. Perhaps the

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