Respected geologist and archaeologist W.A. Cummins sets out to trace Arthur back to the Bronze Age.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
new light on a hidden age,
By Demot "Demot" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: King Arthur's Place in Prehistory: The Great Age of Stonehenge (History/Prehistory and Medieval History) (Paperback)
This is a really fascinating book. King Arthur is a good name to drop, but this is far from just another of those `what happened in Dark Age Britain' books. Dr Cummins looks at the build-up of legend around the character of King Arthur in various versions of the tale, and notices several distinct characters emerging. Many books have noted these different elements referring to a warlord's resistance to the Saxon invasion of Britain (in the late 5th century), and to `Arthurs' invasion of France (thought to refer to Magnus Maxentius aka Guy of Warwick in the early 4th century). Adrian Gilbert calls them Arthur 1 and Arthur 2 in `The Holy Kingdom'. Cummins then investigates the third element which sits uneasily with these two - the Arthur who presides over a golden age of peace & prosperity, and is buried at Stonehenge. He points out how vague history can be in a non-literate society: people remember that some king was specially great, they remember names and spectacular achievements, but without books and calendars people have no way of remembering dates or even eras. Very often locations become just names unless there is some special monument which can be identified (ancient kingdoms were so often named after kings and tribes who came and went, soon forgotten, with fluid borders) Could this third element of `the great king' reveal an even more ancient memory of a prehistoric golden age? Dr Cummins allows himself speculation beyond the hard facts of archaeology, but does not resort to silly fantasies. There was clearly a rich and sophisticated society in southern England more than three thousand years ago - the only traces of which is are the burial mounds and stone monuments - Stonehenge, Avebury, etc. Cummins points out the sophistication of prehistoric (ie. pre-Roman) societies, the details of which have been lost because their material culture was almost entirely perishable (over the three thousand years which separate us from them). They wrote nothing about themselves, and the literate Romans wrote nothing good about what was left of the ancient societies taken into their empire. Only the Greeks were writing early enough to record anything of ancient Western Europe, and Cummins traces tenuous links between ancient Greeks and Britain. He does not suggest that Stonehenge was an alien imposition by Greeks on a savage society. Indeed, his portrait of ancient Wessex suggests that the reason that such monuments seem impossible for their time is because we underestimate ancient societies so badly. The lack of iron does not condemn a people to a brutish `caveman' existence: societies can be rich in culture, lifestyle and organization without leaving visible traces of these. We should be thinking of the glories of Solomon, not of the Flintstones. From the monuments left to us, from place-names, references in later texts and from the mysterious, timeless tales of Arthur, Cummins traces out a possible character of a great king of the second millennium BC, Ambrius (in all his glory), whose kingdom was wealthy enough to build Stonehenge (or rather reconstruct it) whose architect was perhaps a prototype Merlin.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
ideas that would make a good fiction story,
This review is from: King Arthur's Place in Prehistory: The Great Age of Stonehenge (History/Prehistory and Medieval History) (Paperback)
This book is in no way a boring read. It was fun and the authors theory about a connection between the ancient Stonehenge Wessex culture and the mysterious Hyperboreans mentioned by ancient Greek historians is intriguing and believable. And I believe he is probably right in suggesting that the fables about King Arthur's campaigns on the continent were probably based off the Roman usurper Magnus Maximus. His attempt to connect King Arthur and Merlin to the prehistoric pagan past of Stonehenge is a bit pushing it though. That is a couple thousand years before the time such characters were said to live. It is possible such legends were pushed forward 2000 years by story tellers to conform to contemporary circumstances (i.e. British struggles with the Anglo-Saxons and Christian struggles with paganism) but possible doesn't equal probable. More evidence is needed than conjecture. He seems too quick to dismiss and ignore the likelihood that Merlin was based off the legend about a bard who went mad and became a prophet/hermit. I also think it is a bit dangerous to suggest that the chronicles describing Arthur's fall at Camlann in 537 AD should be dismissed as just some guy who was named after the great hypothetical "Arthur of Stonehenge".
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