Myths and Legends of the British Isles [antikvár]

And did those fiet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains ?!rem? And was the Holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?WILLIAM BLAKE'S lines from the poem known now as 'Jerusalem' are familiar enough to us, if only from the Last Night of the Proms. But how many who have sung these words, and caught something of the visionary fervour behind them, know where Blake, arch-creator of poetic myths of his ovra, had found his inspiration? We have lost touch with our legends. Although some of us might think of Glastonbury as the place Blake had in mind, few would be able to identify the story: that when Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury not long after the Crucifixion, he found there a church built by Christ himself, and dedicated to his Mother. This humble hut of watdes undoubtedly existed, whatever its true origin, until it was destroyed in a disastrous fire at the abbey in 1184. But if you go to Glastonbury today, you can still see the famous Glastonbury thorn, a cutting from the original tree which sprang from Joseph of Arimathea's staff when he put it in the ground and it took root. And Glastonbury has been identified with the Avalon of Arthurian legend, which in tum goes back to a yet older myth, the Celtic otherworld, a land of plenty and eternal youth.For these are tales of gods and heroes and marvels, the antithesis of sober history, reaching back into the beliefs of our distant forebears. The usual distinction between myth and legend is the presence of a supernatural element in the former, and an historical basis in the latter; if we add to this the category of Svondertale', this gives us the starting point for this book. Myths, as in the case of the Greek or Norse myths, can have a religious background; but we know too litde about the religion of the Celts or the elusive paganism of the Anglo-Saxons to begin to compile a volume on the scale of those for Greece or the North. So myth in its proper sense hardly makes an appearance on its own in the following pages; but our stories are shot through with mythical threads, which give the narratives their iridescent sheen of the unreal and the dreamt. The British past, however, is rich in legends - legends originally being the lives of saints, which were to be read (kgenda in Latin) in books. This became a synonym for stories in general before the sceptical seventeenth century redefined the word as something not deserving of belief, neady reversing the original meaning. And finally there are the Svondertales', to use Gwyn Jones's name for them, romances with litde historical basis, their adventures almost defiandy unreal.