The Prophesy of Merlin from "King Arthur and Me - The Opera"

"Druids have the roots and springs of Britain at their fingertips.  They can soar like eagles through all the light and dark places of the heavens. They can know the stars, read the future, even change shape. And this is The Myrddin, the Oak Druid, the greatest of them all. He and Britain are one. Let him help you."  from "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" a playscript about some school students and their drama teacher putting on a play abut King Arthur which comes alive in their lives which will be published to accompany the Opera on May 1st on  https://www.blogger.com/blog/pages/1688276452031645275

The old Welsh tune is a treat to sing and you can feel why the armed forces still use it to inspire themselves in tight places. It dates from the Wars of the Roses and the 1461-1468 siege of Harlech Castle which the usual lyrics describe but I know it from a later 60s in my Somerset primary school - where the folk boom found its way onto the curriculum - and from the film 'Zulu.'

The background collage of football crowds represent the warring tribes of Britain (then as now) over which High King Vortigern presided. We don't know his name - Vortigern is just his title - so I've called him King Breck (= breached, broken). The Romans had left and taken with them the political idea of 'Britain' (Britannia) which before Rome only the Druids (and briefly Boudicca as an anti-Roman alliance) had ever conceived. 

The Oak Druid Merlin's vision of a strong and united Britain requires a stronger, wiser, larger and less self-centred ruler than Breck.  Uther gets closer but his son Arthur achieves it. 

That's all in the future. Behind this dialogue between Merlin and Breck, the noisily divided crowd is not really won over and will only be quieted on the next track "Arthur Britain's Making".

Breck’s small eye revolving his treasure -
Little Britain and all it contains -
From Merlin he steals a vision
His tiny mind hardly sustains:

"Your castle, King Breck, keeps collapsing 
Because built on the underground lair
Of two warring dragons, the red split
In the white's jaws of victory there.

"The red dragon stands for Britannia, 
The white for the English-to-be 
And your red worm is turning - and driving
The white dragon into the sea."

"But the red dragon's head is young Uther!"
Says King Breck, "And it ought to be mine!"
"My Breck's Isle exists on division,
I’m the crack in Great Britain's behind."

Merlin magically helmets young Uther,
Who cleaves to his dead captain's wife.
She believes he's her lost war-dead husband 
In the hottest night of her life

And bears him a son, an Arth/Ursus,
A high noon in our deepest night sky,
The May-Winter King of a Lost Land
That Was Never, but Is, and Can't Die.

Let a nation divided/
In battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle 
Conceiving the dove ||
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave with heart unfailing
Till dividers learn with quailing

Hate is conquered by Love.credits

Why are you all dressed up Gaz?

Airplay!!! And a Listening Party

Blood on the Corn : from King Arthur and Me - The Opera

In AD 60, at the time of Boudicca's revolt, the Romans slaughtered the druids, unique to Britain, on their holy island of Mon (modern Anglesey). Mon (Roman Mona) was the druids' stronghold and the druids gave the British Celts their only shared sense of 'Britishness' . They were otherwise a collection of warring tribes, easy to divide and rule, initially as client kingdoms. Destroying the druids and their unifying spirit - which Boudicca mobilised into an actual British army of united Eastern British tribes - was key to Roman Imperial annexation of Britain. The legend of King Arthur is an enduring and ever-developing expression of that Celtic Britishness through many centuries, two different faiths, two different genres (mythology and romance) several invasions, different ethnicities and languages not to mention transmutations through Brittany and Normandy into the whole of Northern Europe and back to Britain form Europe after 1066 and from Tudor Wales after 1485. It has a reality beyond reason and historical intellectualising. In a way it is a phantom but as CS Lewis said no less real for that. Besides, legends have to start somewhere. Real people got killed. As with the druids, behind the mists of history, there was blood on the corn.

Gwenhwyfar (from "King Arthur and Me - The Opera")

Part 1 The recorded version omits verse 3. Lord Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved: Cross on invincible shield, blood-red, Dragon on young-summer green, red, The terrible clatter of returning hooves. I never quite believed. Always feared him Dead. But he always came. Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved: Swift white charger swooping like a spear On the bonfire builders, the wolvers of women, Scourging the rat run inroads of Europe, Animal tracks of attacking Saxon, His spur-tensed Britons beat back the Beast. (Gone my Beloved, my Beloved I mourn: Then Llugh fought battles within himself, Cei fought his own rule, Bedwyr fought Llugh, And some sought long for the holy caldron, Sought it like a spoil of war, And, gentle as light, my Beloved loved me.) And Medraut gnawed through the golden years Myrddin called a threshold to the dark, And its beacon. Medraut, eyes on me Like a dog’s on the moon, snapping his moment. To Camlann the coastland, carried me off. Gone my Beloved, my Beloved I mourn. Part 2 And little the faith I had yet in Arthur, The Angel campaigner, strong as light, His sun-bright stars above the wicked forest Seeming to fade. Rusty the scabbard, Still magic the sword. And, once more, he came. I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession. At last I understood. The flincher from spears, Medraut, was part of Arthur, his shadow, Chancel and gargoyle had to be cancelled Where all deeds are drowned, all swords returned: Avalon. And I’ll run no more. I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession. Night and this nunnery will fall. Ravens Will flock on the gore. Let others keep A glimmer, a glorious page, of Logres alight Until the dawn. My confession’s done. Still my heart waits for hoofbeats. (Still, my heart waits for hoofbeats…) credits Maz: lead vocal, acoustic guitar Gaz: bass, bodhran, howls, cymbal, support vocals in Part 2

The closing aria of "King Arthur and Me- the Opera" (releases May 1st). The lyric, first published in 'Coming Home"(King of Hearts Publishing) in 1991, is based in form and spirit on the elegies, eulogies and 'death bed confessionals' of ancient Welsh poetry. From memory, while Celtic poetry shares the unrhymed alliterative qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the line is unbroken and more lyrical, the rhythms and cadences more lilting and the assonance more marked. In other words, I tried to make the English sound as Welsh as possible.

Maz wrote the minor key tune and sings it beautifully here. Gwenhwyfar ( "white phantom") is very much the dark age Celtic wife of her beloved chieftain Arthur here, not the Norman courtly lover she later became in French romance tradition. ("Guinevere", track -.) Over these earlier versions, the atmosphere of Celtic mythology in which Arthur (Artos) is a god and Gwenhwyfar the land itself, still hangs like a mist, just as Robin Hood was the eternal spirit of the greenwood as well as an outlaw in a specific period of Norman-Saxon England. 

So here, partly in the tradition of a warrior's praise of a fallen lord, we have Gwenhwyfar elegising and eulogising Arthur as a god-like Dark Age Celtic warlord resisting Saxons after the Roman withdrawal from Britain and Gwenhwfar as both his lady and the Britain he was protecting.

(Medraut is the earlier Welsh name for Mordred.)

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry. (Sonnet 66)

The rap version

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill.

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.