"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
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
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