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.

Anyone who's heard the hypnotic circling chords of CS & N's 'Guinnevere' on their eponymous album will know how flexible Arthurian romance can be. There, David Crosby is some West Coast modern day Lancelot caught - amid fraught pentagrams, orange trees, seagulls, gardens with aimlessly wandering peacocks etc - in a fatal spell of attraction for an elusive green eyed, gazing golden haired woman,  longing to be free out on the  sea with her. This is a long way from the Arthur of Dark Age history,  not quite so far  from Celtic mythology and a direct descendant of French romance:  the troubadours of Provence would have recognised this Norman version of The Matter of Breton in it even if the Dark Age warriors riding behind the Romano-Celtic Arth-Ursus into battle against the Saxons might have wondered what their warlord's shadowy wife 'Gwenhwyfar' (white phantom) was doing consorting with a general they hadn't even heard of, unless he was Llugh, the Celtic god of light and harvest, after which Londinos (London) is reputedly named. The point is, 'The Matter of Britain' has lasted because, like Britain itself, it has a magical relationship with time and place. It changes and it stays the same. 

My version of Guinevere below is very much the French romance one, the Matter of Britain as sung in French verse by Provencal troubadours, magical hero-stories exiled to Brittany (Little Britain) with Celtic Britons fleeing through Cornwall as the Saxons conquered the West, given a shining armour polish by the Normans, a brilliant gloss of French romance and courtly love and spreading across the North of Europe (and into Spain).  And that's before we even get to the later Arab enchantments, new learning and flying dragons absorbed as the Christians embarked on the Crusades and those twin propaganda campaigns, the Norman Conquest's identification with the Saxon-subduing Celtic knights of old followed by Henry VIII's repeat of the same, both to legitimise a new Britain using the old Matter.

"Lady Guinevere" was first published in 'Schools Poetry Review' in the late 80s and then in my first volume of poems "Coming Home" in 1991 along with an alternative Welsh-metered Dark Age/ Celtic mythological "Gwenhwyfar" the twinned poems evident love of all things Arthurian earning me an invitation by elegant formal letter to a British order of Arthurians which I was too wary to take up. I subsequently extended the sequence into a book of verse called "The Lost Land" which I learned by heart and performed as a one man show (Arthur; Britain's Making") - using masks and English, Welsh and Scottish flags - at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011. Not to mention an epic school play "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" - epic in every way, cast of 70, 2 hours long, produced by 3 different directors in 3 different local schools, published by a teacher's training college, workshopped in class and with youth theatre groups, still rewriting it for various remakings 30 years later...

The audio link  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/lady-guinevere is to the version of "Guinevere" which will appear on our Peacock's Tale folk indie duo's forthcoming album of "The Lost Land" and opts for our remit of 'traditional' tale with 'contemporary' beat.

Lady Guinevere

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.) 

lyrics