Hollow Hills (56 page)

The following Easter, at the Coronation feast, King Uther fell in love with Ygraine, wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall. He lavished attention on her, to the scandal of the court; she made no response, but her husband, in fury, retired from the court without leave, taking his wife and men-at-arms back to Cornwall .

Uther, in anger, commanded him to return, but Gorlois refused to obey. Then the King, enraged beyond measure, gathered an army and marched intoCornwall , burning the cities and castles. Gorlois had not enough troops to withstand him, so he placed his wife in thecastle ofTintagel , the safest refuge, and himself prepared to defend thecastleofDimilioc . Uther immediately laid siege to Dimilioc, holding Gorlois and his troops trapped there, while he cast about for some way of breaking into thecastleofTintagel to ravish Ygraine. After some days he asked advice from one of his familiars called Ulfin, who suggested that he send for Merlin. Merlin, moved by the King's apparent suffering, promised to help. By his magic arts he changed Uther into the likeness of Gorlois, Ulfin into Jordan, Gorlois' friend, and himself into Brithael, one of Gorlois' captains. The three of them rode to Tintagel, and were admitted by the porter.

Ygraine, taking Uther to be her husband the Duke, welcomed him, and took him to her bed. So Uther lay with Ygraine that night, "and she had no thought to deny him in aught he might desire."

But in the meantime fighting had broken out at Dimilioc, and in the battle Ygraine's husband, the Duke, was killed. Messengers came to Tintagel to tell Ygraine of her husband's death. When they found "Gorlois," apparently still alive, closeted with Ygraine, they were speechless, but the King then confessed the deception, and a few days later married Ygraine. Some say that Ygraine's sister Morgause was married on the same day to Lot of Lothian, and the other sister Morgan le Fay was put to school in a nunnery, where she learned necromancy, and thereafter was wedded to King Urien of Gore. But others aver that Morgan was Arthur's own sister, born after him of the marriage of King Uther and Ygraine his Queen, and that Morgause was also his sister, but not by the same mother.

Uther Pendragon was to reign for fifteen more years, and during those years he saw nothing of his son Arthur. Before the child was born Merlin sought out the King and spoke with him. "Sir, ye must purvey you for the nourishing of your child." "As thou wilt," said the King, "be it." So on the night of his birth the child Arthur was carried down to the postern gate of Tintagel and delivered into the hands of Merlin, who took him to thecastleofSir Ector , a faithful knight. There Merlin had the child christened, and named him Arthur, and Sir Ector's wife took him as her foster son.

All through Uther's reign the country was sorely troubled by the Saxons and the Scots fromIreland . The two Saxon leaders whom the King had imprisoned managed to escape fromLondon and fled thence toGermany , where they gathered a great army which struck terror throughout the kingdom. Uther himself was stricken with a grievous malady, and appointed Lot of Lothian, who was betrothed to his daughter Morgause, as his chief captain. But as often asLot put the enemy to flight, they came back in even greater strength, and the country was laid waste. Finally Uther, though sorely ill, gathered his barons together and told them that he himself must lead the armies, so a litter was made for him, and he was carried in it at the head of his army against the enemy. When the Saxon leaders learned that the British King had taken the field against them in a litter, they disdained him, saying that he was half-dead already, and it would not become them to fight him. But Uther, with a return of his old strength, laughed and called out: "They call me the half-dead king, and so indeed I was. But I would rather conquer them in this wise, than be conquered by them and live in shame." So the army of the Britons defeated the Saxons. But the King's malady increased, and the woes of the kingdom. Finally, when the King lay close to death, Merlin appeared and approached him in the sight of all the lords and bade him acknowledge his son Arthur as the new King. Which he did, and afterwards died, and was buried by the side of his brother Aurelius Ambrosius within the Giants' Dance.

After his death the lords ofBritain came together to find their new King. No one knew where Arthur was kept, or where Merlin was to be found, but they thought the King would be recognized by a sign. So Merlin had a great sword fashioned, and fixed it by his magic art into a great stone shaped like an altar, with an anvil of steel in it, and floated the stone on water to a great church in London, and set it up there in the churchyard. There were gold letters on the sword which said: "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of allEngland ." So a great feast was made, and at the feast all the lords came to try who could pull the sword from the stone. Among them came Sir Ector, and Kay his son, with Arthur, who had neither sword nor blazon, following as a squire. When they came to the jousting Sir Kay, who had forgotten his sword, sent Arthur back to look for it. But when Arthur returned to the house where they were lodging, everyone was gone and the doors were locked, so in impatience he rode to the churchyard, and drew the sword from the stone, and took it to Sir Kay. Then of course the sword was recognized, but even when Arthur showed that he alone of all men could pull it from the stone, there were those who cried out against him, saying it was great shame to them and to the realm to accept as king a boy of no high blood born, and that fresh trial must be made at Candlemas. So at Candlemas all the greatest in the land came together, and then again at Pentecost, but none of them could pull the sword from the stone, save only Arthur. But still some of the lords were angry and would not accept him, until in the end the common people cried out: "We will have Arthur unto our king, we will put him no more in delay, for we all see that it is God's will that he shall be our king, and who that holdeth against it, we will slay him." So Arthur was accepted by the people, high and low, and all men rich and poor kneeled to him and begged his mercy because they had delayed him so long, and he forgave them.

Then Merlin told them all who Arthur was, and that he was no bastard, but begotten truly by King Uther upon Ygraine, three hours after the death of her husband the Duke. So they raised to be king Arthur the young.

Like its predecessor, The Crystal Cave, this novel is a work of the imagination, though firmly based in both history and legend. Not perhaps equally in both: so little is known about Britain in the fifth century A.D. (the beginning of the "Dark Ages") that one is almost as dependent on tradition and conjecture as on fact. I for one like to think that where tradition is so persistent — and as immortal and self-perpetuating as the stories of the Arthurian Legend — there must be a grain of fact behind even the strangest of the tales which have gathered round the meager central facts of Arthur's existence. It is exciting to interpret these sometimes weird and often nonsensical legends into a story which has some sort of coherence as human experience and imaginative truth. I have tried with The Hollow Hills to write a story which stands on its own, without reference to its forerunner, The Crystal Cave, or even to whatever explanatory notes follow here. Indeed, I only add these notes for the benefit of those readers whose interest may go beyond the novel itself, but who are not familiar enough with the ramifications of the Arthurian Legend to follow the thinking behind some parts of my story. It may give them pleasure to trace for themselves the seeds of certain ideas and the origins of certain references.

In The Crystal Cave I based my story mainly on the "history" related by Geoffrey of Monmouth,[1]

which is the basis of the later and mainly mediaeval tales of "Arthur and his Court," but I set the action against the fifth-century Romano-British background, which is the real setting for all that we know of the Arthurian Fact.[2] We have no fixed dates, but I have followed some authorities who postulate 470 A.D.

or thereabouts as the date of Arthur's birth. The story of The Hollow Hills covers the hidden years between that date and the raising of the young Arthur to be war-leader (dux bellorum) or, as legend has had it for more than a thousand years, King of Britain. What I would like to trace here are the threads I have woven to make this story of a period of Arthur's life which tradition barely touches, and history touches not at all.

That Arthur existed seems certain. We cannot say even that much for certain about Merlin. "Merlin the magician," as we know him, is a composite figure built almost entirely out of song and legend; but here again one feels that for such a legend to persist through the centuries, some man of power must have existed, with gifts that seemed miraculous to his own times. He first appears in legend as a youth, even then possessed of strange powers. On this story as related by Geoffrey of Monmouth I have built an imaginary character who seemed to me to grow out of and epitomize the time of confusion and seeking that we call the Dark Ages. Geoffrey Ashe, in his brilliant book From Caesar to Arthur[3] , describes this "multiplicity of vision":

When Christianity prevailed and Celtic paganism crumbled into mythology, a great deal of this sort of thing was carried over. Water and islands retained their magic. Lake-sprites flitted to and fro, heroes travelled in strange boats. The haunted hills became fairy-hills, belonging to vivid fairy folk hardly to be paralleled among other nations. Where barrows existed they often fitted this role. Unseen realms intersected the visible, and there were secret means of communication and access. The fairies and the heroes, the ex-gods and the demigods, jostled the spirits of the dead in kaleidoscopic confusion...Everything grew ambiguous. Thus, long after the triumph of Christianity, there continued to be fairy-hills; but even those which were not barrows might be regarded as havens for disembodied souls...There were saints of whom miracles were reported; but similar miracles, not long since, might have been the business of fully identifiable gods. There were glass castles where a hero might lie an age entranced; there were blissful fairylands to be reached by water or by cave-passageways...Journeys and enchantments, combats and imprisonments — theme by theme — the Celtic imagination articulated itself in story. Yet any given episode might be taken as fact or imagination or religious allegory or all three at once.

Merlin, the narrator of The Hollow Hills, the "enchanter" and healer gifted with the Sight, is able to move in and out of the different worlds at will. And as Merlin's legend is linked with the caves of glass, the invisible towers, the hollow hills where he now sleeps for all time, so I have seen him as the link between the worlds; the instrument by which, as he says, "all the kings become one King, and all the gods one God." For this he abnegates his own will and his desire for normal manhood. The hollow hills are the physical point of entry between this world and the Otherworld, and Merlin is their human counterpart, the meeting point for the interlocking worlds of men, gods, beasts and twilight spirits.

One meeting of the real and the fantasy worlds can be seen in the figure of Maximus. Magnus Maximus, the soldier with the dream of empire, was a fact; he commanded at Segontium until the time when he crossed toGaul in his vain bid for power. "Macsen Wledig" is a legend, one of the Celtic "seeking" stories later to flower into the Quest of the Holy Grail. In this novel I have linked the facts of Arthur's great precursor and his imperial dream to the sword episodes of the Arthurian Legend, and lent them the shape of a Quest story.

The tale of the "Sword of Maximus" is my invention. It follows the archetypal "seeking and finding" pattern of which the Quest of the Grail, which later attached itself to the Arthurian Legend, is only one example. The stories of the Holy Grail, identifying it with the Cup from the Last Supper, are twelfth-century tales modelled in their main elements on some early Celtic "quest" stories; in fact they have elements even older. These Grail stories show certain points in common, changing in detail, but fairly constant in form and idea. There is usually an unknown youth, the bel inconnu, who is brought up in the wilds, ignorant of his name or parentage. He leaves his home and rides out in search of his identity. He comes across aWasteLand , ruled by a maimed (impotent) king; there is a castle, usually on an island, on which the youth comes by chance. He reaches it in a boat belonging to a royal fisherman, the Fisher King of the Grail Legends. The Fisher King is sometimes identified with the impotent king of the WasteLand .

The castle on the island is owned by a king of the Otherworld, and there the youth finds the object of his quest, sometimes a cup or a lance, sometimes a sword, broken or whole. At the quest's end he wakes by the side of the water with his horse tethered near him, and the island once again invisible. On his return from the Other-world, fertility and peace are restored to theWasteLand . Some tales figure a white stag collared with gold, who leads the youth to his destination.

[1] History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Sebastian Evans and revised by Charles W. Dunn (Everyman's Library, 1912)

[2] See Roman Britain and the English Settlements, R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres (Oxford, 1937); Celtic Britain, Nora K. Chadwick Vol. 34 in the series Ancient Peoples and Places, ed. Glyn Daniel (Thames and Hudson, 1963).

[3] Published by Collins, 1960. See also The Quest for Arthur'sBritain, ed. Geoffrey Ashe (Pall Mall Press, 1968)

For further reference see Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages; A Collaborative History edited by R.

S. Loomis (Oxford University Press, 1959); and The Evolution of the Grail Legend by D. D. R. Owen (University of St. Andrews Publications, 1968).

SOME OTHER BRIEF

NOTES

Segontium, Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Vita Merlini tells us of cups made by Weland the Smith in Caer Seint (Segontium), which were given to Merlin. There is also another story of a sword made by Weland which was given to Merlin by a Welsh king. There is a brief reference in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 418 A.D. "In this year the Romans collected all the treasures which were inBritain and hid some in the earth so that no one afterwards could find them, and some they took with them intoGaul ."Galava. The main body of legend places King Arthur in the Celtic countries of the west,Cornwall ,Wales ,Brittany . In this I have followed the legends. But there is evidence which supports another strong tradition of Arthur in the north ofEngland and inScotland . So this story moves north. I have placed the traditional "Sir Ector of the Forest Sauvage" (who reared the young Arthur) at Galava, the modern Ambleside in theLake District . I have often wondered if "the fountain of Galabes [Fontes galabes] where he (Merlin) wont to haunt" could be identified with the Roman Galava or Galaba. (In The Crystal Cave I gave it a different interpretation. The mediaeval romancers make "Galapas" a gaint — a version of the old guardian of the spring or waterway.) The fostering of Arthur on Ector, and the lodging at Galava of Bedwyr, are feasible; we find in Procopius that, as in later times, boys of good family were sent away to be educated. As for the "chapel in the green," once I had invented a shrine in theWildForest I could not resist calling it the Green Chapel, after the mediaeval Arthurian poem of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, which has its setting somewhere in theLake District .