On the Hunt for the Lost Wonders of Medieval Britain | Hacker News Reader

On the Hunt for the Lost Wonders of Medieval Britain

atlasobscura.com

60 pointsThevet9 comments

> Cabal, who was the dog of the soldier Arthur

Possibly interesting tidbit for fans of Arthuriana: as this quote indicates, the Historia Brittonum, like other early sources, does not refer to Arthur as a king. Elsewhere in the document, he is described as dux bellorum, which literally translates as something like "leader of battles", but which could be a nod to the Roman military title dux, one of a number of such titles that can be loosely rendered as "general".

The early Welsh stories about Arthur sometimes call him amerawdwr, which is usually translated "emperor", but which could, like the Latin imperator from which it is derived, also be translated as "commander".

As far as I know, the earliest writing to call Arthur a king is Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, conventionally dated to 1136.

Wow, very interesting article. Thanks for posting. There’s something that makes you feel a little sad, seeing the site of “King Arthur’s Son’s grave” just a parking lot and a gas station.

While I see where you’re coming from, there is nothing sad about it at all. It’s actually quite beautiful that our world just keeps moving on. Impermanence is the only constant here and while I t is important to honour our history as humans, at what point do we draw the line between preservation and progress? Also, it’s a parking lot now but won’t always be a parking lot. 50,100 or even 1000 years from now, this same spot could become abandoned and overgrown with trees and nature (a random example scenario). Therefore coming full circle.

This is simply delightful. I'm so happy to be able to read about people going of on little adventures like this even though the results would be, expectedly, limited.

Limited in the UK, perhaps, but there are plenty of places without such limitations where written texts stretch back millennia. I have seen many things unnoticed by others but recorded in 1000 year old travelogues here in China.

What are some examples of those things??

Well, I was once hired to follow the Tang Dynasty travelogue of a buddhist monk who visited China from Japan in search of scriptures, and recorded his travels in a colloquial period Chinese diary. You can read about him[0] and the journey.[1] Some things that come to mind are temples still standing in the same area with the same name (though no doubt rebuilt), people still raising ducks on the same river bend mentioned 1000 years ago, and the same cities and towns with the same water features, mountains, and weather and the same seasons, surrounded by fields of the same crops (eg. mulberries for silkworms).

Entirely separately I have been translating another Tang Dynasty historical text[2] on Wikisource[3] and have visited and seen many of the mentioned places and cultural features: geography, people playing music on leaves or flutes, certain kinds of attire, flora and fauna, surviving remnants of period built and cultural environment such as Sanskrit carved stelae, recovered tomb ware, endemic foods and festivals, caves, neolithic paintings, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennin [1] http://pratyeka.org/ennin/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manshu [3] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu

I used to live a few miles from Richard's Castle. It's a beautiful area. There was an old unmarked motte and bailey castle down the road in a nearby field. The area's also know for fantastic fossils. I'd regularly find trilobites in what was an ancient lake bed.

This is incredibly well written.

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