“The Keys to Avalon: The True Location of Arthur's Kingdom Revealed”, by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd

301 pages, Element Books, ISBN-13: 978-1862047358

Okay, so it’s like this: I went on an Arthurian kick in High School that lasted, oh, the better part of a decade. I bought a whole mess of books on Arthurian legends, tales and theories, and while the original Le Morte d’Arthur (reviewed by moi on August 6^th, 2012) thrilled me to no end, I was much more interested in the possibility of a real King Arthur, not in a fantasy monarch. And so any book I could find that promoted what was my fondest wish and desire was gold to me, and I bought a bunch of them. I mean, my library has a lot of Arthurian stuff on the shelves (or more accurately, in boxes). The Keys to Avalon: The True Location of Arthur’s Kingdom Revealed by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd is just one of those, purporting as it does to prove that Arthur was a prince from the area we know now as North Wales, with their basic being that the geography of Arthurian Britain is all wrong and that the error goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth; Blake and Lloyd believe that he translated a Welsh text similar to that known as the Brut y Brenhinedd (“Chronicle of the Kings”) into Latin and misidentified its place names.

The first problem with this theory is that, despite centuries of searching, no-one has ever found the text Geoffrey claimed to have translated (Brut y Brenhinedd is definitely not it). Okay then, so what about these place names? They point out that early Medieval Latin texts from Wales refer to “Wales” as “Britannia” and “England” as “Anglia”, a different country. They then assume that when Geoffrey and other medieval writers refer to “Britain” (in Latin or Welsh), they mean “Wales”, so that the Three Kingdoms of “Cymry”, “Lloegyr” and “Alban” are, respectively, “Wales”, “England” and “Scotland”, as has been assumed since at least the 13^th Century, but are in fact subdivisions of Wales (I hope you’re taking notes). This leads them down some very strange alleyways as just about all British early medieval history gets relocated to Wales and the Borders. Thus, Hengist and Horsa (known to the Venerable Bede in 731 as the invaders of Kent) are instead the Saxon invaders of Gwent, in south Wales. Bede himself, long associated with Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, both in northeast England, would be shocked indeed to learn that he was, according to Blake and Lloyd, headquartered in Cheshire!

I could go on but I won’t; suffice to say, my post-adolescent dreams of finding the Real King Arthur (No Foolin’!) were quite dashed by this rot. It’s hard to believe that ignorance on this level could have been responsible for all these errors, so perhaps they have something to do with the fact that the authors have acted as advisers to the North Wales tourist board on historical matters?