“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?

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, by Peggy Noonan

 

255 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0679401605

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is Peggy Noonan’s (y’know, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter?), memoirs of…well, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; as such, it is a hodge-podge collection of thoughts and essays covering a wide variety of topics, with the first part mainly on how a lack of vision by the Republican Party led to Clinton’s election in 1992, and the later essays being mainly about personal transition, including that of becoming a single parent and returning to spiritual values (oh, and it was published way back in 1994). It takes a while to adapt to Noonan’s New Yawker, post-modern, stream-of-consciousness style, but once you do adjust, it’s a rather fun read. Don’t worry, though; the whole book isn’t that way, just yuge swathes of it (evidently, that is the style designed to capture people brought up with short attention spans).

Noonan has lived the examined life, but in writing of one of her former employers (Ronald Reagan) she observed that the unexamined life actually IS worth living, contrary to the ancient philosopher’s assertion. In this book, Noonan asks herself, as her readers peer into her private thoughts: “What do I want my life to mean? What do I want the obit to say, what do I want for the lead?” A similar observation is found in her comparison between individual gifts: of a social acquaintance she writes, “He thinks intelligence is a virtue when of course, it’s not, virtue is a virtue, intelligence is a gift”. She reminds us of the reality that Christianity is really for rebels, for when society accepts it and tries to repackage it it loses its authenticity, as Christians historically have been falsely accused, forced underground and even murdered, but regardless of what pagans do to destroy their faith, it just grows stronger all the time, so she’s not overly concerned that the current social structure seems to reject it (who was it that said “Christianity is like a nail: the harder you strike it, the deeper it goes”?). She says it helps it maintain its authenticity; after all, Jesus predicted such treatment for His followers.

You’ll like this book if you’re interested in both personal reflection and glimpses of cultural change as Noonan combines Macro and Micro analyses in a colorful flow. Like a world class communicator should, she keeps the audience engaged and, all-in-all, I can say that I think she is my favorite Baby Boomer.

“Why Do We Say It? The Stories Behind the Words, Expressions and Cliches We Use”, by Castle Books

286 pages, Castle Books, ISBN-13: 978-1555210106

Say, do you think that Castle Books knew they misspelled “clichés” when they printed Why Do We Say It? The Stories Behind the Words, Expressions and Cliches We Use? Guess not. Anyhoo…knowing the background story behind idioms, expressions and colloquialisms can be very fun and entertaining; it can also help you to use the expressions better or in interesting ways. Alas, this book has not been helpful to me in any of these things and is not to be trusted as an authoritative source for any given information. I have a collection of several other books whose purpose is to explain word and phrase origins and all of the respectable ones warrant, with admirable frequency, that the origin of such-and-such phrase is unknown or in dispute. Often multiple possible etymologies are given as possibilities.

This book, by contrast, never questions its own authority; it just hands down decrees on phrase origins – some of which I cross-checked against other sources in my collection and found contradictory evidence, or reports that the explanation given here had been discredited long ago. Even more alarmingly, this source lists no sources (hell, according to this, there isn’t even an author or an editor); no prefatory or post-script explanation of how this collection came to be; no credits, acknowledgments or history of printing. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. From the sheer number of entries that had, by the time of this printing – 1985, reissued in 2009 – completely disappeared from common speech, one must assume that the text was originally published decades previously, had fallen into public domain and was reprinted for no other reason than to make a quick buck.