sbeep:

briarfox13:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

may-or-may-not-be-me:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

jackironsides:

zaatanna-moved:

anyway just a reminder for the myth lovers out there

king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.

on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.

i’m just saying in my experience a lot of these legends had been so anglo-fied in the past and it’s like, all this cool shit is celtic welsh legend.

Arthur’s wife was called Gwenhwyfar first.

Like the kraken I emerge, summoned by the English theft of Arthur

• Arthur is a Welsh name. It means ‘bear’. He’s likely derived from a Gaulish bear god
• In the form of King Arthur, he is an anti-Saxon mythological WELSH figure, representing the native Brythonic people of Britain against the Anglo-Saxon invaders, dating from the 500s AD
• The version appropriated by the English in the 1100s is the shitty boring sanitised version - they did it because they were trying to compete with the romance tradition on the continent at the time but didn’t have anything of their own to romanticise
• Merlin is called Myrddin
• Percival is Peredur
• Kay is Cei, and also was subject to enormous character assassination in the English version - in the Welsh version he’s much closer to Arthur’s right hand man
• Guinevere is Gwenhwyfar
• There is no Lancelot, no Galahad, no tedious affair story
• There is no Camelot. Arthur’s seat was Caerllion - modern Caerleon, putting him into both the region of the Silures (one of the most fearsome and warlike of the British tribes, modern South East Wales) and the old Roman fortress, which would have been an impossibly huge Palace for a warlord at the time.
• They all have super powers and get up to wacky hijinks involving hair care, giants, strange giant wildlife, spectral revolving/glass fortresses in the Celtic sea, and a really fucking weird chess match. Also a cloak made out of beards.
• What the fuck is the round table

Anyway it’s particularly irritating because traditional Welsh culture and beliefs have been so thoroughly stripped away and destroyed by England over the centuries, and Arthurian legend is one of the few surviving fragments we have left to preserve. And he’s specifically an anti-English figure. So the ubiquity of the boring and appropriative English Arthur across the whole fucking world is… Well, it’s not great.

This is so interesting! Does anyone know a good source/reading material where one could get more of the original Welsh versions of the stories?

The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies is your best bet! It’s got a bunch of big-ass Welsh myths in, but most relevantly it includes Culhwch ac Olwen, which is a full-on Arthurian text (plus a couple of interesting ones).

There’s a whole bunch more that’s survived in fragments, but they’re all in Old Welsh - fully readable if you speak Welsh, but obviously not much use if you don’t (I don’t know if you do or not but from context I’m guessing not lol).

There’s ‘The Black Book of Carmarthen’ too! Currently it’s housed in The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

That contains quite a few stories and is thought to the oldest surviving manuscript text soley in Welsh (I believe). There should a few translations online!

And in local legend Merlin was born in Carmarthen! There’s even a cave that is one of the places he’s meant to be sleeping in.

Good history facts and also want to add that the “Britons” are not the catch all inhabitants of the modern British isles (thought its become muddled up as a term for English, Welsh and Scottish) they were the people here on the islands before the saxons invaded and pushed back into Wales and Scotland and Cornwall.

Theres a quote from the fictional Last Kingdom series that sums it up concisely and violently. “Im a Briton, lord, I was brought up killing saxons”.

King Arthur is a figure and a myth from a time before there even was an England. We might have retold it like the romans retold all the greek stories, but if you’re going crazy on The Green Knight this summer that good! Its all ancient by now, and most versions of ancient myths are fun in their own way but try to remember he harks back to the people that became Wales and you’ll have an excellent time digging through the original myths and the roots of it in the oppression of an ethic group thats lasted for well over 1000yrs.

torsamors:

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ten-and-donna:

chilewithcarnage:

tiktoksthataregood:

the utter ecstasy of “is that lavENDER?” is what sells it for me

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kaasbolletje:

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witchys-stuff-deactivated202005:

Good morning 🌱🍄🐁

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love-the-person-you-are:

-

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loverdeluxe:

please be kind to yourself and stand up for yourself

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izziessogay:

lesbian culture is having a “crush” on young Leonardo DiCaprio when you were little, but thinking he became more unattractive as he got older while everyone else told you the exact opposite

izziessogay:

wlw fashion sense is exclusively inspired by the members of the breakfast club and I am not wrong

I mean…

(via manywinged)

watermelons-writings:

concerningwolves:

what-even-is-thiss:

Wait a minute if elves take a hundred years to grow up that has some weird implications.

So… if we say a human comes of age in fantasy worlds at 16, that means it takes an elf 6.25 years to age one human year. If we say the age of maturity is 18 that’s 5.55 years.

So then… okay with people that live a long time have to see their human friends die and probably see them like pets yeah that’s been explored to death. But what about a human just seeing their friend not grow up?

An elf toddler and a human toddler become friends at a playdate. At the time the human is two and the elf is 13. Emotionally the elf is just a little older than the human. But then the human grows up. He grows up and as he grows up his friend doesn’t. Not much, anyways.

She’s still sucking her thumb and throwing tantrums the entire time that he grows up. When he reaches the age where he’d choose a trade or go to an academy he’s earning extra money by babysitting her. During his initiation into adulthood on his 18th birthday she’s there with her parents holding a stuffed animal. Later that afternoon he sees her being shown some colorful flashcards with letters of the elvish alphabet on it by her father.

The human gets older. He learns how to fight, he goes from town to town getting work. At some point he joins the army. Every time he visits his hometown he has at least one more scar and by the time he’s 30 and the elf girl is mentally seven by human standards she starts to understand that something is wrong. Even after he settles down to be a home maker for the local blacksmith something feels wrong.

And she watches him grow old. When she’s in her 80s she babysits his grandchildren for extra cash after school, coming over in her school robes and ruffling his hair. She doesn’t remember why she became friends with this human or when but a strange sense of jealousy fills her heart.

Now she realizes it. She realizes it too late, on the day her friend learns that he is dying. The first day of her 100th year and the start of his last. Humans’ lifetimes may only last for the childhood of an elf if they’re lucky, but they learn so fast. They do so much. They cram their days full of love and hate and learning and wonder.

He knew this was coming. He knew all of this decades before she did, because elves are slow. Not stupid, certainly not stupid, but very very slow. She holds her old friend’s hand as he lays down on his bed. A man that has led such an ordinary life but feels so extraordinary to her. Because he has always, always been there and now he just won’t. Because in her eyes he became so wise so fast and now he’s just gonna be gone.

On an elf’s 100th birthday they are allowed to choose a new name for themselves. It can be important, or not. Usually it will follow them until the end of time. She stands in front of her family’s elders and is asked what name she will be called from now on.

She names herself after him.

just tear my heart out and stamp on it why don’t you?

oh i LOVE this as a concept

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