The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [216]
Then Arthur fought against them in those days, with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was the leader of battles. The first battle was at the mouth of the river which is called Glein. The second, third, fourth and fifth, on another river, which is called Dubglas, and is in the region of Linnuis. The sixth battle was on the river which is called Bassas. The seventh was a battle in the wood of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was the battle at Castellum Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of Saint Mary, ever Virgin, on his shoulders, and the pagans were put to flight on that day and there was a great slaughter of them through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of Saint Mary the Virgin, his mother. The ninth battle was fought at the City of the Legions. The tenth battle he fought on the river, which is called Tribuit. The eleventh occurred on the mountain, which is called Agned. The twelfth was the battle on Mount Badon, in which there fell together in one day 960 men in one onset of Arthur, and no one laid them low save himself alone. And in all the battles he remained victor.
Only two of these battles can be located with any kind of certainty: that in the Caledonian Forest -- the Old Caledonian Forest that stretched down from Strathclyde into the modern Lake District -- and the one at the City of Legions, which could be either Chester or Caerleon. I have contented myself with using Nennius' own place-names, and identifying only one other, the battle of the River Tribuit. It has been suggested that this is an early name of the River Ribble. There is a place where the old Roman road crosses the Ribble and heads toward the Aire Gap (the "Pennine Gap"). This is called Nappa or Nappay Ford, and local tradition remembers a battle there. The nearby camp that I have called "Tribuit" was at Long Preston; the other two in the Gap were of course Elslack and Ilkley. I also made use of a tradition that Arthur fought at High Rochester (Bremenium) in the Cheviots. Apart from these two "battle sites" I have inserted none in the map.
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Blaise. According to Malory, Blaise "wrote down Arthur's battles word for word," a chronicle which, if it ever existed, has vanished utterly. I took the liberty of building in a destructive agent in the person of Gildas, the young son of Caw of Strathclyde and brother of Heuil. These are historic personages. We are told that Arthur and Heuil hated one another. Gildas the monk, writing in about A.D. 540, refers to the victory of "Mount Badon," but without mentioning Arthur by name. This has been interpreted as a sign, at the least, of disapproval of a leader who had shown himself no friend to the Church.
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Merlin's illness. The episode in the Wild Forest is taken from the story of Merlin's madness as told in the Vita Merlini, a twelfth-century Latin poem commonly ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. This is in part a retelling of the older Celtic "Lailoken" tale of the madman who roamed the Caledonian Forest. Merlin-Lailoken was present at the battle of Arfderydd (the modern Arthuret, near Carlisle), where his friend, the king, was killed. Driven mad by grief, he fled into the forest, where he eked out a wretched existence.
There are two poems in The Black Book of Carmarthen that are attributed to him. In one he describes the apple tree that shelters and feeds him in the forest; in the other he addresses the piglet which is his sole companion.
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Guenever and Guinevere. Tradition asserts that Arthur had two wives of the same name, or even three -- though this was probably only a conveniently poetic round number. The rape of