For thousands of years, we have struggled with the deaths of our idols; we knit conspiracy theories, we tell tales of ‘fake deaths’ and we refuse to believe that the stories of our heroes have drawn to an end. In our hearts we believe we haven’t seen the last of them, and we wait patiently to be proved right.
Legends of warriors who sleep beneath the Earth, waiting for a renaissance, can be found across the British Isles. Eventually I hope to collect all their tales here, or as many as I can – for this post, I am going to concentrate on the Once and Future King himself, King Arthur.
This enduring legend has stayed with me since I first read it as a young child. The story gives the location of Arthur’s mountain as a crag named Craig y Ddinas in Glynneath, Wales. (Other tales give different locations, but that is one of the most charming things about folk stories – passed as songs or poems or tales told by firelight, the details become lost and the locations change, but the thread of the story remains the same.) In my favourite version, Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table lie sleeping in a chamber far beneath the hill, arranged in a vast circle, their swords and shields beside them. Their luminous armour fills the cavern with light, and glinting in the centre of the circle lie two huge piles of coins – one silver, one gold. A bell hangs in the entrance; when this bell is rung, it will wake the Warriors from their enchanted slumber and they will rise to defend their country once more.
In some versions, the story begins with a Welshman who is led to the cavern entrance by a strange, wizard-like figure, who advises him to take only as much gold as he needs, and warns him not to ring the bell lest he accidentally wakes the Knights. The wizard says that if the bell is rung, a knight will ask “Is it time?” to which the man should reply “No, not yet, sleep on”. On his first visit, the bell is rung but the man remembers his words, and escapes unscathed with his pockets full of gold coins. Growing greedy, he returns to the cavern once more; this time, in his haste to escape, he hits the bell on his retreat, and forgets what he must say – the knights break his bones and fling him out onto the road, and he never again finds the entrance to the cavern, no matter how hard he searches.
There is another version of this tale that has its roots very locally to me – Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is set in Alderley Edge in Cheshire (about two miles from my house). Garner’s version has the Edge housing an army of one hundred and forty knights who lie in an enchanted sleep beneath the rocks. If anyone feels like visiting me for a ‘research trip’ one day, do let me know…
