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.
Humans are cool and good actually it’s just colonialism and capitalism that you’re mad at
We’re made to tell stories and braid each other’s hair and build things and fucking help people and we’re just as much part of the earth as all the other living organisms on this bitch y'all just made guns and money and decided the world is something to conquer welcome to my tedtalk
me remembering that luke and rey didn’t even have a good relationship and we didn’t get to see them as a parental relationship or even as friends
cant believe they expected us to believe luke saw rey; a lonely kid from a desert planet dreaming about finding her parents, struggling with her identity, and dealing with the weight and pressure of bringing back the jedi…. and he didnt want to help her. not only that, they also made them argue the whole time. SICK
the real luke skywalker would meet rey and be like oh i know you. i’m your dad now. i can teach you three things: how to Force, how to make the perfect cup of hot chocolate, and how to destroy fascists. let’s go do barrel-rolls in x-wings
