button to main menu  Gents Mag 1901 part 1 p.102
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Gentleman's Magazine 1901 part 1 p.102

  King Arthur
  placenames
Placenames and King Arthur


ARTHURIAN PLACE-NAMES.

FROM the Rev. Sabine-Gould, Dr. Dickinson gives a list of Arthurian localities in Cornwall, Britanny, Wales, and Northern England, extending to Scotland. Some are, of course, well known in legend, as King Arthur's Castle at Tintagel, where the king is said to have been born; Caerleon-upon-Usk, where, according to Nennius, a great battle was fought; and Arthur's Seat, to which it has been vainly sought to give a Gaelic meaning. According to the latest authorities, the district between Penrith and Strathmore is the richest in such associations. There are three Arthur's Seats, and two Arthur's Round Tables, besides Arthur's Stone, Arthur's Oven, Arthur's Chair, Arthur's Camp, &c. &c. There are also Merlin's Fountain and Grave and Mordred's Castle. This is far indeed from exhausting the list. Are we, then, to suppose that all these names are bestowed in connection with people who never lived?
As I stated at the outset, I shall not attempt to decide a question still eagerly contested. Every sympathy I have is in favour of establishing Arthur as King of the Silures, and accepting as real personages Sir Bors, Sir Gawaine, Sir Galahad, Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin, Vivien, the Knights of the Table Round, and even the

Faery damsels, met in forest wide
By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellinor.
Not without pang would I sacrifice the stories which are among the fairest things in literature, which inspired the prose of Malory and the poetry of Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne, and a score others, and were selected by Milton as a fitting subject for an epic poem.
Concerning these beings, Miss Jessie Weston very pleasingly says, "Children of a land of eternal youth, Arthur and his knights are ever young. It is indeed a special attraction about the heroes of the Arthurian cycle, which roused the bile of splenetic Roger Ascham, that they consitute a domain in which one is never weary. As Thompson says in "The Castle of Indolence":-

A pleasing land of drowsy-hed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky.
To employ once more an assertion of Leigh Hunt concerning "The Fairy Queen," which is equally applicable to the Arthurian romances, a lover of poetry would no more tire of them than he would of
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