Ancient Legends Retold: The Legend of Vortigern E-Book

Simon Heywood

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Ancient Legends Retold
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 131

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

'My name is Vortigern ... ' Generations before Arthur's birth, a British warlord looks back on his life: his rise from humble roots to shake the thrones of a dying empire; his stand against chaos amid the aftermath of Rome; his struggle with the greedy, embittered princes of church and kingdom; his loves and his losses, and his last encounter with his own mysterious destiny, on a mountain where the world we know is beginning to take shape before his eyes. Vortigern's voice speaks from the heart of a forgotten darkness, telling a story of courage and cowardice, glory and crime, tragedy and treason.

Leseprobe

To my parents

Illustrations by Samantha Galbraith

Contents

Title

Dedication

Ancient Legends Retold: An Introduction to the Series

Foreword

Prologue

One

Man of the West

Two

A Hide of Land

Three

The Heart of the Storm

Four

The Child of Time

Five

King on the Mountain

Copyright

Ancient Legends Retold:An Introduction to the Series

This book represents a new and exciting collaboration between publishers and storytellers. It is part of a series in which each book contains an ancient legend, reworked for the page by a storyteller who has lived with and told the story for a long time.

Storytelling is the art of sharing spoken versions of traditional tales. Today’s storytellers are the carriers of a rich oral culture, which is flourishing across Britain in storytelling clubs, theatres, cafés, bars and meeting places, both indoors and out. These storytellers, members of the storytelling revival, draw on books of traditional tales for much of their repertoire.

The partnership between The History Press and professional storytellers is introducing a new and important dimension to the storytelling revival. Some of the best contemporary storytellers are creating definitive versions of the tales they love for this series. In this way, stories first found on the page, but shaped ‘on the wind’ of a storyteller’s breath, are once more appearing in written form, imbued with new life and energy.

My thanks go first to Nicola Guy, a commissioning editor at The History Press, who has championed the series, and secondly to my friends and fellow storytellers, who have dared to be part of something new.

Fiona Collins, Series Originator, 2013

Foreword

Vortigern is an enigma. A figure of rumour from a little-known age; a king of mysteriously questionable standing; a friend of his people’s enemies – he is a riddle on more than one count. Even his name has been suspected of being merely a title. It means ‘Great Chieftain’.

Like all legends, Vortigern’s neglected story hangs in the balance between truth and imagination. His world is Britain in the mid-fifth century, a few decades after Britain mysteriously dropped off the map of the Roman Empire. Until the early 400s, Britain was part of the Roman world: Celtic in heritage and language, but Christian in religion, and fairly Latin and literate in education. Then, shortly after AD 400, something happened. Exactly what, we don’t know. For two centuries afterwards, virtually nobody wrote anything in or about Britain that we can still read, and archaeology tells us only so much. But when the art of writing began to flourish in Britain again, around AD 600, a network of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was settled across the South and East. English was spoken and written in these kingdoms, and oral and literate traditions testify to a long, violent and tumultuous age of migration and conquest from Northern Europe. The English had arrived in Britain.

Like Arthur, Vortigern is a British ruler, featuring in legends relating to this mysterious period. His career is defined by generational wars, among his own people – the Celtic British – and against the encroaching English. He bulks large in the Matter of Britain, the medieval legend-cycle which numbers Lear, Cymbeline and Arthur amongst its dozens of kings. If Arthur embodies a sense that Britain was hardy enough to flourish even in adversity, Vortigern’s voice is an older, more anguished one, closer to the raw shock of Britain’s apparent abandonment to her enemies by the ebbing power of Rome. If his age really was a Dark Age, then, unlike Arthur, Vortigern speaks to us bluntly, from the heart of its darkness. Small wonder if he has been ignored; and if not ignored, then usually blamed. But, of the two heroes, Vortigern is the better attested in terms of historical fact, for Gildas mentions him.

Gildas is one of the few writers we know from fifth-century Britain; his work is a Christian denunciation of the British kings and rulers of his own day. Gildas describes an unnamed ‘proud tyrant’ who took the epochal step of inviting the English to Britain as mercenaries, around the middle of the century. This sounds like it was Vortigern; the description may be a pun on his name.

Vortigern is named in the work of the eighth-century monk-historian Bede, which draws on Gildas’ account. Since Bede was English, and Gildas himself appears to have derived some of his knowledge from English sources, there seems to have always been a strong English influence on the extant tales of this British ruler. However, the unknown Welsh author of the ninth-century History of the Britons draws on a biography of Vortigern’s enemy, St Germanus of Auxerre, to present Vortigern as evil, rather than foolish, unlucky or tragic. Evil is how Vortigern has tended to appear ever afterwards – when he has not been forgotten entirely.

Obscure as he remains, Vortigern has never gone away. People may not know his story nowadays, but they have often heard his name. I already felt vaguely and mysteriously familiar with his name when I first read it in another English source, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. There is more to this than the half-afterlife Vortigern enjoys as a minor character in modern Arthurian fiction, for his roots run deep. He maintains a presence in Welsh tradition, giving his name to ruins and topographical features (Nant Gwrtheyrn), besides a whole medieval district (Guorthigirniaun) in Powys, of whose royal house he is reckoned to be an ancestor.

This account of Vortigern’s legend is based on the best-known medieval version, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain. In most respects Geoffrey was a very long way from the real fifth century. But rereading his account, and returning to it repeatedly for guidance, leaves me convinced that he was not a bad historian, as some have thought him, but a storyteller. Or, at the very least, he was a diligent student of storytelling traditions which had harboured Vortigern’s tale since its inception, which Professor Ifor Williams places among the cyfarwyddiaid – the professional storytellers of medieval Wales. My guess is that some of these masters found Vortigern less flatly wicked than Geoffrey admitted. Accordingly, although I have followed Geoffrey in putting legend before history in my loyalties, I have parted company with him in looking for more than a simple villain behind the mysterious name. But I have not forgotten Vortigern’s frailties, or the sorrow of his times. Also, I have sought a glimpse, within the Celtic British heartland, the Albion of legend, of the lost realm which Geoffrey calls Loegria, now lying half-submerged beneath England. Geoffrey, I hope, would approve.

I have done my best to represent legendary Albion in readable terms, but for clarity it may help to note that my Carglu is Geoffrey’s Kaerglou – the settlement which the English called Gloucester; Armor is Armorica, or Brittany; Habren is the Severn; the Mor Habren is the Severn Sea – the Bristol Channel; Rydychen is Oxford; Carguent is Kaerguenit, now Winchester; Car Ebrac is York; Erith is Eryri, that is, Snowdonia; Cernow is Cornwall; Carcaradoc is Salisbury; and Mordun is Carmarthen.

My thanks go to my wife Shonaleigh, for her invaluable comments on early drafts.

Sincere thanks must also go to Nicola Guy at the History Press, and Dr Fiona Collins, the series instigator.

Simon Heywood, 2013

Prologue

Among the western mountains stand the ruins of a tower. Even in your days, you can still see it, if you know where to look. It will strike you as a broken thing, a thing of no account.

Let it. It has weathered storms you know nothing of. And you will think it no more broken than I once thought the ruin of greater things. When I was a man, empires were crumbling which seemed to have lasted since the world began; empires which had been meant to stand forever.

It was wonderful and terrible in those days to listen to the silence that haunted the ruins. Above the wind in the grass around a warlord’s abandoned stronghold, or the larks above the broken stones of a hermit’s empty chapel, it would seem as if a voice had just fallen silent, after whispering a litany of half-forgotten names: the names of our forefathers of the line of Brutus the old – the high kings and the warriors of Albion.

King as I was myself, I raised the walls of that tower in the western mountains. I raised them with my own hands. And, building them, my hands touched the adorable and pitiless mystery of the world: the mystery of power; the mystery of war; even the mystery of love. And I did not see God face to face; but, before the end came, with my own two waking eyes I saw the great mystery of the created world, like a mingled cloud of mist and fire across the skies. And I held converse with it, and through it I gave Albion her last and greatest blessing.

Everything has been taken from me now.

It is enough for me to foresee you, standing amid the ruins of my tower, catching the echoes of the names of my own friends and servants, and my victims and enemies, and those whose victim I myself became; even perhaps my own name.

My name is Vortigern.

One

Man of the West

When Rome fell, leaving Britain in darkness; when news came no more along the ruined roads and narrow seas, only rumours of war about the palaces of Ravenna, in the long shadow of Attila; when harvests failed, and plague and famine swallowed whole families, houses, and villages – until an unwary traveller might stumble across a silent village of corpses; when silver money grew worthless, and weak as prayer; when outer tribes grew restless again, and harried the coasts of Britain, and beat at the northern wall that Hadrian built; when wealthy townsfolk scavenged for food and fire, and murder was done again for bread or kindling; when the rich buried their gold in their villa gardens, never to unearth it again; in those days, the kings returned to Britain, and ruled its peoples, as they had ruled Albion of old.

The civic councils of Rome could no longer rule the towns, or govern the remote villages or forest peoples. Half-starved councillors continued to issue Latin proclamations which were barely read. Outside the council chambers, men of another kind were beginning to lord it over the common peoples. In the space of a few short years, there was scarcely a household or village in Britain that did not bow in fear to them. Only the bishops and church-priests condemned their sins, because they envied their burgeoning power.

At first, the warlords were no more than petty kings. They could not withstand the tribes that battered the northern wall and the eastern coasts, or the slave raiders of the north-west; they were too busy quarrelling with each other, for wealth and power, land and grain, ships and trade routes, ore from the mines, and slaves from the mountains. Some were no more than nameless brigands. But many bore the names of kings who had reigned in Britain before Rome was made. The old chieftains had faded into the grass when Rome came. But when Rome fell, their grandsons came out of hiding, and crowned themselves kings.

So it was often said, at least. It is easy to lie about one’s ancestry when one has a sword to make good the lie. But I truly believe that the blood of Brutus the old, the founder of Britain, did run in the veins of some of the warlords, though it did not make them better men.

And since my own father had no such blood in his veins that anyone knew of, the old chieftains called him a common brigand and tyrant when he finally put down the city council in Carleon in the west, and took the wild hinterlands under his protection, and so became ruler of a new little kingdom, which inherited the name of Gwent.

Carleon was worth holding on to: it was like a little Rome in the wilderness, a refuge of quiet and order and learning. Our most powerful neighbours, the chieftains of Carglu, were children of Brutus the old by name and line. But they lived in an open sty on a hilltop, penned in under the sky like beasts, behind earthen ring-ditches and ramparts which they believed were the tracks of old dragons from before the flood. And they lived by pillaging their own peoples in village and forest, and they still feared and hated stone houses as their forefathers had. And these were the people who called us tyrants.

But my story is part of the story of the chieftains, new and old, so I will begin it with the best of them: Constantine, of the house of Conan, who was king far off to the east, in London, when I was a boy.

Constantine was a very rich lord in Armor, across the narrow seas. The lords of Armor held all the coasts of Gaul; they were the richest lords in all the West. Britain was no great matter to them. Constantine could have taken Rome itself by conquest. But the church-priests of London offered him the throne in fear of the British warlords, and he took it.

Stranger though he was by birth, Constantine ruled as a true king. He married a British queen. She bore him an heir, a son who spoke British, and they called this boy Constans after his father. But despite his name, he was such a born idiot that they had to make a monk of him, and all London soon forgot him.

For a while, the king was too busy to father more sons. He was forcing peace on the quarrelling warlords. He even herded them into a kind of council: his Long Table, he called it. This pleased the priests who had invited him, and it was a wonder to the poor people. Constantine protected the churchless priesthoods, too: the hermits and holy people, the hedge-priests and mountain-priests and street-preachers, who had roamed the villages and towns for generations without ever setting foot within a stone church, each doing his own service to his own Lord Christ.

When all these things were done, Constantine brought treasure and men from Armor, and marched north to face the tribes. Constantine called these new legions his Household Gauls. The warlords, newly penned in around Constantine’s Long Table, hated and feared them. But within the space of a few summers, the Household Gauls had humbled and overthrown the outer tribes and the slave-raiders. Constantine made a peace so generous that even his old enemies acknowledged his friendship. For a few brief summers, it must have seemed that the heyday of Rome had come again.

On his return from the North, Constantine made up for lost time in other matters, and the queen soon bore him twins: healthy, strong-willed sons, whom he christened Aurel and Uther. They were the only lawful brothers Constans the monk was ever to have. My father met them as children, and he would often say to me that either or both of them might easily take the throne of London one day, when they came to manhood. Constantine established the infant twins with their mother, in a household of their own, some way north of London. He had them brought up by tame priests and powerful friends. Among these friends were the chieftains of Carglu; but there was little that we in Gwent could do about that.