There are massive issues here and I am not even going to begin to tackle them this evening but I will note some points:
the British are not the English;
according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the British, like the Romans, are descended from the Trojans;
according to "Anglo-Israel theory," the British are the ten lost tribes of Israel (although "Anglo-" confuses the issue a bit);
according to Sir Malachi Sheldrake, the English are the ten lost tribes;
his evidence is the works of the Great Historian which show English people in Troy, Athens, Rome and Denmark;
A Midsummer Tempest is a work of fantasy in which such ideas can be taken seriously.
The three big discoveries of my teens were that:
Romulus was (supposed to be) descended from Aeneas;
the Aesir would die at the Ragnarok;
the Buddha was not a strange god but a compassionate man.
Onward.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
My first reaction was to dismiss British Israelitism as sheer nonsense and twaddle! But then I recalled A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST is alternate worlds science fiction--which means that something which is laughably false in our timeline just might be true in another universe.
Ad astra! Sean
It's one of history's ironies that the English took up Arthur as a culture-hero, when of course he was Welsh (more or less) and won his fame fighting the... invading English (or their Angle, Saxon and Jutish ancestors).
Incidentally, "Welsh" is from the Old English term for Britons/Celts: wealsc, also meaning "slave, servile, inferior" as well.
As usual, the name a group gives itself is usually a self-glorifying boast, and the one it gives the neighbors is generally a gross insult.Oh,
Oh, and the Breton ("British" -- descended from Britons who fled the Saxons) word for "English person" was "Saoz", "Saxon", usually qualified as "gast Saoz" -- "Saxon whore".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And shadowy figure who became "King Arthur" was probably not even "Welsh"! Rather, "Arthur" was probably a Romano-Briton warlord of the first half of the fifth century AD, fighting against the invading Angles/Jutes/Saxons as the Western Empire was falling.
And hostile peoples usually called each other bad names? Ha! I recall how the French and British were slanging each other exactly like that right up until recent times!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, but a Romano-British warlord would have been a Briton, ethnically, and would have spoken the Britannic language, a Celtic speech ancestral to Welsh (and Cornish and Breton) and common throughout Britain (except possibly among the Picts) from before the Roman conquest.
Hence, proto-Welsh (or proto-Cornish or proto-Breton).
Irish was related to this language and in the 400's CE probably still mutually comprehensible with it, or nearly, but part of a distinctive branch of Celtic that became increasingly distinct.
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