![]() ![]() Main text and footnotes have been designed to make a stylized literary whole: their scholarship, though grounded in extensive research in the sources, rather than being intended strictly academically, has been fictionalized and re-shaped towards serving the projected poem’s mythopœic purpose. The Synopsis also serves to cite the sources used, show how these have been re-handled in drawing upon them, while suggesting a palimpsest-like summa of the Insular tradition of lore. The chief goals of The Synopsis are thus to put the familiar main narrative on a renewed footing and render it coherent and to re-motivate the familiar main characters to render consistent and justified their actions. But the outcome proves to be a radical reinterpretation of the mythos, not least inflicting a "blasphemous" turning inside-out of Merlin, or what had come to be the popular modern idea of Merlin: I like to think it a return to the authentic mediaeval figure or even what lay behind that. The spine of the Arthurian story is linked back together, the narrative reconcatenated and remotivated as a single coherent sweep, whilst cleaving faithfully to that "evidence" recorded in the tradition. What, as it were, must really have happened? The Synopsis presents what I came up with. This I undertook, by following the clues, "the evidence" handed down embedded in the traditional sources (allowing myself also the resources of other but kindred Insular lore), as in a detective thriller. To re-forge and hone the sword from the old shards. ![]() Published 2018, I had begun work on the enterprise of an epic, at least in waking thought, in the early 1990s when I was a teenager at school.There was this nagging question that came to bother the adolescent more and more I worried at it: Could the Arthurian story be made, as by a turn of the kaleidoscope, to make sense? I perceived that, owing to the nature (that nature due to obvious historical reasons) of the mass of bequeathed material, it would be needful to find a way to render the kernel or nucleus of the Arthurian legend coherent. This is a prose treatise, 'The Island of the Mighty', a Synopsis furnishing a re-interpretation of The Matter of Britain for an Arthurian epic. ![]()
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