Lyonesse

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Lyonesse, Lyoness, or Lyonnesse is the sunken land believed in legend to lie off the Isles of Scilly, to the south-west of Cornwall. It is sometimes associated with Avalon. The Trevelyan family of Cornwall takes its coat of arms from a local legend; "when Lyonesse sank beneath the waves only a man named Trevelyan escaped by riding a white horse." To this day the family's shield bears a white horse rising from the waves.

1 Lyonesse in Arthurian legend
2 Kings of Lyonesse
3 Lyonesse in Celtic mythology
4 Lyonesse in modern English-language fiction
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Lyonesse in Arthurian legend

According to Arthurian legend, Lyonesse is the birthplace of Tristan, son of King Meliodas (or Rivalen). One of the signs of King Arthur's return will be that Lyonesse will rise from the depths again.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, describes Lyonesse as the site of the final battle between Arthur and Mordred. One passage in particular references legends of Lyonesse as a land fated to sink beneath the ocean:

Then rose the King and moved his host by night

And ever pushed Sir Mordred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse--

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

A real-life counterpart to Lyonesse is the fishing port of Dunwich.

[edit] Kings of Lyonesse

There is evidence that in Roman times the Isles of Scilly were one large island, known as Siluram Insulam (or Sylina Insula). According to legend, Lyonesse stretched from Scilly to Land's End at the westernmost tip of Cornwall, and once had some 140 churches. Its capital was the City of Lions (sometimes given as Carlyon), located on what is now the treacherous Seven Stones reef. The names of the traditional kings of Lyonesse are derived from Welsh and Arthurian myth. Tristram Fawr may have been an historical Cornish character.

Ffelig (fl. circa 445)

All that is known of Ffelig, recorded as Felix, comes from the Prose Tristan and later Italian romances. In the latter stories, he was the father of Meliodas.

Meliodas ap Ffelig (fl. circa 475)

Son of Ffelig. Married Isabelle, daughter of King Meirchion of Cornwall.

Tristram Fawr, the Elder (fl. circa 510)

Son of Meliodias. The famous Tristram of Arthurian legend, he was sent by his maternal uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to fetch the latter's intended bride Iseult from Ireland. Tristram fell in love with Iseult, but ended up marrying a different woman of the same name, Iseult of the White Hands, whom he did not love. He eventually died of a broken heart, having been tricked by his jealous wife into thinking his true love had forsaken him.

Tristram Fychan, the Younger (died 537)

Son of Tristram Fawr. Only appears in the very late Italian I Due Tristani.

Following the Battle of Camlann, supposedly in 537, King Arthur's men fled west across Lyonesse, pursued by Mordred and his men. Arthur's men survived by reaching what are now the Isles of Scilly, but Mordred's men perished in the inundation.

[edit] Lyonesse in Celtic mythology

The legend of a sunken kingdom appears in both Cornish and Breton mythology. In Christian times it came to be viewed as a sort of Cornish Sodom and Gomorrah, an example of divine wrath provoked by unvirtuous living, although the parallels were limited in that Lyonesse remained in Cornish thought very much a mystical and mythical land, comparable to the role of Tir na nÓg in Irish mythology.

There is a Breton parallel in the tale of the Cité d'Ys, similarly drowned as a result of its debauchery with a single virtuous survivor escaping on a horse, in this case King Gradlon.

It is often suggested that the tale of Lyonesse represents an extraordinary survival of folk memory of the flooding of the Isles of Scilly and Mount's Bay near Penzance. For example, the Cornish name of St Michael's Mount is Carrack Looz en Cooz - literally, "the grey rock in the wood". Cornish people around Penzance still believe strongly in a sunken forest in Mount's Bay, archaeological evidence of the forest is visible at very low tides, where petrified tree stumps become visible. The importance of the maintenance of this memory can be seen in that it came to be associated with legendary British hero Arthur.

[edit] Lyonesse in modern English-language fiction

Lyonesse has been used as a setting for many modern fantasy stories, notably Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. In Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, Lyonesse is where refugees from Atlantis (the "Fair Folk") settle, the word Lyonesse being derived from the Celtic corruption of the word Atlantis. J. R. R. Tolkien drew some of his inspiration for the lost kingdom of Númenor from the legends of Lyonesse; one of the kingdom's many names in his mythos is "Westernesse". In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the narrator describes the Oxford of his youth as being "submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in…" In the film First Knight, Lyonesse is the home of Guinevere, a small land situated between Camelot and Malagant's territory. Lyonesse was ruled by Guinevere's father until his death, after which Guinevere became the "Lady of Lyonesse."