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  • Finding Camlann: A Novel by Sean Pidgeon
  • Raymond H. Thompson
Sean Pidgeon, Finding Camlann: A Novel. New York: Norton, 2013. Pp. 352. ISBN: 978–0–39324–015–0. $26.95.

This novel is set in south-west England and Wales in the present day. After a chance meeting in a pub, Donald, an archaeologist, and Julia, a researcher on the Oxford English Dictionary, renew a brief acquaintance from their student days at Oxford. He is recently divorced and writing a book challenging claims that Arthur was a war leader in post-Roman Britain; she is in a failing marriage with Hugh Mortimer, descendant of the famous Marcher lord family. Thus begins a series of inter-related searches, stretching from the ancient past, through the Dark and Middle Ages, to a haunting tragedy of more recent vintage, which has left its mark upon the lives of all involved. As Julia observes, ‘It’s all about layers,…layers in the rock, your human layers on top’ (31).

The deepest layer is, of course, Arthur, and the search for his identity is sparked when a team of archaeologists unearths human skeletons in a deep pit near Stonehenge: thirteen died the threefold death, skulls crushed, abdomens impaled, bodies tossed into the water-filled pit; above them lie the bones of a male of great stature, and above him those of a female clutching a ceramic cup to her chest. While experts debate this momentous find, Donald and Julia set out on their multi-layered quest.

They find their first clue in The Song of Lailoken, a Middle Welsh poem composed in the fifteenth century by Siôn Cent, the bard of Owain Glyn Dŵr. Bound in a mold-damaged collection of manuscripts discovered some fifty years earlier by Caradoc Bowen, a professor of Welsh at Oxford, the poem describes how Arthur fought against a ‘black enchantress’ (87), who drained ‘blood of men three-times slain’ (86). He killed her and one of her champions, but the other, Madarakt, fled; they meet again in a final battle where both die. Bowen interprets the poem as the bard’s attempt to present Glyn Dŵr as Arthur returned to rally his people against the English; he dismisses Siôn’s claim of an ancient source as a convenient fiction, like that by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

But by now their search has taken on a life of its own, and as further information emerges, it draws them ever deeper towards unexpected conclusions: the bones date, not from the fifth century as first assumed, but from the beginning of the first [End Page 154] millennium BC; the mold-damaged part of the codex is stabilized by conservators at the Bodleian and dated to the end of the sixth century. Moreover, the recovered fragments turn out to be written by St. Cyndeyrn (Kentigern), and they include an earlier version of The Song of Lailoken. Siôn Cent later rendered it from sixth-century Brythonic into Middle Welsh and added two final stanzas. And then a ring is found in a sacristy chest from a monastic crypt in Wales, and it bears the initials GM….

All this, needless to say, is an Arthurian scholar’s delight. Archaeological evidence and an ancient poem that shed light upon the historical Arthur, the discovery of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s lost source, a complex puzzle to challenge research skills, the cut and thrust of academic debate, problems with publishers, a likeable pair of scholarly protagonists struggling with disappointments in their lives, but given the chance to find happiness again with an old flame as they bond on a shared quest: what’s not to like? There is even, appropriately, a touch of mysticism. With her dying breath, the enchantress in The Song of Lailoken curses the bard: ‘Three times reborn, three times you will die/By stone, by stake, by water’ (129). And did not Professor Bowen, who dies by drowning (as he himself foresaw), experience frighteningly vivid dreams of having lived (and painfully died) twice before? By stone and by stake, no less, and him a poet in his own right as well as an inspirational voice for Welsh nationalism...

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