Avalon

Avalon is the enchanted otherworld-island of Celtic and Arthurian legend, most famous as the place to which the mortally wounded King Arthur is carried across the water to be healed. Its name is usually connected to the Welsh and Breton word for "apple" (afal), making it the "isle of apples", an orchard-paradise of the kind common in Celtic imagining of the otherworld, a land just beyond the mortal one where sickness and age lose their power.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who did much to fix the legend, describes it as a fortunate isle ruled by the enchantress Morgan and her sisters, where Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he lies healing his wounds, from which, the tradition holds, he will one day return. In the later Middle Ages Avalon was famously identified with Glastonbury in Somerset, whose monks claimed in 1191 to have discovered Arthur's grave, an identification that fused the mythic island with a real place of pilgrimage. Avalon belongs to a wider Celtic family of blessed otherworlds, like the Irish Tir na nOg, lands of youth and healing beyond the western sea, and it carries the particular Arthurian charge of a hope deferred: the king who does not die but waits.

Avalon enters written record with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who says in his history of the kings of Britain, around 1136, that Arthur's sword was forged there and that he was carried there to be healed of his wounds. Geoffrey's later Life of Merlin describes the island of apples at length, self-cropping and ruled by nine sisters. Whether he was drawing on older Welsh material or composing is argued, and Geoffrey is not a reliable witness about his own sources.

Then Glastonbury Abbey burned in 1184. Rebuilding a great church required money, and pilgrims brought money. In 1191 the monks announced that they had excavated in the cemetery and found a hollowed log containing the bones of a large man and a woman, with a lead cross identifying the grave of Arthur in the isle of Avalon. Reports of the cross survive; the cross and the bones do not.

The timing has been noticed by every historian who has looked at it. A grave that funds a rebuilding, ends the Welsh expectation that Arthur will return, and does so under Angevin kings with an interest in that expectation ending, is a great deal of usefulness for one discovery. The abbey ruins are worth visiting and the marked site is worth seeing, provided one knows what one is looking at.