The Quest for Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe

Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America.King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury.A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz (1968).įor me at the time, though, it was the door to a strange world of history-cum-romance, a realm bordering on full-on New Age works such as John Michell's The View over Atlantis (first published in that same year, 1969) but also with a strong dose of the dry-as-dust archaeological precision of Leslie Alcock's Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367-634 (1971). It is, in retrospect, little more than a précis of parts of the argument of more 'grown-up' books such as King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury (1957) and From Caesar to Arthur (1960), not to mention the book of essays The Quest for Arthur’s Britain Ashe edited, with contributions by himself, Leslie Alcock, C. In fact, so many have there come to be, that All About King Arthur has dropped off most of his bibliography lists.įair enough, really. The obsession abated after a while, but it left me with an abiding taste for the works of Geoffrey Ashe, author (as I gradually became aware) a whole slew of other titles on King Arthur and kindred subjects. White's The Once and Future King, Mary Stewart's 'Merlin' trilogy - you name it, if it had anything to do with King Arthur, I was for it. Nor is there any doubting his basic seriousness when it comes to weighing up stray pieces of evidence bearing on his own King Charles's head: the possible historicity of certain aspects of the Arthurian legend.įor a while after reading that book, King Arthur and the Arthurian Legend was everything to me: T.

His books are immensely entertaining, and even quite well written (especially the earlier ones). There's no doubt, though, that Geoffrey is the easier to recommend of the two. While I suppose that there's no really direct connection with strangely lyrical writer of erotica Aran Ashe, whom I blogged about in a post about different modes of narrative construction last year, one could perhaps argue that both Ashes inhabit a conceptual no-man's-land: in Aran's case, between abnormal psychology and straight pornography in Geoffrey's, between no-nonsense archaeology and New Age claptrap. I must have been about eleven or twelve at the time, and I see from the back that it must have cost 95 cents - not an inconsiderable sum for me back then. The other titles in the series included such gems as 'All About Football,' 'All About Money' and 'All About Weather,' so you can see that it already stood out as a bit of an anomaly. One of the first books I ever bought off my own bat was Geoffrey Ashe's All About King Arthur (London: Carousel Books, 1973).

The Quest for Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe