Am I Looking at the Arthurian Battles the Wrong Way? or What Happens When Badon is Given Precedence

   The first page of annals in Harleian                             MS 3859

What happens if I change the way I look at the Arthurian battles?

Suppose instead of saying that Arthur never had anything to do with Badon and that the famous battle was merely tagged onto the HISTORIA BRITTONUM list, what if we instead go with Badon as Arthurian and the battle list as a fictional construction whose purpose is to present the Badonic Arthur as having fought, super-hero style, all over Britain?

If that were the case, we can say we 1) know where Badon was (as we can show Welsh tradition places it 3 times at the Liddington Badbury)  and 2) the only other important battle - and, indeed, the only other battle we can be fairly certain actually happened - is that of Camlan.

In other words, we give precedence to the two ANNALES CAMBRIAE entries and, essentially, ignore the HB list.

In this context the only Camlan worth paying attention is the one at Afon Gamlan in Gwynedd, as that is identied by Welsh tradtion as Camlan. The Afon Gamlan is within the parish of Llanelltyd. Illtud looks to be Uther Pendragon (whether we accept Uther as Arthur's father or not!).

Once we free ourselves of the straitjacket of the HB battles list (if even just provisionally), we are free to investigate more closely who Arthur really was and why he ended up falling in battle in what was at his time the ancient kingdom of Meirionydd.

My wife, a professional coach, has often warned me against falling victm to assessments. An assessment, as she defines it, is as 

“An interpretation that we believe is true, but that cannot be proven in the same way a fact can.”

This concept is foundational in ontological coaching, which views human beings through three domains: language, emotions, and body.

The term “assessment” in this specific ontological context was coined and developed by Julio Olalla, the founder of the Newfield Network and one of the leading figures in ontological coaching. Olalla distinguishes between "assertions" (statements that can be proven true or false) and "assessments" (subjective interpretations), emphasizing that recognizing and shifting our assessments can lead to powerful personal and professional transformation.

This being the case, I'm going to step back from my insistence on the primacy of the HB battle list and instead see where a switch in assessments might take me. 

Rather than actively seeking to dismiss the significance (or even existence!) of Badon and Camlan, what happens if we embrace both battles as the linchpin of Arthurian history?

With this in mind, I've had a new thought about Uther, Arthur and the Gewissei. And this is something I will be exploring in my next blog post.