Medieval Romance and Arthurian Legend
The Old (Iron Age) Religion of Britain: an attempt at understanding
Eleusinianm stands for Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret religious brotherhood (and sisterhood) that thrived in classical Greece in the fifth century BC (Iron Age in Britain) and could trace its roots, we now know, into the Bronze Age of Mycenaean Greece.
This entire project stems from the reading of two books in 1998, when my attention should probably have been directed elsewhere. One of them was a Penguin Classics edition of Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances in English translation. The other was a reprint of an old Victorian work called Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages by George Cox and Eustace Jones, including the romances of Olger the Dane (Ogier le Danois), Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton.
From this began the idea of translating into Modern English prose many of the Medieval tales that few people have ever thought worthy of such attention, or have been considered of interest only to scholars, and of using these tales to explore an ancient belief system. Because it seemed to me that there must be a reason behind the ubiquitous interest that the Medieval age showed in reproducing themes and motifs which are found repeated and recast again and again in these Medieval tales, themes and motifs that I could see might be capable of explanation.
Eleusinianm explores the underlying narrative structure of Medieval romance, and particularly Medieval Arthurian romance, and finds reflections of a much older world in its stories. And in a two-way process, it takes hints from these stories and compares them with anything else that might give a clue to the Old Religion of Britain and Europe. Anything else at all – and an awful lot of fascinating material will be uncovered – in an ultimate search for the true teachings of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
You may not be entirely comfortable reading Middle English. It can take quite a while to cut through the strange dialect, unfamiliar words and grammar and the crazy spelling. But the true enjoyment of a story requires fluency. A true understanding, it can be argued, requires fluency. So these fascinating Medieval stories are presented in Modern English prose translation.
Many of these tales have been published in Middle English by the Early English Text Society, of which the present writer is a member (the EETS would wish, however, I am sure, to disclaim any involvement in the quest underlying this maverick and unendorsed project that has become Eleusinianm). Many others have been made available by TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) or under the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester, USA. Inestimable thanks to all these projects are very gratefully given. Scholars for TEAMS and on behalf of the EETS have researched and transcribed these tales from fragile and often less than perfect manuscript copies that have languished for hundreds of years in libraries such as the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and many others, and brought them painstakingly into modern print. But a vital last step has sometimes been lacking. Eleusinianm tries, however audaciously and however imperfectly, to have a shot at taking this last vital step. Because six hundred years is a long time. The language has moved on, but the stories are as entertaining as ever to the general reader; as entertaining as the novels that lie behind the eighteenth and nineteenth century period dramas that are currently so popular on British television, and a lot more interesting in the current author's opinion, if only they could be read fluently. These Medieval stories are marvellously imaginative, intriguingly focused and throw a wonderful light upon an age that Terry Gillian and Monty Python (bless them both) have tried undeservedly to cast into a black and brown mire of horrific squalor. But the Medieval period was in fact a very colourful and vibrant age, and often a very thoughtful one. And it was an age that was possibly trying to keep alive something that was impossible at the time to transmit openly.
Read these stories and make up your own mind.
