Lyonesse

For other uses, see Lyonesse (disambiguation).

Lyonesse
Tristan and Iseult location
Genre	Arthurian legend
Type	Fictional country
Notable characters	Tristan

Lyonesse is a country in Arthurian legend, particularly in the story of Tristan and Iseult. Said to border Cornwall, it is most notable as the home of the hero Tristan, whose father was king. In later traditions Lyonesse is said to have sunk beneath the waves some time after the Tristan stories take place, making it similar to Ys and other lost lands in medieval Celtic tales, and perhaps connecting it with the Isles of Scilly.

Lyonesse in Arthurian legend

In medieval Arthurian legend, there are no references to the sinking of Lyonesse, for the simple reason that the name originally referred to a still-existing place. Lyonesse is an English alteration of French Léoneis or Léonois (earlier Loönois), a development of Lodonesia, the Latin name for Lothian in Scotland. Continental writers of Arthurian romances were often puzzled by the internal geography of Great Britain; thus it is that the author French Prose Tristan appears to place Léonois contiguous, by land, to Cornwall. In English adaptations of the French tales, Léonois, now "Lyonesse", becomes a kingdom wholly distinct from Lothian, and closely associated with the Cornish region, though its exact geographical location remained unspecified. The name was not attached to Cornish legends of lost coastal lands until the reign of Elizabeth I of England, however.^[1]. However, the legendary lost land between Land's End and Scilly has a distinct Cornish name: Lethesow (sometimes rendered Lethowsow). This derives from the Cornish name for the Seven Stones reef, on the reputed site of the lost land's capital and the site of the famous wreck of the "Torrey Canyon". The name translates into English as "the milky ones", from the constant white water surrounding the reef.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, describes Lyonesse as the site of the final battle between Arthur and Mordred. One passage in particular references legends of Lyonesse as a land fated to sink beneath the ocean:

Then rose the King and moved his host by night

And ever pushed Sir Mordred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse--

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

Deriving from a false etymology of Lyonesse, the 'City of Lions' was said in some later traditions to be the capital of the legendary kingdom, situated on what is today the Seven Stones reef, some eighteen miles west of Land's End and eight miles north-east of the Isles of Scilly.

Analogues in Celtic mythology

The legend of a sunken kingdom appears in both Cornish and Breton mythology. In Christian times it came to be viewed as a sort of Cornish Sodom and Gomorrah, an example of divine wrath provoked by unvirtuous living, although the parallels were limited in that Lyonesse remained in Cornish thought very much a mystical and mythical land, comparable to the role of Tir na nÓg in Irish mythology.^{[citation needed]}

There is a Breton parallel in the tale of the Cité d'Ys, similarly drowned as a result of its debauchery with a single virtuous survivor escaping on a horse, in this case King Gradlon. The Welsh equivalent to Lyonesse and Ker Ys is Cantre'r Gwaelod, a legendary drowned kingdom in Cardigan Bay.

It is often suggested^{[citation needed]} that the tale of Lyonesse represents an extraordinary survival of folk memory of the flooding of the Isles of Scilly and Mount's Bay near Penzance. For example, the Cornish name of St Michael's Mount is Karrek Loos y'n Koos - literally, "the grey rock in the wood". Cornish people around Penzance still get occasional glimpses at extreme low water of a sunken forest in Mount's Bay, where petrified tree stumps become visible. The importance of the maintenance of this memory can be seen in that it came to be associated with the legendary British hero Arthur, although the date of its inundation is actually c.2500 BC.

Lyonesse in modern English literature

Walter de la Mare's "Sunk Lyonesse" (1922) evokes it as a lost world:

In sea-cold Lyonesse,/ When the Sabbath eve shafts down/ On the roofs, walls, belfries/ Of the foundered town,/ The Nereids pluck their lyres/ Where the green translucency beats,/ And with motionless eyes at gaze/ Make ministrely in the streets./ / And the ocean water stirs/ In salt-worn casement and porch/ Plies the blunt-nosed fish/ With fire in his skull for torch./ And the ringing wires resound;/ And the unearthly lovely weep,/ In lament of the music they make/ In the sullen courts of sleep:/ Whose marble flowers bloom for aye:/ And - lapped by the moon-guiled tide -/ Mock their carver with heart of stone,/ Caged in his stone-ribbed side.

Lyonesse has been used as a setting for many modern fantasy stories, including:

• Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy
• Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon in Lyonesse, the eighth book in the Dragon Knight series.
• In Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, Lyonesse is where refugees from Atlantis (the "Fair Folk") settle, the word Lyonesse being derived from the Celtic corruption of the word Atlantis.
• In the film First Knight, Lyonnesse is the home of Guinevere, a small land situated between Camelot and Malagant's territory. Lyonesse was ruled by Guinevere's father until his death, after which Guinevere became the "Lady of Lyonesse."
• The Trevelyan family of Cornwall takes its coat of arms from a local legend, in which a man named Trevelyan escaped the innundation by riding a white horse.^{[citation needed]} To this day the family's shield bears a white horse rising from the waves.^{[citation needed]}. Based on the above, in Cornish author Craig Weatherhill's The Lyonesse Stone trilogy (The Lyonesse Stone, Seat of Storms, The Tinners' Way), the Trevelyan family, drawn into the worlds of ancient Cornish legend, are direct descendants of the Lyonesse flood survivor.
• Both Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath published poems referring to Lyonnesse, the latter taking the mythical land's name as its title.
• Sam Llewellyn wrote two children's books set in the sinking Lyonesse, with original Celtic names for the cast of Arthurian legend: Lyonesse: The Well Between The Worlds (2009) and Lyonesse: Dark Solstice (2010).
• "Lyonesse" is a song, by Cornish folk composer Richard Gendall, which appears as the title track of the 1982 album by Brenda Wootton.
• In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the narrator describes the Oxford of his youth as being "submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in..."

Other uses of Lyonesse

The name Lyonesse has often been applied to transport subjects:

• Lyonesse - West Cornwall Steam Ship Company steam ferry
• Lyonesse - Great Western Railway Bulldog Class steam locomotive no. 3361
• Lyonnesse - Southern Railway (Great Britain) King Arthur Class steam locomotive no. 743
• Lyonnesse - British Railways Standard Class 5 steam locomotive no. 73113

See also

• Cornish culture
• Gallia Lugdunensis
• Matter of Britain
• St Michael's Mount
• Ys

Notes

1. ^ Bivar, A.D.H. (February 1953). "Lyonnesse: The Evolution of a Fable". Modern Philology 50 (3): 162–170. doi:10.1086/388954. 

References

• Eilhart von Oberge (c. 1180) Tristant
• Anonymous (c. 1220) Prose Tristan
• Anonymous (c. 1335) La Tavola Ritonda
• Malory, Sir Thomas (1470) Le Morte D'Arthur
• Anonymous (1555) I Due Tristani
• Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1886) Idylls of the King