Lyonesse

Lyonesse (Lyonnesse) was the mythical birthplace of the hero Tristan. The legend of Tristan was originally a popular medieval romance of the Celts before it became popular among the French, English and German kingdoms. The legend was originally independent of King Arthur.

Please note, before you continue further, I do not intend to write about the legend of Tristan and Isolde here. You will find this medieval romance in the Arthurian Legends section under the page titled Tristan and Isolde.

It was said that Lyonesse lay between the region of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. The region became submerged when the water rose.

The poet Beroul (fl. c. 1160) said that Tristan's father Rivalen ruled Lyonesse. Beroul was the earliest person who mentioned Lyoness, but he was rather vague on where it was located.

In the Prose Tristan, the kingdom was called Leonois, ruled by Meliadus, Tristan's father. Leonois could very well be another name for Lyonesse. Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur (1469), used the Prose Tristan as his main source for Tristan, and called the kingdom Liones and the king Meliodas.

According to other various sources on the tale of Tristan and Isolde, Tristan's place of birth was variously placed in Brittany, like Armenye by the poet Thomas, while the German Gottfried von Strassburg called Rivalen's kingdom, Parmenie.

None of the legends which I have, in regards to Tristan, said anything about the kingdom of Lyonesse being submerged.

One thing you must understand is that Tristan had not originally come from Brittany at all. Tracing the sources back further in time from the 12th century and moving north of Cornwall, you will find that Tristan was called Drystan in Wales. But there are older sources which moved the scene even further north. Tristan could very well be the Pictish prince named Drust.

The Picts lived in Britain, perhaps long before the Celts arrived from the Continent in the 6th century BC. They lived in the region which was known as Caledonia, in northern Britain, a region that we now call Scotland. The Picts were a fierce, warlike tribe that clashed against the Celtic Britons, and later with the Romans, between the 1st century AD and the early 5th century AD.

Drust was believed to be a historical figure who lived in the mid-8th century BC. But as time went by, the historical Drust was almost lost and displaced by a legendary hero. Drust changed from rescuing a princess from pirates, to killing an Irish giant named Morholt and slaying the dragon that we are now familiar with from the Tristan legend.

As the legend of Tristan moved further south and the tale evolved over a period of time, so did the spelling of the name of the kingdom. Also consider that the legend had to traverse four linguistically Celtic regions before the French and English gave us the finished works: Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.

By the time the legend arrived in Brittany, the archetypal poem was fully developed, perhaps before the mid-12th century, but it has long been lost. The early French poets like Beroul and Thomas derived their tales of Tristan from this lost archetypal poem, and perhaps from Breton oral tradition, namely from the Breton storytellers or singers.

My point is that Lyonesse may very well have little to do with a submerged kingdom between Cornwall and the Scilly Islands, or even with a duchy or kingdom in Brittany. Since Drust came from northern Britain, then is it not possible that Lyonesse is really Lothian, a kingdom in Scotland, between the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. Lothian, because this was where the original tale of Tristan had started.

But if the legend of Tristan had nothing to do with the inundation of Lyonesse, then where does this idea of an inundation come from?

As far as I can tell, the earliest source came from William Camden, an English traveller and geographer who wrote Britannia in 1586. It was he who said that Lyonesse was located between St Michael's Mount (an island near Cornwall) and the Scilly Isles. Camden says that this originally formed one landmass, with a forest and many prehistoric monuments. Here, Lyonesse had nothing to do with Arthur or Tristan.

However, the inundation didn't happen overnight, like Atlantis or the city of Ys. Rising sea levels over a long period of time caused the inundation, so that the water covered more and more land.

We can blame Alfred Tennyson (died in 1892) for connecting the inundation of Lyonnesse with the Arthurian legend. Tennyson wrote a series of poems about King Arthur, and one of them was the Morte d'Arthur (1842). Tennyson says that Lyonesse was the final battle of Arthur where the king met his death. Merlin caused Lyonnesse to vanish beneath the sea, drowning Mordred and his entire army.