Dr Mary Bateman

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168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr Mary Bateman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast
And for a Briton, he doesn't really big up his own team very much. The text is called On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, De excedio et conquestae Britanniae. It basically describes Britain as being kind of a muddled mess at this time.
He thinks that Britain's downfall is due to a series of just not very nice, very ungodly, immoral rulers. He does say that there is a British victory at the Battle of Baden, which sounds exciting and, oh, you know, it could match up, but he doesn't connect it with Arthur. He connects it with another victor, another figure, called Ambrosius Aurelianus, which is another wonderful title.
It means the golden immortal in Latin. Ambrosius Aurelianus.
A Romano-Briton, yeah.
Yeah, there are still military commanders, we think, in Britain after the Romans have left because they've left lots of skills and training and things in place.
That's great, yeah, a mabinogion. And actually that's a collection of texts, a mabinogion. Within this collection of tales, there are some interesting Arthurian examples. The mabinogion, it doesn't appear, as with my other example, until quite late in manuscript form. We're talking sort of 14th, 15th century manuscripts.
But we think the texts contained within them were actually probably first written down as a collection much earlier in the 11th or 12th century. And here's the kicker, they probably have oral origins, some of them that are even earlier than that.
I would say so, yeah. The stories themselves seem to have much earlier roots, a bit like a Godothan, really. There's a few of them that mention Arthur, but one of my favourites and one of the earliest is a tale called Coluch a Colwen. You sometimes hear it in English called How Coluch Won Olwen. This seems to have really quite early roots.
It doesn't bear any resemblance to the other kind of big Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition Arthur texts. And Arthur is most definitely a king in this story. At last! Yes, he's got there. And it's just a fantastic story. So basically, Arthur has a cousin called Culloch, or Killoch, who's a young man. And he's fallen in love, potentially through a curse, but never mind, with a young woman called Olwen.
And her father is a terrible giant called Isbav Arden, chief of all giants. In order to win Olwen's hand, Killoch is given a series of tasks, impossible tasks, 40 of them he has to complete. He can't do this on his own, you know, he's just a weedy young guy. So he goes off to King Arthur's court and enlists the help of Arthur and his kind of almost superhuman knights, his superhuman retinue.
Yes, it's really complex.
It's him, it's you. Yeah, no, that's the climax point really of the whole. So these 40 tasks are very varied and they involve some quite scary things from kind of impossible husbandry, agricultural tasks to retrieving a magic cauldron and the blood of a black witch who lives at the uplands of hell. And the climax is this hunt for this boar called Turchuth.
And the interesting thing is about half, like a large number of the tasks relate in some way to preparing for this great boar hunt that happens at the kind of climax of the story. And the reason why they need to hunt Toichtruith is that this giant scary boar has between his ears on his hairy little head... He's got a male grooming set. Yes, he does.
Is that what you were thinking when you were thinking it's quite out there?
Exactly, yeah. But this is not the Arthurian map that we know. OK, so first off, there's no Camelot here and it's nowhere near Kilion, which is where it is for much of the Middle Ages after later writers get involved. Arthur's court is called Kellywig and it's in Cornwall. So in quite a different place.
I think that's a later development which comes with Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are other candidates put forward all the time for Kettlewig and where it might have been based on the place name and things like that.
Arthurian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Arthurian tat. Yeah. I mean, there was an early 20th century scholar who said that there is no name more ubiquitous in the British landscape other than the devil than Arthur. So, yeah, he really is everywhere. He gets absolutely everywhere.
No, it's not. It's called Kaledwilch, which means hard cleaving. So it's a serious sword. But there are some recognisable characters here. So amongst Arthur's superhero knights, there is Kay or Kay. When the author is describing all of the superhuman characters, qualities that this massive list of names from Arthur's Court has. Kai has lots.
He's kind of, I don't really know much about superheroes, but he would be the superhero that has all of the superpowers.
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