KATHLEEN RAINE
THE SLEEP OF ALBION
There is, in the treasury of every nation, a body of mythology,
legend and folklore, interwoven with history and prehistory, associated with certain places and the names of kings and heroes, with
events natural and supernatural, preserved by tradition both oral
and recorded. These legends and records belong to the whole people, lending to each brief, unremarkable life a larger identity and
participation, as if in some sense these stories were our own. They
give us a place in history - and not merely in history but in a story
whose imaginative meaning goes beyond history, lending a sense of
glory and cosmic significance special to our own people and place on
earth. This mass of material, although it may have its basis in actual
events, in real men and women who lived and loved and battled and
quested, and who may very well be buried in the sites associated
with them, eludes the kind of factual proof or disproof nowadays so
popular with the excavators and researchers, all the error-proof
techniques which modern fact-finding demands. That the stories
have been told and retold is the only certain fact about them.
Such is what is known as the "Matter of Britain," the corpus of
British history and prehistory, as it has been handed down, and so
designated in distinction from the "Matter of Rome," established in
the legends of the founding of that city by Romulus and Remus, and
in the story of the conquest of Aeneas, refugee from Troy. France's
"matter" centers around Charlemagne and his knights; and the Teutonic nations likewise have their legendary history interwoven with
myth and miracle- all those themes of Odin and Asgard, Siegfried
and Parsifal that Wagner has recreated in his operas.
The Matter of Britain too traces our origin back to Troy through
the legendary Brut, who is said to have founded his kingdom in the
British Isles, but also has roots in the prehistory and myths of the
most ancient indigenous Celtic peoples, a marvelous mingling of
Christian and pre-Christian themes. Above all the Matter of Britain
centers about a fifth-century Romanized British king or war-leader,
684
