Lyonesse

Lyonesse is a kingdom which according to legend, consisted of a long section of land stretching from the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England to what is now the Isles of Scilly in the Celtic Sea portion of the Atlantic Ocean. It was considered lost after being swallowed by the ocean in a single night. The people of Lyonesse allegedly lived in what is described as fair towns with over 140 churches and they worked in fertile, low-lying plains. Lyonesse’s most significant attraction was a castle-like cathedral that was presumably built on top of what is now the Seven Stones Reef that is located between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly in southwest England some eighteen miles west of Land's End and eight miles north-east of the Isles of Scilly. Lyonesse is mentioned in Arthurian legend, but particularly in the tragic love and loss story of Tristan and Iseult written by Richard Wagner. Lyonesse is most notable as the home of the hero Tristan (one of the Knights of the Round Table), whose father Meliodas was king of Lyonesse. After the death of Meliodas, Tristan became the heir of Lyonesse, but he was never to take up his inheritance because Lyonesse sank beneath the sea while he was away at his Uncle Mark’s court in Cornwall. In later traditions, Lyonesse is said to have sunk beneath the waves in a single night, yet stories differ whether this catastrophic event occurred on November 11, 1099, or ten years earlier in 1089. According to legend, the people of Lyonesse allegedly had committed a crime so terrible that God took vengeance against them and their kingdom. The crime is never mentioned in any text or stories, but the legend tells of a horrific storm that occurred over the course of a single night which resulted in an enormous wave that swallowed the kingdom and everything that was in its path. In what may have been a tsunami or tidal wave, the Kingdom of Lyonesse was lost forever and disappeared from the face of the earth as if it had never existed.

Not to be confused with Lyonnaise.
For other uses, see Lyonesse (disambiguation).
Lyonesse
Tristan and Iseult location
GenreArthurian legend
Information
TypeFictional country
Notable charactersTristan

The Sole Survivor

Local Cornwall village tourism guides offer stories of a man who escaped the storm and a subsequent wave while riding a white horse. Apparently, the horse lost one of its shoes during the escape. It is thought that the rider's name was Trevelyan (or Trevilian). The rider had been out hunting during the day and had fallen asleep under a tree. Trevelyan was awoken by a horrible noise and raced across the land to higher ground. This story is linked to local Cornwall families who have used the image of three horseshoes as part of their family crest for generations. One family in particular that goes by the name Vyvyan and are one of Cornwall’s oldest families, also has a crest of a white horse and they also claim to be descendants of the sole survivor, Trevelyan. In Cornish, ‘Vyvyan’ means ‘to flee’ or escape. The Vyvyan family claims that Trevelyan was the last governor of the lost kingdom before Lyonesse was swallowed by the ocean.

Today, many myths and legends continue to rise to the surface about Lyonesse without physical evidence. Included among these legends are tales of local fishermen who claim that on calm days one can still hear the bells of the many churches softly ringing in the seas off the west Cornish coast. Local fishermen also claim that they have caught glass, forks, and wood in their fishing nets.

"The Lyonesse Project"

[1] A 2009-2013 joint study titled “The Lyonesse Project: a study of the coastal and marine environment of the Isles of Scilly” was commissioned by English Heritage and carried out by the Historic Environment Projects, Cornwall Council with a team of specialists from Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Exeter and Plymouth Universities, English Heritage's Scientific Dating Team, volunteers and local experts and enthusiasts from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Maritime Archaeological Society and the Islands Maritime Archaeology Group. The purpose of the study was “...to reconstruct the evolution of the physical environment of the Isles of Scilly during the Holocene, the progressive occupation of this changing coastal landscape by early peoples and their response to marine inundation and changing marine resource availability.” Even though this investigation is named after Lyonesse, the researchers only studied the evolution of the immediate Scilly coastal environment. The Lyonesse project explored the Isles of Scilly and claimed that while much of the story of Lyonesse can be “dismissed as fantasy”, an overflow of legends and memories of submergences are common throughout the northwestern portion of Europe. The study concluded that the Isles of Scilly were once a single large island that was separated into smaller islands due to the rapid sea-level rise. It was also noted that “It has long been known that the islands in their current form are a result of past sea level rises that flooded early sites. It is therefore a valuable microcosm for studying continuous sea level rises within an historical context as well as for research and recording important sites that will be lost and investigating how past populations adapted to their shifting shores.” Stone walls have been located under the water in the vicinity of the Isles of Scilly which supports the findings that sea level rises impacted the towns of the area. According to the study, “the ‘Hedges and Ruins’ on Samson Flats in the Isles of Scilly were first noted by Dr. William Borlase in the 18th century (Borlase 1756). OGS Crawford visited Scilly in 1926 to examine these submerged walls and concluded that Scilly, rather than the Seven Stones, was the lost land of Lyonesse (Crawford 1927), although he later considered in an editorial for Antiquity that these features might instead be the remains of medieval fish traps (Crawford 1946).”

Lyonesse in Arthurian legend

In medieval Arthurian legend, there are no references to the sinking of Lyonesse, because 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 of the 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.[2] However, the legendary lost land between Land's End and Scilly has a distinct Cornish name: 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 notorious wreck of the Torrey Canyon. The name means '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 King Arthur and Mordred (King Arthur's nephew and illegitimate son). One passage in particular references legends of Lyonesse and its rise from (and subsequent return to) 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.


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.

There is a Breton parallel in the tale of the Cité d'Ys or Ker 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 Ys is Cantre'r Gwaelod, a legendary drowned kingdom in Cardigan Bay. Not too dissimilarly, the Gaelic otherworld Tír na nÓg ('Land of Youth') was often conceived of as a mystical place that had to be reached via a sea voyage, though it lacks an inundation myth.

It is often suggested 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 [3] when the sea levels rose during the Bronze Age. For example, the Cornish name of St Michael's Mount is Karrek Loos y'n Koos - literally 'the grey rock in the wood, suggesting that the bay was once a forest. According to local tourism guides in the region, Lyonesse was once connected to the west of Cornwall and is firmly rooted in Cornwall’s traditions and mythology. 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 adjacent to the Celtic Sea. John of Worcester, a famous English monk and chronicler, wrote in 1099, that St Michael’s Mount (now an island in Mount’s Bay) was located five or six miles from the sea, enclosed in a thick wood. The importance of the maintenance of this memory can be seen in that it came to be associated with the legendary Brython hero Arthur, although the date of its inundation is actually c. 2500 BC.

Notable cultural references

In fiction

In poetry

In music
  • Lyonesse, a song by Cornish folk composer Richard Gendall, appears as the title track of the 1982 album by Brenda Wootton
  • When I Set out for Lyonnesse, a setting of Hardy's poem by the English composer Gerald Finzi in his 1936 song cycle Earth and Air and Rain
  • "The Bells of Lyonesse", a song by German Progressive Metal band Subsignal, appears on their 2018 album "La Muerta"

In transport

See also

References
  1. "The Lyonesse Project".
  2. Bivar, A. D. H. (February 1953). "Lyonnesse: The Evolution of a Fable". Modern Philology. 50 (3): 162–170. doi:10.1086/388954. S2CID 162310176.
  3. Hind, C. Lewis. (1907). "Days in Cornwall": 163. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932): 293-94
  5. https://www.distance.to/Dorchester,Dorset,England,GBR/St-Juliot,Cornwall,England,GBR
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