A QUICK HISTORY OF THE CAMELOT MYTH
The earliest "Round Table," ye young of mind and heart, was the ground. The "table ronde" was a figure of speech, a metaphor. What it described was an open place, like a clearing in the woods, maybe a part of a field, the movable arena visible anywhere on this globe where warriors met, fought or parleyed.
This roundabout phrasing is known to literature professors as periphrasis (from Greek), or circumlocution (from Latin), or a kenning, another way of knowing (ken-ning) the topic, if you remember your Beowulf. It was a linguistic formula such as Anglo-Saxon poets passed down from father to son, as part of their oral tradition -- like gargling, if you remember your Tom Lehrer. In such a metaphor, Anglo-Saxon poetry called the ocean the "whale's road" or "swan's pathway," darkness the "helmet of night," and their military headquarters the "mead hall." No surprises there, by the way. A "helmet bearer" was a warrior; a "battle light" was a flashing sword.
The phrases became traditional mnemonic devices -- some little trick of language used to aid memory, like “i before e / except after c / or in words that rhyme with hay / like neighbor and weigh." By the way, if you did not recall this rhyme right off the bat, not to worry: mnemonics don’t always work, although they tend to be accurate and applicable a higher percentage of the time than Spell-Check and Grammatik. The reason we still have centuries-old phrases like "black and blue," "toss and turn," "weep and wail," "caught between the devil and the deep blue sea" and "harried and hounded from pillar to post" -- in music, they fueled classic “rock-and-roll” (another example) and rockabilly -- is that starting a series of words with the same consonant (alliteration) is a mnemonic; the words last because their links linger in the memory. The fourteenth-century anonymous poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also wrote a poem called Pearl, in which he uses a Middle English phrase still recognizable to any English reader today, "the mo the myrier" (the more the merrier).
For another example, the third finger has been called the "ring finger" ever since Anglo-Saxon times. The Anglo-Saxons emphasized the phrase partly because rings were treasured gifts awarded by your beloved leader who fought in battle with you and camped out in the field with you, and having a place to wear those rings was important. (J. R. R. Tolkien, a genuine Anglo-Saxon scholar, played up this tradition indirectly in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he reportedly began writing to entertain his son, serving in World War II.) According to the Laws of King Aethelbirht (ca. A.D. sixth century), "If a thumb be struck off," the acceptable recompense (bot) is "XX shillings";
If a thumb nail be off let 'bot' be made with III shillings.
If the shooting (i.e. fore) finger be struck off let 'bot' be made with VIII shillings. If the middle finger be struck off let 'bot'
be made with IV shillings. If the gold (i.e. ring) finger be struck off let 'bot' be made with VI shillings.
Even today, insurance companies still use similar formulas to compute payment for personal injury. Just try to get one to admit it. Incidentally they also still incorporate the one saying, "If a claim be made, always be it rejected at the fore; if a man's arm with the hand, be entirely cut off before the elbow, let 'bot' be made after he has submitted his claim thrice, if he be not already dead." It might be worth something to know which insurance companies if any have hired Anglo-Saxon scholars or other historians as consultants in writing their coverages.
In the gleaming figurative language of King Arthur’s antique, smaller world, furnished much like a Shakey's Pizza Parlor, the "table round" was actually flat dirt, cleared for business. It was metaphor for the round level world of what later became gaudier arenas -- but only much later -- a word picture of the earth’s sphere long before Columbus, earth bounded by the horizon as seen from on foot or on horseback, metaphor for life as a movable joust like the ceremonial Round Table tournaments later put on by King Edward I.
Since every horizon seen clearly, from any spot on Earth, looks circular, by the way, it is worth wondering how many people of ancient times figured out that the earth must actually be round. Maybe the mass media of their times actually promulgated the “flat earth” theory, long after about the bottom half of the population held it in question.
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