The Fabled Third

＂The Fabled Third is the final instalment in the sequence that began with A Presentment of Englishry. It continues to follow Laȝamon’s 12th century version of the legendary history of Britain up to the death of Uther, ending as the story begins to overlap with Sir Thomas Malory’s later, better known tale of King Arthur. When Laȝamon’s Uther arrives at Tintagel, he doesn’t enter the late fifth century settlement revealed by recent archaeology, but a castle that didn’t exist on that site. Looking at the fifth century through the lens of the twelfth produces a blurred version of the past. My attempts to reconcile that version with what is now known about late-fifth-century Britain makes the picture even less focussed. I recommend the pleasures of a flexible attitude towards geography, history, architecture and chronology.＂ -Liam Guilar

＂The deconstructionist view of there being no single attainable truth about the past is worth bearing in mind as we become immersed in Liam Guilar’s moving reconstruction of the land called Britain in the long-gone world of the 11th and 12th centuries: there are merely the histories which people tell to empower themselves in the present. This is of course applicable both to history and to memory since everything we see is filtered through our present-day mental lenses and we interpret the past in the light of what we have now become.

[...] Liam Guilar’s reconstruction of the foundations of our past is a con-vincing sift of details that offers the reader a ’morning familiar as cold stone’ with ’Rain drifting through the smoke hole in the roof’.＂ -Ian Brinton, Long Poem Magazine