I keep meaning to post, and then forgetting. I meant to write this hours ago. Ah well, such is life.
At the busy end of a summer that has been full of work, I find myself returning to old vacation pictures. I have selected one of the dorkiest in my collection. I took this picture while on a solo whirlwind tour of England and Wales, visiting places that crop up in Arthurian literature. Here, I am leaning over the edge of a short cliff so that I can take my own picture with that rock you see next to my head. The rock happens to be next to the Camel river in Cornwall, and to get to it, I had to take several buses from the nearest train station to get to a small Cornish village, whence I hiked a few miles to a little Arthurian tourist stop on the side of the road, and then hiked the little trail they had marked out, all for this rock.
Why? Well, it's speculated to be (maybe, kinda, sorta) the burial place of the historical Arthur and Mordred. There's some very-difficult-to-make-out writing carved into the stone that looks like maybe it could be Arthur and Mordred. Maybe. I first learned of it from a footnote in the Penguin edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, (the editor also found his way there, and also thought it was really cool). This was the single spot in all of Great Britain that I most wanted to see (close runners-up being where Thomas More was beheaded, Alfred's capitol at Winchester, and Tintagel--where Arthur is most commonly said to have been born).
And as if all that didn't make me enough of a dork, I'm also wearing a flannel shirt. Flannel is my great weakness. It feels so right-- how could it be wrong?
Anyway, for my course theme, I'm planning on covering World Religion in Secular Media. I'm pretty stoked for it.
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