“Woad” is a plant that yields a blue die. I think they were Celts, not Picts. Celts were known to use blue paint on their skin.
You are right but people have been associating Woad with the Picti for centuries, so it is an understandable mistakes.
The Movie made it plain that Merlin was leading Britons, the Picti were further north anyway.
Britons I think were type P-Celtic.
Y’know, an “adult” version or parody of this could be very entertaining, if one’s into that sort of thing. Ribald references to jousting staffs, codpieces and anachronistic[?] corsets, dis-armor-ing the knights, watery tarts lobbing scimitars, and a three-way with “it’s good to be the king” Arthur, Guinnevere, and Lancelot.
That’s setting the bar pretty low, all right.
Picts WERE Celts. Ethically, they were no different from the Britons, they just lived further north.
By “official” I meant the position of the British Royal Establishment/regime/family/whatever. I’m pretty well up on the various scholarly opinions on the subject, and there’s no absolute smoking gun of historical factual conclusion, so I was interested to see what appeared to be an indication that that, at any rate, the Peerage or whatever doesn’t count him as “Arthur I.” Further elucidation from subsequent posts also clarified for me.
Heh…I wasn’t aware they COULD have an official version of history…
It (sorta) worked for Hitler.
OK. I also assume that Arthur, if he existed, was a Celt as well-- just a Romanized one. I’ve always thought it odd that he’s regarded as a sort of founding father of England (Anglo-Saxon Britain). The American anolog might be someone like Geronimo-- a folk hero, yes, but not a member of the conquering majority.
The Anglo-Normans sorta conquered Arthurian legend the same way they conquered the whole damn country.
Doh! Ethically=EthNically. :smack:
John Mace writes:
You and everyone else. From Geoffrey onwards, Arthur fights the Saxons, after all. But it’s not the only time a culture hero has been adopted by his nominal enemies.
Dude, if there’s no conclusive factual record, then an institution like the British Royal Family would have to “officially” choose an opinion they agree with, I would think. Surely you aren’t suggesting there’s an indisputably factual history of “King Arthur”?
True 'nuff. The original Arthurian legends were Welsh. (The Welsh being the unconquered remnant of Celtic Britain.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur#Earliest_traditions_of_Arthur Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the Historia Regum Brittanniae, was Welsh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_of_Monmouth Thomas Malory was from Warwickshire, but that’s on the Welsh-English border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malory
And the Celts in Britanny dwove on the wong side of the woad.
In one of Jack Chalker’s “Dancing Gods” books, someone is following another person who’s been infected with ticks. In order to get rid of the ticks, they use a special preparation of woad. The special preparation turns the woad from blue to yellow.
In order to track the person he’'s looking for, then, he has to…
…Follow the Yellow Tick Woad
I’m sorrow that I wrote that. A Little.