On the coast of Cornwall in southern Great Britain, on a clear day, you can see the Scilly Archipelago in the distance. According to legend, these islands are the remains of a sunken prosperous kingdom.
Others believe that the legendary kingdom known as Lioness was not located on the site of the Scilly Archipelago, but between it and the main part of Great Britain, being a kind of bridge between them. Still others believe that Lioness was in France at the English Channel, where the department of Saint-Paul-de-Leon is located today.
Some say that Lyonesse was a single piece of land, which then split into islands (the Scilly archipelago) due to rising sea levels. Others believe that Lioness was located between Mount St Michael in Cornwall and the Scilly Archipelago. Still others believe that Lioness is a region in France, Saint-Paul-de-Leon.
Lioness is first mentioned in the 15th century work of Sir Thomas Mallory, The Death of King Arthur. In this famous collection of legends about Arthur, Lioness is listed as the birthplace of Tristan. Engaged in a tragic affair with Isolde, wife of King Mark (Tristan's uncle), he was never able to return to Lyonesse.
According to Mallory's version, King Mark killed Tristan. In the 19th century, Lord Alfred Tennyson in the epic poem "Royal Idylls" called Lyonesse the place of death of Arthur.
Version one: Lioness sank off the coast of Cornwall
The English historian William Camden, in his 1586 work Britannia, writes that Lioness is a sunken area stretching from Mount St Michael in the County of the Duchy of Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Camden discovered the name Lyonesse in a manuscript he acquired from the Cornish antiquarian Richard Carough.
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King Arthur's battle with Mordred. Illustration by Newell Wyeth for The Death of Arthur: The Story of Thomas Malory of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, 1922
Caro may have pieced together different legends, says Adrian David Hugh Bivar of the University of London. In his article Lioness: The Evolution of a Legend, he writes: “The few Cornish legends about the loss of a small piece of land have been exaggerated and detailed in Normandy and Britain and combined with the name Lioness. This was probably done by the Cornish antiquarian Richard Caro during the reign of Queen Elizabeth."
The 15th century William of Worcester's travel notes also mention a sunken land that extended as far as the Isles of Scilly. It states that Lyonesse had 140 church towers, fertile land, and a thriving population.
The Penny Encyclopedia of the Knowledge Society, published in 1841 by Charles Knight, states that a settlement existed in the now sunken area between Cornwall and the Scilly Archipelago. This area was supposed to sink before the coming of Christianity.
A place in the Isles of Scilly known as St. Mary's Rise.
The book says that the Greek historian and geographer Strabo described the Isles of Scilly in the 1st century, and his description does not mention such a territory. Thus, if Lioness really existed, then by that time he had already sunk. Therefore, the references to churches in Lyonesse are not true.
The ancient Romans who inhabited the Isles of Scilly spoke of an integral land area, and not of islands, which supports the hypothesis of further submersion of this territory under the water.
Dorothy Dudley's article "Excavations at Nornur in the Isles of Scilly", published in the Journal of Archeology in 1967, states that there is evidence of an early and gradual sinking of the archipelago. During these excavations, Roman coins of the 4th century AD were found. e. It is also reliably known that already in 1200 BC. e. this place was inhabited by people, including settlers from Brittany, Northern France.
Version two: Lioness sank off the coast of France
Lyonesse can refer to the region near Saint-Paul-de-Leon in the French province of Brittany, the Encyclopedia Britannica says.
In Brittany, there is also a legend about a sunken land - the city of Is or Caer-Is. There are different versions of the legend, but all of them talk about King Gradlon, who built a luxurious city in the sea for his daughter Dahut.
But due to the licentiousness of Dakhut, the city sank into the water. This is a bit like the biblical legend of Sodom and Gomorrah. As in many myths about sunken or disappeared countries, divine powers punished people for moral decline.
Dakhut had a new lover every night, and in the morning she killed him. The bodies of these men were dumped into the sea. One day a man dressed in red appeared in the city to woo her. She fell in love with him. He convinced her to hand over the keys to the bronze dam that separated the city from the sea by a pool, protecting it. This mysterious man opened the gates, and the ocean swept over the city, flooding it.
The king of the city, who was a highly moral person, was the only one whom the saint saved by giving him a magic horse.
Another legend about Lyonesse tells of Treviglian, the only survivor who managed to escape the city on a white horse.
The National Coast Guard Organization (NCI) website states: “Interestingly, the Vivians, one of the wealthiest Cornish landowning families, have a family coat of arms that depicts a white saddled horse - a reminder of this famous Lioness horse. It is said that the Vivians always kept a white horse in the stable in case of such a disaster."
Although the NCI writes that at the beginning of the 20th century, people reported the city's ruins above the water, and fishermen even managed to get some debris from buildings, there is no studied evidence of the existence of a sunken city.
The only source of information about the land sinking in the Isles of Scilly region is the legends, which sometimes intersect and sometimes contradict each other. To what extent the Arthurian legends correspond to real historical events is a moot point.
It is possible that different authors retell the story of King Arthur and his associates, including Tristan and Lancelot, using some real facts from the past, but changing them to suit their tastes and the wishes of their contemporaries.