Logres

The name Logres is far older than any romance. Lloegr is the ancient Welsh word for England, the land of the enemies of the Cymry in early Welsh poetry, and its true origin is lost. When Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century cleric who first made Arthur a king of European fame, wrote his History of the Kings of Britain around 1136, he gave the old word a founder. The Trojan exile Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy, conquered the giants of Britain and divided the island among his three sons. To Locrinus, the eldest, went the midland between the Humber and the Severn, called Loegria after him. To Kamber went the lands beyond the Severn, called Cambria, now Wales. To Albanactus, the youngest, went the north, called Albany, now Scotland. Twenty years later the Norman poet Wace turned Geoffrey's Latin Loegria into French verse, and Logres was born.

The name first appears in Arthurian romance in the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes, written about 1177, and in his Perceval, the first Grail story, a lord prophesies that the whole kingdom of Logres, which was once the kingdom of ogres, will one day be destroyed by a lance that bleeds by itself. In the great French story-book of the legend, the Vulgate Cycle of about 1215 to 1235, Logres is the stage for everything. Arthur is its king; Camelot, his brightest city, stands at the very entrance of the kingdom. Its capital is the city of Logres, which the scribes often simply called London, and it is before the archbishop's church there that the sword in the stone appears on the Christmas Eve after King Uther's death, the sign by which the unknown boy Arthur is chosen king. Around it lie the border realms of the adventures: Cameliard, the kingdom of Guinevere's father Leodogran; the wild land of Gore; and the forest of Bedegraine, where the young king broke the rebellion of the kings who refused him homage. Into this land, the romances say, the family of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who buried Christ, brought the Holy Grail, the cup of the Last Supper, and Logres became the land of the sacred quest.

The darkest day in the history of Logres is the Dolorous Stroke. The knight Sir Balin, called the Knight with Two Swords, came to the feast of King Pellam, the keeper of the Grail, and there cut down the king's brother Garlon, an invisible knight who had murdered Balin's companions. Pellam attacked Balin in vengeance and broke his sword. Fleeing from room to room, Balin burst into the chamber where the Grail stood, and seized the only weapon at hand: the spear of the Roman soldier Longinus, the very lance that had pierced the side of Christ on the cross. With it he struck Pellam through both thighs. A voice rang through the castle declaring that a great enchantment would fall upon Logres, and it did: the walls crashed down, the people fell dead or senseless, and three kingdoms withered into the Waste Land, where no tree bore fruit and no child was born. The wounded king lay in his ruined castle for twenty-two years, unable to die and unable to be healed.

Healing came with Galahad, the pure knight, son of Lancelot, the greatest of all Arthur's warriors. When Galahad sat in the Siege Perilous, the one seat at the Round Table reserved for the knight who would achieve the Grail, the adventures of the kingdom of Logres began in earnest. He rode the Waste Land with the knights Perceval and Bors, came at last to the Grail castle of Corbenic, and anointed the Maimed King with blood from the sacred spear, closing the wound the stroke had opened. The age of marvels closed with it. Sir Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century knight who gathered the whole legend into his Le Morte d'Arthur of 1485, kept the old name alongside his plainer word England, and gave the surname de Logres to several of his knights, but after his book the ancient name slept for four hundred years.

Modern writers woke it again as the name of the sacred Britain. Charles Williams, the poet and novelist who walked with the Inklings at Oxford, made Logres the living heart of his Arthurian cycle Taliessin Through Logres of 1938, a kingdom that is a province of the spirit as much as a place on the map. His friend C.S. Lewis carried the word into his novel That Hideous Strength of 1945, where Logres is the true and hidden Britain, the land of Arthur and Merlin that survives beneath the modern country and must rise against it. Between them they fixed the meaning the name still carries: Logres is Arthur's kingdom not as it was, but as it ought to be.