Lyonesse - Lyonesse in Modern English Literature

Lyonesse in Modern English Literature

Walter de la Mare's "Sunk Lyonesse" (1922) evokes it as a lost world:

In sea-cold Lyonesse,/ When the Sabbath eve shafts down/ On the roofs, walls, belfries/ Of the foundered town,/ The Nereids pluck their lyres/ Where the green translucency beats,/ And with motionless eyes at gaze/ Make ministrely in the streets./ And the ocean water stirs/ In salt-worn casement and porch/ Plies the blunt-nosed fish/ With fire in his skull for torch./ And the ringing wires resound;/ And the unearthly lovely weep,/ In lament of the music they make/ In the sullen courts of sleep:/ Whose marble flowers bloom for aye:/ And - lapped by the moon-guiled tide -/ Mock their carver with heart of stone,/ Caged in his stone-ribbed side.

Lyonesse has been used as a setting for many modern fantasy stories, including:

• Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy
• Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon in Lyonesse, the eighth book in the Dragon Knight series.
• In Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, Lyonesse is where refugees from Atlantis (the "Fair Folk") settle, the word Lyonesse being derived from the Celtic corruption of the word Atlantis.
• In the film First Knight, Lyonnesse is the home of Guinevere, a small land situated between Camelot and Malagant's territory. Lyonesse was ruled by Guinevere's father until his death, after which Guinevere became the "Lady of Lyonesse."
• The Trevelyan family of Cornwall takes its coat of arms from a local legend, in which a man named Trevelyan escaped the innundation by riding a white horse. To this day the family's shield bears a white horse rising from the waves.. Based on the above, in Cornish author Craig Weatherhill's The Lyonesse Stone trilogy (The Lyonesse Stone, Seat of Storms, The Tinners' Way), the Trevelyan family, drawn into the worlds of ancient Cornish legend, are direct descendants of the Lyonesse flood survivor.
• Both Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath published poems referring to Lyonnesse, the latter taking the mythical land's name as its title.
• Sam Llewellyn wrote two children's books set in the sinking Lyonesse, with original Celtic names for the cast of Arthurian legend: Lyonesse: The Well Between The Worlds (2009) and Lyonesse: Dark Solstice (2010).
• "Lyonesse" is a song, by Cornish folk composer Richard Gendall, which appears as the title track of the 1982 album by Brenda Wootton.
• In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the narrator describes the Oxford of his youth as being "submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in..."
• In the PC game Dark Age of Camelot, Lyonesse is a partially inundated zone at one end of the land of Albion, filled with ruins and dangerous monsters, many of them undead.