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Joy and Annoyance

A review of the film Mists of Avalon (DVD, 2001)

by Freeman, December 18, 2004

I dearly love this movie. The atmosphere, the scenery, the music, the cast, and the sense of magic and romance have led me to watch it many times. I have plenty of other DVDs and tapes I cannot say that about, and wish I had just rented.

Comparisons to the book[i] abound, but I read the book too long ago to be able to do a detailed one fairly. I will just say that as movie adaptations go, it is not all that awful.

As retellings of the Matter of Britain, the book and the movie are both jokes. The pre-Christian Britons were polytheists; there would have been no predominant cult of a Great Goddess, and certainly no matriarchy[ii]. In any case, it is very likely that they were already overwhelmingly Christian by the time of the Saxon invasions. Both book and movie completely ignore the influence of Roman culture, which would have been hard to miss for an observer who was privileged to be present at the time. Arthur, if he did exist, would have been a commander of Roman-style heavy cavalry, which could very well have been responsible for the respite that the British tribes gained from the Saxon depredations at that time. He also might well have been Christian, or just possibly an initiate of Mithraism.

What finally brought Celto-Roman Britain down in the 7th century was the same thing that doomed other tribal peoples: their inability to set aside intertribal conflict and unite against a common enemy. In fact, the leaders of the various British tribes would not have even thought in those terms; to them, an enemy was an enemy, whether a neighboring kingdom of long standing or an invading force.

All that said, it was a good thing to tell the story from the point of view of the powerful women who helped to shape it. It is an effective counterpoise to the usual tale of big smelly warriors on big smelly horses, and is more true to British culture than the medieval romances were. Having the story set in a religiously diverse milieu is also a worthwhile corrective, even considering that most of the details are wrong, since the Church did not fully control religious life in England[iii] for another two centuries or so[iv].

Suspending disbelief of all the laughable history and theology, the movie still has a certain grandeur. The sense of an enormous brooding fate which neither individuals nor the island as a whole can long escape make it a powerful experience and a worthy piece of literature and cinema. Just forget Arthur's Britain, forget the Roman Empire, forget what little we know about Druids and Celtic religion, and enjoy a fine fantasy enacted by a cast of beautiful and charismatic actors.

[i] Zimmer, Marion Bradley. The Mists of Avalon. New York, NY: Del Rey, 1982.

[ii] Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2000.

[iii] I have been careful to use "Britain" as the name of the island prior to the Anglo-Saxon conquest, a distinction that the scriptwriters failed to observe on one occasion in the dialog. It always makes me wince when I see Morgause refer to it as "England" while her people are still defending it against the Angles after whom it was later named.

[iv] See the excellent histories by Ramsay MacMullen for details about the conversion process and the relationship between Pagan and Christian in Western Europe from 100 - 800 CE:

MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire A.D. 100-400. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Other relevant works include:

Jones, Prudence, and Nigel Pennick. A History of Pagan Europe. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1999.

Kirsch, Jonathan. God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. New York: Viking Compass, 2004.