Camelot
kam'e-lot, a legendary city in England where King Arthur's palace was located. The Knights of the Round Table met here. There has been much dispute as to the site of Camelot. Shakespeare located Camelot in Wales, for the Earl of Kent in Shakespeare's King Lear says:
I'd drive ye cackling home to Camelot.
This has been interpreted as allusion to the fact that large quantities of geese were bred on the moors in Somersetshire. Consequently, Shakespeare is quoted as authority for locating the fabulous city in Somersetshire. Others identify it with Winchester. Caxton located it in Wales.
Camelot is best known through Tennyson's use of it. The following description in prose was found among the poet's papers after his death:
On the latest limit of the West, in the land of Lyonnesse, where save the rocky Isles of Scilly, all is now wild sea, rose the sacred Mount of Camelot. It rose from the deeps, with gardens and bowers, and palaces, and at the top of the mount was King Arthur's hall and the holy minster with the cross of gold.... The Mount was the most beautiful in the world, sometimes green and fresh in the beam of morning, sometimes all one splendor, folded in the golden mists of the West. But all underneath was hollow and the mountain trembled, when the seas rushed bellowing through the porphyry caves; and there ran a prophecy that the mountain and the city on some wild morning would topple into the abyss and be no more.
The Lady of Shalott begins with the lines:
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot.
The name Camelot is of constant recurrence in the poem. In the Idylls of the King, it is thus described: