Camelot
Camelot names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Camelot kam'e-lot, a legendary city in England where King Arthur's palace was located
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
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: Goose, if I had you upon Sarum plain 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: On either side the river lie 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:
Camelot a city of shadowy palaces And stately
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a city of shadowy palaces And stately, rich in emblem and the work Of ancient kings who did their days in stone; Which Merlin's hand, the Mage at Arthur's court, Knowing all arts, had touch'd, and everywhere At Arthur's ordinance, tipt with lessening peak And pinnacle, and had made it spire to heaven. See Arthur
Camelot a name applied in the mediæval romances to the
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a name applied in the mediæval romances to the splendid "City of Legions" which grew up out of the permanent quarters of the Second Augusta Legion at Caerleonupon-Usk, but was built earlier by the mythical Belinus. The name is familiar to readers of Tennyson.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 rehearsed the old guesses — Winchester, Wales, Somerset — and Collier's in 1921 flatly identified Camelot with Caerleon-upon-Usk, the Roman "City of Legions." Modern scholarship instead traces the name to a single passing mention in Chretien de Troyes's "Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart" of about 1180, and treats it as a literary invention rather than a place with a lost address. The one hard piece of evidence to arrive since came from Leslie Alcock's excavations at Cadbury Castle in Somerset between 1966 and 1970, which uncovered a hillfort refortified in the fifth or sixth century with a large timber hall — a genuine British stronghold of Arthur's supposed era, though nothing found there names Arthur. Camelot has also acquired a meaning these writers could not have imagined: after the Lerner and Loewe musical of 1960, the word was attached to the Kennedy White House and now serves as shorthand for any brief golden age.
Written for this edition, 2026.