Avalon — The Isle of Apples

Geoffrey's Avalon is not a place of mourning but of abundance — a land where crops grow unplanted and unattended, where the climate never turns harsh, and where nine skilled sisters, Morgan foremost among them, practise the healing arts. The name is generally traced to the Welsh word for apple, afal, and the apple carried deep symbolic weight in Celtic tradition already, as a fruit of the Otherworld associated with immortality and rebirth — a resonance scholars believe Geoffrey was consciously drawing on, whether or not he had a specific prior source in mind.

Some later scholarship links the name instead to a hypothetical Celtic figure called Aballach, and the island has often been compared to Emain Ablach, "Emain of the Apple Trees," a paradise associated in Irish tradition with the sea god Manannán — one more instance of the apple-Otherworld pairing recurring independently across Celtic-language traditions.

In 1191, monks at Glastonbury Abbey announced they had exhumed a grave containing two skeletons beneath a hollowed oak, along with a lead cross inscribed identifying the remains as Arthur's — buried, the inscription said, on the "island of Avalonia." The timing is difficult to separate from institutional need: the abbey had recently been devastated by fire and stood to gain enormously in pilgrim traffic and royal favour from establishing itself as Arthur's resting place, and King Henry II is recorded as having encouraged the search, in part to undercut Welsh hopes that Arthur might return to lead a rebellion against Norman rule.

The identification worked because Glastonbury genuinely resembled an island for much of its history — rising, before later drainage, out of the surrounding Somerset marshes, reachable by boardwalk. Whatever the motive behind the 1191 discovery, the Glastonbury-Avalon equation was rapidly accepted by other medieval chroniclers and has remained the dominant popular identification ever since, despite the absence of any evidence connecting the two sites prior to that announcement.

Contemporary Glastonbury-centred spirituality has largely stopped treating Avalon as a rival candidate location and instead reads it as operating on an entirely different plane overlaid onto the physical town — Avalon as an astral or etheric realm, with Glastonbury Tor functioning as a "portal" or point of thinning between the two, rather than as Avalon itself under a different name. A striking natural phenomenon lends this reading unusual visual support: on certain misty mornings the Tor can appear to float above a layer of ground fog, an optical effect called Fata Morgana — named, by no coincidence, for Morgan le Fay herself, the term having reached English via Norman Sicily.