Pseudo history or a folk memory?

It's of no secret that a genesis point of writing for Stone Lord came from studying the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth. A welsh monk, born in the 12th century, he was responsible for writing "The History of the Kings of Britain" - essentially one of the first histories of this country.

Geoffrey describes in clear detail how Stonehenge came to be, attributing it to the ingenious work of Merlin the Magician.

Let's remove for a moment any dates and names that he used, and what we have left is actually a pretty accurate "guess work" of many established facts that we have only just come to realize about the monument.

Yes, the bluestones may not have been from Ireland, but they were from the West. Preseli in fact, which is the first thing you see when crossing the Irish Sea. Communities of Irish settlers governed that part of South Wales.

Geoffrey tells us that the monument was taken down and moved. We know that features of Stonehenge allude to a period of unknown construction where bluestone lintels were utilized, from evidence that can still be seen in the stones - bluestones bearing tongue and groove, & mortice and tenon joints.

Merlin tells us that Stonehenge was erected as a monument to the dead. Well, we've been able to prove that this is certainly one of its main functions. It's a vast prehistoric crematorium, one of the biggest in NW Europe (with approx. 200 individuals deposited around the Aubrey Holes, not to mention the landscape as a whole comprising of over 300 burial mounds, spread out like satellites around the horizon) It also contains the articulated bodies of at least 5 individuals (famously, one shot full of arrows) and possibly more, as rather sketchy stories abound of bones being unearthed in the centre of the stones frequently when the area was being disturbed by amateur diggers.

Merlin is a "wizard" or magic man. At the time of Stonehenge, in the new Stone Age, the first copper and bronze artefacts are beginning to appear. Men with talents to transform liquids into solid and shiny weapons would have been considered magicians.

Geoffrey attributes Merlin as being intimately connected with Stonehenge, and actually born in Wales, very close to the source of the bluestones.
He suggests its movement involved long journeys by water with many men (a theory that still holds water today :P)
Lastly, that a King played some part in the building of Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain. At the height of Stonehenge certainly, many kings or powerful chieftains resided in the area of Wessex, as evidenced by the affluent material culture and sophistication of the monuments of the area.

So, really as we right to throw the baby out with the bath water? It has always been my belief that some of our oldest texts can be used as windows onto older times, and that Geoffrey couldn't have been pulling this information from his imagination. Let's not forget the period that he lived. He didn't have the advantage of comic books, video games, tv, and other such "distraction to stimulate his imagination and influence his writing. He was a historian, who read history books.

Indeed he claims to have consulted a very ancient book from Brittany, loaned to him by the Archbishop of Oxford, written in the "British language" but sadly the name of that book, its age, or its current whereabouts, is not known.
It could be highly possible that this ancient book might have been something written down by priests. What ancient priests do we know of that would be able to write in the ancient british language, but druids?

Indeed, Geoffrey's history was very much met with approval for centuries after it was written, up until the 17th century. I think we need to examine what was going on at that point to change the paradigm.

I think it's by far time that we started to address the disservice archaeology and time has done to Geoffrey and applaud him for being the first to come up with a tangible history the stones. Ideas have only become more muddied, more outrageous, and more preposterous in probably the last 50 years, than the last 1000.

The site of Vespasians Camp, near Stonehenge and the River Avon. The key to unlocking the answer of why the stones were built where they are, dismissed for centuries by arrogant archaeologists who are looking inwardly, and in the wrong directions. It took one man, on a completely different assignment, the work of a dedicated team of professionals and local enthusiasts, to make the connection.

One of the things that was created from this was Stone Lord and Moon Lord, being a fictionalisation of many ideas, little known discoveries, linguistic information, and the works of one, misunderstood Welsh monk, writing to entertain a court.

A Merlin was just a wise man, or man of "magic" - an outcast living on the edges of society, and providing a direct link between the real world and the world of the ancestors.