Mystical systems
Avalon
Direct answer
Avalon is the island of Arthurian legend where King Arthur's sword was forged and where he was carried after his last battle to be healed of his wounds.
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At a glance
- Also called
- island of apples
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Lyonesse, Hy-Brasil, Atlantis, Hyperborea
Avalon is the island of Arthurian legend where King Arthur's sword was forged and where he was carried after his last battle to be healed of his wounds.
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Is Avalon a real place?
Avalon first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, written in Latin about 1136. He calls it Insula Avallonis and says two things of it: Arthur's sword Caliburn was made there, and the mortally wounded king was taken there after the battle of Camlann. In a later poem Geoffrey describes it as the Isle of Apples, a fertile place where crops grow untended, ruled by nine sisters of whom Morgen is the chief and a skilled healer.
The name is usually linked with the Welsh word for apple, afal. Avalon belongs with the blessed islands of Celtic story, lands in the western sea where there is no age or want. It is a place in literature, and the hope attached to it, that Arthur was not dead and would return, was a real force in medieval Welsh and Breton feeling.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Lost worlds.
What sets Avalon apart
Avalon is the lost land with the best documented birth as a place of pilgrimage. For half a century it existed only in Geoffrey's Latin; then a single excavation gave it an address. The inscription on the lead cross, known from a drawing William Camden printed in 1607, names Arthur and the island together, which is just what a sceptic would expect a forger to write. The island's other mark is its company of nine women, which recalls older accounts of nine priestesses on an island off Gaul.
- First source: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, about 1136
- Latin name: Insula Avallonis; later Insula Pomorum, the Isle of Apples
- Rulers: nine sisters led by Morgen, in the Life of Merlin, about 1150
- Glastonbury find: 1191, a grave and a lead cross, reported by Gerald of Wales
- Reburial: 1278, in the presence of Edward I
Often mistaken for something else: Lyonesse is a land said to have drowned off Cornwall; Avalon is an island of healing that in the stories never sank, and was later pinned to Glastonbury.
The story behind Avalon
Geoffrey's Life of Merlin, about 1150, gives the fuller picture of the island. In 1191 the monks of Glastonbury Abbey announced that they had dug up the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere, with a lead cross naming the place as the Isle of Avalon; Gerald of Wales reported the find. The abbey had burned in 1184 and needed pilgrims, and historians generally regard the discovery as staged. The bones were reburied before Edward I in 1278 and lost at the Dissolution.
Why Avalon matters
Avalon shows a literary island gaining a location on the map through a monastery's need, a pattern common to lost lands.
How to read Avalon
Readers of Arthurian legend know it as the place of healing and return; Glastonbury takes the name for its own sacred landscape.
Avalon in practice: an example
A walker on Glastonbury Tor is standing where medieval monks placed Avalon, a claim made some fifty years after Geoffrey wrote.
Where readings of Avalon go wrong
The Glastonbury identification rests on a twelfth century find that most historians think was arranged.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- isle of avalon, avalon meaning, king arthur avalon, where is avalon, island of apples
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Is Avalon a real place?
It is a place of legend, first described in the twelfth century. Glastonbury in Somerset has been identified with it since 1191, and other sites have been proposed, but no source earlier than Geoffrey of Monmouth names it.
What does the name Avalon mean?
Most scholars connect it with the Welsh afal, apple, so that it means something like the place of apples. Geoffrey of Monmouth himself glossed it as the Isle of Apples.
What happened to King Arthur in Avalon?
In Geoffrey's account he was taken there so that his wounds could be tended. The story leaves his fate open, and from that grew the belief that he would one day return.
