Comet Sceptics

King Arthur and the Sky

THE MYTHS of the reign of King Arthur are at last explained. For centuries they have presented historians with an inexplicable mystery: Why were events before the Arthurian time—the decline of the Roman Empire, with its wars, treaties and assassinations—so precisely chronicled, as were events after Arthur, while the century in between is filled with fantastic stories about princesses who lived at the bottom of lakes and knights whose severed heads talked from beneath their arms? The answer, as some astronomers have long suspected, is that Britain was struck by a comet. This occurred—according to research at Cardiff University—at some point between 536 and 540 AD, coinciding with the supposed dates of Arthur.

The effects were described by the 6th century British historian Gildas, in a passage that few have understood until now: ``The fire of righteous vengeance, kindled by the sins of the past, blazed from sea to sea. Once lit, it did not die down. When it had wasted town and country, it burned up the whole surface of the island until its red and savage tongue licked the western ocean. All the greater towns fell down. Horrible it was to see the foundations of towers and high walls thrown down bottom upwards in the squares, mixing with holy altars and fragments of human bodies.'' But why the fantastic stories that make Arthur's period sound like the madder sort of computer game? It must have been simply a question of money. Chroniclers, the freelance journalists of the time, could not get hold of the hard facts on which they normally relied for a living. Communications had totally broken down. And so they simply fabricated, inventing any story they might get paid for. It had happened before. The Mycenean Civilisation, the great commercial and military empire that produced Homer and Theseus, collapsed swiftly and mysteriously in about 900 BC. Conventional historians, seeking a political or social explanation, have never understood why. But to Solon, the statesman and scholar of a later age, the matter could not have been clearer: ``The truth behind it is a deviation of the bodies that revolve in heaven round earth, and destruction of things on earth by a great conflagration. The torrents of heaven swept down like a pestilence. You do not know that the noblest and bravest race in the world once lived in your country. From a small remnant of their seed, you and all your fellow-citizens are derived. But you know nothing of it because the survivors of many generations died leaving no word in writing.'' Whether Solon was describing a comet or an asteroid there is no way of knowing—especially since he couldn't have known the difference. But the inference of his and Gildas's testimony is plain. Parts of our history are periodically blotted out, with sometimes whole civilisations being eradicated, by impacts of debris from the sky. And this peril will continue until space engineers find a way of preventing it. Perhaps a more subtle danger is the narrow-minded scepticism of many academics and politicians. As President Jefferson said in 1807: ``I would rather believe that Yankee professors lie than that stones fall from heaven.''