Avalon is an island where crops grow without farming, people live past a century, and Excalibur is forged. In the 1190s a group of English monks claimed to have dug it up in Somerset. This episode traces the name from the Welsh word for apple tree and Proto-Celtic roots for a fruit-bearing thing, through Irish parallels like Manannan mac Lir’s island of apple trees, to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who first tied Avalon to Arthur in his 1136 Historia Regum Britanniae and added Morgan and her nine sisters in the Vita Merlini around 1150.

The hosts then examine the 1184 fire at Glastonbury Abbey, the 1190 announcement that Arthur and Guinevere had been found sixteen feet down in a hollowed tree trunk with a lead cross naming the island of Avalon, the quietly dropped third body identified as Mordred, and how a lead relic could be cast and inscribed to look ancient. They explain why Henry II and Edward I backed the find as a way to kill the Welsh, Cornish and Breton belief in Arthur’s return, culminating in the 1278 reburial before the high altar, and survey rival locations from Mount Etna and the Fata Morgana mirage to Greenland, Brittany, Majorca, a Roman fort in Cumbria, and Geoffrey Ashe’s case for Avallon in Burgundy.

• William of Malmesbury’s ruler Avalloc and Pliny the Elder’s amber island as alternative name origins
• How Geoffrey of Monmouth blended Isidore of Seville’s Fortunate Isles with Celtic apple-island lore
• Why Glastonbury Tor looked like an island before the surrounding marshes were drained
• Gerald of Wales declaring the fairy tales of Arthur’s return snuffed out
• Whether pinning a myth to a map location destroys the magic that made people search for it