Greetings!
In writing this week’s post about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, I found that I had trouble tracking down where Hank Morgan was exactly when he was witnessing the antics of the Round Table. I knew he was in Camelot…but where exactly?
Was it a banquet hall? A feasting hall? Just a hall?
In doing some research, it appears to be considered a “Mead Hall”–at least according to some sources. So, today, we are going to define this term and see how it relates to the novel we are reading!
Definition
A mead hall is a place where great celebrations and parties occur. Some sources describe it as a “traditional cultural gathering space where mead … has been shared for thousands of years,” which seems to speak to Hank Morgan’s location in the two most recent chapters of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Batch Mead). The knights of the Round Table are enjoying their customs–boasting, joking, eating, and drinking–in this very hall.
Moreover, in “Fighting and Feasting in Anglo-Saxon Society” by Stephen Pollington, the author describes a mead hall as an “essential” place where members of society promoted, rewarded, and cemented their bonds. After all, with “mead” in the name, one can only imagine how these halls operated for the leaders of a society. With only a scant knowledge of the mead hall in our book, we are unsure if this is a place of promotion, but we do know King Arthur is there, as well as Guinevere, and other maidens.
Furthermore, Pollington states, “”Alcoholic drinks were used for ‘feasting’ in the sense of an enjoyable gathering with plenty of food and drink, but were more important than that–drinking was used to seal commercial and social transaction, to mark the turning seasons, to formally mourn the dead and, in pre-Christian times, to invoke the gods.” In other words, the mead hall was the community hub for nobles and society’s elites to discuss politics and the comings and goings of the world.
Additionally, famous mead halls in literature appear in abundance, but the two most famous might in fact be Herot in Beowulf and Camelot in Arthurian legend.
Works Cited
“Mead Hall- History of Authentic Mead Halls.” Batch Mead. March 11, 2023. Web. https://www.batchmead.com/blogs/batch/authentic-mead-halls
Pollington, Stephen. “The Mead-Hall: Fighting and Feasting in Anglo-Saxon Society.” Medieval Warfare, vol. 2, no. 5, 2012, pp. 47–52. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48578043. Accessed 29 July 2023.
