The Isle of Apples Where the King Waits

Avalon is the enchanted otherworld-island of Celtic and Arthurian legend, most famous as the place to which the mortally wounded King Arthur is carried across the water to be healed. Its name is usually connected to the Welsh and Breton word for "apple" (afal), making it the "isle of apples", an orchard-paradise of the kind common in Celtic imagining of the otherworld, a land just beyond the mortal one where sickness and age lose their power.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who did much to fix the legend, describes it as a fortunate isle ruled by the enchantress Morgan and her sisters, where Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he lies healing his wounds, from which, the tradition holds, he will one day return. In the later Middle Ages Avalon was famously identified with Glastonbury in Somerset, whose monks claimed in 1191 to have discovered Arthur's grave, an identification that fused the mythic island with a real place of pilgrimage. Avalon belongs to a wider Celtic family of blessed otherworlds, like the Irish Tir na nOg, lands of youth and healing beyond the western sea, and it carries the particular Arthurian charge of a hope deferred: the king who does not die but waits.