Giant's Dance

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The Giant's Dance or Giants' Dance is a stone circle in an Arthurian legend first documented c. 1136 in Historia Regum Britanniae.[1]

In the Merlin legend[]

Geoffrey described it as a megalithic stone circle, whose stones were used to build the neolithic Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England. That description was based on the legends that still existed at the time. Archaealogists have identified the mesolithic Waun Mawn in Pembrokeshire, Wales, as being this older Stone Age stone circle, which is where the bluestones of Stonehenge were taken from.

According to Geoffrey, the wizard Merlin disassembled a circle at Mount Killaraus in Ireland and had men drag the stones to Wiltshire, and had giants assemble Stonehenge.[2][1]

At the time of Geoffrey, western Wales was identified as part of Ireland, so the legend of a circle disassembled from Ireland and moved to Salisbury to create Stonehenge, has some relevance to the western Wales location of Waun Mawn.[3][4]

Current use of the name[]

In modern use, Giants Dance has been used to refer to:

  • fictional stone circle that was moved from Ireland to Britain by Merlin[1][5]
  • Waun Mawn, Wales, UK; the dismantled megalithic stone circle[7]

  • Merlin re-assembling the Giants Dance

  • Waun Mawn

  • Stonehenge

References[]

  1. ^ a b c Geoffrey of Monmouth. Historia regum Britanniae [The History of the Kings of Britain] (in Latin). c. 1136; original title Latin: De Gestis Britonum, lit. 'On the Deeds of the Britons'.
  2. ^ Pearson, Mike Parker; Pollard, Josh; Richards, Colin; Welham, Kate; Kinnaird, Timothy; Shaw, Dave; et al. (February 2021). "The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales". Antiquity. 95 (379): 85–103. doi:10.15184/aqy.2020.239.
  3. ^ "The First Circle of Stonehenge". Secrets of the Dead. 2021. PBS.
  4. ^ "Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed". Documentaries. 2021. BBC Two.
  5. ^ Marshall, Henrietta Elizabeth (1920). "Chapter 11: The story of how the Giant's Dance was brought to Britain". An Island Story: A history of England for boys and girls.
  6. ^ Kendrick, Sue (2005). "Stonehenge: The Giants' Dance". Time Travel Britain.
  7. ^ Alberge, Dalya (12 February 2021). "Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales". The Guardian.
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