Not to be confused with either the 1996 Fantasy movie, or well-known Metal band that plays guitars really fast DragonForce — who, incidentally, performed in their early days as “DragonHeart”, and whom, if you’re in my age demographic at least, remember from Guitar Hero the Brazilian Metal band known as Dragonheart doesn’t have much of an online presence.
For reference, when I wrote the earliest version of this post a few years, the version of the song on YouTube had about 300 views. It has since passed 1,000. I’m not going to unironically say most of those were me, but I definitely helped pump up those numbers…
They do have a Facebook page and have attained at least enough notability to have a TV Tropes article.
Now, said Facebook page hasn’t been updated in about a year. Possibly because of the death of a member. The post is in Portuguese and the automatic translation provided by Facebook isn’t particularly coherent in English.
The band has apparently been around since 1997 and put out 8 albums (their most album releasing in 2023), and I’ve known about them since high school. Though it happened entirely by accident.
My first experience with them was Mists of Avalon, though only because some of my friends had just introduced me to DragonForce and when I happened across Mists of Avalon, it was incorrectly attributed to DragonForce online. I could tell it didn’t sound like DragonForce and did some digging to uncover the real artists, which in turn led me to a couple other Dragonheart songs — none of which I thought were quite as good as Mists of Avalon…
The song refers, of course, to the weather conditions in Eastern Newfoundland.
That was a joke.
It’s about King Arthur.
Image by Monika from Pixabay
Now, technically, that statue — called Gallos — is not about King Arthur. Although located on the grounds of Tintagel Castle, which is associated with King Arthur, English Heritage itself says the statue is meant to represent Tintagel broadly and generally, including its role as the residence of the Kings of the Sub-Roman Kingdom of Dumnonia.
Fittingly, Gallos is both broadly Arthurian and sort of contradictory in its meaning. Which is actually a great way to represent the Matter of Britain itself.
[And the Matter of Britain was, funnily enough, hugely popular in France…]
Anyone who has read any amount of Arthurian folklore is probably going to realise the whole thing is sort of a mess. There’s no real original definitive, authoritative source for the stories. And even what, if any historical events and personages inspired the stories, continues to be debated.
I could (and, back in school, I’m pretty sure I did) write an essay about the development of the Arthurian mythos and that would be a post unto itself. But to give a brief sense of how much the mythology changed: the earliest reference to Mordred is in the Welsh Annals merely notes “The strife of Camlann [in AD 537], in which Arthur and Medraut fell”, with no indication that Mordred was Arthur’s enemy, and other early references seem to speak of Mordred positively, as a heroic figure.
Mordred as a traitorous figure seems to originate in Geoffrey of Monmouth‘s History of the Kings of Britain, which only deals with Arthur fairly briefly relative to the overall length of the work. Whereas, in the 12th century, he rarely appeared at all, and by the 13th century, he was pretty much consolidated into a bad guy.
Also, the original Celtic antecedent for the Holy Grail is, like, a pot and even after it’s established as explicitly something to do with Jesus and the Last Supper, in the earliest versions, it’s a dish, not a cup.
We’ve discussed this before:
The whole corpus of Arthurian literature really is just successive generations of writers adding and changing things as they saw fit as they told their stories.
With that in mind, Mists of Avalon doesn’t really a story about King Arthur, but does at least evoke the spirit of the legends and give at least a brief rundown of what is probably the most famous version of the story: Excalibur, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, Mordred ruining everything, King Arthur dying and being brought to Avalon with the promise to return in Britain’s time of need.
And, of course:
“In the mists of Avalon
The Lady of the Lake is dancing.”
Which is a pretty strong way to sum up the mythological aspects of the stories…
Admittedly, Dragonheart’s grasp of English is not great. There are clear mispronunciations of words and the lyrics themselves are fairly awkward. It’s noticeable and potentially distracting, but I’m not going to hold it too much against them.
Plenty of the other bands I like whose first language isn’t English have their own examples of clumsy English. And, like, it’s not like I could write or perform a song in Brazilian Portuguese.
nd, honestly, in my time, I’ve seen people whose first language is English write worse than this.
It can be hard to follow some of the lyrics, and I could only figure out what he’s saying by reading along with lyrics at some places, but at least the most sing-alongable parts are pretty clear. For example:
“In the mists of Avalon
The Lady of the Lake is dancing.”
Take a listen here:
The Emona Literary Services™ Playlist is here:
Now, a quick reminder that I am a professional writer and editor, and if you’re in need of writing and editing support, please consider taking a look at the work and rates currently offered by Emona Literary Services™ and reach out if you think I can help you.
Please consider supporting Emona Literary Services™ to help me expanding my publishing and content creation projects, via Patreon, Ko-fi, or directly through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
You can follow me on my various social media platforms here:
© Joel Balkovec — Published by Emona Literary Services™.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
View the Emona Literary Services™ Privacy Policy here.
Emona Literary Services 
Leave a comment