Compare two figures from our early history, King Arthur and King Oswald. Many people have heard of Arthur. The stuff of legend. Oswald, however, was for real, not for legend. And much that people yearn for in the legendary Arthur was for real in the factual Oswald. Yet few have heard of Oswald. Even though he was the originating godfather of today’s UK royal family.
Arthur probably did exist. Most likely a Britonnic Celt general living around about 500. At that time, he helped force many Anglo Saxon invaders back to the European mainland. They stayed there about forty years before returning to sweep all before them. In the long run, Arthur lost.
The legend of Arthur dates to the 12th century, and legend is pretty much what it is. The “once and future king” – I wonder how many can see in that a garbled motif for Jesus Christ?
Oswald, on the other hand, King of Northumbria 635-642, was the most dramatic factual figure of our lost history. An epic hero. More like the King Arthur legend than Arthur ever was. But… for real.
The image on the front of my book, “The Mustard Seed”, is an artistic representation of Oswald. His warrior helmet, if you look closely, is a Celtic Christian Cross. Appropriate – Oswald was Early England’s Christ figure.
Here is what Oswald accomplished. Unlike Arthur, he really did return to his people to save the day. In so doing, he ended an attempted genocide. He went on to spark the second most transformative Christian Awakening in human history. And he godfathered the Wessex royal family which would eventually found the Nation of the Christian English. He became its enduring hero.
In the end, Oswald was slain by a pagan rival King, then dismembered and displayed in a parody of the Cross of Christ. Yet… in the long run, Oswald won.
You see, he emerged as Saint King Oswald, rallying banner for the many for generations to come. His bones got involved in sealing a peace deal which became a building block in the creation of England. They became the cherished possession of Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, daughter of King Alfred the Great and a genius Christian Warrior. She had not long laid Oswald’s bones in a brand new church when, on Saint King Oswald’s Day in 910, she won the battle which was a key step towards the formation of England. The family would not have been worshipping the bones, by the way. It would have been praying to the Christian God for all that had been good and great in Oswald to prevail once more in their own times.
Oswald was an Angle, Angle-ish, the root word of English. However, he embodied the Celtic Christian Life of Gaelic Iona at the height of its powers. As a teenage refugee there, Oswald received the Christ. As a grown man, refugee no more, it was Oswald who sent to Iona for St Aidan, a Celtic Christian Great. Under Oswald’s shelter, St Aidan became the Apostle to the English. He brought Christ’s love to Oswald’s Angle-ish people.
Therefore, Oswald embodied a reconciliation: the Germanic Angle and the Gaelic Celt were at one in the vibrant Christian Life at the heart of him. As such, he gives the lie to the fashionable caricature of Anglo versus Celt. The truth in Oswald is many times more glorious than the bitter latter-day caricature. He even became the hero of the Britonnic Celts in times after his death. Think it through: Arthur had given his all to fight the Anglo Saxons. Yet Arthur’s own Celtic ethnicity went on to adopt the Angle-ish Oswald. They gave Oswald a heroic name: Lamnguin, meaning White Blade, intended in context to mean, Holy Sword, a descendant of all that had been finest in Celtic Christianity.
It was Oswald, embodier of Anglo/Celt reconciliation, who, in 635, first sponsored the Royal House of Wessex into Christian Identity. He was its original godfather. The late Queen Elizabeth II and the present King Charles III descend from a cousin branch of that family, that is, from the family of King Alfred the Great, which, over the space of three generations, founded the Nation of the English as a Christian Nation. Cousin branch or not, Alfred the Great’s family, three hundred years on, cherished the values represented by the bones of Oswald, and saw him as their original godfather in the Christian faith.
I had a sense of revelation as I recovered Saint King Oswald, lost hero of our earliest history. I came to love him. I think that, if you recover him with me, you will love him too.