The Mystery of the Kingdom that Sank into the Ocean

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Sunken kingdoms, missing kingdoms, Arthurian connections, Ancient Celtic tribes, Wales is so much more interesting then people give it credit for, thank you for sharing these cool stories and legends from Wales, they are all fascinating!

You’re a lost Welsh kingdom. He’s a lost Welsh kingdom. I’m a lost Welsh kingdom. We’re all lost Welsh kingdoms.

I can see why Tolkien was so inspired by Welsh history, language, and myth. Everything is so old, and deep, and mysterious. It’s the kind of place where ancient oaks live in the graves of kings, and stories are written in the very wind.

Here in northern germany we have a similar story, the legend of the sunken city of Rungholt. Rungholt was once the richest town in the north sea, but it's people grew arrogant and greedy and so were punished when a great flood sank the entire city beneath the waves, though it is said that when the tide is low one can still hear churchbells ringing in the deep... This story was long thought if as just that, a story. The atlantis of the north sea. But it turned out that Rungholt and its fall were very much real. The city appears on old maps and even some remains were found during low tide, and while the town might not have had goldplated roofs it likely was quite wealthy, and in a strange twist even the story of how arrogance and greed caused the citys ruin might have some truth to it as the towns people were harvesting peat, which destabilized the ground, and when a great storm came the city and most of the island it sat on were devoured by the sea.

As a linguist, a T transforming over time to S is not impossible. They are both voiceless alveolars, which basically means they have the same place of articulation when you pronounce them and you don't use your voice when pronouncing them. The only difference between the two is the movement of air from the vocal tract. The T is a stop, meaning minimal air is moving out of the vocal tract. The ancient Welsh T may have been aspirated at the beginning of a syllable and over time "weakened" to a sibilant S, the opposite of a stop. So the idea that Teithi Hen may have changed over time to Seithenhin is absolutely plausible.

I'm not even Welsh but I can imagine how magical it must be to see the history of your land unfold through myths and legends into reality.

Ok so this is weird, but when i was younger my family had a caravan in Ceredigion. And when I was younger I used to have dreams about islands that would appear at mega low tides (were talking tides so low they don’t exist in the real world since it was a dream) and I would go over on boats and explore sunken kingdoms. Never knew there were actual sunken islands until today, bit of a weird coincidence.

It's not difficult to imagine costal settlements, dealing with seasonal and tidal floods, would, over generations, build a series of weirs and levies to hold back the typical inundation. (Imagine modern-day New Orleans but on a smaller scale.) However, when that tsunami or 500-year storm hits, it washes away the weirs and levies, resulting in immediate and catastrophic destruction of lands at or slightly below sea level by violent inundation.

I went to Aberystwyth University studying Geography, we were told about the Sarn Cynfelyn causeway and a legend that the bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod can sometimes be heard from the coast, which inspired a song called Clychau Aberdyfi. In Aberdovey they have a bell under the pier that rings at high tide to celebrate the legend. We took tree cores from the submerged forest at Borth / Ynyslas the trees are 4,000 - 5,000 years old and were submerged around 3,000 years ago from my memory, Ynyslas is also interesting as during WW2 they performed rocket tests there.

I was reminded of the town of Rungholt in North Frisia, in modern Germany, which sank beneath the waves of the North Sea in a storm tide in 1362. If anything it proves that it is definitely possible for some destructive cataclysm to cause an entire settlement to be lost to the sea.

Wales trying to not lose a kingdom to fleeting memories every 5 minutes (impossible) On a more serious note though, I wasn't initially interested in welsh history, but as a former non subscriber, this is the 3rd video I've seen from you(except the king arthur one) where Wales has lost a kingdom(mythical or not) to obscurity, which isn't a lot, but it's weird it's happened thrice.

To me this bears a striking rememblance of the area known as Doggerland which disappeared quite violently after a series of minor floodings from the glacial ices that melted.

Actually the most interesting historical YouTuber, no exceptions I have literally zero connection to wales, or the British isles, or even Western Europe, but this guy makes me love that place

I know nothing about Welsh history or even that much British history, but these videos on lost kingdoms and historical mysteries are amazing. Keep it up!

I'll admit, I spent most of this video thinking about the Petrified Forest in Borth and Ynyslas. When that was discovered back in 2014, everyone had the same thing on their mind. Cantre'r Gwaelod was based on a real place! This was a hellishly good video. Adding some actual historical info to the bafflingly large amount of confusing mythology we've got here.

I absolutely love this style of storytelling history. It feels like we are solving a mystery and piecing bits together in a scholarly way.

when I looked up Gwynn Ap Nudd and Gwyddno's sunken kingdom, I never realized just how deep into manuscripts, local legends, cartography, and historical events this story went into. That being said, I did find some interesting connections to other flooded lands associated with Brythonic language-speaking regions: the Kingdom of Lyonesse, usually said to be the homeland of Sir Tristan and located somewhere near Cornwall (altho wikipedia said the legend and even the name of Lyonesse isn't consistent); and the Breton legend of Ys, which sank underwater due to the machinations of the princes Dahut (kinda like how Mererid let Maes Gwyddno sink underwater). Gwynn Ap Nudd's random connection to Gwyddno is also interesting to me, mostly bc Gwynn is this psychopomp fairy king figure who's better known from 'Culwch and Olwen'

Just an observation on Ynys Seiriol's previous English name of "Priest-holme". In Spanish, puffins are called "frailecillos", literally "little friars". There are several other languages where puffins are named for friars, deans and priests - could there be a connection between that and the island's previous English name?

I was told a story by my grandmother, who was from Aberdyfi, who said that there was an old town of Aberdyfi under the waves offshore. When the wind and tide were in the right direction, you could hear the bells of the sunken Church.