Finding Arthur (38 page)

When next the Angles staged a full-blown invasion, in the mid-610s, they went south to what is now England, not north to Scotland, and so Scotland remained at “peace.” The Angles clearly remembered what Arthur had done to them the last time they went north.

In the south the Angles won the Battle of Chester or Carlisle around 615 and so cut off the Britons of the north from their southern cousins. In the next few centuries the Angles and their Saxon cousins
pressed the British west into what is now Wales. The rest of the south of Britain became Angle-land, England.

So it was that Arthur and the Great Angle War determined the future of Britain. But for Arthur there would be no Scotland today, no Wales, perhaps even no Ireland, only a Greater England.

The Great Angle War ended with the Battle of Badon-Badden, but Arthur had still another campaign to fight—his last. Earlier, we saw that the capital of Dalriada was said to be the hillfort Dunadd, an opinion shared by Skene, although, as the toponymist William J. Watson said in the early twentieth century, some of the evidence Skene used referred to another site, the mysterious and unidentified Dun Monaidh. It is possible, indeed probable, that Dunardry is the mysterious Dun Monaidh and, even more famously, Mount Badon, the hill of hills.
²⁸

10

The Legend Is Born

T
HE SOURCE
N
ENNIUS USED TO COMPILE HIS LIST OF
A
RTHUR’S BATTLES
was probably based on an original created by someone who knew Arthur Mac Aedan. The Men of Manau were involved in other battles in the late sixth century, and so it would have been easy to inflate the number of battles in which Arthur was said to have been involved, but Nennius, and we must suppose Nennius’s source, mentions only twelve. He does not mention Arderydd or Delgon, because Arthur Mac Aedan was not in command in these battles; neither does he mention the naval action in which a Scots fleet attacked the Orkney Islands in the early 580s, because Arthur Mac Aedan, was not in command. Camlann, the legendary Arthur’s last battle, is omitted too. It is generally accepted that this is because Nennius’s source, whatever it was, was created before the Battle of Camlann was fought.

The twelve battles on the list are chronologically and geographically in order and lie within a sensible historical context and within literal striking distance of one another (in stark contrast to later writings, which have a southern Arthur fighting in Scandinavia, France, and Italy) provided, of course, that Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan. All this suggests some fundamental source written in the time of Arthur
Mac Aedan. The question that arises is, Who created this source of evidence?

The most obvious candidate is Aneirin, the author of
Y Gododdin
, the poem that contains the earliest surviving reference to Arthur. There is just enough evidence to make a case for Aneirin, but that is all. There is not enough to say that the case is proved, at least not beyond reasonable doubt.

Aneirin flourished at the right time to create Nennius’s source. The last battle on Nennius’s list, the Battle of Badon, was fought around 588 (if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan). Arthur Mac Aedan died in 596. Nennius’s battle-list does not tell of Arthur’s last battle, and so, if Arthur was Arthur Mac Aedan, Nennius’s source was written before 596. The Catterick campaign that lies at the heart of Aneirin’s
Y Gododdin
was fought around the year 598. It is generally accepted that Aneirin wrote
Y Gododdin
around 600. This means it is possible Aneirin wrote the sources used by Nennius, sometime shortly before 596.

Aneirin was also in the right place to create Nennius’s source. It is generally accepted that Aneirin wrote
Y Gododdin
in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is only a few miles east of Stirling’s “Round Table” and a few miles north of the battlefields of the Great Angle War. Arthur’s Seat is in the middle of Edinburgh. Aneirin was in the right place to have known Arthur Mac Aedan and to have written about him.

The following, although somewhat speculative, is consistent with the slight evidence that survives.

Aneirin of the Flowing Verse, Prince of Poets, is almost invariably said to have been a Welshman, indeed his name is now stereotypically Welsh, but there is reason to doubt he was ever in Wales; indeed the little evidence that has survived suggests he was not.

The Britons who lived in the north of England had grown soft under Roman rule, while the Scots, who had never been conquered by Rome, had remained practiced fighters. Consequently, when the Romans left, the Scots increasingly raided British lands, and the Britons responded by bringing in Angle mercenaries from their German homes to provide them with protection. Before long the Angles became a greater threat to the Britons than the Scots had ever been; indeed by the mid-sixth century the Angles had become a threat to
both the Britons and the Scots, and so the Britons and the Scots became allies.

Aneirin’s father, the warlord Dunod Fwr or Dunawd Bwr—that is, Dunod or Dunawd, the great or stalwart—was one of many Scots warlords who moved south and found employment bolstering the forces of the kingdom of Elmet in the north Pennines, against Angle pressure (just as Arthur’s grandfather Gabhran had been called upon to lead the Men of Manau a generation before). Dunod-Dunawd died around 593. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real name of Aneirin’s father has been forgotten, and that all we have left, Dunod or Dunawd, was really “of Dunadd” or “from Dunadd,” that is, Dunadd in Argyll. If he was a Scots warlord then this would make sense.

In “The Reciter’s Prologue” at the beginning of
Y Gododdin
, Aneirin is described as the “son of Dwywei.” This links him with the royal houses of the North of England. Dwywei, a princess of Elmet, the lands about modern Leeds, was the sister of Gwallog (r. 560–590), one of four “kings” who fought alongside Urien of Rheged, Rhydderch of Strathclyde, and Mordred of the Gododdin against the Angles at Lindisfarne in the late 560s.
¹
It appears that Aneirin’s father married into the royal house of the kingdom of Elmet just as Gabhran, Arthur’s grandfather, married a Pictish princess in Manau.

Dwywei was the mother of Deinioel, the patron saint of Bangor, who according to the
Annales Cambriae
died in 584. If Aneirin was Deinioel’s younger brother, these dates would fit well with those of a poet who flourished in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.

Aneirin probably spent most of his boyhood in the north of England, although it may be he also spent some time among his father’s people. If he did, this would have allowed Aneirin to join Arthur Mac Aedan’s company, indeed, to have become Arthur’s friend and personal bard.

In his later years, despite many misgivings, Aneirin marched south with the Gododdin army to Catterick, when he must have known they were headed toward inevitable defeat. A man such as this, when he was a young man, would almost certainly have “charged to the sound of the guns.” In the sixth century the equivalent of sounding guns was the clash of shields, and, more often than not, this was where Arthur was
to be found. It would have been only natural if a poet like Aneirin gravitated to Arthur, because Arthur was the most fruitful source of heroic material in the sixth century (and, indeed, as things would turn out, the most fruitful source of heroic material … ever). They would have been a perfect match, Arthur and Aneirin, the greatest warrior of the age and the greatest poet of the age. It is not possible to say with certainty that Aneirin was actually with Arthur Mac Aedan for all or indeed much of his career, but he was certainly in the right place at the right time to have heard about it firsthand.

In
Y Gododdin
Aneirin was scathing about those in authority. He seems to have been a man who pushed the envelope of tolerance to its limits. Luckily for him those in power needed the fighting men Aneirin championed and entertained with his work, and so, like one of Shakespeare’s fools, he was probably allowed some license. Arthur Mac Aedan was popular with his men because he brought them victory; Aedan, Arthur’s father, probably was not. Aedan was not primarily a warrior but a politician, and so he was less likely to be held in affection.

Older men, especially politicians like Aedan, a man known as “the wily,” have always been the butt of jokes made by younger men who do the fighting. A man like Aneirin probably played upon this by entertaining Arthur and his men with jokes and impersonations at the expense of the high command. Just as modern politicians have to put up with mockery, men like Aedan would have had to tolerate men like Aneirin, while pretending to enjoy the fun. Of course, given a free hand, things would be different, and when Arthur died Aedan had a free hand.

When Arthur died in 596, Aneirin lost his protector and became open to the vengeance of Aedan and the old, stolid men of the court whom he had ridiculed while he lived under Arthur’s shield. How would a hard, cynical politician like Aedan deal with a man like Aneirin when he no longer had to tolerate him? The answer must have been obvious to Aneirin, because within a year of Arthur’s death Aneirin was to be found hiring out his pen for cash in the dissolute court of the Gododdin. Aneirin had moved fast. He probably had to.

Of course it could be argued that Aneirin did not
go to live
among the Britons, because, as the conventional wisdom holds, he was already a man of the Britons. Until now I have always gone for the simplest explanation.
Why then should I now place Aneirin with Arthur’s Scots and Men of Manau and then have to move him a few miles east and place him among the British Gododdin? Why not just accept that Aneirin was always a Briton? The answer to this question is, because even the Britons thought of Aneirin as a Scot.

It is unlikely that the sixteenth-century Greek painter, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, would have been called
El Greco
, The Greek, if he had stayed at home in Greece where there were a lot of … well, Greeks. He was called
El Greco
because he worked for much of his life in Spain, where he stood out as a Greek and so was given the sobriquet,
El Greco
.

An
is Gaelic for the indefinite article “the.”
Eirin
is rooted in
Éire
, which, even today, is the Irish name for the island of Ireland.

At the turn of the sixth century, only a hundred years or so had passed since Fergus Mor’s Scots-Irish had invaded Argyll, and less that twenty-five years had passed since the Council of Drumceatt, when Scottish-Dalriada gained its independence from Irish-Dalriada. During this time and for a long time afterward, until at least the union of the Scots and the Picts in the ninth century, the designations Scottish and Irish were synonymous.

And so, just as we have
El Greco
, The Greek, we have
An-Eirin
, The Irishman, and just as the Spanish only called
El Greco
“the Greek,” because he was not Spanish, the Britons of the Gododdin called
Aneirin
, “the Irishman,” because, in their eyes, he was not a Briton.

Of course, it is always possible that Aneirin’s father’s Scots background led to him being nicknamed Aneirin, and that Aneirin inherited the sobriquet, but this is unlikely. Aneirin’s mother was British. If he lived for most of his life among his mother’s people, it is unlikely he would have been marked out as very different. If however he spent much of his life among his father’s Scots, as Arthur’s friend and bard as the evidence suggests, and only came back to live among Britons late in life, it is likely he would have been distinguished as
An-Eirin
.

Aneirin was killed by an ax-blow to the head, inflicted by someone called Eidyn or, and this is more likely, by someone of or from Eidyn, that is, of or from Edinburgh (the assassin’s real name has been lost). This suggests that Aneirin died in Edinburgh (or at least somewhere
where there was a man with an Edinburgh connection). This could be Wales, but this must be considered unlikely.

Those who hold to the received wisdom say that the “But he was no Arthur” verse in
Y Gododdin
is an example of how far Arthur’s fame had spread in the three or four generations that
they say
separated their southern Arthur’s death, somewhere in south of Britain, from the writing of
Y Gododdin
in Edinburgh, in the north of Britain. It is more likely that this verse was inspired by the recent (four years in the past) death of Arthur Mac Aedan at Camelon, Falkirk, thirty miles west of Edinburgh, where
Y Gododdin
was written around 596.

I accept that the reasons why Aneirin ended up among the Gododdin are necessarily somewhat speculative—the available evidence is too slight to justify greater certainty—but they are at least consistent with the known facts.

Aneirin mentions Merlin-Lailoken only once in
Y Gododdin
. He says, “Myrddin of song, sharing the best / Part of his wealth, our strength and support.”
²
This would be a surprising thing for Aneirin to say if
Y Gododdin
was pure fiction. If it was pure fiction it would be reasonable to expect a poet with Aneirin’s powers of invention to have said Merlin-Lailoken did something more exciting than provide financial-backing. This suggests that
Y Gododdin
has historical foundations. I have argued in
Finding Merlin
that Merlin-Lailoken was an old man by the time of the Catterick campaign, and that consequently it makes sense to suppose that all he was able to make was a financial contribution.

It is impossible to believe that the Aneirin only wrote one line about Arthur. By the time he came to live among the Gododdin, Aneirin must have written innumerable poems praising Arthur. This early work would have found a ready market among the Gododdin because Arthur was a Gododdin hero too: they had won their greatest victories while serving under Arthur in the Great Angle War.