Finding Arthur (46 page)

Arthur won this battle at Carpow, but only after suffering horrific losses. Adamnan said three hundred and three of his men were killed, an enormous number, given the size of armies in the sixth century. This is the battle recorded in the
Annals of Tigernach
as the Battle of Chirchind; that is, Circenn; that is, modern Carpow.

News of this battle would have taken some days to reach Iona, ninety miles to the west. There Columba would have heard it along with everyone else. This was the battle Adamnan said Columba reported on while it was still ongoing, but this may be discounted as fiction.

According to Adamnan the dead included Arthur and his brother Eochaid Find but not Arthur’s brother Domangart, who, according to Adamnan, was later killed in battle in England. This contradicts the
Irish Annals
but is not surprising, because Adamnan was writing political propaganda. His only concern was to make Columba-Crimthann look good. He either did not know that Arthur survived the battle against the Miathi Picts only to be killed soon thereafter at Camlann or, and this is more likely, he confused the two battles. After all, Adamnan’s main aim was to pretend that Columba-Crimthann had magical powers and so all he needed was a little historical material upon which to build his pretense.

Adamnan’s omission of the Battle of Camlann can be attributed to ignorance; laziness; or cynicism, but it was probably just carelessness, because Adamnan did not care about history—he had no reason to care, history was not his job. Alternatively, it may be that Adamnan was just being economical with the truth, using only what was necessary to promote the cult of Columba-Crimthann, while deleting historical details that were of no interest to him. Adamnan did not care whether there was one battle or two, the second being the battle at which Arthur fell, all he cared about was that he boosted Columba-Crimthann’s reputation as a man of magic. He used a particular battle, Arthur Mac Aedan’s Battle of Chirchind-Circenn-Carpow in 596, the first battle in the Camlann campaign, but he could just as easily have used another battle.

The historical details would have been of great interest to Columba-Crimthann the politician. He would have been disappointed that Aedan’s army, under Arthur, had been victorious once more but heartened when he learned that his old enemies, Aedan and Arthur, had been weakened by the loss of so many men.

The most likely scenario is this. News of Arthur’s costly victory was heard in the land of the Gododdin forty-five miles south of Carpow long before it reached Columba on Iona. Mordred, hearing of the losses sustained by Arthur’s army, saw his chance to strike. While Arthur was still in the north nursing his injured army, Mordred prepared to march on Manau and, almost literally, stab Arthur in the back. When Arthur heard that the Gododdin had mobilized he turned for home, marching south to Manau to meet the threat of invasion.

The figure “three hundred and three dead” may be a stock figure meaning simply “a lot” but it sounds about right. There must have been
at least as many wounded men and so the army that Arthur led home was not only drastically weakened but heavily encumbered. It must have been a sad sight to see this once great army, in its day the greatest army in Britain, limp back to Stirling, only to be told when they got there that a large Gododdin force was already massed on Manau’s border, about to invade.

There was no time to call for reinforcements from Dalriada, even if there had been men available to call upon. No help could be expected from Merlin-Lailoken in Strathclyde; he had his hands full at this time dealing with the disruption caused by the recent return of Mungo Kentigern. In any event the Christians, of whom there were now many in Strathclyde, would not have wanted to take on the might of the Gododdin of Arthur’s behalf, given that Arthur was the most able war leader of the people of the Old Way. It would have been impossible for Merlin-Lailoken to raise an army to fight for Arthur, even if there had been time—and there was no time.

Arthur left his wounded soldiers at Stirling and marched with the few men he had left to the fort at Caer Aedan-Coraind, the fort that stood near the ruins of the old Roman fort (at what is now Camelon).

As Mordred’s army approached, Arthur moved out from the fort and formed a defensive line along what was left of the old Roman ramparts, behind the four immense Romans ditches: the crooked ground that gave the battle its name, Camlann.

Only slight and confused hints survive to provide us with some idea of the state and disposition of Arthur’s forces at this time. One of the
Triads
tells of the band of Alan Fyrgan, “Who returned back by stealth from their lord, on the road at night with his servants at Camlann, and there he was slain.”
²⁷
This may be a reference to the desertion of a company of soldiers on the way to Camlann and of the death of their captain in the battle that followed.

One of the few things that can be said with some certainty is that Arthur had only a small force of exhausted men, who had only recently been engaged in a brutal battle against a fearsome foe, to pit against Mordred’s vastly more numerous and fresh-in-the-field army of the Gododdin.

Hugely outnumbered, Arthur’s Scots and Men of Manau fought
on until they were overwhelmed. The details of the battle are lost. All we can be sure of is that the battle was not started by a snake as Malory said and that Arthur and Mordred did not kill each other in hand-to-hand combat.

Arthur lost his last battle. He was carried from the field dead or mortally wounded and taken to Iona-Avalon and buried there. Mordred and Arthur did not kill each other at the Battle of Camlann as Malory says. That would be just too good to be true, too much the type of thing someone like Malory or a modern screenwriter would come up with. In real life heroes don’t always survive to the end of the story, and when they are killed they don’t always take their killers with them when they go. It is easy to see why Malory said Mordred was killed by Arthur at the Battle of Camlann: Mordred was the antihero and killing the antihero at the end of a story provides the feel-good factor that pleases audiences. Malory’s version is “box-office,” but it is not history.

It is generally accepted that when Nennius said the legendary Arthur fought “together with the kings of the British; but he was their leader in battle,” he meant that although the legendary Arthur was a leader of kings, he himself was not a king. Arthur Mac Aedan fits this profile: he died some twelve years before his father and so did not succeed to his father’s throne.

It is possible Arthur’s sword was thrown into a loch in accordance with Celtic custom, perhaps into Loch Katrine, which lies almost exactly half way between Camlann and Avalon. Who knows? We do know that a woman’s hand did not appear from the waters to take the sword, because Arthur lived in real life, not in myth or in legend (or in the south). Walter Scott wrote the poem
The Lady of the Lake
after he spent time with his family at Loch Katrine, but this poem is set in the time of James V’s and has nothing to do with the legendary Arthur, although Walter Scott was an avid collector of traditional tales, and so it may be that he heard something in the oral tradition on the banks of Loch Katrine and that this inspired his title. I started to look for his diaries to see if there was anything to this but … time. There is always somewhere else to go and something else to find.

Epilogue: Árya

I
FOLLOWED
O’B
RIEN’S DEFINITION OF
A
IRIGH
, “C
ERTAIN, PARTICULAR
, especiall [sic], prince, nobleman &c.,” and it led me to Arthur and Merlin, but there was another way I could have taken to the same end.

MacBain in his
Etymological Dictionary
expanded on O’Brien’s definition of
Airigh
. He looked back to its origins in the Sanskrit of the Vedas of the Indus Valley civilization of India in the second millennium BCE.

Sanskrit is perhaps the oldest member of the Indo-European family of languages, of which Scottish Gaelic is a part. In Sanskrit
Airigh
is
Árya
, “good” or “lordly.” Not lordly in the aristocratic sense but in the sense of a worthy person. It is from
Árya
that we get the word
Aryan
, meaning an honorable person. In the Vedas being
Aryan
was not a matter of rank but of character. It was certainly never a matter of race. It is ironic but perhaps not surprising that
Aryan
, a word that epitomizes all that is good in human nature, should have been stolen by the Nazis and abused for their perverted purposes. To be Aryan is not a racial thing, as the inhuman Nazi abomination would have had it, but a philosophical thing, a human thing.

According to the early-twentieth-century Indian scholar Sri Aurobindo,
Árya
was a belief in an ideal: “All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable [
Árya
]” In time, he says, it came to be that,

The word
Árya
expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candour, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness of knowledge, respect for the wise and learned, the social accomplishments … There is no word in human speech that has a nobler history.
¹

These are the very values exemplified by the idea that is
Camelot
.

I considered some of the complexities of the word
Airigh
, with particular reference to its Sanskrit derivation and the Indian philosophy described, and concluded that O’Brien’s definition, “certain, particular, especial,” and not “prince, nobleman,” made most sense. This was especially so when considered with reference to Arthur, Lailoken, and Camelot because
Airigh
-
Árya
connotes the very values that are today associated with the Arthurian Canon.

Of course, the ideals of Camelot embody universal values to which every right-thinking person aspires. The problem is that there have always been people like Crimthann or the Taliban waiting in the wings ready to enforce an inhuman alternative. This has led to struggle between those who believe in (or say they believe in) the supernatural and those who are content with nature, especially human nature. This struggle has gone on for millennia and continues today.

I tried to follow the idea that
Árya
represents from its Sanskrit roots and came to understand a little of the Old Way—I think. I think it had relatively little to do with the supernatural, that is, relative to, say, Christianity, and that it was more, as someone in the twenty-first century might say, a people thing. Of course, the Old Way of the druids was not without supernatural elements. There is always someone who does not know how something works who comes up with a supernatural answer, and, given that this is not testable, there is always someone else who comes up with a different supernatural answer, and then the fighting starts. This is what much of our history has been about.

Crimthann and Mungo Kentigern introduced their forms of Christianity to Scotland; Augustine introduced his form of Christianity to England; and various other forms of Christianity, promulgated by
other saints in the sixth and subsequent centuries, popped up in different parts of Europe. There was no place, in what came to be called Christendom, for a way of life that that allowed people to be actively curious.

Arthur and Lailoken came to personify human resistance to the new dogma. They did not become famous because they thought of the “Round Table” or of the ideal that is “Camelot.” Arthur and Lailoken became famous because they were the last men holding a torch for the Old Way of the druids, in effect, for human nature, when Christianity crushed freedom of thought in the Western world for a millennium.

In the film
633 Squadron
, one officer says to another officer, “all dead, all 633 Squadron,” and the other officer replies, “
you can’t kill a squadron
.”

You can’t kill ideas either, ideas such as, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Human nature is winning.

The ideals of Camelot did not begin with Arthur. One of the greatest threats to the existence of modern Christianity was the Arian Heresy in the fourth century CE. I looked to see if I could find a connection with
Árya-Airigh
. I got to the fourth century BCE before the trail ran cold, at least for now.

The ideals of Camelot did not end with Arthur. About 1900, an eighth- to eleventh-century stone with Celtic markings on it was found on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea: “The absence of the Christian cross and the context of the inscription give no indication of the stone being raised over a Christian person.”
²

This stone was raised by a man with a Scottish-Pictish name. The name of the place where this stone was found is
Ardre
.

Arthur is no more the center of the stories that bear his name than the Earth is the center of the Solar System. The battle for Heliocentricity has been won. The battle for Camelot has only just been joined.

In legend he was Arthur,
Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus
, the Once and Future King. In history he was Arthur Mac Aedan and this is the once and future history.

Selected Bibliography

Adamnan,
Life of Columba
. London: Penguin, 1995.

Alcock, Leslie.
Arthur’s Britain—History and Archaeology AD 367–634
, 2nd Ed. London: Penguin, 1989.