Finding Arthur (6 page)

2

The Would-Be Arthurs

M
ANY BELIEVE THERE WAS NO HISTORICAL
A
RTHUR, WHILE OTHERS
believe that several figures formed a foundation upon which the legend of Arthur was built. The conventional wisdom current among those who believe there was a historical Arthur has him living about the turn of the fifth century, give or take a generation; and a southern British, Christian king who became famous fighting the Anglo-Saxons. There is no consensus as to who this Arthur was, when he was active, where he was active, what he did, why he did it or who he did it to. No one who cleaves to the conventional wisdom can answer many, far less all of these questions while pointing to a historical Arthur.

Suggested historical Arthurs include Lucius Artorius Castus, a Roman military leader who lived circa 140 to 197 CE. This was the man played by Clive Owen in the 2004 film
King Arthur
, the first major film to place Arthur north of Hadrian’s Wall. Despite living long before any possible historical Arthur, it is said Castus was remembered as a hero and injected into British history hundreds of years after his death, although no one has come up with a good reason why this might be. He did nothing of an importance that would justify such a development, certainly not in Britain. It is likely that the simple similarity of the name Artorius and the name Arthur led to the conclusion that he must have had something to do with the legend of Arthur.

Even slighter similarities of name have not stopped other claims, including Arthun, son of Magnus Maximus, a Western Roman Emperor who ruled from 383 to 388; Arthwys ap Mar of the Pennines, who lived between approximately 450 and 520; Arthwys of Elmet, West Yorkshire, born circa 479; Arthfael ap Einudd of Glamorgan, who lived circa 480 to 550; St. Arthmael, formerly King Athrwys of Glywyssing, who lived circa 482 to 552; Arthfoddw of Ceredigion, circa540 to 610; Artúir ap Pedr of Dyfed, circa 550 to 620; and Athrwys ap Meurig, a Welsh king, circa 610 to 680.

The net has been cast wide. These would-be Arthurs span five hundred years, from long before the early sixth century—the time when most historians place the historical Arthur—until long after this time. All these men are from the south of Britain, although some people have sought to buttress a favored candidate’s claim by asserting that their man had northern connections. Lucius Artorius Castus is said to have been posted to Hadrian’s Wall, and Arthun to have lived for a time at Caerleon (Carlisle)—both in the far north of England, near, but not quite in, Scotland.

Possible southern Arthurs include almost everyone known to have lived in Britain in the five hundred years before the mid-seventh century whose name begins with the letters
Ar
. There are almost as many interpretations of the name Arthur as there are “Arthurs.” The most popular holds that the name Arthur is derived from the fifth-century P-Celtic Welsh words
art
or
arth
, which are said to mean “bear” with the addition of “ur,” which is said to be P-Celtic Welsh for “a man.” This produces Arthur, Bear-man. Alternatively, the P-Celtic Welsh word
arth
, meaning “bear,” has been added to the Latin word
ursus
, which also means “bear,” and so we end up with
Arthursus
(a name with double the bear-iness of other names).

In early Q-Celtic
art
also means “bear,” although John O’Brien’s eighteenth-century
Irish-English Dictionary
says that the name Arthur may also be derived from
art
, meaning “noble” or “generous.” In either event, “bear” names work just as well in Scotland as they do in the south.

Scotland has only one Arthur-candidate, Arthur Mac Aedan, the son of the king of the Scots, a man of the late sixthcentury. His claim has been “debunked” on the grounds that little is known of his life.
“Artuir Mac Áedáin [
sic
] might be the historical Arthur but, even if he was, there is nothing else we can say about him,”
¹
writes academic Guy Halsall in a recent book that sets out to undermine the very idea of finding a historical Arthur. Halsall notes that the reference to Arthur in
Y Gododdin
(circa 600) “might be the earliest mention of [the legendary] Arthur,” but it goes on to say that,

No fewer than three genuine historical Arthurs are mentioned around the end of the sixth century. One was a son of King Aedan of the Scots… This interesting cluster of three Arthurs appearing close together in the historical record might be proof of the reality of a great Arthur a generation or two before their birth, thus sometime in the early to mid-sixth century.
²

One might think the existence of three late-sixth-century Arthurs is more likely to be proof of the reality of a late-sixth-century “great Arthur” (rather than an earlier “great Arthur”), but, then, this would be counterintuitive for those who hold to the conventional wisdom. (It was not clear to me who the two other Arthurs referred to were.)

A similarity of names is not always deemed essential for a historical candidate. Owain Ddantgwyn, White Tooth, of Powys in North Wales, has been put forward as a possible historical Arthur. The supposition is that the name Arthur was a nickname, and the “proof” is that his son was said to have driven a chariot called “the receptacle of the bear”—the word “bear” in P-Celtic is
arth
, as I mentioned earlier. The idea seems to be that the son was the father’s charioteer.

The most famous potential historical Arthur is not actually called Arthur either: he is the shadowy Riothamus who went to the aid of a people called the Bituriges, in central France in about 468. Riothamus is said to have been king of the Britons, but it is more likely he was the king of the Bretons of northern France. It is unlikely a British Riothamus would have had the strength or the motivation to invade central France in the middle of the fifth century when there was more than enough to occupy him at home. If he did invade France from Britain, why did Gildas, who wrote of this time in the following century, not mention him? The little that is known of Riothamus does not suggest
he was an especially successful warrior; on the contrary, all we know of his one campaign is that his army was routed and that he “fled with all his men” toward Burgundy, before vanishing from history. The weightiest evidence for Riothamus is that in Burgundy there is a place called Avallon, although it was not called Avallon in the fifth century, and there is nothing to suggest Riothamus was ever there.

Geoffrey Ashe, one of the most prominent advocates of Riothamus as the historical Arthur, also favors a connection between Arthur and Glastonbury, where, some say, Arthur was buried. According to Ashe, “The Arthur-Riothamus equation might be thought adverse to the [Glastonbury] grave, on the grounds that if [Riothamus] died overseas he would not have been buried in Glastonbury. Yet if his mortal career ended in Burgundian country, at the real Avallon for instance, his remains might have been brought back later for re-interment …” This would seem to preclude Avallon being, well, Avalon.
³

Riothamus has only a slender connection with Britain, if any, and none at all with any one of the twelve battles on Nennius’s battle-list or with Camlann, or with any Round Table, or with Camelot, or with anything much that has anything to do with the legendary Arthur—not even a name. It is difficult to see that, as Geoffrey Ashe says, “In the High King called Riothamus we have … a documented person as the starting point of the legend,” or that “[Riothamus] is the only such person on record who does anything Arthurian.”
⁴

There is almost nothing to connect anyone whose name sounds a little like “Arthur”—or indeed anyone whose name does
not
even sound a little like Arthur—to any one of the battles attributed to the legendary Arthur: at least no one who hails from the south of Britain.

Y Gododdin
is looked upon as a southern British, specifically Welsh, poem, despite it having been written in the Edinburgh area circa 600. It is never easy to identify the origins of a first millennium source, far less to place an individual in a clear historical or geographical context. Any chance that Nennius might have made things clear was probably lost when he made a heap of his sources before writing his
Historia
. It has been said that the Nennius list of battles has provoked more commentary than any other passage of early British history, which, even if not exactly true, is not far from the mark. The
Nennius battle-list is to the matter of Arthur what the Rosetta Stone was to understanding Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion deciphered it.

The archaeologist Leslie Alcock once wrote, “The most serious danger for the historian is the scribe who knows, or thinks he knows, more than the original, and who cannot resist the temptation to insert his knowledge.”
⁵
At least one such scribe appears to have worked on the
Annales Cambriae
. Writing long after the earliest years covered by the
Annales
, the scribes who compiled them had very limited sources to work with. They did, however, know about Arthur and Merlin, at least as stories: everyone did. They also had empty spaces in the historical record of the south of Britain. The solution was to put the stories of Arthur in those empty spaces.

It was a match made in heaven. Arthur’s most famous battle, the Battle of Badon, was inserted as the entry for the year 516, and Camlann, Arthur’s last battle, was said to have been fought in 537, thus creating an instant “Arthurian Age.” If these entries were accurate, not only would it mean that twenty-one years separated Arthur’s last two battles, but also that Arthur died thirty-six years before Merlin was active at the Battle of Arderydd in 573. Some scholars have solved this problem by saying there must have been two Merlins.

The Badon entry and the Camlann entry in the
Annales Cambriae
“are now discounted as historical evidence,”
⁶
and increasingly it is accepted that these entries were inserted long after the events they purport to record, to fill the gaping hole in southern British history that is the sixth century. They are just too good to be true—too like the kind of thing someone would insert if they wanted to place Arthur in the early sixth century. Furthermore, they come without any sensible context or corroborative evidence, and the entries for the fifty years before the Badon entry and the fifty years after the Camlann entry refer to people who have little or nothing to do with the south of Britain. No champion of any potential Arthur can rationally show that any, far less almost all, of the people mentioned in the
Annales Cambriae
, in any possible “Age of Arthur,” are connected to a southern Arthur.

Lewis Thorpe, in his introduction to
The History of the Kings of Britain
, says, “Geoffrey had several clear-cut political reasons for what
he wrote … [including] his wish to ingratiate himself with his various dedicatees.”
⁷
It was Geoffrey who located Arthur’s magical conception at Tintagel. The castle ruins at Tintagel today are from the early thirteenth century. They stand on the site of an earlier castle built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, around the year 1141. Richard was the brother of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patron, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and so it is possible, indeed probable, that Geoffrey set the scene of Arthur’s conception in Tintagel to ingratiate himself with his patron. It was not until 1478 or so that Arthur was first said to have been born in Tintagel, no doubt because a birth site was more commercially appealing than the site of a rape. Today there is a thriving tourist industry founded on Geoffrey’s identification of Tintagel as Arthur’s birth place.

Geoffrey and Malory both say Arthur’s father was Uther Pendragon; indeed, the first words in Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
are “It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England,”
⁸
but there is no Uther in the history of the south of Britain or a sensible explanation of the name. The second name is usually taken to mean Head Dragon—in effect, Chief Dragon—but the origin of this name is much disputed. The first name
Uther
is simply a mystery, at least in the south of Britain. According to Geoffrey Ashe, “Uther … is not real. Before Geoffrey he only figures as ‘Uthr Pendragon’, in uninformative Welsh verse.”
⁹
Likewise, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Mordred have no part to play in southern British history. No one has placed them separately or together in a historical setting with anyone who might have been a historical Arthur.

Geoffrey, like Jocelyn of Furness, was happy to change evidence to suit his book, to please his patrons and his audience. Fortunately Geoffrey did not change all the evidence, and so there are a number of Scottish place-names in his work that hint at the true origins of his sources.

Choosing a “king” by means of a sword-from-a-stone test is unknown anywhere else in history, myth, or legend. Some say the legend of the sword and the stone is an echo of a Sarmatian practice that involved the veneration of swords stuck into the ground. There is nothing to suggest that this practice involved the selection of a king, nor would a sword stuck into the ground be difficult to remove. Scandinavian
folklore contains a story of a sword stuck in a tree, but this was a test of strength and not part of any inauguration ceremony or coronation. Another alternative explanation claims that when people saw early blacksmiths extracting metal from iron ore and using it to make swords, they thought something magical was happening—something, we must suppose, involved with becoming a king.
¹⁰
Others have claimed there was a time when kingship disputes were settled by combat, with a sword going to the winner as a prize, and that these swords were left lying on a nearby stone until the fight was over. It has even been claimed that the Latin word
saxum
, said to mean a large stone, was confused with the word
Saxon
, and that when Arthur took the sword out of the stone he, in effect, took the fight out of the Saxons. Not one of these ideas comes with an Arthur attached.