St. Denys and the Terrible Head: Or How the Story of Uther Pen[dragon] Keeps Getting Stranger

St. Denis Carrying His Head

I'm not sure anyone else has noticed this before, but...

While Uther Pendragon is having his way with Ygerna at Tintagel, his men are defeating and killing Gorlois at Dimilioc.  The latter place is modern Domellick, site of a hillfort at St. Dennis, Cornwall.

As it happens, Trevena ( = Tintagel) is also a site anciently sacred to St. Denys.

Why might this be significant in the context of Uther Pendragon?

Well, I have before discussed the elegy poem of Uther as perhaps referring to the decapitated head of Urien of Rheged.  Before I came up with that idea, Celticist John Koch had suggested Uther Pen as the Terrible Head' may have originally represented the head of the Welsh god Bran. From his CELTIC CULTURE: A HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA:

"One possibility is that the strange and strangely named

yspyªawt urªawl benn (feast of the stately head) around

Brân’s living severed head in the Mabinogi represents

a garbling of a more appropriate ‘feast of the uncanny

head’ (uthr benn); the marwnad would make sense as

the words of the living-dead Brân mourning himself."

Bran's head was carried around by his followers after he was killed in Ireland.

St. Dennis is, perhaps, the most famous cephalophore or 'head-carrier' in Christian hagiography.  After being decapitated, he carried his head several miles to what was to be the site of a monastery.  See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Denis.  The name Denis derives the divine name Dionysius (https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Dionysos.html).  

North Side of the St. Dennis Hillfort

This seems to me an absolutely bizarre coincidence.  Which, in reality, can hardly be such!

I noticed something else at Domellick/Dimilioc as well.  Hard by the hillfort is a place called CARNE.  This is simply the Cornish word for a rock outcrop.  Front it with a Welsh 'Y-", the definite article, and you have Igraine, Igerna, Ygerne, Ygraine.  For years I preferred to go by the Welsh form of Arthur's mother's name, viz. Eigr, and the Welsh scholars do give this form precedence.[1]  However, I see no reason why a 'The Cairn' place-name at the Domellick hillfort of St. Dennis could not have easily yielded the name of Arthur's mother.  Her transfer to Tintagel was merely a matter of storytelling, as Gorlois put here there for safekeeping.  

Carne at St. Dennis

I've not yet determined what, if anything, this St. Denys connection may mean in the context of Uther Pendragon.  It may be nothing more than an instance of creative genius on Geoffrey of Monmouth's part.  In other words, he had a character who was known for a terrible head and, knowing as he did about the Cornish St. Dennis fortresses, he associated the two men because of a perceived similarity.[2]

[1] For years now, I've held to my theory that Eigr was a personification of the headland at Tintagel.  I had arrived at this notion after extensive correspondence with Dr. Graham Isaac.  See
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-repost-of-my-summarized-treatment-of.html.  But given the presence of Carne at Domellick, I now think this earlier proposed etymology is rather unwieldy.  In Welsh, carn often appears as garn.  There are many Y Garns in Wales. We also find carn or carne appearing in Cornish  as cerne or kerne.

[2] In previous blog posts, I've discussed the Celtic saint Nechtan of Hartland not far from Tintagel.  This saint is also a cephalophore. For the most recent article covering this subject, see
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2019/11/arthur-of-northern-dumnonii.html. Could it be that I was right when I very tentatively proposed identifying Uther Pendragon with Pen son of Nethawg/Nechtan?  Is it the Nechtan connection which caused him to be linked in the Tintagel and Domellick stories with St. Denys?