St. Illtud's Church, Llanelltyd
Okay... so this has happened more than once. In fact, three times, to be exact. What, you ask, am I talking about?
Quite simply that the moment I feel like I've settled on a decent Arthurian theory (one that has the hero born at Ribchester), someone brings up the Welsh soldier-monk Illtud again.
This would appear to be a random and supremely ironic occurence, were it not for the fact that I had just written the following post essentially trashing Welsh heroic tradition:
And it was exactly that piece that incited a reader to send this complaint:
"Dear Mr. Hunt, no disrespect intended and I am not a troll. Don't have any axe to grind either with my own ideas on Arthur and Uther. Pretty much I've always found it impossible to even know where to begin when it comes to trying to find something historical in the Matter of Britain. I don't know if it's wise to even try, although it sure seems like a fun exercise. What I don't understand, though, it why you seem to have discovered a "code" in the legendary material that reveals the true identity of Uther kind of like unmasking a superhero to see his alter-ego and then you just pretty much brushed it aside because an unreliable saint's life didn't seem to support the idea. I am of course referring to your Illtud identification for Uther which you readily admit is the only extant identification that seems provable by the sources you analyzed. It seems to me and again I mean no disrespect that discounting the only actual identification of Uther offered by those sources just because you want an Arthur in the North and need to trace the Arthur name to the Roman Artorius and find it easier or more satisfying to find Arthur's battles in the North is more than a little problematic. I was going to say unsafe but am not sure that word really works. It just seems to me that the only actual identification for Uther should be provisionally retained simply because it is the only identification we have and it may well be right. Otherwise it seems to me that you are going off on unnecessary tangents chasing the dragon's tail as you have put it yourself by trying to use the Sawyl/Samuel metaphor from the elegy poem on Uther to look towards Ribchester or the presence of Dacians at Birdoswald to put Arthur's dragon-father in one of those two places. I mean, the Welsh use of the word dragon denoted warrior or chieftain in the poetry and it is pretty plain that Geoffrey of Monmouth misinterpreted Pendragon as "Dragon's head" and then made up the story of the dragon-shaped comet and the draco standard. You showed that in reality Uther Pendragon was a very good Welsh translation of terribilis miles, magister militrum, princeps militum titles used for Illtud before he became a religious. I'm wondering how you justify ignoring that and going with the draco even though you've written on the nonexistence of the Sarmatian draco and need Geoffrey to support any connection with the draco with Dacian Birdoswald. It is much more exciting to be able to connect Uther with the Liddington Badbury as you did most convincingly and then inexplicably abandoned. Just some thoughts and I hope you don't mind me bringing them up in the hopes that you may someday revisit the Illtud possibility and write something more about it. Thank you very much for your time, patience, tolerance and understanding and I look forward to reading more of your future blogs no matter where you decide to go with your Arthurian theory."
Whew! Wow. That was a lot to take in.
To begin, the author is referring to any number of articles I wrote on the Illtud-Uther identification and related matters. There are several such, but here are some of the more important ones I culled for the blog site:
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/01/illtuds-father-bicanus-and-his-llydaw.html
In essence, I did show that at least as far as the PA GUR poem "evidence" was concerned, Illtud was Uther Pendragon. While initially very excited by this revelation, I knew that it must be seen as doubtful simply because the entire poem was riddled with legendary/mythological motifs, as well as both English and Gaelic place-names. In other words, it might well represent a fictional identification of Uther with Illtud created by the author of the poem or his source. I was even more excited by an apparent correspondence of place-names which suggested that the Liddington Badbury (the site of the Second Badon battle, according to the Welsh Annals) was the real origin point of Uther/Illtud. Again, though, as the place-names involved were English in nature I could ascribe the identification to spurious and rather late tradition found in the saint's life or even mere coincidence.
And so, combined with the difficulty of properly placing the Arthurian battles in the South, and with no way to explain the preservation of the name Arthur other than viewing it as a decknamen for an original Celtic bear-name, I dropped everything Illtudish and looked longingly to the North.
Was I right to do so?
Perhaps not. I will be looking into the "Illtud Paradigm" again over the next few weeks. If for any reason I see fit to embrace the theory, in whatever modified form, I will, of course, publish the results here. For now I am content to continue questioning everthing, as I always do, whether it drives my readers crazy or not!
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