HOW L. ARTORIUS CASTUS WAS TIME-TRAVELLED TO THE DARK AGES

             St. Germanus of Auxerre

I once pitched a couple of ideas here on my blog that I initially thought were promising. They turned out later not to be, but only because I was hoping they would point towards a historical Arthur - a hero who was closely connected to Cerdic of Wessex/Ceredig son of Cunedda. I eventually abandoned this avenue of research.

Simply put, I had gone with the oft-expressed opinion that the Elesa of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE was to be identified with the Elafius of the Life of St. Germanus of Auxerre. From there I proposed that Elafius' crippled son might be a reference to Arthur (whose name had been subjected to a folk etymology). There was no real problem with this theory, especially as I had obtained decent scholarly support for it.

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-i-ultimately-decided-on-ceredig-son.html

Much later, while exploring L. Artorius Castus as a possible Arthurian prototype, I suggested that personages appearing in Germanus' Vita may have aided in the folk transferrence of Castus from the 3rd century to the 5th/6th. But for some reason I'd forgotten all about the crippled boy.

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/two-lupi-two-severi-mechanism-by-which.html

Well, suppose that instead of trying to see Elafius' son as an Isidore-like reference to a sub-Roman Arthur, we allow for the possibility that an Artorius who fought under Septimius Severus and Lupus the governor of Britain and Caracalla Germanicus was associated in tradition with the crippled boy (who actually had nothing to do with an Arthur!) in the time of Severus and Lupus and St. Germanus?

If this did occur, then we might have here at least one significant vehicle by which Castus was temporally shifted from the Roman period to the Dark Ages. 

According to the HISTORIA BRITTONUM, Arthur's floruit perfectly matches that of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE'S floruit for Cerdic. Thus Arthur is inserted as a foil to the founder if Wessex.

Cerdic first appears in 495, and bows out in 534. Arthur supposedly wins at Badon in 516 (or thereabouts) and dies in 537. 

Although Germanus' second visit to Britain is sometimes believed to be a false narrative, it it occurred or was believed to have occurred, this would have happened around the middle of the 5th century. A young boy at this time, wrongly linked to the name Artorius, might well as an adult have been projected into the 6th century. Sure, he would have been very old at Camlan, but given the leniency of heroic legend in such matters we might well imagine Castus becoming Arthur in this fashion.