FURTHER DISCUSSION ON THE POSSIBLE CONFUSION OF UTHER PENDRAGON OF ELEI/ELY WITH THE MIL UATHMAR OF LIDDESDALE

Liddesdale, photo courtesy http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4149070

In past blog articles, I've a) definitively identified Uther Pendragon with St. Illtud and b) have shown how this personage could have been wrongly associated by Geoffrey of Monmouth with the mil uathmar/fer uathmar of the Irish  'Conception of Mongan' story.  In turn, this mil uathmar or Terrible Warrior is, transparently, an Irish attempt at rendering a common corruption of the Degsastan place-name (viz. Egasan-stan).  

My first attempt to treat of a historical Arthur - THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY - sought to place this famous war-leader in Northern Britain.  However, I felt that my argument in that book fell short of being completely convincing.  I had not yet been able to discover the true identity of Uther, and could not demonstrate a more than tenuous genealogical link with the Irish (via the Fergus Mor intrusion into the pedigrees of some of the Men of the North).  The best I could do was suggest that Arthur might be Ceidio son of Arthwys (of the Irthing Valley, wherein we find Camboglanna and the Dark Age hall at Birdoswald).  Ceidio is a hypocoristic form of a longer name which, in all likelihood, meant the same thing as the 'dux erat bellorum' title given to Arthur in Nennius.  A connection with Eliffer of York was a great deal less satisfactory chronologically and was, in any case, based on a corrupt Triad.

THE BEAR KING, a sort of sequel to THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY, looked to Southern Britain for a viable candidate.  I found what seemed to be good textual evidence for equating Arthur with Cerdic of the Gewissei/Ceredig son of Cunedda. In settling on Cerdic, I was finally able to account for the indisputable fact that all subsequent Arthurs belong to Irish-founded dynasties in Britain.  Cerdic's descendants also bore several bear-names, and the Arth or Bear river was in the midst of his kingdom in western Wales. Other less conclusive clues pointed in the same direction. At the same time, Uther revealed himself to be Illtud.  While this was a first an exciting discovery, it became obvious upon closer inspection that Illtud had nothing whatsoever to do with Arthur.  His being made the latter's father was yet another fiction imposed upon the tradition by Geoffrey.  

After completing THE BEAR KING, I thought my work was done.  Yet something was still nagging at me.  For some time, I've not been able to put my finger on it.  Now, though, after considerable reflection, I feel that I may be able to articulate this final doubt and what it might mean for anyone going forward with a more finalized Arthurian theory.  What follows is a bit complicated (or convulated!), but bear with me (pun strictly intended).  Hopefully, what I'm getting at will become clear by the end.

Mabon as the servant of Uther Pendragon/Illtud is situated in the Elei/Ely Valley.  I had connected this location in Glywysing (a kingdom name based on the Welsh eponym for Glevum/Gloucester) with Mabon's placement in Gloucester, according to CULHWCH AND OLWEN.  But the truth is, Mabon's center of worship was in Dumfries, not far at all from the Irthing Valley and from Dawston in Liddesdale.  The Clochmabonstane is near Gretna Green, while Lochmaben lies somewhat further to the NW.  The territory in question was that of the ancient Anavonienses, themselves apparently part of the larger tribal group the Novantii.  

Ambrosius (the 'divine/immortal one') of Campus Elleti (Llanilid in Glamorgan) was in legend strongly associated with Mabon/Lleu.  Lleu is said in the Mabinogion to become Lord of Gwynedd, and his death-place in Nantlle is the same location as Mabon's grave. 

Illtud was said to hail from Brittany or Letavia/Llydaw.  The real 'Letavia/Llydaw' in this case appears to have been the Vale of Leadon.  These names are related to the Welsh words lled, lledaf, lledu, llydan.

Now Liddesdale (citing Ekwall) is from Hlydan-dael 'the valley of R Hlyde [the loud one]'.  

What I'm proposing here - very tentatively - is that originally it was known that Arthur's father belonged not in the south, but in the north.  And, specifically, in the area in or near the River Liddel.  Now, Arthwys's son Ceidio is said to have a son named Gwenddolau (Myrddin's lord).  This last is almost certainly a personification of a place-name.  It is preserved in Carwinley, earlier Caer Gwenddolau, a place hard by where the Liddel empties in the Esk.  If Arthur's family once controlled this region, then his father could have been mistakenly linked to the mil uathmar of Dawston.  And this mil uathmar was himself wrongly identified with Uther Pendragon/Illtud!

Yes, that implies quite a mess - a real mangling of historical fact.  But that is exactly the kind of thing that happened in the early sources, many of which stemmed ultimately from oral tradition.  

If we assume, for a moment, that Arthur did hail from the Irthing Valley, how would we account for his relocation to Ceredigion?  Why would he have been identified with Ceredig son of Cunedda/Cerdic of the Gewissei?

Well, the Irthing River is probably from a Cumbric word meaning Little Bear (according to place-name expert Dr. Andrew Breeze), and as such is quite similar to the River Arth is Ceredigion.  As mentioned already, there are bear-names in the royal line of Ceredigion.  And if I am right about Ceredig = Cerdic, then this man was quite a famous war-leader.  The trouble with saying that the name Arthur, from a Roman/Latin Artorius, was used as a decknamen for an Artri or Arthr(h)i ("Bear-king") title or name given to Ceredig is just this: Artorius is a rare name even among the Romans, and so far as we know it was born in Britain only by a camp prefect at York.  Therefore, we can easily imagine that the name continued in the North.  And as Arthwys is said to be related to Eliffer of York, any problem with an Arthur in or near the Irthing Valley is easily overcome. However, we cannot so readily account for its use for the Hiberno-British Ceredig in western Wales.  We are forced to asked the painful question: where did they get the name Arthur/Artorius for Ceredig?

In my two books, I presented two completely different arenas for Arthur's famous battles, as these are found listed in Nennius.  THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY finds the battle-names in the North, and does not have to rely on any linguistic trickery to "make them fit."  Some fairly early poetic traditions (like those present in the 'Pa Gur' poem) supply proof that some of the battles (e.g. that of the Tribruit) were thought to have been in the North. In THE BEAR KING, I attempt to indicate, with varying degrees of success, that the battle-names in the "Historia Brittonum" are Welsh "translations", as it were, of battles recorded in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle."  Unfortunately, only some of the battles credited to Arthur may belong to Cerdic.  Others have to be gleaned from battles fought by other members of Cerdic's family. 

Could it be that at some point in Welsh tradition a famous Northern Arthur was identified with Ceredig?  This may have been done in error, or intentionally for some regional propagandist reason.

In passing, I would remind the reader that Cunedda was claimed to be from the far North - when in reality he was from Ireland.  His essential "Irishness" was removed from history. In an early Welsh elegy on Cunedda, the chieftain is made to fight battles against the Bernicians.  One of the locations listed is Carlisle/Luguvalium hard by the Stanwix I had proposed in THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY as the Northern Arthurian center.

So where do we go from here? 

I'm not quite sure.  My "gut" tells me Arthur belongs in the North.  That he fought battles ranging from Buxton and York up into the Scottish Lowlands, mostly all along the Roman road known as Dere Street.  That he fought and died at Camboglanna/Castlesteads and that his real or mythical burial place is the Aballava/Avalana Roman fort at Burgh-By-Sands (where there was actually a Roman period Goddess of the Lake and a vast marshland).  But the fame of this man does seem to have been co-opted by Ceredig of Ceredigion.  This uncomfortable possibility brings up an additional problem, a sort of chicken and the egg conundrum: if the battles of the "Historia Brittonum" did, originally, belong in the North, why do these seem to dovetail so well with those of Ceredig in southern England?  Is it possible that the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's" Cerdic battles are English "translations" of the Arthurian battles found in Nennius, and not the other way around?

I must confess to not being able to see my way forward to reconciling these two very opposing views on historical Arthurian candidates.  In the near future, I will give this all some more serious thought and see what I can do to clarify matters.