Illtud, Father of Arthur, and the Llydaw/"Brittany" of Brycheiniog

Brecon Gaer Roman Fort, Photo Courtesy COFLEIN

Readers of my past blogs will know that I've proposed several "Llydaws" as the home of Illtud/Uther Pendragon, the reputed father of Arthur.

As any father of Arthur has to have proven Irish heritage, I had dispensed with those theories that did not fulfill this condition.

Two possibilities remained.  1) Illtud was not from Llydaw/"Brittany", but was of the Ui Liathain of SE Ireland.  I showed how Llydaw could have been mistakenly substituted for Liathain.  However, the idea is made difficult by two facts.  First, we would have to account for the change in the terminal letter from /n/ to /w/ (or perhaps /u/ or /f/).  This happens, under certain circumstances.  And while we have several instances of Liathain being written in a form that could more easily allow it to be mistaken for something like Welsh llydan, there is no doubt that the two words are NOT related.

From Professor Jurgen Uhlich at the Department of Irish and Celtic languages, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland:

"These are actually two different words that cannot be confused: líath, gen. sg. m. léith, etc., has an original long ē, while the -e- of lethan is short, < *i and corresponding to Gaul. litano- etc. Ui Liathain is thus for Ui Líatháin, with the common suffix -án, and the Primitive Irish equivalent would be, written in Ogam, *LETAGNI, i.e. nothing to do with ‘broad’, which would have given *Ui Lethain < *LETANI lowered from *LITANI. The reported reading in CIIC no. 273 is actually ‘LIT[ENI]’, which could not be ‘broad’ either, and Macalister’s sketch appears to read LITOVI instead (though perhaps meant to be damaged, i.e. two dots might be intended to be missing for an E, and one stroke for an N). So in short, the ía strictly rules out your proposed equation."

Because of these problems, I looked again to the prevailing view (as evinced, for example, in P.C. Bartram's A CLASSICAL WELSH DICTIONARY) that this particular Llydaw was to be found in Wales - and, in particular, somewhere in the vicinity of the Brycheiniog where we find two supposed graves for Illtud. The saint was said to have been buried in Letavia/Llydaw, so the fact that we find two prehistoric tombs bearing his name to the west and east of Brecon is surely significant.

One grave is near Defynnog and Mynydd Illtud, the Bedd Gwyl Illtud or Grave of Illtud's Festival, and the other is Ty Illtud or House of Illtud north of Llanhamlach.

I decided to see how Llydaw (from a Celtic root meaning 'broad' or 'wide') could possibly refer to this region.  What I found, rather surprisingly, were many references to the BROAD valley of the River Usk at Brecon.  While I could cite all of these, I hope the following will suffice.  It is drawn from Charles Thomas's AND SHALL THESE MUTE STONES SPEAK?, which discusses the Irish-founded kingdom of Brycheiniog in some detail.

"The centre [of the Kingdom of Brycheiniog] is modern Brecon, at the south end of the broad corridor between mountains running north-north-east up to the river Wye at Glasbury."

In other words, the Usk Valley was unusually wide or broad at this point, and the Welsh word llydaw (from a well-attested Celtic root meaning wide or broad or extensive) may well have been applied to it as a descriptive term, which in time came to be confused for an actual place-name.

Having read these many references to the wide valley of the Usk at Brecon, and having viewed photos and studied topographical maps, I'm now convinced that this location is, in fact, the "Llydaw" of Illtud.  And, having reached this conclusion, I can now say that as a man of Brycheiniog, he most likely had Irish blood in his veins.  If he were, in actuality, the father of Arthur - as tradition insists - then we can account for the fact that the name Arthur was later used only for royal sons of Irish-descended dynasties in Britain.