Stefan Zimmer's THE NAME OF ARTHUR (apologies for some format irregularities; this was converted from a pdf)

JCeltL, 13 (2009), 131–6
The Name of Arthur – A New Etymology
Stefan Zimmer
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Abstract
The name of Arthur, the mythical war-leader and ideal king, probably referring to a second-century Roman commander in Britain, still lacks an etymology convincing in every detail. This short note reviews earlier proposals and presents a new explanation. Welsh Arthur < Latin Artōrius is the Latinized form of a Celtic patronym *Arto-rīg-i̯os, a derivative of *Arto-rīχs = Old Irish Art-rí.
Even in the modern, globalized world, the name of King Arthur is popular in many circles, and exploited in various kinds of media. Medieval tales relating his own adventures and more often those of his knights are perhaps better known today than in the Middle Ages. The origin of his name is still a puzzle, though many proposals have been made. The following is intended to clarify the discussion and to attempt a substantial step towards a deeper understanding of the case.
As I have discussed in a previous publication (Zimmer 2006, with earlier references), the name of ‘King Arthur’ is most probably that of a well-known historical figure, that is, the Roman general Lucius Artorius Castus, probably a native of Dalmatia, and buried in Podstrana near Strobeč, not far from Split. His career is succinctly reviewed in the (unfortunately undated, as usual) epitaph CIL III/Suppl. 2, nr. 12791; cf. also III/1, no. 1919 + III/Suppl. 1, no. 8513. Among other deeds, he served as commander (praefectus castrorum) of the Legio VI Victrix in York, and later as leader (dux) of British legions fighting in Aremorica in the year 184. His fame must have lived on among his veterans and their descendants, so that the legendary dux bellorum of the British kings fighting against the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries was soon named Arthur after that prominent Roman soldier.
1. The name of Arthur is therefore intimately linked with Latin Artorius. This is a common name in Roman inscriptions. The exact number of attestations cannot be established: RE names 10 or 11 men
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called Artorius, plus one Artoria; the epigraphical databank in Eichstätt (www.manfredclauss.de) has many more. Two features are noteworthy: Artorius is nearly1 exclusively used as a nomen gentile, never as a praenomen or cognomen, and it is often used by liberti, liberated former captives (slaves).
The following formal possibilites for explaining the name may be considered:2
1.1. Artorius as a genuine Latin formation may belong to the word family of ars ‘art, skill, craftmanship’, and be a derivative of artus, -ūs (masculine substantive) ‘structure, joints’, or, less likely, from artus (adjective) ‘structured, tight’. Artorius might have been a substantivized adjective meaning ‘joiner’ (not necessarily in the restricted sense of the modern English word).
1.2. Artorius might be an epichoric name from Dalmatia. But we can hardly inquire further because next to nothing is known about the ancient languages of the region. A few names of ethnic groups, such as Liburni and Illyrii, together with some personal names are attested. They are mostly isolated and have not been connected to known languages.
1.3. The third possibility is to take Artorius as an originally Celtic name, Latinized rather early. After all, Celts were present in the region very early. In northern Italy, Celtic invaders arrived in the sixth and fifth centuries BC; they reached the northern coast of the Adratic by the fourth century at the latest. All these Celts underwent rapid Romanization: by the end of the republic, Celtic was no longer spoken there. Furthermore, the many liberti called Artorius may have been captives from wars against the Cisapline Gauls (or from some similar circumstances).
1.3.1. If Artorius is Latinzed Celtic, the root etymology is salient. Celtic *artos is the word for ‘bear’, well attested since antiquity. Practically all the names of the big predators figure in Indo-European onomastics. The ‘bear’ is found in many Celtic names (see e.g. Delamarre 2007: 27). Simple names like Artos, Artus,3 Irish Art; derivatives such as patronyms, e.g. Galatian Artiknos, and hypocoristica of the type Artillus, Artilla. A fine example of the latter has been found in Trier (CIL XIII/1.1, no. 3909): HIC QUIESCIT IN PACE URSULA . . . ARTULA MATER TIT(ULUM) POSUIT. Mother and daughter bear the same name, the mother still in Celtic, the daughter already in the Roman tongue. This is typical for the
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language switch implied in Romanization throughout the empire.4 ‘Bear’ is also found in the ‘noblest’ type of Indo-European proper names, nominal compounds, cf. Comartio-rix ‘king of [men] connected with (= comparable to ?) bears’, or Artebudz (Ptuj, Slovenia), which may be a late form of *Arto-buððos ‘having a bear’s penis’ (according to Eichner et al. 1994). There are a number of Insular Celtic names obviously continuing Old Celtic formations:
Old Irish Artbe = Old Welsh Artbeu = Old Breton Arthbiu, all < Old Celtic *Arto-biu̯o- ‘quick as a bear’;
Old Irish Artgal = Old Welsh Arthgal, Middle Welsh Arthal, < *Arto-galno-, possibly ‘having the vigour of / vigorous like a bear’;
Old Irish Artrí < *Arto-rīχs ‘king of bears / bear-like king’, besides Old Welsh and Old Breton Arthmail, Middle Welsh Arthuael, Middle Breton Arzmail, Modern Breton Armel < *Arto-maglos ‘prince of / among bears’ or ‘bear-like prince’.
In all these names, ‘bear’ may mean ‘prince’ or ‘warrior’, but may also refer to the real animal, to a totem figure, or to a godhead. After all, a Celtic goddess Artio is well attested, from Muri (near Bern in Switzerland) – see Figure 1 – and from Daun (CIL 4203), Stockstadt (CIL XIII 11789), and Weilerbach (Luxembourg) (CIL XIII 4113).5
2. Recently, Ch. Gwinn (apud Delamarre 2003: 56) has proposed to understand Artorius directly as a Latinized version of *Arto-rīχs. This cannot be excluded categorically, but is highly unlikely. The Romans used to treat all the many Celtic names in -rīχs, well known at least since Caesar’s commentaries on his Gaulish wars, like their own word rex, regis because the close relation of the two lexemes (in fact, their etymological identity) was obvious to them. So, a Celtic *Arto-rīχs should automatically appear in a Latin context as *Artorix – but it never does.6
3. Up to now, the word-formation of Artorius has not been explained satisfactorily. With due caution, I propose to understand Artorius – exclusively used as gentilicium as mentioned above – as the Latinized version of a Celtic patronym *Arto-rīg-i̯os. This is nowhere attested in the Celtic world. But the basic *Arto-rīχs is, see above OIr. Artrí; the British forms with second member *-maglos are but a variant of the same.
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Figure 1. By courtesy of Historisches Museum, Bern.
The patronymic type in *-i̯os is well known, cf. Gaulish names such as Tarbeisonios ‘son of Tarbeisu’; and of course, outside Celtic, especially in Greek. It should be safe to assume as a working hypothesis that the *-g- underwent a kind of early lenition (whether a Latin or Celtic phenomenon need not detain us) to the spirant -ʒ-/-j-, giving, with subsequent assimilation of [ʒj] > [jj] > [j], *Artorījos.7 The Latinization implied two simple adaptations to Latin:8
3.1. According to Latin writing conventions, *[artori:ʒjos] or *[artori:jos] was spelled, with automatic replacement of the Celtic ending by Latin -us, as Artorius.
3.2. Following the obvious and frequent pattern of Latin nouns in -ōrius, -a, -um, regular derivative adjectives to agent nouns (including proper names) in -tōr, the short -ŏ- in *Artŏrius was replaced by -ō-, and the long -ī- shortened, thus producing a totally Latin-sounding Artōrius.
3.3. The subsequent phonetic development from Latin Artōrius to Early Welsh Arthur is perfectly regular (cf. L labōrem > W llafur, etc.).
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4. Finally, it must be admitted that the presumed tradition from LUCIUS ARTORIUS CASTUS, second century, to the dux bellorum Arthurus in the Dark Ages of Britain cannot have been an undisturbed, textually continuous one. Most early Latin texts mentioning Arthur spell the name Arthur (this is the standard Welsh form) or, with a Latin ending, Arthurus, but never Artorius.9 The latter, obviously, was unknown to the written tradition. The name-forms Artus and Artu are later Romance adaptations.
Notes
1. This qualification is necessary since there is one Artorius Modestus from Narbonne (CIL XII 5204); he may have been related to C. Artorius Orta[... (CIL XII 4623) and to Artoria Procula (CIL XII 5066).
2. The old proposal by the great Wilhelm Schulze (1904) who argued for Etruscan origin of Ar-torius (as he analysed the name) may be safely discarded.
3. Cf. CIL XIII 10008,7: Artus Dercomogni (from Maar, near Trier); not mentioned in Delamarre (2007).
4. Torsten Meissner points to the pertinent comments by Raepsaet-Charlier (2001) on the names of the Treveres. See now also Meissner (2010).
5. This latter inscription Artioni Biber ‘To [the goddess] Artio, Biber [gave this]’ may explain that at the same place, Artio is known as a man’s name: Artio Agritius (CIL XIII 4203).
6. Cf. the inscription from Carlisle in Britain: TANCORIX MULIER VIGSIT ANNOS SEGSAGINTA (RIB 908).
7. Cf. the parallel development in briga: Fr. Brie presupposes *Bria < Briga; Conim-briga > Coimbra.
8. Graham Isaac kindly proposed that I should make this explicit.
9. A twelfth-century variant Arcturus is due to learned speculation, linking the name with the asteronym Arcturus, designating the constellation Bootes, and especially the most brilliant star near the Great Bear’s tail end (< Greek Ἀρκτ-οῦρος ‘Bear warder’). It gained a certain popularity in British royal heraldry (cf. Anglo 1963).
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References
CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin: Reimer/de Gruyter, 1853–.
RE Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1839–1980, 84 volumes.
RIB Collingwood, R. G. and Wright, R. P. (1965) The Roman Inscriptions of Britain. I Inscriptions on Stone. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anglo, S. (1963) The London Pageants for the Reception of Katharine of Aragon: November 1501. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26, 53–89.
Delamarre, X. (2003) Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. 2ème éd. Paris: Errance.
Delamarre, X. (2007) Noms de personnes celtiques dans l’épigraphie classique. Paris: Errance.
Eichner, H., Janka, I., Milan, L. (1994) Ein römerzeitliches Keramikgefäß aus Ptuj (Pettau, Poetovio) in Slovenien mit Inschrift in unbekanntem Alphabet und epichorischer (vermutlich keltischer) Sprache. Arheoloski Zbornik 45, 131–42.
Meissner, T. (2010) Das Hieronymuszeugnis und der Tod des Gallischen. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 57, 91–6.
Raepsaet-Charlier, M.-Th. (2001) Characteristiques et particularités de l’onomastique trévire. In Dondin-Payre, M. and Raepsaet-Charlier, M.-Th. (eds), Noms, Identités culturelles et Romanisation. Bruxelles: Timpermann.
Schulze, W. (1904) Zur Geschichte lateinischer Eigennamen. Berlin: Weidmann.
Zimmer, S. (2006) Die keltischen Wurzeln der Artussage. Heidelberg: Winter.