UTHER PENDRAGON BY SIMPLE PROCESS OF ELIMINATION

Over the past several months I've quested after the Questing Beast that is Uther Pendragon.  Having concluded my systematic search, I can offer only four GENUINE candidates for this supposed father of Arthur.  My criteria is pretty basic: only those Dark Age chieftains who bore either Welsh names or Latin titles that could be rendered by Uther Pendragon qualify.  Of these four candidates, only two are credible chronologically.  For details on these various Uthers, I urge my readers to check out the relevant past posts.

1) Amlawdd Wledig of Ercing, from an earlier Welsh Anblaud Wledig, 'the very terrible/horrible ruler.'  This man is said to be the father of Eigr, Uther's wife and Arthur's mother.  Eigr, however, is a fiction, a personification of the Tintagel headland or an epithet for the goddess Hera.  I discussed her comprehensively in my book THE MYSTERIES OF AVALON.  It is difficult, though, to explain why a perfectly good Welsh name and title would be rendered by another such! Amlawdd/Anblaud,  whose daughters are the mothers of heroes who are all cousins of Arthur, does not appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pages.

2) St. Illtud, said in his VITA to be the cousin of Arthur.  He is referred to as 'terribilis miles', the terrible warrior, and has other military titles which accord very well with Pendragon.  Uther's servant Mabon, according to the 'Pa Gur' poem, is placed in Ely, where Illtud served as master of soldiers.  Unfortunately, there is nothing in the VITA to indicate that Arthur was Illtud's son.  Still, in terms of a perfect rendering of Welsh Uther Pendragon, I can find nothing more suitable than Illtud as he is described in his VITA. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Illtud appears as Eldadus of Gloucester (this last being an error for Glywysing).

3) Urien of Rheged, if the 'Marwnat Vthyr Pen' is about this chieftain's decapitated head.  Urien is much too late to have been Arthur's father.  If Ceidio son of Arthwys is Arthur, then it may be significant that Urien's sister Efrddyl married Ceidio's/Arthur's brother, Eliffer of York.  In a corrupt TRIAD we find a certain Arthur Penuchel 'the Overlord', son of Eliffer.  Geoffrey of Monmouth knew of Urien, however, and associated him by name with Arthur in his HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN.  

4) The 'terrible warrior/man' (of Manannan Mac Lir) of the Irish COMPERT MONGAIN.  The terrible warrior in the short version of this tale is a reference to a variant spelling of Degsastan.  The date is wrong and the episode is wholly mythical.  Geoffrey may have used the transformation of Manannan into Fiachnae for his Uther-Merlin story, although (as I pointed out in my THE MYSTERIES OF AVALON) the Herakles birth story contains the same motif and Tintagel may have been (or been mistaken for) the Promontory of Herakles of Ptolemy. 

That, then, is my "summary" of Uther candidates.  One may be the real Uther, but even if so it doesn't follow that Uther was necessarily Arthur's father.  In fact, Uther may have been little more than a "filler generation", meant to make up the gap between Ambrosius and Arthur.

A fifth candidate was written about in some detail in two previous blog posts: a man named Julian after previous famous Roman Julians, viz. Emperor Julian the Apostate and Julian the son of Constantine III. Such a person, based out of Dark Age York, is a purely hypothetical construct.  We would have to assume that this Julian belonged to the House of Eliffer/Eleutherius and that he went by the title Uther Pendragon because of the pronounced dragon characteristics attached to the earliest Julian. While this personage appears attractive for several reasons, I again warn that I have absolutely no evidence for his existence.  But for those who are interested in Roman period parallels, I urge you to carefully read or re-read the following articles.

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-new-paradigm-for-vortigern-and-uther_24.html

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2017/10/julian-dragon-and-his-draco-standard.html