UFFIN AND THE SON OF CEIDIO/ARTHUR

Castle Rock, Edinburgh

In Aneurin's GODODDIN, the son of Ceidio (my candidate for Arthur) is said to be at a place called "(g)las uffin" or "verdant Uffin."  To date, I've not found anyone who do anything with the Uffin place-name.  Recent scholars and translators treat it as "Germanic." According to Dr. Simon Rodway, 

"Specifically they mention OE Wuffa and Yffi (cf. OE hosa > hosan). Cf. the notes by Marged Haycock, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, second ed. (Aberystwyth, 2015), pp. 381-82."

Now, the reference to Taliesin is important, as the place-name is used in one of his poem's as well:

"I have drunk wine

in the hall of Uffin

on the estuary [Firth of Forth] of Gododdin."

- Canu y Cwrwf

Thus given that all the champions of the Gododdin who perish at Catraeth are said to have feasted and drunk at Din Eidyn prior to the battle, we must assume Uffin is a reference to that same place or someplace nearby.

Oddly enough, scholars seem have missed an earlier identification offered for Uffin:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30070021?read-now=1&seq=14#page_scan_tab_contents

The idea is that as Welsh uffern, "hell", comes from Latin inferna, so does Uffin come from in fine, 'at the border.'  I find this derivation for uffin especially appealing, as in the PA GUR poem we are told of  'Din Eidyn on the border' (Line 28, Patrick sims-Williams translation). The term 'at the border' came to mean 'border place', in this case Din Eidyn.

This seems to me a much better solution to the problem than proposing a Germanic name for a place utilized by the Gododdin champions.

When I asked Brythonic place-name expert Alan James about this, he replied:

"Now that is an interesting idea. Phonetically it could work. 

As you say, Uffin is very odd, very hard to see a Celtic origin. Uffern is indeed the one word that comes to mind. According to Jackson LHEB 276, the development is inferno > Br Lat (indeed, Vernacular Lat from early, ibid 496) *i:fern- > uffern because of a 'tendency for Br Lat u, i: before a labial to becom u' - so presumably you could be looking for something, maybe Latin, like *inBin-, *i:Bin- or *uBin- where B is a labial /b,p,v,f/.

It would entail in fine > *infine > *i:fine in British Latin, and I've never come across such compounding, but if it did happen the outcome could well have been uffin.

Uffin in this context would be a locative. But where you locate the border depends on extra-linguistic considerations outwith my ken."