WHY UTHER PENDRAGON IS JUST THAT - A STANDARD NAME PLUS EPITHET

It has long been the habit of amateur Arthurian scholars - and a few professional academics - to seek in the name of Arthur's father something other than what is there.  I myself have fallen victim to this tendency.  Yet all of my efforts to find some deeper significance in the name, and to thus be able to identify it with a known historical figure, have come up short.  

Recently, as a sort of exercise, I went through every single name listed in Bartrum's A CLASSICAL WELSH DICTIONARY.  What I found was not unexpected: a plethora of early Welsh names which were formed of a regular name plus epithet.

I was so struck by the sheer number of such instances that I decided to write to my long-time correspondent, Dr. Simon Rodway at The University of Wales, a scholar who is widely acknowledged as one of the top experts in Old and Medieval Welsh.  My question to him was as follows:

"I keep running into people trying to interpret Uther Pendragon as something other than a standard name + epithet.  In fact, some arguments for this were convincing enough that I got bogged down in a search for such!  But I've been comparing the name with many others like it in Welsh tradition and I don't see why we should view it as anything other than what it appears to be."

His response? Simply this:

"I can't see any reason to suggest otherwise."

I'm now convinced this is the right tact to take in future Arthurian research.  We must accept the fact that Uther Pendragon was just that - Uther Pendragon.  And we must resist the temptation, in our quest for ever-elusive historical certainty, to identify him with other figures from sub-Roman or early medieval Britain.  Like many another Dark Age British chieftain, he went by a standard name plus a heroic title.  

In my final version of THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY (https://www.amazon.com/Arthur-History-Revised-August-Hunt/dp/1092772839/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+arthur+of+history+august+hunt&qid=1603054795&sr=8-1), I did settle for Pendragon as a reference to a leader at the Banna/Birdoswald fort on Hadrian's Wall, where the Dacians had long been the garrison.  The Dacians are generally credited with introducing the draco standard into the Roman army.  Dacia was centered in what is now Romania, and Romanian folklore associates meteors and comets with dragons - which remind us of Uther's comet-dragon.  In my book, I discussed in detail a man of the Roman period in Britain named Draco who appears to have been from Birdoswald.  Lucius Artorius Castus, a 2nd century Roman who served in northern Britain, also served in Dacia.  He went to Armenia with a governor of Britain who had also been a governor of Dacia. The legion LAC had served with in Dacia was later used in the Armenian campaign. Thus a 'Chief Dragon' Uther at the Birdoswald fort seems a reasonable supposition.