Region of the Roman-Period Setantii, the Later Dark Age Kingdom of Sawyl Benisel
Despite giving precedence recently to this or that Arthurian theory, the one I keep coming back to is the one in which I identify Uther Pendragon with Sawyl ('Samuel') Benisel, who ruled from the vicinity of ancient Ribchester in Lancashire. My "gut instinct" keeps telling me this is our man. However, stumbling blocks to being able to accept Sawyl as Uther keep popping up. In this article I wish to address these issue head-on and see if I can resolve them to my (our?) satisfaction.
The first point to tackle is whether the name Sawyl actually appears in the BOOK OF TALIESIN'S elegy poem on Uther.
The following lines are taken from Marged Haycock's edition of the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN. I have replaced Sawyl in the Welsh text with the original kawyl, and have supplied my translation of the pen kawell line, which Haycock left untranslated (but included in her Notes to the poem).
Neu vi luossawc yn trydar:
It is I who commands hosts in battle:
ny pheidwn rwg deu lu heb wyar.
I’d not give up between two forces without bloodshed.
Neu vi a elwir gorlassar:
It’s I who’s styled ‘Armed in Blue’:
vy gwrys bu enuys y’m hescar.
my ferocity snared my enemy.
5 Neu vi tywyssawc yn tywyll:
It is I who’s a leader in darkness:
a’m rithwy am dwy pen kawell.
Our God, chief of the lamp, transforms me.
Neu vi eil kawyl yn ardu:
It’s I who’s a second Sawyl in the gloom:
ny pheidwn heb wyar rwg deu lu.
I’d not give up without bloodshed [the fight] between two forces.
Now, I had initially entertained the notion (pretty exciting in and of itself) that kawyl should be not for Sawyl, but for cannwyll, the Welsh word for 'candle' (or 'lamp') [1]. As this word as a figutive meaning of 'star', and as Geoffrey of Monmouth says the dragon-star is Uther, I suggested the whole idea of the dragon-star had been derived from this line of the elegy.
Unfortunately, there are some major problems with accepting the cannwyll reading for kawyl. As pre-eminent Welsh expert Dr. Simon Rodway of The University of Wales remarked:
"I think this is possible, but three things make me slightly uneasy.
1) this requires positing an n-suspension. These do occur occasionally in medieval Welsh MSS, but they are very rare.
2) The single l would mean suggesting an Old Welsh exemplar, for which there is no other clear evidence in the poem. Elsewhere the scribe has ll where needed, so if he was copying from an examplar with l for ll, then this would be the only occasion on which he didn’t correctly modernize.
3) Supposing an n-suspension would only allow us to restore one n. In an OW form, one would expect nt, nh or perhaps nn, but not n.
Overall, emendation to Sawyl, while totally speculative, involves less issues (eye-skip to kawell), and eil Sawyl, ‘a second Samuel’ gives plausible sense."
To make what Dr. Rodway is saying clearer, while we can allow for the disappearance of one /n/, we can't allow the second one to simply go away. And as cannwyll is always spelled with two /l/ letters, and there is no evidence of any other word in the MS. having dropped an /l/ in this way, the cannwyll hypothesis is quite problematic.
Worse yet, as Professor Peter Schrijver made clear,
"Line 6 kawell rhymes with line 5 tywyll(< *ti~vwyll (where *~v is lenited *m) ‘dark’ and with line 7 Sawyl [emendation for kawyl!!] (< *Sa~vwyl(l)) ‘Samuel’. So kawell should read something like *ka~vwyll, which is the word for ‘camel’ (see (see Peter Schrijver, British Celtic Light on the Latin Alternation of -l- and -ll- in Words of the Type cam ̄elus, camellus, in Vina Diem Celebrent Studies in Linguistics and Phi-lology in Honor of Brent Vine edited by Dieter Gunkel, Stephanie W. Jamison, Angelo O. Mer-cado, Kazuhiko Yoshida, Beech Stave Press Ann Arbor New York 2018).”
The spelling kawell is a modernization of a late Old Welsh model found in a now lost exemplar. Rhyme suggests that we spells normal MW wy (the diphthong). Such modernizations (or rather mis-modernizations) are rather common. There’s nothing missing, it’s just that we cannot under-stand this as MW -we-, but rather as MW -wy-."
My follow-up question to Schrijver:
“Then we are limited to either camel (!) or can[n]wyll, then.”
His response:
“That’s right. With cannwyll being the more likely option because it exists (unlike cafwyll ‘camel’) and cafwyll being the more likely option because it does not require an emendation.”
On the likelihood that kawell is for cannwyll, both scholars chimed in with the following:
Every line in this poem has end-rhyme. Kawell forms proest (a type of half-rhyme) with tywyll, so that might be okay, although there are no other examples of proest in the poem.
"Considering that double n is often written single in Middle Welsh, and that e for y is extremely common, I don’t see a great difficulty in reading kan(n)wyll for kawell."
- Simon Rodway
"Writing double or single n for what is phonologically double n is trivial, and so is the accidental omission of a suspension mark of that nasal. Writing e for y is also trivial."
- Peter Schrijver
To make sure of this, I asked one more eminent scholar for his opinion on kawell and the rhyming problem - Prof. Paul Russel. He responded thusly:
"kawell cannot make full rhyme with tywyll, hence the likelihood of the emendation to kannwyll. It is possible to make proest-rhyme (i.e. a syllable where the vowels differ but the consonant stays the same) between -yll and -ell, but the rest of the poem has full rhyme. Usually you wd expect to see proest elsewhere in the poem. So I think the emendation is probably correct. NB a'm rithwy is subjunctive, thus 'May our God ... transform me'."
"kawell cannot make full rhyme with tywyll, hence the likelihood of the emendation to kannwyll. It is possible to make proest-rhyme (i.e. a syllable where the vowels differ but the consonant stays the same) between -yll and -ell, but the rest of the poem has full rhyme. Usually you wd expect to see proest elsewhere in the poem. So I think the emendation is probably correct. NB a'm rithwy is subjunctive, thus 'May our God ... transform me'."
And that is why Marged Haycock suggests, among several possibilities, that kawell, not the following kawyl, might well be for can[n]wyll.
Let us then, provisionally, accept Sawyl for kawyl, and canwyll for kawell. [My original idea, that kawell was for W. cafell, 'sanctuary' - a word derived from the same Latin source as W. cawell, 'basket' - must now be abandoned.] If we use the transferred sense of cannwyll, we then can have God as the Chief of the Lamp, a reference to the 'Lamp of God' in 1 Samuel 3:3 ('lucerna Dei' in the Latin Vulgate; lucerna meant not only 'lamp', but also 'candle-light'). Sawyl 'in the gloom' would recall the boy Samuel, sleeping in the sanctuary.
To this rendering of the poem lines, Prof. Schrijver responded simply, "That sounds reasonable."
We may even be able to make more out of Uther's/Sawyl's epithet gorlassar, which means, literally, 'the very blue.' Usually, this is defined as referring to blue enamelled weapons or armor, and I once thought it could refer to blue woad tattooing. The word is otherwise found used only for Urien of Rheged (BOOK OF TALIESIN). But in the context of Uther we are reminded that the Biblical Samuel wore an ephod as a boy at Shiloh, and the robe of the ephod was colored entirely BLUE (Exodus 28:31; see https://www.internationalstandardbible.com/E/ephod-(1).html). Although, given that the context of gorlassar in the Uther elegy is a martial one, it is unlikely the author was thinking of the priestly robe.
The second point to deal with is the proper rendering of ARM[...]S on the 2nd century L. Artorius Castus stone. There are only two possible readings for this word: ARMENIOS or ARMORICOS. The recent attempt to see this fragmented word as ARMATOS has been universally rejected and I do not myself consider it a viable contender. For more on ARMATOS for ARM[...]S, see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2021/11/my-rebuttal-of-antonio-trincheses.html and many other articles here on my blog site.
The other reading, ARMENIOS, is also quite plausible. Statius Priscus as goveror of Britain was sent to head up the army in Armenia. And our only record of the reorganization of Dalmatia (quite possibly when Liburnia was created as a separate province) occurred under Marcus and Verus only a few years after the end of the Armenian War. However, if Castus went to Armenia with British troops, he did this before the Sarmatian troops were in Britain. And that means that our attempt to link the Dark Age Arthur with Ribchester loses its appeal.
Armenia was also very far from Britain. My analysis of British vexillations on the Continent and beyond (see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2022/12/vexillations-sent-from-britain-to-fight.html) revealed that other than a proposed Armenia expedition, the two other most distant postings for British vexillations were Carnuntum in Austria and Sirmium in Serbia.
The location of Sawyl hard by the Ribchester Roman fort of the Sarmatian veterans makes the ARMORICOS reading very attractive. Why? Because we could have Castus take his three legionary detachments to Armorica in Gaul to fight in the Deserters' War of Maternus. This would put him at a time when the Sarmatian troops were in Northern Britain. He may even have taken Sarmatian cavalry with him as legionary auxiliaries. If this deed were considered to be of legendary importance to the Sarmatians who settled at Ribchester, the Artorius name might have been preserved there among the mixed Sarmation and British population.
I should mention that the claim made by some that ARMORICOS will not fit on the Castus memorial stone is wrong. See https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-lucius-artorius-castus-stone-with_14.html.
Quite a bit has been written on the topic of Armorica and the Maternus rebellion. For more on the subject, please consult the following sources:
Castus' fame would have been magnified even more if we can assign him to the deputation that went to Rome to force the execution of the Praetorian Prefect Perennis. We are told by Cassius Dio that 1500 spearmen went on the mission, and the Greek word to describe these troops may well imply that they were Sarmatian contus-bearers. Of course, the account of this deputation has been doubted by Classical scholars, as it is difficult if not impossible to account for how it may have happened.
A way out of this predicament may be hinted at by a statement made by Anthony Birley in his THE ROMAN GOVERNMENT OF BRITAIN:
"...it remains a mystery what 1,500 soldiers from the British army were doing outside Rome. One possibility is that they were part of a task force rounding up deserters, whose activities had reached alarming proportions in Gaul and Spain, and perhaps even had got as far as Rome. Their inclusion in such a force may have seemed a good way of dealing with them after the mutiny."
Now, Herodian gives what is believed to be a false story of Maternus' end. In that story, Maternus comes to Rome to try and assassinate Commodus. While the trappings of the story certainly seem fictitious (a man named Maternus, 'of the mother', comes to Rome during the festival honoring the Mother Goddess Cybele!), we could suppose that - as Birley suggests - the British force may have been among those soldiers who pursued Maternus to the very outskirts of Rome. We might presume it was there the chief of the deserters was finally defeated, and that their proximity to the capital gave the Britons the opportunity to air their grievances to Commodus about Perennis. We could even surmise that Castus and his men had captured Maternus, and in handing him over to the Emperor felt enboldened or entitled to demand Perennis in exchange for their valuable prisoner.
It is important at this stage in my argument that I make it very clear I do not hold to the opinion of a fringe group of Arthurian scholars that everything Arthurian can somehow be trace to Sarmatian (or Alanic) tradition. I've spent much of my life exploring the origins of Arthurian story and am quite content with my many findings, all of which show distinct and traceable development of folk and mythological motifs embedded in early and medieval Arthurian literature to Celtic, Classical and Christian exemplars. Not once have I been able to support a theory for Sarmatian influence on Arthurian legend. If it did occur, it would have to be in the later medieval Continental romances - and I concern myself little with those. I am really only interested in the earlier Welsh substratum, which I feel preserves a purer, more pristine Arthur. One that may, in some important ways, better reflect the ghost of historical reality.
Still, I am not the kind of person who wishes to throw the baby out with the bath water. If we can best account for the survival of the name Artorius in the North, and also account for the Arthurian battles in the same region by ascribing to the Sawyl-Uther equation, then I'm all for it.
In the coming weeks I will considering the Northern vs. the Southern Arthur in private contemplation. My readers should expect a bit of a gap in my blog posts as I come to grips with which camp I decide to finally commit to. At this stage in my life I feel that soon there will be no going back. I must take up the banner of an Arthur I can confidently serve from here on out, for I feel more theoretical vacillation with only be counter-productive and, ultimately, self-defeating.
[1]
cannwyll
[bnth. Llad. Diw. cantēla < candēla, H. Grn. cantuil, Llyd. C. cantoell, Gwydd. coinneal]
eb. ll. canhwyllau.
a Darn silindraidd o wêr neu gŵyr wedi ei weithio o gwmpas pabwyryn ac a ddefnyddir i roi golau, yn dros. am seren, haul, lloer, llusern, lamp, &c.; yn ffig. am oleuni, disgleirdeb, cyfarwyddyd, arweiniad, arweinydd, arwr, y pennaf, y rhagoraf, &c.:
candle, luminary, transf. of star, sun, moon, lamp; fig. of light, brightness, instruction, leader, hero, choicest or best of anything.
Submit
10g. (Ox 2) VVB 64, cannuill, gl. lichinum vel cantela vel teda.
13g. C 304-6, Kin myned im guerid imiruet. in tywill heb canvill im gorsset.
13g. C 8511, kanuill kangulad.
13g. LlDW 239-13, kanuyllyd … a del[y] pen ekanuylleu a tenh[o] ay ddannet.
14g. T 1517, canhwyll yn tywyll a gerd genhyn.
1346 LlA 39, tebic ynt y gann()yll yn goleuhav y ereill.
14g. WM 12324-6, peredur tec … blodeu y milwyr achanhwyll y marchogyon.
id. 43016-18, gwedy llosgi cannwyll o honei hi yn oleuad itaw ev vrth wiscaw.
14g. GDG 294, Gorffwyll am gannwyll Gwynedd.
c. 1400 R 103229, tec agannwyll pwyll y dyn.
c. 1400 MM 50, Kymryt kanhwyll o wer deueit.
15g. GGl 203, Cannwyll yw’n canu llawer / I beri clod a berw clêr.
1567 TN 104b, Canwyll [:- Goleuad] y corph yw’r llygat.
1588 Diar xiii. 9, cannwyll y drygionus a ddiffoddir.
1595 Egl Ph [ix], Pwy a gymmer arno chwilio’n lwyddiannus yr Arabieit … heb y gannwyll ymma yn gynrithawl o’i blaen?
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