A few years ago now I got very excited when I was quite certain I had successfully identified King Arthur's father Uther Pendragon with a historical personage: St. Illtud. However, subsequent work on the traditional association of Illtud with the name Sawyl in three different instances led me to abandon the notion in favor of a northern chieftain bearing the latter name. My final book on Arthur (https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Leader-Ribchester-Definitive-Identification-Legendary/dp/B085RNKWT6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=16RL3JWOM3XQG&keywords=the+battle+leader+of+ribchester+august+hunt&qid=1697739359&sprefix=the+battle+leader+of+ribchester+august+hunt%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1) settled on this northern Sawyl as Arthur's actual father.
Only the other day, however, I decided to address a query sent to me by an interested reader (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/10/lac-rides-again-sigh-or-reader-urges-me_19.html). My brief commentary on that query seemed unsatisfactory to me and so I am embarking here on a more detailed exploration of the possibility that we should prefer Illtud over Sawyl.
For some background on my case for and against Illtud, please see the following older articles:
Now, the question is really pretty simple. If we accept that Uther Pendragon is, indeed, a Cymricized form of the Latin titles given to Illtud, and the reference to Uther's having Mabon of Elei/Ely as his servant helps fix that river valley as Uther's location, and given we know Illtud was at that location, do we leave it at that or do we push for a misidentification of Uther/Illtud with Sawyl of Ribchester - and thus allow for Sawyl as Arthur's real father?
Of course, if we knew what the ARM[...]S on the LAC inscription read, our decision would be easy. ARMENIOS would mean LAC had nothing to do with Sarmatians, as those warriors were only transferred to Britain after LAC was stationed there. On the other hand, if the stone read ARMORICOS, we could allow for LAC having fought in the Deserters' War during the reign of Commodus, and that would allow us to establish a Sarmatian connection for him.
But, alas, we don't know how the original inscription read. Probability heavily favors a reading of ARMENIOS. This is due to the reasons I presented in the prior article posted at the top of this page.
The reception for Illtud as Arthur's father was not a good one. This is because, primarily, the hagiographical account of Illtud's life does not allow for such a relationship. We are told Illtud and Arthur were cousins, that Illtud visited Arthur's court (as he did so on the way from Llydaw/River Leadon to Dinas Powys, the site intended may well be Geoffrey of Monmouth's Caerleon), that Illtud had his wife he put away when he became a religious and that no children of their union were recorded. We know he was a soldier, and quite a notable one, but nothing is told of his exploits other than that he was the leader of a local chieftain's soldiers. Studies on some of the Welsh saints have shown that even once they became "rulers" of major monasteries, they continued to maintain significant retinues, essentially household troops.
Still, we must accept the fact that as soon as Uther Pendragon became established as an independent entity in the tradition, i.e. it was forgotten that Uther = Illtud, there was no restraint on the part of the hagiographer in concocting his story of the warrior monk. The tradition essentially "split", with Arthur continuing as the son of Uther and Illtud being made into the paragon of a leader of soldiers who had made the transition into a man of God. Uther himself was subjected to mythologization, culminating in the "history" of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which did all sorts of crazy things - like turning the epithet gorlassar into a Duke of Cornwall named Gorlais and creating the name Igraine from that of a Cornish place-name (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-new-identification-of-arthurs-mother.html)! In both Illtud and Uther, history is lost and legend is born.
Needless to say, if we stick with Illtud as Arthur's real father, there are some problems we must address.
First, we lose a connection with LAC in terms of likelihood of name transference and preservation from the "famous" north-centered Roman officer to the subsequent British population. If Sawyl of Ribchester descended at least in part from Sarmatians, and LAC had used Sarmatian troops, then we can propose the passing down of the name in the generations from the time of the Romans to the Dark Ages. But establishing a tie with Illtud of South Wales is quite impossible. We would simply have to allow Artorius showing up as Arthur from another source/process, one that must remain unknown to us. This is not as big a deal as we make it, as an Arthur of any other name would still be an Arthur. If we had a Welsh name that derived from a Roman one that could not be traced to a specific known Roman individual in Britain, we would just view it as a name. We would not try to make more out of it. And as Professor Roger Tomlin has remarked, Artorius was not an uncommon name among the Romans.
Second, we lose the wonderful array of Arthurian battles that I have managed, over many decades of research, to place in the North. With an Illtud descended from the territory of the Roman period Dobunni, we might instead see in Arthur a British foil to the Gewissei of south-central England, a group who themselves counted among their members non-English federate mercenaries (Cerdic of Wessex being the Ceredig son of the Irish chieftain Cunedda of the Welsh materials). A case can be made for the Arthurian battle-list being a Cymracized version of battles from in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, and I have taken the trouble in the past to tackle that task. The results of a redirected search for the battles are satisfactory, although they lack the clarity one may find in the Northern sites.
A good example of the kind of trouble we get into when treating of the battles can best be seen in that of Arthur's Tribruit/Tryfrwyd shore. In the PA GUR poem, a piece replete with Welsh forms of Gaelic and English place-names, Tribruit would seem to be a trajectus on the Firth of Forth, near the Manann place-names. But the same Manawydan of the PA GUR poem is found on the Severn estuary in the MABINOGION, and it is there that the Classical sources place Trajectus, the Latin equivalent of Tribruit. So it is entirely possible that a known historical site like Trajectus on the Severn has been relocated in the literary tradition to a crossing on the Firth of Forth because Manawydan was wrongly associated with the Manann places. The southern Trajectus has been situated by Roman geographers perilously close to Dyrham, the site of battle in the ASC, and it may, therefore, stand in for the Welsh version of the Dyrham battle.
In my total lack of free time these days, I will eventually try to carve out a moment or two to prepare a final analysis of the Arthurian southern battles. If I feel the conclusions I reach on these sites are worth putting forward in preference to northern battles, I will publish those here, as always.
Otherwise, I will leave the Northern Arthur stand as depicted in my book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF RIBCHESTER.
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