FORSAKING SAWYL BENISEL AS ARTHUR'S FATHER or HOW I GOT THAT WRONG

As a result of my final decision to go with the ARMENIOS reading for the fragmentary ARM[...]S of the L. Artorius Castus memorial stone, I was forced with having to forsake what I had proposed was a Sarmatian connection for Arthur's father.  In this brief blog piece, I want to try and account for how I might have made a blunder that huge.

If anyone has read my articles on Sawyl Benisel of Ribchester as a theoretical father for the early Medieval Arthur, they know that the road to this personage was a bumpy one, full of many a proverbial twist and turn and dead-end.  

To summarize the process briefly:

1) I looked at Mabon of the River Ely in the PA GUR heroic poem.  He is said there to be the servant of Uther Pendragon (https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2023/05/mabon-on-river-ely-glywysing-and-glevum.html).

2) I noticed that the warrior monk St. Illtud had served as captain of the soldiers for a chieftain whose lands embraced the lower part of the Ely Valley.  Illtud, in his VITA, held a number of Latin ranks/titles which, when combined, could easily have been rendered into Welsh as Uther Pendragon (as the Terrible Chief-warrior or Chief of warriors; se Rachel Bromwich).

3) Illtud made no sense as Arthur's father.  He was Arthur's cousin, put away his wife and is not recorded as having any children.

4) However, in the Welsh poem 'The Death-Song of Uther Pendragon", the father of Arthur is poetically referred to as 'a second Sawyl (= Samuel)', an allusion to the Biblical hero.  Geoffrey of Monmouth knew of this (or created the idea in the first place?), as he has his St. Eldad (= Illtud) compared to Samuel in his fictional history.

5) There was a Sawyl of the North whom I had pretty firmly situated right next to the Ribchester fort of the Sarmatian vetereans. He had a son Madog, as Uther was said to have, and Uther's grandson Eliwlad might be a variation on Ailithir, the Irish epithet given to Madog son of Sawyl.  This all looked quite promising, and I ran with it - as long as I could insist that the ARM[...]S of the LAC inscription was suppoaed to read ARMORICOS.  Armoricos allowed me to have LAC in Britain when the Sarmatians were there.  The alternate reading, ARMENIOS, did not.

And that's where things rested for a number of years.  My book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF RIBCHESTER is proof enough of that.

But I also knew there were problems with the theory.  Madog as son of Uther could have been drawn from the Madog found as son of Emyr Llydaw in a Welsh genealogy.  Emyr is "Emperor", and Llydaw is Brittany.  Uther is said to have come from Brittany, and various personages have been identified with Emyr.  

Eliwlad, given that he appears in the form of a spectral eagle in an oak tree, was best rendered as 'Grief-Lord', not as something akin to Irish Ailithir ('Other Land', i.e. Pilgrim).  This fit the theme of  gloomy darkness attending the dead Lleu in the Mabinogion, and I was able to demonstrate that at Nantlle in Gwynedd where stood Lleu's oak tree were Madog place-names that perfectly matched those of the Cornish wood the poem claims as the site.

So, there is an easy way out of this difficulty. We just have to switch things around.  If we allow for Uther Pendragon being the ruling title of a chieftain at the old Dacian Roman fort of Banna, quite possibly the Aelian Dragon of the Ilam Cup, and a place where the draco would have been just as sacred as it was at Ribchester, and we acknowledge what is already well-known, i.e. there was a strong tendency for the Welsh to relocate British heroes from other places to Wales, then we can propose that Uther of Banna was at some point in the development of the tradition wrongly identified with Illtud, given his Latin military ranks.  And once that was done, we need not concern ourselves with whether it was first Uther or Illtud who was compared with the Biblical Samuel. In neither case was this an actual reference to a Sawyl of the North.  

Personally, I am content with this explanation.  Banna was hard by Carvoran/Magnis, a fort which in the late period was manned by a Dalmatian unit.  I have already taken great pains to show that LAC, who ended up in Dalmatia as procurator, may have been born there.  Furthermore, the Statius Priscus who took him to Armenia is now thought to be a Dalmatian, as was the man who had hand-picked Priscus. A woman from Salona was buried at Magnis, and we know Artorii are attested from Salona. 

Camboglanna/Camlann is in the same river valley as Banna/Birdoswald, and Aballava/Avalana (= Avalon), with its Dea Latis or 'Lake Goddess' was just a few miles to the west.  All the Arthurian battles spread out to the north and south, roughly along the old Roman Dere Street, which would mean Banna was pretty much right in the middle of the military theater.

I am now putting out a slight revision of my earlier book, THE BATTLE-LEADER OF THE NORTH, available in ebook, paperback and hardcover formats.  As far as I can tell, this will be my last major work on Arthur. 

Ironically, it's the theory I held when I went to Croatia in 2019, and the subject of the paper I presented there at the Artorius symposium.  Things have gone full circle, indeed!