Illtud as Arthur's Father: a No-Go

                   Liddington Castle

The concluding statements from my last two blog pieces:

"So where to go from here?  

Not back to the drawing board entirely. But the apparent PA GUR identification of Illtud with Uther continues to beckon, mainly because that strand of tradition leads straight to the Liddington Badbury. 

First off, then, will be a reevaluation of the three raptors of Elei, one of whom - Mabon son of Modron - was the servant of Uther Pendragon."

***

"My conclusion, therefore, is that 'Pa Gur' does, in fact, point strongly towards the presence of Uther Pendragon at Dinas Powys, and it is the unavoidable conclusion that at least as far as the author of the poem was concerned, Uther Pendragon was the Welsh rendering of the Latin military descriptors used for St. Illtud."

I once again find myself hearing my late father's words of wisdom: don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

If

1) the Pa Gur identifies Uther with Illtud and 

2) Illtud is once confused with a Sawyl and another time likened to Samuel

3) the Uther elegy, if we abide by a strict absence of poest end-rhyme, can have Uther say God transformed him into a second Sawyl 

and

4) Illtud was really born at Badbury/Liddington Castle hard by Durocornovium (cf. W. Cernyw) and Barbury Castle (the 'Bear's fort')

5) The AC have Badbury at Liddington as the site of the Second Battle of Badon

then perhaps this is what we should run with. We need not go so far as to bring Sawyl Benisel of the North into the picture. Really, our only justification for doing so would be my dubious identification of Madog Ailithir, son of Sawyl, with Madog and Eliwlad, son and grandson of Uther (see below).  

So let's try this on and see how it fits - while bearing in mind the Pa Gur's apparent identification of Uther as Illtud could be more spurious tradition.

First, to get another serious matter out of the way. What to do about CULHWCH AND OLWEN'S claim that Arthur's father had kin at Caer Dathal in Arfon? This hardly squares with an Uther hailing from the territory of the Roman period Dobunni!

Well, I already accounted for that in a previous article. Caer Dathal likely betrays an Irish Tuathal. The W. Cognate is Tudwal. Illtud taught a Tudwal who became a Breton saint. And a Tudwal was inserted into Uther's ancestry. Therefore, any supposed link with Caer Dathal could easily be bogus. Math of Caer Dathal is probably from Irish math, 'bear', and if the Welsh knew this then they may have chosen to put Arthur there, as arth meant 'bear' in their language. It seems unlikely that Caer Dathal is a relocation of Tintagel; rather it is probably the other way around.

Moving on...

None of the above seems to preclude the possibility that Illtud = Uther.  This is true even if we choose not to interpret the 'Marwnat Vthyr Pen' lines as containing a metaphor comparing Uther to Sawyl/Samuel.  Going further and trying to make the Sawyl allusion into an identification with Sawyl Benisel is not viable, although I once very much liked the idea.  Even if Madoc Ailithir and Madog and his son Eliwlad are to be related to each other, it is probable that this merely represents an intrusion of nonhistorical material.  The final determining factor is refusing Sawyl Benisel is my certainty that L. Artorius Castus went to Armenia, which means any connection with the Ribchester fort of the Sarmatian veterans is severed.

The main argument against Eliwlad as a substitute for Ailithir is obvious: why not just use Ailithir or the direct Welsh rendering of the Irish name?  Eliwlad, given his clear modeling upon the death-eagle Lleu of the MABINOGION, makes much more sense as 'Grief-lord' (*Eiliw-gwlad).  

However, there is one HUGE reason for not choosing Illtud as Uther, or for selecting an origin point for Uther at the Liddington Badbury: ARCHEOLOGY.

I have remarked several times in the past the the Gewissei battles in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, when laid out on a map, clearly suggest that they were "designed" to provide a portrait of the boundaries of a nascent Wessex.  The lack of internal battles (or of any successful ones; we need only note that battles in Wiltshire, the core of the region, are few and far between, and are all unsuccessful).  The chronology of these battles is believed to be deeply flawed, and it is consensus opinion among Anglo-Saxon scholars that the enemy probably moved up the Thames Valley before making progress in the South.  Add to this the fact that we are no longer sure who the Gewissei were fighting for.  There are some scholars who think they were actually, originally, the British defenders of the area, and were co-opted by the victors when the latter wrote their own history.  Or the Gewissei could have been fighting for Britons in alliance with the Saxons against other Britons.  Thus trying to make a case for an Uther and Arthur militarily active in the Swindon area becomes difficult to maintain.  

The Gewissei Battles

But more telling are the Saxon settlement maps that have been made available to us by the archeologists.  These quite definitively show that at Arthur's dates (516 and 537), battles in the region we are talking about are an impossibility.  I am posting some of these maps below, all drawn from N. J. Higham's KING ARTHUR: MYTH-MAKING AND HISTORY:

Most amazing is the last map, showing the boundary area of the Saxons and Britons in the North from south of the Humber up into the Scottish Lowlands.  That line matches to an uncanny degree the distribution of Northern Arthurian battles I long ago established in my book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF THE NORTH.  But just as importantly is our acknowledgment of the extent of the Saxon settlements in the time of Arthur.  In brief, if we're talking about Arthur being in the heartland of the Dobunni kingdom, well, sorry, that was already English.  And if we want our hero to be the defender of any part of Britain at all, for even a relatively short period of time, we must look to the North.  For it is only there that archaeology proves the British were able to hold out much longer against the Saxon encroachment.  

One could place Arthur in the West country and in Cornwall, more of the Celtic Fringe, which is where some of the tradition places him. He would then be fighting on the eastern frontier against an expanding Wessex. But neither I nor anyone else has been able to find his battles in that region.  On the other hand, several of the HB battles can be conclusively shown to belong to the North.  There is no extant Camlann place-name in the South, either, and for Avalon we must default to the highly suspect Glastonbury.  Or we can look toward the Camboglanna Roman fort on the Wall, in the same river-valley near Banna with its Dark Age royal hall, and to Aballava/Avalana/"Avalon" just a few kilometers to the west.  

It is for these reasons that I have decided, once and for all, to abjure the Southern Arthur.  Any Welsh sources that put him in the South must be regarded as good stories only.  And as I can no longer resort to Sawyl at Ribchester, I will resign myself to accepting my earlier theory on an Arthur based at the center of Hadrian's Wall.  I do so realizing that I lose any traditional genealogical trace for Uther Pendragon.  But I can live with that.  When it comes to treating of things Arthurian, I have learned that we must lean on more reliable disciplines than early Welsh literary works.  I do utilize some Welsh records for my Northern Arthur, but these are used only when I can dovetail them convincingly with place-name studies and the like.  And I make use of them sparingly, tentatively and always with appropriate caveats.  

I will be offering once more for sale my book THE BATTLE-LEADER OF ARTHUR, and do not have plans to pursue other research avenues at this time.

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