Elafius (Elesa?) and His Crippled Son (Arthur?) - One More Time!

Statue of Saint Germanus of Auxerre

Before I can fully settle on 

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/03/badon-at-liddington-and-two-arthurs-my.html

as my final Arthurian theory (three decades or more in the making!), I do need to address one old piece that continues to nag at me.  In the following blog -

https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-i-ultimately-decided-on-ceredig-son.html

- I suggested, quite plausibly, that the crippled boy of the St. Germanus story may well be an oblique reference to Arthur.  

The way this works, quite simply, is that the description of the boy's lameness may well have been arrived at fancifully by the hagiographer, who was attempting in the process to account for the boy's name.  To him Arthur looked/sounded an awful lot like various Latin words derived from arto or artus.

Some experts I consulted on the idea liked it, or at least saw nothing wrong with it.  To them, this was exactly how a medieval author would set about to concoct an etiological tale. 

Of course, it has long been proposed by some scholars that Elafius, the chief man of the region (regionis illius primus) and father of the boy, was a reflection of the Elesa, father of Cerdic of Wessex, of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE. 

This all seemed too good to be true.  Was this yet more evidence (loosely defined) that Arthur was Cerdic of Wessex?

Well, it depends on two things.

1) The crippled boy, with a contraction disease of his knee joint, is an Isidorian play on the name Arthur

and

2) Elafius = Elesa

Both are debatable, yet both are quite possible.  If I decide to lend enough weight to these two points, then I must opt for Cerdic son of Cunedda as Arthur, and not a son of St. Illtud.