Grampian Mountains
Only in the last week or so I've had a chance to review my old work on Arthur's Caledonian Wood battle. Alas, as is so often the case, I've found it sorely lacking in the quality of its argument and conclusion.
When treating of the battle initially, I had, of course, sought a way to make it conform to a list of battles that were all supposedly fought against the Saxons. I had arrived at what I thought a clever solution, equating Celidon with a Scottish river-name that may have contributed to the original Caledonian Wood being relocated from the Scottish Highlands to the Scottish Lowlands. By doing this, I was able to situate a plausible battle site near Dere Street, where several of the other battles were aligned. For my earlier argument, please see
Alas, I now realize I must dispense with this idea. Why?
Well, I began by re-reading studies such as "Calidon and the Caledonian Forest", Clarke B., Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies xxiii, 191–201, 1969. And one thing became immediately clear: the Caledonian Wood before or up to the 10th century (the date of the HISTORIA BRITTONUM, although the substance of the Arthurian battle list likely predates the actual writing of the HB) could not have been in the Scottish Lowlands. This is, literally, quite impossible. The Lowlands did not become Scottish until much later in the Middle Ages.
So, we must allow for Arthur's Caledonian Wood battle to be in the actual Caledonia, a region covering, essentially, the Grampian Mountains in the Highlands of Scotland.
This location is the only reasonable candidate for Arthur's Caledonian Wood.
Needless to say, this wrecks havoc with the HB's claim that all Arthur's battles were fought against the Saxons. More than any other battle, that of the Caledonian Wood has given fits to Arthurian researchers (such as myself) who have opted for the Saxon champion over one who may have been either the ghost of L. Artorius Castus or a fusion of several Arthurs, with the extreme northern battles belonging to the later Arthur of Dalriada.
This problem intensifies when the battles of Bassas and the Tribruit are thrown into the mix. Best arguments for those two sites, as I've explored in great depth, are Dunipace (between the two Miathi/Maeatae forts near the Arthur's Oven Roman monument) and North Queensferry. These sites also do not point to an Arthur fighting Saxons. The Dogheads at Tribruit in the PA GUR may owe their existence to the name of the headland at Queensferry, although the Roman era Venicones tribe ('hunting hounds' according to Andrew Breeze, or 'kindred hounds' according to John Koch) held the territory north of Queensferry.
It is tempting to do something similar with the battles at the mouth of the Glen and the Dubglas in Linnuis, but to do so we must resort to Gaelic names (see Inverglen on Loch Fyne, directly opposite of which is a Douglas Water). It seems safer to leave these two sites as British place-names, both being easily locatable in Northumberland ( = the mouth of the Glen near Yeavering and the Devil's Water at Linnels near Corbridge).
I once went even further with the Gaelic spin, seeing Agned as a corruption for agued, in this case a reference to the Aghaidh Artair or 'Arthur's face on the west side of Glenkinglas in Scotland. This involved a comparison of W. agwedd, from gwedd, 'face', with Irish agad, agaid. It was clever, I thought - until I found agued used to describe the dire straits of the British host at Catterick in the GODODDIN, a poem that contains the earliest known mention of Arthur.
All the names of the list can be shown to be British, but they still describe a campaign ranging from somewhat south of York to Caledonia. The City of the Legion is the York of L. Artorius Castus, Guinnion is Vinovium/Binchester, Breguoin is Brewyn/Bremenium/High Rochester.
Badon for English Bathum points to Buxton, the Aquae Arnemetia of the Roman period. I still think there is nothing unusual about the use of the English term, as no one seeking to promote the great Christian champion Arthur would mention the name of a pagan goddess. Or Badon was a tag-on, a site actually in the South (Bath in Somerset), the scene of a famous battle whose victorious commander was unknown. Giving it to Arthur magnified his importance. Geography may also have played a part in a decision to give Arthur a southern Badon, as it could then be shown that he was a truly mythical hero, having fought from extreme northern Scotland to southern England.
In the Northern scheme of things, Camlan is not a problem. It is certainly Camboglanna/Castlesteads on Hadrian's Wall in the Irthing Valley (a river-name that may mean 'Little Bear'; I have placed the *Artenses or Bear people here, a tribal designation preserved in the Welsh eponym Arthwys). Aballava/Avalana/"Avalon" at Burgh-By-Sands is not far to the west, as is a possible prototypical Grail Castle, Concavata at Drumburgh. There is even a Dea Latis or Lake Goddess who was worshipped at Aballava and at Birdoswald/Banna.
If we go with this picture, and ignore the various Welsh attempts to relocate Arthur to the South (all of which seem to be spurious tradition when we compare them to the HB battle list), what can we say about the HB Arthur?
Time for perfect honesty here: were it not for the fact that Arthur is said to die at Camlan, I could not help but see in the arrangement of the HB battles a perfect blueprint for L. Artorius Castus, possibly serving under the governor Ulpius Marcellus during his victorious campaign in the North, or under Severus and Caracalla during their major action against the Caledonii and the Maeatae. I have before discussed the interesting presence of Arthur of Dalraida in a fatal battle agains the Miathi, the Dark Age version of the Roman period Maeatae, and the correspondence with the Bassas battle of Arthur of the HB.
I had even gone to the trouble of coming up with a new reading for the lacuna of the L. Artorius Castus memorial stone - a reading which actually received academic acceptance: ARM.GENTES, indicating the Castus had led three legions against armed tribes (in the North, as he was prefect of the Sixth at York). I dispensed with this idea only because I am somewhat philosophically opposed to adopting the Arthur = LAC theory. And I abandoned the notion despite the fact that the consensus opinion on the date of the Castus inscription put it well into the Severan period. Here are two of the most valuable statements on the stone's age:
Benet Salway:
"Basing my opinion purely on the script, I would favour a date in the Severan period (AD 193-235) or up to a decade or so later. I base this on the high degree of ligaturing in the design."
Abigail Graham:
"There are a few things that, in my mind, make it very hard to accept an Antonine date, at the earliest, one could say Commodus, but its a stretch. These have to do with a combination of visual features, ligatures, spacing, stops, textual organisation and spellings.
Ligatures & Spacing. Ligatures can happen at any time for practical reasons: when cutters run out of space (often in the right hand margin). As texts become more complex, this happens more often. By the time of Septimius Severus, however, they also become decorative, and some seem deliberate, even artistic. Quite a few ligatures in this text happen early on in a line (ll 2-3, 5, 6) not as the carver ran out of space, and with the letter T. Two unusual ones of curved forms also fall beneath each other. ll. 7-8. Also line 9, there was no need for a ligature of 'TE" there was plenty of space (compare with a practical use of ligature NTE at the end of line 8). Ligatures of vowels and T form become popular under Sept Severus, and occur regardless of spacing. cf. Line 2 of this text from Britain. https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1151.
Terms: "Duci" tends to be used in the 3rd c. CE. I found one use in Pannonia on a shield referring to Commodus (180-191). for [Vi]ctoria [re] duci . All other uses are Severan or later.
Spellings: Another dating issue noted by Salway is the replication of letters "Legg" (or "Augg" ""praeff" to show a potential plural. I cannot find a single example of this anywhere in the empire before Sept Severus (201 CE), though it occurs frequently after.
The lovely letters, the contrast between deep and light chisel cuts (for another example of this Severan from Pannonia cf. https://lupa.at/26913, also note the fine triangulate interpuncts), plus the double letters, the ligatures for decorative rather than functional use... As well as spelling and terminology all point to Severan or a bit later. At the earliest, this could be 180, but the issue is, it does not look anything like the parallel text cited by Miletic CIL 3. 11695 https://www.flickr.com/photos/156429244@N04/43444599171. A monumental text from this period (ca. 179/180) has no ligatures, and diff lettering style altogether. It is hard to believe that a man born in ca. 100, in his fifties by 154, as he claims, was commemorated in ca. 180-190. It is not impossible, but it would be incredibly rare.
Where do the interpuncts fit in? You are right to observe these: this is a beautifully arranged inscription with skilled carving. Dating at text involves taking in the whole picture, and reconciling skill and message with the medium. Few texts are perfect and this had moments of difficulty, but it is beautifully rendered. The idea that all ligatures are from lack of talent does not hold, in theory or in practice. That double letters are a series of errors in common terms "legg". "praeff" is hard to accept, especially when these features emerge after 200 CE Legg= at least 22 cases, all dating to the 3rd. C. CE, most between 200-250. "praeff" 40+ cases, none dating before 200. I lean towards Benet Salway's date: Severan or later. I'm not sure one can rule out something from 180, but it would be an anomaly. It's a shame Miletic's archaeology/history and the dating don't align, but this happens often."
Let's play a little game at this point. What if two things about the Arthurian battle list are true:
1) Arthur did not fight at Badon.
2) Arthur did not die at Camlan.
How peculiar it is that the two battles that show up in the Welsh Annals are the only two that really make me pause on identifying Arthur with L. Artorius Castus!
We start playing by saying that Badon was assigned to Arthur. It may (probably did) happen in the South, but Arthur had nothing to do with it outside the manufacturing of heroic legend.
So, that's easy to do. But what about Camlan? LAC died at Epetium (modern Stobrec) in Dalmatia (Croatia). If Arthur is a ghost of LAC, and the death at Camlan is a folkloristic fiction, why place his death there?
Well, I wrote about some interesting aspects of Camboglanna in connection with Severus and Caracalla:
While not all of the speculations there are necessarily valid, two points may be: L. Artorius Castus may well have served under Severus and Caracalla and may even have been present at Castlesteads. There is nothing implausible in that scenario at all. Second, both Artorius and Arthur may well have been taken as 'bear' names fairly early on by the British, and Camboglanna is in the Irthing Valley. Irthing may, as already mentioned above, be a 'bear' river-name. For Dr. Andrew Breeze's article on this etymology, see
Is it a coincidence that the famous Arthur is said to die in the valley that seems to have been called after a Little Bear river?
I've even sought to relate the Camlan in NW Wales with the Miathi battle of Arthur of Dalriada - itself a possible reflection of L. Artorius Castus going against the Maeatae under Severus and Caracalla:
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/camlan-as-folk-relocation-of-dalriadan.html [1]
https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2025/02/camlan-as-folk-relocation-of-dalriadan.html [1]
Alternately, and as I once theorized, a sub-Roman Arthur may have belonged to Banna/Birdoswald in the Irthing Valley, where there was a remarkable Dark Age royal complex. The name Artorius, associated with a bear, could have come from nearby Carvoran/Magnis, garrisoned in the late Roman period by Dalmatians. LAC had Dalmatian connections, finished his career in Dalmatia and we know of several Artorii from Salona in Dalmatia. We have a funeral stone from a Salona woman at Carvoran.
As for Banna, that fort may be referred to as the 'dragon' on the Ilam Cup, as it was garissoned for centuries by Dacians. The Dacians were noted for their devotion to an ethnic version of the draco standard. I once sought to situate Uther Pendragon at this fort and we might still give the idea some currency, but only if we adopt the Galfridian tradition regarding Uther's draco and dragon-comet. The prevailing view among Welsh literature specialists is that he conjured all that from a misinterpretation of the Pendragon epithet (poetically it had come to mean 'chief-warror' or 'chief of warriors', not Dragon's Head), and I have added the possibility that he may have gotten his dragon-star from a line in the MARWNAT VTHYR PEN.
Give all of that, what would it take to push me over the edge and see in the HB Arthur nothing more than a reflection of L. Artorius Castus? I mean, I'd already proven that Ambrosius Aurelianus was a 4th century conflated Gaulish figure and not a British war-leader of the 5th century. With that kind of chronological manipulation going on in Gildas and the HB, why should I have any particular allegiance
to a 6th century Arthur? All the subsequent Arthurs, from Irish-descended dynasties in Britain, could easily have adopted the Arthur name because already in their time it represented a great legendary figure of the British past. What we do know is that the Dessi who went from Ireland to Dyfed (where we later find Arthur son of Pedr) took great pains to change the names of their Irish ancestors to Roman ones.
NOT BRITISH ONES. And this last is an important point. If the Dyfed royal family would opt to assume Roman names for the ancestors, why wouldn't they choose to give a prince of their line the name of one of the most famous Romans to serve in Britain, viz. Artorius?
The alternative to explaining why the Arthur name was taken by these Irish chieftains does not seem to work: we have to propose that a British Arthur who died c. 537 had become so famous that by the middle of that century Aedan son of Gabran of Dalriada, who had presumably taken a British wife (from Strathclyde, it is assumed), names a son after him. So, within a couple decades the earlier British Arthur ws held in such great esteem in Strathclyde (or perhaps was descended from someone in Strathclyde, e.g. Ceredig Wledig?) that the Dalriadans introduced the name into their own dynasty in Kintyre.
But if that's so, how do we explain Arthur son of Pedr? Sure, there was an Artchorp or 'Bear-bodied' in the Dessi Dyfed genealogy. But Arthur is beyond doubt from Roman Latin Artorius, and while a bear-name in the ancestral pedigree may have been a factor in Pedr's choosing Arthur, the King of Dyfed would still have to have knowledge of the Artorius name and what it signified.
There is no traceable connection between the Dessi who went to Dyfed and the Dalriadans who went to Scotland. It could be that Pedr named his son for Arthur of Dalriada simply because the Dalriadans, like the Dessi, were Irish, but if so, it still would only have been done if the signficance of the Arthur name were known and appreciated.
So have I answered my own question? Am I willing to admit that the famous Arthur of legend may, in fact, be an anachronistic shadow of L. Artorius Castus?
Obviously, I need to think on that a bit. But I am creeping closer and closer to acknowledging the likelihood of the identification.
"...Prefect of the Sixth Victorious Legion, Dux of Three British Legions Against Armed Tribes...
[1]
I have written to Alan James, noted Brythonic place-name expert, on Camelon, Falkirk. His response will be pasted here once it is received. For now I can quote from his Dictionary on Brittonic Place-Names:
It seems to form such a name, Kolanía, in Ptolemy, PNRB pp. 311-12: see CPNS p. 32, Jackson
(1948) loc. cit., and Isaac (2005) loc. cit. This was probably the Roman fort at Camelon Stg
(which place-name may have replaced *Celein because of misidentification with Camulodunum
PNRB p. 295, and with Camelon AC s.a. 537, on the part of Boece and Bellenden: see also
cam[b] and lann). Cair Celemion in the list of civitas capitals appended to HB66 should
probably be *Celeinion, a plural form, but is unlikely to be the same place as Kolanía, and not
necessarily in the North.
Thus Camelon seems first to have been mentioned by Boece (see below for a selection from a dissertation discussing the site, followed by Boece himself). Thought to be Roman Colonia.
Are we to see Camelon as merely a corruption of Colonia?
I only asked him because the Dalriadan Arthur is said to have died in these parts fighting the Miathi, and one could see in Camelon the Camlan of the Welsh Annals (were the dates of the two Arthurs not so divergent).
Note the Camelon fort is on an extreme bend of the River Carron, near Arthur's Oven.
8.5.3 Camelon Less can be said about Camelon’s historic role in the region’s mythic landscape. On the surface, there is a striking resemblance to “Camelot,” and it may be possible that this derives from a regional variation of the Arthur myth, encompassing Arthur’s O’on. If so, there are no clear literary attestations of such an Arthurian connection, though Stukeley (1720: 7) notes that “the Country People say it was called Camelon or Camelot, [and] that it was the Metropolis of the Picts.” The name itself is first mentioned by Boece (1527), leading Christison to claim that it was “invented by that clever romancer” (Christison et al. 1901: 335). The site is most deeply mythologised in Boece’s history, wherein he places numerous Roman period activities here. This is, however, less the result of an invented narrative as it is the mistaken identity of Camelon with the Camulodunum (modern Colchester) mentioned in a number of classical sources, including the story of Boudica’s rebellion (Hingley and Unwin 2005: 116–17).
The earliest mention of Camelon is the fabulous account by HectorBoece, whose Latin history of Scotland, published in 1522, was translatedby John Bellenden,1 and printed about 1536, at the request of KingJames V., and of which a highly elaborated metrical version was alsowritten about the same time by William Stewart.2Bellenden, vol. i., the first buke, p. 29 : " In this time (i.e., of Fergus,King of Scots), rang Esdaill, King of Brittonis, and Cruthneus Cameloun,King of Pichtis, quhilk biggit efter, upone the Watter of Carron, theciete of Camelon." " This ciete of Camelon resistit, mony yeris efter,to the Britonis and Komanis, quhill at last, Kinneth, King of Scottis,quhilk put the Pichtis out of Albion, brocht it to uter subversioun."Having given Camelon this highly respectable origin, the romancerfurther on comes to a wholly fictitious narrative of its " utersubversioun," of which the following are the concluding passages. Vol.i., the tent buke, p. 161: " The cieteyanis, astonist with this suddaneirruptioun of Scottis, and nocht of power to resist, left the wallis, andfaucht, sa lang as thay micht with perseverant hatrent to the deith ;and finalie wer all slane, bot ony mercy or ransom. The nobillis com-mandit to cast douii the toun, and to leif na Pichtis on live within the1 The History and Chronicles of Scotland, Hector Boeee, translated by JohnBellenden, circa 1536 ; reprinted 1821.2 The Bulk of the Croniclis of Scotland, or a Metrical Version of the Historyof Hector Boece, edited by W. B. Turnbiill, 1858.
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