Arthur, the Grail, and Independence

It seems that next year's Scottish independence referendum, timed to take place in the 700th anniversary year of the Battle of Bannockburn, has been inspiring film makers.

Two projects - both about William Wallace - are in the pipeline; one, I believe, by Scottish Television, and the other by Sir Ridley Scott.

And why not?  It's a great story, and even if Mel Gibson's Braveheart played fast and loose with historical facts, it makes a great film.  We'll not make too much, at the stage, of the fact that the name Wallace derives from the same Anglo-Saxon root - wealas, meaning 'foreigner' - as 'Welsh', so that whatever his Scottish ancestry, William Wallace was actually a Welshman, a Briton.

But then, maybe we should celebrate Wallace's Welsh - i.e., British - roots.  After all, his heroic attempts to free his country from foreign (English) oppression came a full 700 years after an earlier Briton - who was also a Scot - fought so hard to stop the original English from taking over the Island of Britain.

That earlier hero was Arthur, and if you think he wasn't of Scottish blood - if you think he cannot have been a Scottish prince - then you've been brainwashed by propaganda.  To put it very simply, the English stole the cultural heritage of the Scots (and the 'Welsh' Britons) and pretended that it belonged to them.  It's as if the Brits decided that they liked the story of Shaka Zulu so much, they insisted on rewriting it in such a way as to make out that Shaka was born in Surrey.

If I might crib from the notes I made for my talk at Pagan Pride the other weekend:

King Arthur is a medieval myth.  There never was a 'King' Arthur - the word 'king' didn't exist when Arthur was around.  The earliest native sources refer to him as ymerawdwr, a Welsh variant of imperator or 'emperor'.  The idea that he was a 'king' didn't come till much later, along with the preposterous claims that he was a 'Christian' and that he was buried at Glastonbury.  Just one lie after another, I'm afraid, and mostly emanating from the medieval Church.

In fact, when the Cistercians gained a foothold in Scotland, alongside the Knights Templar, they began to rewrite the Grail stories with more than a few references to Scotland.  Those references were later exchanged for 'Glastonbury' by propagandists working for the Benedictines, who were the Cistercians' main rivals.

The first Arthur on record was a Scot.  Well over 100 years before the first 'recognised' reference to Arthur - in the History of the Britons (circa AD 829) - the Life of St Columba by Adomnan of Iona referred to a son of the then King of the Scots, Aedan mac Gabrain.  This son was called Artur or Artuir, and he was destined to die in battle.  The Irish annals indicate that he died in about 594, fighting against the Picts of Angus.

What is more, the early British literature abounds with references to Arthur in a northern context.  There is, for example, Aneirin's Y Gododdin poem (circa AD 600), which is regularly mistranslated by scholars in order to make it appear that Arthur wasn't involved in Aneirin's catastrophic battle in North Britain.  There are also the poems of Taliesin, the Chief Bard of Britain, who flourished in the second half of the sixth century, primarily in North Britain, and wrote of Arthur as a contemporary.  Taliesin, like Aneirin, also praised certain conteemporaries of Artur mac Aedain, such as Peredur - i.e. Perceval; Owain - i.e. Yvain; Cynon - i.e. 'Kentigern'; and various others.

The poems of Myrddin Wyllt - later identified as 'Merlin' - belong to North Britain in the late-sixth century.  The individuals named in medieval lists of the Pedwar Marchog ar Hugain Llys Arthur ('The 24 Horsemen of the Court of Arthur') were predominantly sixth-century figures based in North Britain, as are the individuals encountered in one of the earliest ecclesiastical sources to mention Arthur (Caradog of Llancarfan's Life of St Cadog - Cadog having been one of Arthur's knights), and the battles cited as Arthur's 12 great victories in the History of the Britons can all be traced to locations in Scotland, several to historically-attested battles involving the family and contemporaries of Artur mac Aedain.

I could go on.  In fact, I am - in The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion, which is exploding the silly medieval myths about cups of the Last Supper and Arthur hanging around Glastonbury (or you could try The King Arthur Conspiracy, which has been praised by those who came to it without prejudice and preconceptions).  But for now, the point is this:

Only English racism (sorry; let's say "nationalism", along with a touch of "xenophobia", a dash of "imperialism" and a healthy dose of "superiority complex") continues to try to pin Arthur and his legends to southern Britain.  Only English racism - and Christian dishonesty - continues to insist that he must have been a fifth-century warlord of the south ... even though not a single shred of evidence has ever appeared to indicate who such an Arthur might have been.

Most of them refuse even to discuss THE FIRST ARTHUR ON RECORD, and when pushed will come up with some ludicrous gobbledegook along the lines of: "Well, Arthur son of Aedan - the first Arthur to appear in any literary source - MUST have been named after an earlier, decidedly more English Arthur, about whom we know absolutely nothing."  You've got to be pretty far gone if you have to make claims like "the earliest on record must have been named after someone even earlier who probably didn't exist".  But this is the reason why scholars persist in mistranslating the relevant lines in Aneirin's elegaic Y Gododdin poem - anything to hide the glaringly simple fact that Arthur was a sixth-century prince of the North.

Even Geoffrey of Monmouth, who cobbled together the nonsense about Arthur at Tintagel in Cornwall - even he knew that Arthur had fought at Dumbarton, and around Loch Lomond, and that he met his end fighting against 'Scots, Picts and Irish ... some of them pagans and some Christians.'

Artur mac Aedain died fighting against the Picts (and others).  Before long, I'll be explaining what the Pictish symbol stones of Angus can tell us about that battle.  According to the Irish annals, the battle was fought in 'Circin' - that is, Circenn, the Pictish province we now know as Angus.

Circenn - from cir, a 'comb', and cenn, 'heads'.  The Picts of Circenn modelled their appearance on the boar, and shaved their heads in such a way as to mimic a boar's crest or 'comb'.

Of course, we all know that 'King' Arthur died fighting at Camlann.  But where was 'Camlann'?

Well, much of southern and central Scotland was invaded by the Germanic Angles, once Arthur had been destroyed.  So that by the seventh century, a great part of Scotland was speaking a Germanic tongue.  This evolved separately from English to become the 'dialect' known as Lowland Scots.

Hence, Camlann - from cam, a Scots word meaning 'comb', and lann or laan, a Scots word meaning 'land'.  And - surprise, surprise - the Pictish standing stones of 'Comb-Land' even show us images of the Grail and the death of Arthur's queen (who was buried, as the Scots have maintained for centuries, close to the site of the last battle).

Arthur was killed in the land of the 'Comb-Heads', otherwise the 'Comb-Land' or Camlann.  And he died desperately trying to defend his people - the Scots, and the Britons of the North - against the encroaching Angles.  The very people who, many years later, would steal his legend and pretend that it was theirs.

So, two major productions about William Wallace in the run up to the Scottish independence referendum.  Not necessarily a bad thing.

But one of them, at least, should have been about Arthur - a true Scottish hero, betrayed by generation after generation of Englishmen.

On the bonny, bonny banks ...

One of the benefits of writing The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion for Moon Books is that I'm going back through so much of my research into Arthur and discovering new things.

Take his battles.  A list of twelve victories won by Arthur in his capacity of dux bellorum - 'duke of battles' - was included in the Historia Brittonum or 'History of the Britons' (see right), compiled in about 829, possibly by a monk called Nennius.

Battles 2, 3, 4 and 5 were fought on a river 'which is called Dubglas ['dark-grey'] and is in the region of Linnuis'.

This 'region of Linnuis', it is usually assumed, relates to Lindum.  The 2nd-century Roman geographer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, identified two places in Britain as Lindum.  One was Lincoln, the other by Loch Lomond, in the Scottish district of Lennox.

Now, I once had a thoroughly ridiculous discussion with an Arthurian 'scholar' about Linnuis.  He insisted that only the Lincoln Lindum could have been known as Linnuis.  I asked him why the Lindum by Loch Lomond could not have been known as Linnuis.  But apparently, only Lincoln could have been the Linnuis where Arthur fought his battles.

I then pointed out that Loch Lomond has got a very big, triple-peaked mountain called Ben Arthur.  And that there are four waters in the Lennox area that are called Douglas (from dub-glas).  And that there are records of four historical battles fought in the region during the lifetime of Artuir mac Aedain, the first 'Arthur' to appear in the records.  And that these battles involved historical figures who accompanied Arthur into the legends (two of these - Lleenog of Lennox and his son, Gwallog the Battle-Horseman - became the 'Lancelot of the Lake' and his son, 'Sir Galahad', of the later romances).

Oh, and I also pointed out that Geoffrey of Monmouth knew that Arthur had fought battles at Dumbarton and around Loch Lomond, since he said as much in his History of the Kings of Britain (c 1137) and the Life of Merlin (c 1150).

So what has Lincoln got that Lennox hasn't, I wondered.

'The right name, for a start', said my pig-headed interlocutor.

Writing about Arthur's battles again, something struck me.  The most dominant geographical feature in Lennox is Loch Lomond - the biggest lake in Britain.  The Welsh word for a 'lake' is llyn.

Hmmnn ... Could llyn actually have been the first part of Linnuis?  If so, what might the rest of Linnuis have meant?  The most obvious answer is that it came from gwys - a 'summons'.

I then consulted W.J. Watson's wonderful book, The Celtic Placenames of Scotland.  Watson himself quoted Nennius:

'De magno lacu Lummonu, qui Anglice vocatur Lochleuen in regione Pictorum.' - 'Of the great lake Lummonu, which is called in English Loch Leven, in the region of the Picts.'

Watson states that 'lake Lummonu' would be Llyn Llumonwy in modern Welsh, from llumon, a 'chimney' or 'beacon'.  He then points to a bit of genuine Arthurian literature, the old tale of Culhwch ac Olwen, in which 'Kai and Bedwyr sat on a beacon cairn on the summit of Plynlymon.'

So - Loch Lomond was, once-upon-a-time, the 'Lake of the Signal-Beacon', with Lomond in fact coming from the Welsh llumon, a 'beacon' (compare lluman - a 'banner' or 'flag').

An alternative form of that name would be Llynwys - the 'Lake of the Summons'.

Llynwys would be Latinised as Linnuis.  Arguably, then, the 'region of Linnuis' was not named after Lindum at all.  It was named after Loch Lomond, the great lake of the Beacon.

So what has Lincoln got that Lennox hasn't?

A totally spurious claim to Arthur, for a start.

Finding Arthur

Back in the first quarter of the ninth century, a monk in Wales gathered together a pile of scrolls and manuscripts, from which he cherrypicked the material for his Historia Brittonum - a 'History of the Britons'.  One of his sources comprised a list of twelve battles won by Arthur, the dux bellorum or 'duke of battles' who led his allies to a string of victories.

Nothing took me longer than pinning down the locations and rough dates of those twelve battles (the list does not include Arthur's final battle campaign, but there's a separate poem about that).  Some weren't too difficult; others were a real problem.  But I tended to feel that I was on the right lines when coincidences began to crop up.

Put it this way - when several different pieces of information appeared in connection with one particular location, I began to feel that I'd found another of the battle sites.  And that's the key thing.  You see, it's a common thing in Arthurian studies for someone to suggest such-and-such a place on the grounds that the name is a bit similar.  But that's not enough.  It's like triangulation: I need several pointers to indicate a place before I'm prepared to accept it.  A similar-sounding name isn't enough.

Now, there's been an interesting discussion on Arthurnet lately concerning the eleventh battle fought and won by Arthur.  Different versions of the Historia Brittonum have different names for this battle.  It was fought either on the 'mountain which is called Agned', or at a place called 'Breguoin' or 'Bregion', or was perhaps known as Agned Catbregomion - the 'Agned Battle of Bregomion'.

A few blogposts back I referred to the 'Professor Schoenbaum Said' phenomenon, and something along the PSS lines has been happening on Arthurnet.  Somebody has decided that there was no such place as Agned.  It was one of those pesky scribal errors (a familiar resort of the historian who hasn't yet dug up the right information).  Strangely, that theory is being pushed quite forcefully on Arthurnet.  There was no 'mountain which is called Agned'.  It was a misprint.  It meant something else altogether.

In fact, Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the twelfth century, indicated that there was city on Mount Agned - one of three created by a mythical British king, the others being York and Dumbarton.  In the fourteenth century, John of Fordun explicitly stated that Agned was an old name for Edinburgh.

Arthur's family, on his mother's side, were Edinburgh-based.  The obvious 'mountain' of Edinburgh is the volcanic plug we know as Arthur's Seat.

An old Welsh poem known as Pa Gwr ('What Man is the Porter?') has Arthur and his foster-brother Cai pleading for entry at the gates to the Otherworldly hall of heroes.  The poem acknowledges that Arthur and his comrades fought at Mynydd Eidyn - the 'Mountain of Edinburgh'.  So it's a reasonable assumption that the eleventh battle, fought on the 'mountain which is called Agned', took place somewhere near Edinburgh.

Not a clerical error at all.

Just south-west of Arthur's Seat rise the Braid Hills, their name coming from braghaid, the dative form of the Gaelic braigh, meaning the 'upper part'.  The equivalent of braigh in Welsh is brig - 'top' or 'summit'.  This would appear to have been the root of 'Bregion' or 'Bregmion'.  The battle known as Agned Catbregomion would therefore have been the Edinburgh Battle of the Braid Hills.

Right by the Braid Hills, in the Edinburgh suburb of Fairmilehead, there stands a great standing stone, three metres tall, known as the Caiy Stone or 'General Kay's Monument'.  Doesn't that sound like Arthur's foster-brother, Cai?

A little further up the shore of the Firth of Forth, the headland of Bo'ness juts out into the sea.  It first appears on a map of 1335 as Berwardeston - the 'Town of the Bear Guardian'.  Arthur was named after the bright star and red giant Arcturus, the 'Bear-Guardian'.

It would be one thing simply to state that Arthur's eleventh battle was fought in the Edinburgh district.  The nay-sayers would simply respond with the bizarre assertion that there never was such a place as "Agned".  But add to that the presence of the Braid Hills, the Caiy Stone, Arthur's Seat, the 'Town of the Bear Guardian' and the reference in the Pa Gwr poem to Arthur and Cai having fought in the region of Edinburgh (Mynydd Eidyn), and things begin to look pretty convincing.  At least, that's what I think.

Ultimately, though, I guess it's up to the individual.  Do you accept the theory, based on little or no evidence, that "Agned" was a misinterpretation of something else, or do you acknowledge the likelihood that Arthur and his warriors fought in the Edinburgh region, given the various clues we have touched on?

It probably all depends on whether or not you're prepared to accept that the historical Arthur of the North was the genuine, original 'King Arthur'.  If you refuse to accept that the real Arthur had anything to do with North Britain, then you have to make up reasons not to allow the "Agned" battle to be counted.

But then, there are eleven other battles mentioned in the Historia Brittonum, and Arthur's later battle campaigns on top of those.  You can't dismiss all of them simply because they don't suit your theories.