Geoffrey continues the story with the massacre of the British by the Saxons at their peace conference, following Historia Brittonum. Vortigern flees to Wales and tries to build a castle which keeps collapsing. At this point, we are introduced to Geoffrey’s major innovation, the figure of Merlin.
Although Geoffrey did not know this at the time, the Welsh prophet Myrddin (his Merlin) had acquired quite a legendary history. He was connected to the late sixth-century British kingdoms of the north and was famous for his prophecies. Several poems in the Black Book of Carmarthen are attributed to him. Geoffrey subsequently learnt more about him and incorporated it in his Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin) some twenty years later.
Geoffrey had access to the prophecies of Merlin in the British tongue, so he says. While he was writing the history, there was much interest in the prophecies, so Geoffrey ‘translated’ them into Latin. He attached them to the History crudely, at the point in Historia Brittonum where prophecy was mentioned, that of the boy about to be sacrificed at Vortigern’s tower. In Historia Brittonum the denouement is that the prophetic boy is Ambrosius. Here it is Merlin ‘also called Ambrosius’.
The prophecies of Merlin were originally independent of the History. They have their own dedication. They allude to Arthur as ‘The Boar of Cornwall’. This image is not carried through to the History, where Arthur uses a golden dragon as his symbol. When Arthur has a dream about a bear fighting a dragon, his advisers connect him with the dragon while he and Geoffrey seem to think he is actually the bear.
The epithet ‘of Cornwall’ is also odd. According to Geoffrey, Arthur was conceived in Cornwall and is related by marriage to the rulers of Cornwall. This seems hardly sufficient to warrant describing him as ‘of Cornwall’.
‘The end of the Boar will be shrouded in mystery’, we are told. Although, as William of Malmesbury confirms, legends were circulating that Arthur would return, or that his grave was unknown, or a mystery, Geoffrey does not make this explicit. In his version, Arthur goes to the Isle of Avallon to have his mortal wound treated. He then disappears from the story. Perhaps Geoffrey later decided he had been too coy, for the version given in the Vita Merlini is more mysterious than the account in the History.
Merlin prophesies that ‘six of the boar’s successors shall hold the sceptre, but after them ‘the German Worm’ [the Saxons] will return’ (HRB VII.3). Thorpe translates this as Arthur’s ‘descendants’, though it is perfectly clear that he has none, or at least that his successors are not among them. The successors are Constantine of Cornwall, Aurelius Conanus, Vortiporius, Malgo and Keredic. As suggested, the fact that there are only five of them indicates that, at some early stage, the reign of Cuneglassus was dropped accidentally.
Ambrosius
By allocating the prophetic role from Historia Brittonum to Merlin, Geoffrey can tell the story of Ambrosius in a generally realistic fashion. Ambrosius begins by overthrowing Vortigern’s government, as we have inferred earlier. ‘The Britons counselled an immediate attack on the Saxons, but [Ambrosius] persuaded them against it, for he wanted to hunt down Vortigern first.’ Vortigern is defeated and burnt in his castle in Erging.
Next, Ambrosius turns his attention to Hengist. The terrified Saxons have retreated north of the Humber and fortified cities there. They are strengthened by the proximity of Scotland, ‘for that country had never missed an opportunity of making matters worse whenever the Britons were in distress. It was a land frightful to live in, more or less uninhabited, and it offered a safe lurking-place for foreigners’ (HRB VIII.3, Thorpe 1966:189). Although Historia Brittonum supports a northern location for some of these wars, this derives primarily from the political situation in Geoffrey’s own time. In the early twelfth century, England and Scotland were hostile kingdoms, warring in the debatable land which separated them. It was therefore a natural battleground in the British Isles, easy for Geoffrey and his readers to imagine as a scene of past conflict.
Ambrosius’s forces consist of Britons (Geoffrey means people from England), Bretons and Welsh. They defeat Hengist at the battles of Maisbelli and Kaerconan (Conisbrough), after which Hengist is executed. His son Octa surrenders at the siege of York and is settled in lands near Scotland. After this Ambrosius ‘was devoted to restoring the realm, rebuilding the churches, renewing peace and the rule of law, and administering justice’. He was eventually assassinated by a Saxon, on the orders of Vortigern’s son, Pascent.
There is little in Geoffrey’s account of Ambrosius which cannot be put down to imaginative linking of material from Gildas, Bede and Historia Brittonum. The only additional aspects are the names of the battles. The only major part of the story of Ambrosius which has no known antecedents concerns Merlin, Stonehenge and Uther Pendragon.
Ambrosius decides to build a memorial at Mons Ambrii (Amesbury) to the Britons killed at the council. On Merlin’s advice, Ambrosius decides that the monument will be the Giants’ Dance, a stone circle with magical properties in Ireland. Ambrosius’s brother, Uther Pendragon, Merlin and 15,000 men go to Ireland to take it back. Only Merlin is capable of the engineering feat of dismantling the stone circle and re-erecting it at Mons Ambrii, where it now stands, known, as we later discover, as Stonehenge. It serves as the burial place of Ambrosius, Uther Pendragon and Constantine of Cornwall. The disgruntled Irish, meanwhile, make a league with Pascent and the Saxons. They invade and fight Uther Pendragon near St David’s.
During this campaign, a star appears, in the form of a dragon with two beams of light issuing from it. Merlin interprets this as meaning that Ambrosius has died and that Uther Pendragon is now King of Britain. The star symbolises him and the rays are his son (Arthur) and his daughter, whose sons and grandsons will one day rule Britain.
When Uther returns to his coronation in Winchester, ‘mindful of the explanation given by Merlin of the star . . . he ordered two dragons to be fashioned in gold, in the likeness of the one which he had seen in the ray which shone from that star’. He gave one to Winchester Cathedral. ‘The second one he kept for himself, so that he could carry it round to his wars. From that moment onwards he was called Utherpendragon, which in the British language means “a dragon’s head”. He had been given this title because it was by means of a dragon that Merlin prophesied that he would become king’ (HRB VIII.17, Thorpe 1966:202).
Many odd features of this story suggest that Geoffrey is dealing with an outside source. His explanation of Uther’s name makes no sense. A dragon’s head has never been mentioned, nor any convincing reason why Uther should take this surname. In fact, Geoffrey has called him Uther Pendragon since birth. The prophecy Merlin gives on the star is not carried forward into the rest of the narrative, nor are the two dragon figures and Uther’s motive for making them. Only one dragon, with two rays of light, is seen in the sky.
Geoffrey did not understand that the meaning of Uther’s surname is not ‘Dragon’s Head’ but rather ‘Head Dragon’. As we saw, early Welsh only knew Dragon as the title of a ruler or military leader. Uther’s surname is therefore ‘Chief Warlord’. It is similar to Maglocunus’s epithet ‘insularis draco’, warlord of Britain.
The Stonehenge episode sits oddly in context. Although Ambrosius is the King of Britain, it falls to Uther Pendragon to go to Ireland to capture the stone circle. Likewise, when the Irish attack Britain to take it back, Uther has to defend the island. The story, involving Uther Pendragon’s journey to Ireland to bring back a mystical artefact, need not originally have involved Ambrosius at all. Uther is later buried at Stonehenge.
Uther Pendragon was known before his incorporation in Geoffrey’s history. He is mentioned in Pa gur, where Arthur’s companion, Mabon, son of Modron, is called his servant. This Mabon is clearly a mythological figure, which must raise questions about the historicity of Uther. One of the triads, the three great enchantments, refers to the enchantment of Uther Pendragon. Readers of Geoffrey would see this as a reference to the enchantment whereby Uther changed his appearance to sleep with Yge
rna. Yet, as Geoffrey reports it, this is an enchantment of Merlin, not of Uther. All three of these great enchantments are skills which the named characters teach to other famous enchanters. Thus, Uther Pendragon teaches his enchantment to Menw, Arthur’s shape-shifting enchanter in Culhwch and Olwen. He is clearly its caster, not someone affected by it. This suggests that Merlin’s name has been attached by Geoffrey to a famous magical incident concerning Uther alone. Of most significance is Geoffrey’s idea that Uther is the father of Arthur. Nothing until this point has suggested that there was any tradition of Arthur’s father.
We can identify Uther and the unexpected episodes he is connected with as deriving from external sources. Whether, before Geoffrey, Uther Pendragon had been seen as a Saxon-fighting fifth-century king of Britain or Arthur’s father will be discussed later. We can say that the tales of Stonehenge and enchantment are unlikely to derive from Dark Age reality.
Uther Pendragon becomes King of Britain after Ambrosius. His military career seems to be derived from the Arthurian battle-list. Thus, Hengist’s son Octa comes down from the northern part of Britain, destroying all the towns down to York, which he besieges. Geoffrey once again recasts the Saxon wars into the familiar pattern of conflict between England and Scotland. Uther tries to raise the siege of York but is driven back to a defensive position on Mount Damen. On the advice of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, Uther makes a surprise night attack on the Saxon camp and captures Octa. This Mount Damen is the nearest Geoffrey comes to a battle of Mount Agned. This is strange as he is aware of Mount Agned and does refer to it earlier in his History. In pre-Roman times, it is founded by King Ebraucus, who also founded York. Geoffrey affirms that it is now called the Castle of Maidens. Other twelfth-century sources called Edinburgh the Castle of Maidens, but the identification is not explicit in Geoffrey.
Uther defeats Octa and enters Alclud (Dumbarton) as victorious king of all Britain: ‘Then he visited all the lands of the Scots and reclaimed that rebellious people from their state of savagery; for he administered justice throughout the regions in a way that none of his predecessors had been able to do.’ He returns in triumph to London.
It is at the victory celebrations that Uther first sees Ygerna, wife of Gorlois, and falls in love with her. Angered, Gorlois withdraws to Cornwall, and Uther, inflamed by lust, pursues him. Ygerna is placed for safety in the fortress of Tintagel. There was nothing for it but to summon Merlin, who transforms Uther into the likeness of Gorlois to gain entry to the castle. While Gorlois is being killed in an unwise sally from a nearby fortress, Arthur’s parents, Uther and Ygerna, are united. ‘That night she conceived Arthur, the most famous of men, who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery’ (HRB VIII.19, Thorpe 1966:207).
Digging up Arthur I – Tintagel 1998
It was a broken stone, used to cover a drain. It was a piece of slate, poorly etched with Dark Age British names. It was also ‘the find of a life-time’; ‘an extremely exciting discovery’; an artefact where ‘myth meets history’; so said Dr Geoffrey Wainwright of English Heritage. Professor Christopher Morris described the physically uninspiring piece of stone as ‘priceless’ and ‘very exciting’.
Professor Morris clarified that his ‘excitement’ was based on the evidence the slate provided ‘that skills of reading and writing were handed down in a non-religious context and that [one of the men mentioned on it] was a person of considerable status’. This was slightly disingenuous, as the ‘context’ of the object was re-use as a drain cover and the inscription itself hardly a high-status work. The press interest was not prompted by the inherent value of a Dark Age inscription. Dr Wainwright obliged with the connection the journalists were seeking: ‘It is remarkable that a stone from the sixth century has been discovered with the name of Arthnou (sic) inscribed upon it at Tintagel, a place with which the mythical King Arthur has long been associated’ (Smith 1998).
The stone was found during excavations at Tintagel. The spectacular site is dominated by the ruins of ‘King Arthur’s Castle’, actually Earl Richard of Cornwall’s thirteenth-century fortress, built perhaps to hark back to the legends. When archaeologists turned up large amounts of high-status sixth-century material, Tintagel was at first described as a monastic site (Ashe 1968). This theory eventually had to yield ground, as no other monastic features could be discovered, while at the same time similar luxury goods, including the distinctive imported pottery dubbed ‘Tintagel ware’, were unearthed at other clearly secular sixth-century locations. It is now accepted that Tintagel was a major secular centre for the Kingdom of Dumnonia, much as Geoffrey of Monmouth describes it.
Tintagel’s undoubted importance during the reign of Arthur, one of the locations where we might expect to find traces of the tyrant Constantine which might clarify much of Gildas’s world, has been utterly obscured by the site’s supposed Arthurian connections. The slate, described by its discoverer Kevin Brady as ‘a red herring’ and ‘a very tenuous link at best’, does not mention Arthur at all. The fragmentary inscription appears to read:
Patern . . .
Coliavificit
Artognov . . .
Col . . .
Ficit . . .
Professor Charles Thomas offered a tentative translation as ‘Artognou, father of a descendant of Coll has had this made’. This translation seems based on a partial transcription of the text, omitting the second part and unaware of the ‘n’ which appears at the end of ‘Pater’. I follow Andrew Smith’s proposed translation, in which both Patern and Artognou are named as donors (Smith 1998).
The most striking feature for most commentators was the name ‘Artognou’, seen as very similar to that of Arthur. In fact, its only similarities are its first three letters, presumably derived from the same Celtic root. The names are not the same and there has never been any question that ‘Arthur’ was a garbled version of the hero’s real name. In all the sources we have studied, the name has been given only as ‘Arthur’. These sources are independent and none of them gives any hint in all their manuscript variants that a slightly different ‘Art . . .’ name lay behind that of Arthur. The only name which we can reasonably expect to find on any sixth-century inscription relating to Arthur is Arthur itself, or accepted Latin versions of the same. Whoever he might have been, Artognou was not Arthur. Even if the name had actually been ‘Arthur’, the ‘traditions’ and ‘coincidences’ linking him to Tintagel do not feature him as the ‘father of a descendant of Coll’.
Smith suggests a more plausible reading of the stone, which does give a vague Arthurian connection. ‘Patern . . .’ is readily recognisable as the name Paternus, Padarn in Welsh, the name of, for example, the sixth-century saint we encountered previously. The following line reads not ‘of a descendant of Coll’, but ‘of Grandfather Coll’. Now, if Paternus has anything to do with Grandfather Coll, then the likelihood is he is his grandson. The inscription would then read ‘Paternus, descendant of Grandfather Coll made it’. The reappearance of ‘Col . . . Ficit’ at the bottom suggests that the inscription continued ‘Artognou, descendant of Grandfather Coll made it’, a joint dedication by two members of the same clan.
Interestingly enough, a legendary Cornish figure named Coll appears in two triads we have already noted. He is one of the powerful swineherds tending pigs in Cornwall. According to the triad, one of his pigs gave birth to Palug’s cat, killed by Kai in Pa gur. Coll is also one of the three enchanters and appears in the ‘Triad of the Three Great Enchantments’, along with Uther Pendragon.
Wainwright made much of the ‘coincidence’ of the Artognou name and Tintagel. A slightly more intriguing coincidence is that of Tintagel, Coll and Uther Pendragon, featuring in local tales of enchantment.
We should reconsider the evidence on which ‘the find of a lifetime’ was lauded in the press. The general discrediting of historical Arthurian material has the effect of ‘if every source is equally suspect, then every source is equally permissible’. Even respectable academics like Dr
Wainwright were quoted in the press as describing Tintagel as ‘a place with which the mythical King Arthur has long been associated’ and that Arthur was ‘a rough tough leader of men’; ‘a tough little Celt . . . given command of a number of Celtic Warbands . . . killed at the battle of Camlan in 510 BC ’(sic). Professor Morris on the other hand raised the objection that ‘Arthur is a figure who first enters the historical domain in the twelfth century’, all exceedingly debatable statements. We have to remember that the connection between Arthur and Tintagel is hardly founded on historical material. There is nothing in all the sources before Geoffrey to lead us to suspect that Arthur was connected with Tintagel, and all later references derive from Geoffrey. Geoffrey’s account of Uther’s seduction of Ygerna at Tintagel is by far the most legendary, magical episode in his history of Arthur. It seems unjust that one of the few things permissible for academics to say about Arthur is that a longstanding tradition connects him with Tintagel.
Even if every word which Geoffrey wrote about Tintagel was to be proven as historical (a very unlikely supposition) then he still gives no connection between Arthur and Tintagel other than as the place of his conception. Arthur is not even said to have been born there. Nothing in Geoffrey or the romances indicated that Arthur lived at Tintagel or had any reason to dedicate a slate slab at the site. It is unlikely that a historical connection existed between Arthur and Tintagel, and even if it did, Geoffrey does not document it.
The Reign of Uther
The story of Uther fizzles out after the Tintagel episode. With Gorlois killed, Uther and Ygerna marry and have two children, Arthur and Anna. The daughter, foretold by Merlin as the progenitor of future kings of Britain, is a source of confusion in the text. She is married to Loth of Lodenesia and is the mother of Gualguanus and Modred, Arthur’s nephews. Later she is described as the wife of King Budicius of Brittany and mother of Arthur’s ally, King Hoel. This cannot work in Geoffrey’s chronology, since Hoel is a grown man only fifteen years after the birth of Arthur.
The Reign of Arthur Page 26