Finding Arthur (22 page)

What of Malory’s name for Kay’s father? If Malory used the name of the real person, Kay, for the son, then it was reasonable to suppose he would have used the actual name of the father for the father. Why not? Perhaps the name of the father did not work in English. In this event the simple thing to do would be to
make
it work, to translate it. Ector, the name Malory uses for Arthur’s foster father translates to Hector in later English, which translates to Eachann in Gaelic. Malory could simply have deleted the Gaelic name Eachann and substituted the English, Ector.

It may therefore be that that Arthur was fostered out into the family of a man named Eachann, a chieftain of Strathclyde and the father of a son called Kay. I cannot say anything about the family of Eachann and Kay. I accept that their existence is based almost entirely upon my speculations. If there was an Eachann, and if his family was close to Merlin-Lailoken’s family, either as neighbors or allies or both, this would allow for Malory’s fictional version of history that has Merlin a close but not ever-present part of Arthur’s childhood. This would also go some way toward explaining how it came to be that Merlin-Lailoken and Arthur worked together as allies—Merlin-Lailoken the politician and Arthur Mac Aedan the general—in the Great Angle War of the late 580s. This does not seem to me to stretch things too far. A scenario such as the one I have described could have provided the inspiration for Malory’s version of the childhood of Arthur.

A scenario in which Arthur spent much of his boyhood in Strathclyde would explain why, in the earliest legends, the Celtic heroes Kay and Gawain were Arthur’s closest companions. In the earliest stories they were relatively rounded characters, but in time, as the stories were Christianized and later Anglicized, Gawain and Kay proved to be too Celtic to survive intact. As time passed they came to be portrayed as somewhat dull figures, if not quite bumpkins—men who played second
fiddle to more acceptable, less Celtic characters such as Lancelot and those two-dimensional Christian milksops Galahad and Perceval.

If Arthur was fostered out into the care of a family in Strathclyde, whoever they may have been, he would have crossed paths with Merlin-Lailoken. In the late 560s, Arthur Mac Aedan was about ten years old, and Merlin-Lailoken was in his late twenties and a champion of the people of the Old Way, who were locked in a fierce struggle with Mungo Kentigern’s Christians for control in Strathclyde. The young Arthur would have seen the remarkable Merlin-Lailoken about the Royal Town of Pertnech (Partick) and on the Druid’s Hill (the Glasgow Necropolis in the present day) near Mungo’s church.

Street fights between rival parties escalated in numbers and ferocity until the situation became intolerable. Consequently, Tutgual, the king of Strathclyde, called Mungo Kentigern, the Christian leader, and Morken, the leader of the people of the Old Way and father of Merlin-Lailoken, to a peace conference. This ended when Morken threw Mungo onto the floor and gave him what in Glasgow is called
a kicking
.

Soon after this episode, Cathen the druid, Merlin-Lailoken’s teacher, was pulled from his horse by a Christian mob and murdered. (Cathen was called “the Battler” by his friends and “the Blasphemer” by his Christian enemies,
Blaisbheum
in Gaelic. It is from this that we get
Blaise
, the name used by southern writers for Merlin’s mentor and teacher.) This was the world in which Arthur grew up. It was a time of war, a time for which he was perfectly suited.

It is likely that when he came of age, probably when he was about fifteen, Arthur Mac Aedan returned to Manau and married a prominent Pictish woman and so secured his family’s rights among the Picts. This marriage was to the woman known to legend as Guinevere, which, loosely translated, means “most lovely.”

Mungo continued to stir up trouble in the early 570s, not just with the people of the Old Way but also with other Christians who would not accept his form of Christianity. By then Merlin-Lailoken and his twin sister, Gwyneth-Languoreth, were predominant among the people of the Old Way. (Gwyneth-Languoreth, queen of Strathclyde, was also known as the Lioness of Damnonia, and as the swan-necked woman.
She is the “adulteress queen,” commemorated by the fish and the ring on Glasgow’s coat of arms.) Together Merlin-Lailoken and Gwyneth-Languoreth defeated Mungo Kentigern, and in 572 they had him exiled from Strathclyde.

Mungo ended up in Wales where he met David, later the patron saint of Wales, but Mungo was not an easy man to get along with and so he soon fell out with David. He then went off to found a monastery of his own in Flintshire in north Wales, with a young man called Asaph as his lieutenant. Before long Mungo fell out with Asaph too and so headed north with his more fanatical followers, leaving Asaph to give his name to what is still today the bishopric of St. Asaph.

It seems likely that Mungo and those who followed him into exile brought with them to Wales stories of Mungo’s struggle with Merlin-Lailoken and, perhaps, of the very young Arthur, although Arthur was in his teens when Mungo was in Wales and so this is unlikely. These stories, subsequently reduced to writing, would have become part of the records held by the monks of St Asaph. It is also possible that the monks of St. Asaph kept in touch with the monks who followed Mungo back to Glasgow.

It is unlikely that it is simply a coincidence that almost 600 years later Geoffrey was bishop of St. Asaph. It is unlikely in the extreme that of all the bishoprics in England and Wales, the one to which Geoffrey, the man who wrote so much about Arthur and Merlin and who did so much to popularize their legends, was appointed bishop, just happened to be the one founded by Merlin-Lailoken’s mortal enemy, Mungo Kentigern. It seems more likely that Geoffrey found some source material through his St. Asaph connection and that this enabled him to, in effect, “invent” the legend of Arthur and Merlin. If this is correct, then it may be that Geoffrey was telling the truth when he said he based his stories of Arthur and Merlin upon a “certain very ancient book” given to him by his patron and friend, Archdeacon Walter. Geoffrey says Walter obtained the “certain very ancient book,” “
ex Britannia
.”
³

One eighteenth-century historian determined to fix Arthur in the south, J. S. P. Tatlock, wrote, “There can be no question at all that
ex Britannia
can only mean from Brittany.”
⁴
This is but another example
of the tendency to wrench the stories of Arthur and Merlin-Lailoken away from their Celtic roots and “find” their origins somewhere else—anywhere except Celtic Wales or Scotland, in this instance in France.
⁵
Lewis Thorpe disagrees with Tatlock; he says
ex Britannia
means “out of Wales.” This makes sense if the book was brought to the lands of the Anglo-Normans—that is, England—from the lands of the Britons—that is, Wales. In this event the book would properly have been described as being
ex Britannia
. If, as I have suggested, the father of Arthur—that is, Arthur Mac Aedan—was Aedan, then the question arises of why everyone else says that Arthur’s father was Uther Pendragon (albeit without saying who Uther Pendragon was).

The mid-sixth century, in which Arthur Mac Aedan grew up, was a time of turmoil. The Britons of the southern Gododdin had grown soft under the shields of the legions, and so, when the Romans left, they found themselves prey to the more warlike Picts and Scots. In the following century Vortigern, the effete king of the southern Gododdin, unwilling to lead his people in battle, hired Angle mercenaries to fight for him.

The Angles, a Germanic people, came from across the North Sea in increasing numbers, until in 547 they reached critical mass, rose up against Vortigern, and expelled him from Berwick, the capital of his kingdom. Instead of rallying his people to resist the usurpers, Vortigern and his aristocratic supporters took to the hills, built fortresses, and hid. This allowed the Angles to march unhindered to the western sea where, as Gildas wrote, the Angle army licked the ocean “with its fierce red tongue.”
⁶

It was then that Emrys, a man of the people, a lowly captain of captains, “raised his head,” inspired his people, and waged a guerrilla war that drove the Angles back to their eastern beachhead. Gildas was unable to accept this usurpation of the social status quo, and so in
De Excidio
he gave Emrys a fictional background and an upmarket name. Gildas said Emrys was the offspring of Roman Emperors no less, and called him Ambrosius Aurelianus, but Emrys was not an aristocrat. Emrys was a rough soldier, and so when he became the undisputed leader of the British resistance (after burning Vortigern’s fortress with Vortigern in it) he needed a title.

Southern writers were bound to avoid any mention of Arthur’s real father, Aedan, because it would have identified Arthur as a man of the north. Geoffrey and Malory decided to give Arthur a fictional father, Uther Pendragon.

Hadrian’s Wall, which lay in the southlands of the Gododdin, was once the northern border of the Roman Empire and manned by cavalry auxiliaries from Sarmatia. The Sarmatians hailed from the steppes north of the Black Sea and rode into battle under Dragon-head standards tailed with windsock-like banners, which made a scary sound when they charged. So it was that just as the people of Strathclyde were the people of the Stag; the people of Caithness were the people of the Cat; and the people of Argyll, the people of the horse and later the boar; Emrys’s people, many of whom were descendants of the Sarmatian auxiliaries and proud of their Sarmatian heritage, thought of themselves as the people of the Dragon.

In P-Celtic the word for “a head,” as in “chief,” is
Pen
and so Emrys, needing a title and being the chief of the people of the dragon, became the first
Pen Dragon
. The traditional histories have Emrys as a fifth-century man of the south because there is an empty space in the history of the south, and southern writers used Emrys to fill it. After Emrys was assassinated his second in command and Merlin-Lailoken’s kinsman, Gwenddolau, became the second Pen Dragon. In later centuries Emrys was remembered as “the” Pen Dragon and Gwenddolau as the “other” Pen Dragon—in Scots,
Uthyre Pen Dragon
.

Emrys was active in the 550s and 560s, Gwenddolau in the 560s and 570s, and Arthur in the 570s, 580s, and 590s. Three great warlords: Emrys, Gwenddolau, and Arthur. All Geoffrey and his fellows had to do was take the identity of the “Other” Pen Dragon who chronologically preceded Arthur, delete references to Gwenddolau as an individual, and use the title that was left,
Uthyre Pen Dragon
, as if it were not only a name but the name of Arthur’s father.
Hey presto
, they had, in its Anglicized form, Uther Pendragon, the name by which the legendary Arthur’s father is known today.

The historical Pen Dragons were of the Old Way and therefore a threat to Christianity, and so memory of their actual actions was effectively eradicated as the centuries passed. This left the title they
bore free and clear for Geoffrey and his like to use as they willed. There were three Pen Dragons. The third was a warrior called Maelgwn, who fought bravely at Arderydd and ended up a pensioner in Merlin-Lailoken’s home.

Of course the name Uther Pendragon was not connected with any royal house, and so it was impossible to place it in any existing royal list. This made it easy to place Arthur in some vague time (about the turn of the fifth century) and in some vague place (in the south of Britain). Everyone could claim the legendary Arthur and place him anywhere they liked, because he belonged to no one and to nowhere, at least, not in the south of Britain. There never was a historical Arthur in the south; in the south Arthur was pure fiction.

While the story of Arthur did “befall in the days of Uther Pen Dragon,” Uther Pendragon was not a king, far less, as Malory said, a king of all England. Uther Pendragon was Gwenddolau, the man who led the armies of the Old Way at the Battle of Arderydd and made his name fighting Angles.

In time, as the stories of Emrys, Gwenddolau, and Arthur were gradually distanced from their historical and geographical origins, Arthur stopped being referred to as the son of Aedan, because this identified him as a man of the north, but at least the name of Arthur survived. The names Emrys and Gwenddolau, champions fit to stand with Arthur, have been all but lost to history.

When Vortigern and his coward courtiers headed for the hills to hide from the Angles, Emrys was left with too few educated people to govern the land of the Pen Dragons efficiently, and so, Gwenddolau, one of the few aristocrats to take Emrys’s side, called upon his distant cousin, Merlin-Lailoken of Strathclyde, to assist him. The scholarly Merlin-Lailoken was in his late teens when he rode south to help Emrys and Gwenddolau administer the land of the Pen Dragons. In the next decade and more, Merlin-Lailoken divided his time between the peoples of the Pen Dragons and of Strathclyde.

In Strathclyde Merlin-Lailoken, his father, Morken, and his teacher, Cathen the druid, were among the leaders of the people of the Old Way, people who opposed the imposition of Christianity by Mungo Kentigern’s Christians. In 572 the king of Strathclyde, exasperated
by the civil unrest Mungo had engendered, sent Mungo into exile. Merlin-Lailoken must have hoped that Mungo’s departure would have allowed the Old Way to become predominant again but this was not to be. The Christians, albeit the more moderate Telleyr Christians, remained in control in Strathclyde. This was too much for Merlin-Lailoken. He went against the wise counsel of his twin-sister Languoreth and recklessly sided with Gwenddolau against Strathclyde. When Strathclyde and its allies went to war against Gwenddolau and the people of the Old Way, Merlin-Lailoken found himself fighting against his native people.

The British policy was to surround the Angles with allied kingdoms that included Ebruac (York) and the kingdom of the North Pennines in the north of England; Rheged in southwest Scotland; Strathclyde in central Scotland and the Northern Gododdin in east central Scotland. The land of the Pen Dragons was the one break in this chain of allies.