King Arthur by Nicholas J. Higham

Author:Nicholas J. Higham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300210927
Publisher: Yale University Press

The northern dimension

That does not, though, quite get rid of Arthur for, as we have seen, Nennius often adopted the names of real people from the past for his fictional characters. However incongruous Dolabella’s role in the Historia Brittonum, his name is historical, as too is Bellinus’s (albeit badly garbled). So are those of Brutus and Cunedda, and we can at least see how and why Welsh scholars came up with Vortimer. We need to ask ourselves, therefore, where might the name Arthur have come from before it was parachuted into the Historia to fulfil this particular role? There can be no certain answer to this question but we can at least explore some possibilities.

Firstly, the name Arthur as used in Historia is a Welsh form, despite most probably originating as the Roman Artorius. The starting point was therefore probably either the Welsh name or its close Old Irish equivalent, Artúr, not Artorius, Artus, Arturus or Arcturus. This pretty well rules out any text written outside the British Isles.

Secondly, there is no reason to expect the name to have occurred in a passage similar to that in which Arthur appears in chapter 56 of the Historia. Just as Dolabella and Cunedda (to take just two) were parachuted into scenes in the Historia Brittonum which were very different from those from which their names had been taken, so too is this likely to have been the case with Arthur. Each time, though, there was a reason to select a particular name. Brutus became the British eponym because Isidore suggested that the name derived from brutus, ‘brutish’. Why Dolabella? Perhaps so as to take advantage of the meaning of the second part of the name in the (altered) accusative (Dolabellum; cf. Arthur as dux bellorum).

Much like Dolabella and Vortimer, Arthur appears in the Historia Brittonum not as a king but as a military leader. There is no reason to think any of his battles to be authentically connected with him (and those for which we have other information all seem to have been ‘lifted’ from other stories), but the notion of a brave warrior leading a ‘national’ army may be something which carried over from the ‘original’ individual of this name. One option is to identify the Historia’s character with Arthur, son of Peter in the royal genealogy of Dyfed (see above, p. 171),251 but as has already been remarked Nennius shows barely any awareness of or interest in southern Wales. A somewhat more attractive possibility is to connect the Arthur of the Historia with the enigmatic figure of that name in Y Gododdín. As already discussed (see above, p. 167), this collection includes a verse honouring the British hero Gorddur, which notes that, though heroic, he was ‘not Arthur’. Like the Arthur of the Historia, therefore, this allusion implies a great martial reputation. Given that Arthur appears in the earliest version of Y Gododdín now extant, this may pre-date the Historia. Y Gododdín passed south from northern Britain to Wales at some point.

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