The Lost Tomb of King Arthur by Graham Phillips

Author:Graham Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Myth
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2016-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 8.1. Locations discussed in the search for Merlin.

Besides Uther Pendragon the early medieval romances also include Ambrosius Aurelius, the first author to interpolate him by that name in the Arthurian saga being Geoffrey of Monmouth (although he calls him Aurelius Ambrosius). However, in Geoffrey’s twelfth-century work, he is depicted as a separate character to Merlin, as he is by the Arthurian authors who followed his lead. In my opinion, however, he was clearly wrong. Recall, Geoffrey asserts that Merlin had been the psychic boy brought before Vortigern, while Nennius—three hundred years earlier—records precisely the same episode, identifying the youth as Ambrosius. By the 1300s Ambrosius had obviously been confused as two separate figures: Ambrosius Aurelius and Merlin—understandably, as Ambrosius was a warrior king while Merlin was a wizard. But, as we have reasoned from both Nennius and early Welsh literature, Merlin and Ambrosius Aurelius were originally considered to be one and the same. We have to remember that in Geoffrey’s time the various historical sources available to us today would still have been scattered throughout various uncataloged and uncollated manuscript collections all over the British Isles. During the twelfth century there was certainly much confusion concerning post-Roman British history. Some things Geoffrey got right; others he got completely wrong. One example of a glaring inaccuracy is in reference to Ambrosius’s parentage. According to Geoffrey, Ambrosius’s immediate predecessor as king of the Britons was his brother Constans, the son of a British king called Constantine. Constans, he tells us, had been a monk, but on the death of his father, he was persuaded to leave his monastery and accept the crown. Geoffrey is right in as much as such a man really existed. The Roman emperor Constantine III had a son called Constans; ordained a monk, he reluctantly gave up the cloth to become emperor when his father died. However, neither had anything to do with Britain, and Constans died in 411, over half a century before Ambrosius’s time,13 besides which we have seen how Ambrosius was almost certainly the son of the consul Quintus Aurelius. So Geoffrey’s confusion concerning Ambrosius and Merlin as two separate characters fits with his handling of other historical figures of the late and post-Roman eras.

Returning to Uther Pendragon, in his History of the Kings of Britain of 1136, Geoffrey depicts Uther as ruling Britain immediately after Ambrosius. According to Geoffrey, Ambrosius was poisoned by the Saxons; although, as we have seen, none of the older sources reveal how or when Ambrosius died. So Geoffrey’s assertion that Ambrosius was succeeded by Uther, who was in turn succeeded by Arthur, became the version of events adopted by the subsequent medieval romances. Uther, therefore, is envisaged as having reigned somewhere around 480. And this is precisely when Enniaun Girt was king of Gwynedd. Whether he succeeded Ambrosius as high king of the Britons, if indeed they had one at all during this time, is unknown. However, it is certainly possible. By the time Gildas was writing, Enniaun’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.