Finding The Real King Arthur part one.

Copyright Susan Morrison Jones

Finding The Real King Arthur

So let’s start with a truth, that way no one is under any illusions, misconceptions or hoping I discover a vast hoard of treasure that they can sometime visit sunny Wales and see...........

Arthur Pendragon is a myth, a total and absolute made up for the general public myth. I’m making this statement knowing full well it will rile every legend loving man, woman and child into grinding their teeth with denial but it is a truth. Arthur never existed, Pendragon? a made up English word, never existed until writers got hold of some mixed up stories and made a nice tale out of it. A whole industry of media hyped entertainment has followed for centuries and it’s just not true.

Welcome aboard fellow sleuthses ? sleuths’? sleuthers? well anyhow...come with me, let me introduce you to a little fort in the middle of the mountains, it’s a really interesting little place and where my story really starts off..........hot on the trail

The REAL Arthur Pendragon however, I can’t even prove...YET, but I can make a damned good try at changing a few minds, maybe cause an historian to rethink, and possibly find my hero.

The son of a King, a true hero, a giant of a man whose energy, exploits and heroism have become veiled by the mists of time and the arrogance of the English speaking world.

This is my personal view, one I have come to through a variety of paths but it is truth and not legend, provable facts and hopeful explanations.

All my own work and so totally absorbing that I am guilty of having whiled away a lot of hours just tracking and trailing the story line through so many twists and turns I believe I have become a detective, and I hope, a good one at that. This was the original quest which brought me to The Last Great Adventure and remains part of its foundations, as I travel around the country I will research the myth and legend of each locale in an effort to discover the truth.

Let me introduce you to my Hero, The Real King Arthur............he lived in the North of what is now Wales and he was a giant amongst men. He was brought up on the Lleyn Peninsular near the Snowdonia mountain range. So huge was he in size that his nick name was ‘The Bear’ and the Welsh name for bear is Y Arth pronounced ‘ee Arth’. A man amongst men; in a country that stretched from what in 2016 is known as Carlisle on the borders of Scotland to the very southernmost part of England named Cornwall.

The Welsh country included Wales (as it is) and half the of what is now England and was held strongly by the then current King Vortigern against the might of the Saxon and Viking invasions.

Rome was invading, the Welsh Gold, the Coal and the many other riches of this lush country were begging to be ripped off by the invading greedy forces of the known (then) world. It was a harsh job to rule a country and so a harsh leadership begat harsh men. Vortigern was wily, cruel by modern standards and strong, very strong for the times.

 There are other names for my hero one is Arth (bear) and Aur(gold) but either way, Arth is who he is...a hero in the making.

Arth is the son of a Prince Eurthur pronounced ‘oothur’ which name means he is perceived to be the son of a god, much like the Egyptians claimed their Pharaoh descended from gods, so too did the people of that times liken their Princes and Kings as descended from a divine order.

Arth is a big strong lad, he is trained as a prince of his times, so he has arms, a sword and a shield, perhaps even some armour. But we are talking Wales, during the Roman invasion and occupation. Sheep skin and leather is more the fashion of the day than metal plates. Though influences will have happened and some armour is probable. Horses are not part of daily life, though goats are used for transport as well as milk, making parchment and goatskins to keep off the ever present rain.

Arth is living in a part of Wales where the old mountain range known as the Dragons Bones lies. These days we use the English word Snowdon for the King mountain but in those days the old grey mountain was named Y Wyddfa (ee withvah) in English that is The Tumulus and in Welsh it means ‘grave mound’ it is a description of a pile of stones placed in a pyramid style over a grave of importance. And before it was Wyddfa it was probably simply known as Merthyr (a burial place 'merthearr') or maybe Garth which is part of several mountain names or as some would have it ‘the place where eagles live’ which is simply Eryrod Nyth( earodt nith) the eagles nest...whatever it was known as its current name is Snowdon and in those times it was Wyddfa,

 I’m getting distracted with trying to sort out Welsh and English so I shall just take a short pause and make a little statement guaranteed to add to the earlier hackle rising elements of statements made about Arthur not existing.

NB: until the 1 Century AD  Wales was a strong language and is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales.

Historically it has also been known in English as "the British tongue", "Cambrian", "Cambric" and “Cymric".

From the Roman invasion onwards the Welsh language becomes infiltrated by other languages, mixed with them and with a high probability that when someone ‘not welsh’ couldn’t actually pronounce the word they hear...they used the word nearest to its sounds in their own language...because that’s what ordinary humans do.

Language experts where around to translate, an example is the word for sea Mor in Welsh, to the French and Italian Mer is sea, not much difference really but add the accents of all those countries and have one or the other pointing at the sea...and bingo! Understanding washes over faces and Mer becomes Mor or vice versa, but the Welsh language has absorbed other countries words and used and created from them for centuries, it is not, as some would have it, a dead language.

Oh and just to add a bit more coal to the fires it isn’t ‘welsh’ its Cymraeg (kimraig) and it isn’t ‘Wales’ either, its Cymry (Kumree or Kumrye) but I am digressing again.

(I do that a lot so if you get bored easily I’d toddle off and read something else if I were you)

A lot of the records we do have of Wales and of the times I am describing had a real problem with language and recording it.

Here is a quote from the Battle of Abbey Rolls: -

Men wrote their names when they could write at all in any way that occurred to them at the moment, for there was neither rule nor precedent to guide them. Mr. Henry Drummond, in his ' Noble British Families,' quotes eighteen different ways of spelling Nevill that he had met with in deeds and records;

Nash, in his * History of Worcestershire,' gives us twenty-three versions of Percy : and this uncertainty, if we are to judge by the example of Shakespeare, still continued in the sixteenth century.

V and F, S and C, C and G, G and W, V and W, W and M, are also used indiscriminately to produce the same sound. Nor should we fail to remember how easy it is to confound one letter with another in the old black letter character.

The u and n are there as undistinguishable as they are in the " running hand " of our own times.

Sir Francis Palgrave mentions " the strange tricks produced by the ambiguity of the form of the n and the u in ancient manuscripts.

The name of Septvans or Septvaus affords a curious example of the fact, that in the black letter days, the old scribes could not always be certain of their own writing." (See Vauville, vol. iii., p. 239.)

The distinctions between them in the printed lists, given, as they must be, by guesswork, are very generally wrong.

Further, the w easily merges into m j the s, so unlike an / in our modern print, becomes its twin sister as the black letter T, and is several times given for it I might easily multiply these instances of confusion.

All I am really saying in a very long winded way...is keep an open mind! I have this in mind as I develop my hypothesis: -