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Appendix 1: Legendary
Versions of the Roman Conquest of Britain
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Beli son of Manogawn may not
unfairly be described as a legendary figure who
spends his time being deprived of the throne of
Britain by Roman emperors. In the earliest
legend we have - given by Nennius, who else? - he
is the British opponent of Julius Caesar; but it
is this very same Beli son of Manogawn who is
defeated not by Caesar but by Maxen Gwledig in
the Dream. In Nennius, and it would
seem in the Triads, Maxen is the last Roman
emperor in Britain, as Caesar is the first; the
plot of Maxen, however, makes Maxen the
conqueror of Britain who expelled Beli, father of
all native monarchy, and bestowed his crown on
his father-in-law Eudav (Octavius), of course
under his own universal overlordship.
As Nennius tells the story, the Romani,
once they had acquired the rule of all the world,
sent messengers to Britain demanding a highly
Celtic sign of submission: tribute (census)
and hostages (obsides). There is no
indication here that Nennius had any
understanding of Rome as a State, a republic with
complex institutions and defined by those
institutions rather than by ethnicity: the
impression one gets from his admittedly curt
expression – Romani autem, dum acciperent
dominium totius mundi – is that the
Romans are seen as a tribe, an ethnic group, only
one endowed with supreme military and political
power. Their sheer pre-eminence makes them
almost sacred: when the British reject their
demands, Nennius takes a very negative view,
calling them tyranni et tumidi, tyrants
and over-swollen, pointing out that every other
nation has already accepted Roman overlordship.
That is, the whole story is cast (as we would
expect) within the categories of Celtic royalty,
with no understanding of the existence of
different political systems – even the most
famous of them all, the Senate and the
magistrates of republican Rome.
Within this Celtic world, the
monarchy Beli stands for is not the universal
monarchy of Rome, the Empire, but the local
monarchies of Britain, several steps below in
rank and value. As we saw when discussing
the figure of Elen, Beli’s world is one of
tiny, separate lordships, with no token of union
such as roads; roads are an innovation brought in
by Elen, who also had fortresses built in various
parts of the island, presumably for the use of
the king of the whole country. Beli is
certainly the representative of those pre-Roman
"tyrants" known to Gildas; the
annihilating defeat inflicted by the
"Romans" of Gildas on the
"British" traitors after the murder of
the rectores finds, as we have seen, its
structural parallel in his all-too-easy defeat by
Maxen in the fable. If structural parallels
mean parallel in interpretation, then the role of
Beli must be seen as parallel to that of the
defeated British aristocracy replaced by a new
Roman settlement, and therefore to stand for that
whole social stratum, the royal caste of people
descended from the original alliances of an
ancestral hero and a goddess from which every
good Celtic royal tribe knew itself to be
descended.
According to Nennius, Caesar
invaded Britain after he had achieved supreme
rule, cum accepisset singulare imperium primus.
This means that the person who took Roman arms to
Britain is the same who has completed the process
of empowerment of the universal Empire by
becoming its first lord. In the end, it seems
that the conquest of Britain and the
establishment of Caesar as first emperor are part
of the same culminating process; the conquest of
Britain completes the Roman subjection of the
world; and the enthronement of Caesar places the
royal capstone on the formation of this new and
perfect world state. This, we can see, is
not history, but ideology. It is probably a
part of this sense of progression, of things
becoming fulfilled and spaces being filled in,
that both Caesar and Beli only appear on the
scene after the earliest preliminaries of the
confrontation are got out of the way, with
unnamed “Romans” sending legates, and
unnamed “Britons” treating them with
contempt.
The subjection of Beli son of
Manogawn to a representative of Roman majesty is
therefore a structural, not a historical idea: it
has to do with the eternal realities of the world. As Beli was
conquered both by Caesar and by Maxen, I did ask
myself whether it was possible that, at any stage
or in any area, Maxen, rather than Caesar, was
remembered as the Roman conqueror of Britain; but
I don’t think so. Maxen’s role as
the ender of Roman power not only was too clear,
but, according to Dumville, developped too early.
As he crisply summarizes his own findings:
"in the dark age of Welsh history between
the cataclysm of the later sixth century and the
more outward-looking Wales which emerged (after
two centuries of near-isolation) in the later
eighth, the native learned classes, secular and
ecclesiastical, had been hard at work. A
series of basic historical dicta had been
developed. One of these was that Roman
Britain had ended with the death of Magnus
Maximus in 388, and that from the descendants of
this last British emperor all legitimate
post-Roman power flowed. The result was a
series of genealogies relating existing royal
pedigrees to Maximus by way of marriages to
invented daughters of Maximus (as for Powys and
Cornwall) or by claiming direct descent from him
(as did the kings of Dyfed and, most importantly,
the second dynasty of Gwynedd); in the process
this gave some of the northern heroes Maximid
ancestry." If Maxen is in one sense a
finisher, the last of the Roman lords of Britain,
in another sense he is a commencer, the father of
all legitimate British kings; and I would say
that it is in this capacity that he conquers
Beli. His victory shows that his –
Maxen’s – successors in Britain are
legitimate, because ultimately Roman. The
defeat of Beli Mawr by the lords of Rome is a
structural fact; it is as natural, as innate,
for a lord of Rome to defeat Beli Mawr, as it is
for Beli Mawr to be defeated by a lord of Rome.
Both sides are simply acting out their own roles
in the world, the one as the embodiment of
supreme, universally binding and uniting
monarchy, the other as the living image of lesser
kingship, small and fragmented without an
overarching level of royal power.
But if Beli son of Manogawn was
the representative of the class of under-kings
and teyrnedd, it must follow that his
legend would lose or change its meaning as the
distinction between over- and under-king became
blurred in later mediaeval Wales. In fact,
that is exactly what we see happening: a loss of
focus, and the invention of a new character.
Nennius saw Belinus as Caesar's enemy,
representative of the kind of kings present in
Britain at the time; by the time, however, of our
next layer of evidence, not only in the
classically inspired material of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, but even in bardic and triadic legend,
Beli's place as enemy of Caesar is taken by his
"son" Casswallawn.
However much of actual historical
knowledge may lie behind the creation of this
character, we must notice that Cassivellaunus was
known to Bede – who was known to Nennius;
and yet Nennius, in spite of Bede’s clear
statement, does not even mention him. It
is, therefore, not only due to a progress in
historical knowledge, that Casswallawn takes
centre stage. Nothing would have been
easier than to identify the two characters, and
call the synthetic figure something like Belinus
Cassiuellaunus, as the same learned classes
resolved another historical difficulty by
inventing a double-named Myrddin Emrys.
But they did not: when the revision took place,
Casswallawn was made Beli’s son. If
the ideological structure behind the legend had
still been clear, then the status of this new
character would not have been; and in fact, as we
will see, there are violent alterations in the
meaning of his rank within Geoffrey’s
narration – aided, but perhaps not entirely
explained, by the fact that Geoffrey demonstrably
was in debt to two separate and incompatible
sources.
I deliberately said “was in
debt to” and not “used”, because
it is not clear that the two versions were joined
together by Geoffrey himself, and not by his
source. As we have seen, Geoffrey spoke no
Welsh. Rooted in the university learning of
the twelfth century, with its classical and
Arabic sources, he approached actual Welsh
tradition in the romantic intellectual spirit of
a man of books (it is no coincidence that he was,
for much of his career, based at Oxford!). Yet
one of the devices that the unifier of the two
accounts seems to have used is the traditional
Welsh device of the triad: he devised a sequence
of three successive landings of Caesar in
Britain, of which only one was known to Nennius.
Nennius makes absolutely no use of the accounts
used by Geoffrey for the battles of the first and
third invasion, but tells a very similar story of
the second, in which the British prevent Caesar
from even touching land and destroy his fleet
with sharpened stakes below the waterline. There
can be little doubt that Nennius and Geoffrey
shared for that account, and for that alone, a
common source.
The battles of the first and third
invasion, again, show evidence of different
origins. In Nennius, Belinus has an
otherwise unexplained army commander by the name
of Dorobellus. This is surely a Nennian
misunderstanding. Nennius says that Caesar
fought apud Dolobellum. Apud
is a preposition of place, or, less frequently,
of time, “at, near to”, which
can never have meant with; Caesar, the
phrase says, fought at Dolobellum, not with
Dolobellum. Nennius, however, goes on to
add, qui erat proconsul regi Britannico,
who was proconsul to the British king; which is
grammatically absurd: Caesar fought a battle at
Dolobellus, who was a proconsul? In
Geoffrey, on the other hand, Caesar’s first
invasion sees Cassivellaunus stop at a town
called Dorobellum and consults with his nephews
Androgeus and Tenvantius - and with his army
commander, Belinus. The coincidence in
names cannot possibly be casual, and Dorobellum
is found nowhere else in Geoffrey.
Now, in Geoffrey’s third
invasion, Cassivellaunus and Caesar have a deadly
battle at Durobernia from which Caesar
emerges victorious thanks to the support of the
British king Androgeus. Durobernia
is clearly the Roman Durovernum,
Canterbury. Some Welshmen knew that until
quite late: the Welsh-language Jesus manuscript
of Geoffrey says Caer Gueint, which is
surely the Nennian Caer Ceint –
Canterbury. Clearly, Dorobellum and
Dolobellus must be derivations or
misunderstandings from this place-name.
What this unclear tangle of
places, people and battle suggests is the
coincidence of a definite person and of a place
of battle with Caesar. Both Nennius and
Geoffrey have separate and incompatible mentions
of an army commander, Dorobellus or Belinus, in
their description of Caesar’s first invasion
and its repulse; which argues that such a
character must have existed, though the unhappy
double chance of Nennius misunderstanding the
name of the place and Geoffrey wanting to
identify him with Belinus means that we may never
know his name or meaning. That the place is
Canterbury is undeniable, even though Nennius has
misunderstood name and place – the only
settings known to him are London and the Thames
mouth.
There must be a strong presumption
that the idea of Kent as the field of war
underlay this group of notices; but I have the
gravest suspicions of their relationship with
historical reality. While Julius Caesar did
in fact invade Britain through Kent (as,
according to majority opinion, did Claudius), Durovernum was not
part of his account, and may not even have
existed in his time. Bede, through whom
actual features of Roman history reached Wales
– to judge from Nennius’ account, in
which recognizably Bedan elements are joined with
pure legend - did not mention it either. We
have a series of three successive invasions
(Geoffrey, who repeats this pattern, has them
occurring at three-year intervals) of which the
first is marked by the great battle apud
Dorobellum, the second by a battle at London,
and the third results in complete Roman victory
and British subjection. None of this is
historical, and it follows that there is no
reason to regard its setting as historical.
The fact that it shares its Kentish setting with
the actual historical invasions of Caesar and
Claudius does not seem more than a lucky
coincidence, based on the obvious fact that Kent
is the closest British region to the continent.
The fact that the name Durobernia
had passed through many hands, and been
thoroughly misunderstood, by the time it reached
Nennius, shows that this is an ancient story.
It does not agree with another story, in which
the same name-place receives the form Dolobellum.
It seems natural to assume that the story with
the more corrupt place-name – Dolobellum
as against Durobernia – is later (or
at least, further along the scale of
mythologization), and in fact there are features
about the scene in Dolobellum that make us
think of a Dark Age rather than Gildasian origin.
Apart from Belinus and from his nephews
Tenvantius and Androgeus, Cassivellaunus is
attended at the battle by three kings, Cridous of
Albany (that is of the North, probably
Strathclyde), Guethaet of Gwynedd and Brittahel
of Demetia. Their names are recognizably Welsh (I
mean, rather than Latin or Old Celtic), and their
kingdoms represent a rough division of the
surviving British lands in the seventh, eighth or
ninth centuries, before the fall of Strathclyde,
with Dyved standing for all South Wales, and
Gwynedd for all North Wales. This will no
doubt have served the interests of definite
dynasties, but the point is that the Britain it
thinks of is already, and long since, that of its
poor mountain survivals in the West. The Dolobellum
version, therefore, took shape some time between
the onset of the full-fledged Welsh Dark Age
(after the fall of Cadwallon, say 650) and
Geoffrey’s own time. The fact that
Cornwall is not mentioned, while Strathclyde is,
suggests a narrower period: that between the
conquest of Cornwall by the kings of Wessex (in
the 800s) and the end of British Strathclyde (in
the 900s).
While Geoffrey’s account of
the first invasion uses Dolobellum, that
of the third uses Durobernia. At the
same time, Geoffrey’s account of
Cassivellaunus’ family relationships
suddenly goes astray. Earlier he had
described Cassivellaunus and Androgeus as uncle
and nephew; now he speaks of them as though they
were equal in age and the nephew of the one could
be the equal of the nephew of the other. In the
second invasion, Cassivellaunus receives sterling
support from his surviving brother Nennius
(Nyniaw; Lud is already dead), who dies
heroically on the shores of his kingdom,
single-handedly destroying the Roman hordes after
a lucky blow delivered into his hands
Caesar’s magic sword Yellow Death,
that could rout a whole army.
But after both his brothers are
dead, the two greatest figures in
Cassivellaunus’ kingdom are his nephews
Tenvantius and Androgeus. Androgeus is the
son of Cassiuellaunus’ elder brother Lud;
which spells trouble. And punctually, at
the unprecedentedly colossal banquet prepared by
Cassiuellaunus to celebrate his second victory
over Caesar, the nephews of Androgeus and of the
King quarrel; Androgeus’ nephew kills
Cassiuellaunus’; the King demands the guilty
man for his justice; Androgeus tells him to get
stuffed, he isn’t going to have his man
tried at another king’s court. The
story seems to have forgotten that Androgeus is
Cassiuellaunus’ own nephew, transferring the
quarrel at a younger generation of nephews and
placing, by implication, both Androgeus and
Cassiuellaunus in a senior position. This
oddity is compounded by the fact that Androgeus
acts as if he thought that his court of justice
and that of the king of all Britain’s were
equal in rank! For all we know if we came
in at this point in the story, the two contending
parties might be brothers or cousins instead of
uncle and nephew.
This suggests that this confusing
and perhaps confused account of
Cassivellaunus’ family links might come from
a different source. Interestingly, this
source was in touch enough with ancient realities
to use the name of Canterbury in something like
its right form and with a clear understanding of
its geographical position – an understanding
denied to Nennius and possibly to the Dorobellum
source. And each of the three invasions has a
climactic battle that seems to have come from a
different source. The story of Nennius
brother of Cassivellaunus and Yellow Death
seems to come from the Dorobellum source;
the battle of the shores of the Thames, during
the second invasion, seems to either come from
Nennius’ Historia Brittonum or to
share a common source, since Nennius is familiar
with its events but says very little about the
first and third invasion – especially the
latter – and almost nothing that is
compatible with Geoffrey. From what we have
seen of Nennius’ methods and interests, the
fact that he only dedicates a single, not very
descriptive sentence, to the third invasion,
suggests that there was (as we would expect) a
standard and famous account of this decisive
event; probably the Durobernia source.
It is perfectly clear that, if we
have to separate the invasions between different
sources, the third and final one belongs to the Durobernia
account and no other. Androgeus thinks that
Cassivellaunus outraged him; he promptly goes
over to Caesar, sending what Caesar had asked
nine years before – hostages. Game,
set and match for Caesar. This is actually not
unlike what happened in reality between
Cassivellaunus and the exile Mandubracius, who
fled to Caesar; and even in subsequent ages, it
was clear to all thinking Welshmen that the
disastrous consequences of the lack of a
recognized superior authority among Celtic kings
were a matter of history and no joke.
We have no reason to believe that
the original Durobernia account saw
Cassivellaunus and Androgeus as uncle and nephew;
they are treated as equals, and, underlining
their equality, it is their nephews who
quarrel. Androgeus feels oppressed when the
supposed king of Britain tries to impose his
authority over him; and it seems clear that this
has to do with the absence of an overriding
authority in the world of Beli, incarnation of
the most basic form of royal authority. It
is Caesar who eventually settles the row between
them by taking Androgeus to Rome: that is,
Androgeus does not accept Cassivellaunus’
jurisdiction above his own, but accepts
Caesar’s. In spite of the general
anti-Roman spin of the story, the fact that
Caesar wins because of divisions among the
British may be read as symptomatic of the inner
problems of the level of monarchy embodied by
Belinus, one with no real rank between kings and
where each is on the same level as the other and
each can therefore both threaten and be
threatened by the other, with no recourse to any
superior authority. A fair peace can only
be achieved by the intervention of an innately
superior authority, who satisfies the claims of
both: the fact that he honourably removes
Androgeus to Rome means, among other things, that
he leaves Cassivellaunus as unchallenged king of
Britain. This is actually quite close to
what Maxen does when he makes Eudaf king of all
Britain upon marrying his daughter: that is, once
the Emperor of Rome has conquered Britain,
Britain has not only a supreme Roman overlord,
but also a native high king whom Rome recognizes.
By contrast, the Dorobellum
version seems to treat Cassivellaunus as a
perfectly regular king of Britain, entitled to
rule over its princes, and there is no hint of a
challenge to his legitimacy, nor any need of a
superior one to legitimate it in turn. Now
if Cassivellaunus has, as I believe, replaced
Beli(nus) in this account, and if Beli is the
divine representative of the under-kings, then
the Durobernia account seems much closer
to the spirit of the story, showing graphically
the inevitable submission of a naturally inferior
group of monarchies to a naturally superior
power, not even by means of strength, but because
of the unity of the one and the division of the
other.
But it is in the Dorobellum
version, that we find evidence of revision, and
perhaps the origin of the mysterious army
commander. In his battle at Dorobellum,
Cassivellaunus is accompanied by “Belinus,
the commander-in-chief of his army, with the help
of whose planning and advice the whole kingdom
was governed”. It is all too obvious
that Geoffrey or his source want to explain away
a mention of Belinus as lord of Britain fighting
Caesar at Dorobellum by making him a sort of
prime minister, concerned with the governance of
the country, but not a sovereign. This conception
assumes the existence of an all-island monarchy,
which a prime minister would serve; itself a
questionable assumption in the world of Beli.
Geoffrey named Cassivellaunus’ father Heli,
but every other source tells us that Casswallawn
was the son of Beli Mawr. Indeed, Heli is
not even a Welsh name: Geoffrey, or his source,
found it in the Bible.
Geoffrey, of course, was in
something of a chronological bind as regards this
character. His Belinus was the brother of
one Brennius, and Brennius, in turn, was the
famous Celtic chieftain who sacked Rome in 390 BC
– the last time when the City fell to any
enemy until Alaric in 410 AD. Geoffrey’s
chronology dated this to 300 years before
Cassivellaunus, who fought Caesar in the first
century BC.
But why did Geoffrey not just
create a Belinus I and II? It would be the
most natural solution, frequently adopted by
historians faced with similar difficulties.
That he resorted to the desperate means of
importing a Jewish name with no Welsh parallel
(until the age of Methodist chapels) means that
he had a stronger reason to deny that Belinus was
the father of Cassivellaunus. The notice
that there was a character called Belinus who
fought Caesar at Dorobellum and “with the
help of whose planning and advice the whole
kingdom was governed” fits this difficulty
like a glove. It strongly suggests the
existence of an alternative account in which
Belinus was Caesar’s enemy, and
“governed the whole kingdom by his advice
[that is, counsel, thought] and planning”,
not, I suggest, as a prime minister, but as a
well-advised king. If Belinus was the
father of Cassivellaunus, then he could not be
ruling the country at the same time!
In Brittany, where the distinction
between over- and under-king survived till quite
late, the identity of Beli as the ancestor of the
lower order of British kings took priority over
any credible chronological scheme, so that the
genealogy of St. Gurthiern placed him after the
Roman emperors and the king of Britain, as the
brother of Kenan of Brittany, to signify the
inferiority of Breton lordship – on a level
with the Beli king of teyrn kingship
– compared with all-British kingship, and,
even higher, Roman empire.
Elsewhere, however, the invention
of Casswallawn, flanked by his two brothers Lludd
and Nyniaw, has left no space for Beli at all.
The presence of Lludd – that is Nuada,
Nodons, the god of lower royalty – as the
elder brother of Casswallawn, suggests how the
rewriting was carried out: maintaining Beli in
something like his original foundational role,
the one name that must have been structurally
associated with him, that of the mythical
archetype of all kings, was changed from his
father to his son. There are precedents in
Celtic culture for this sort of alternation
between a divine father and a semidivine or
heroic son. The necessary
other son, Casswallawn, was then attached to
Lludd as a younger brother, and a third brother,
Nyniaw, was attached to the others to form the
inevitable Welsh triad.
Lludd himself, I think, had an
original legend, largely to do with what we find
ascribed to him in the late but important prose
story Lludd and Lleverys (see Appendix VI,
below), which described analytically the
fundamentals of royalty – any royalty, high
or low – and that involved the supernatural
support of the supreme god, Lug, for Lludd as
first king. This story remained attached to
Lludd as he was placed after Beli; therefore, he
had to be placed chronologically before
Casswallawn, since his stage of the evolution of
royalty preceded that attached, first to Beli,
then to Casswallawn.
We find Casswallawn representing
the lower royalty of Britain as opposed to that
of Caesar in the legend of Caesar; but we are
told how he won that royalty in the Mabinogi
story of Bran and Branwen, in which he takes the
crown of Britain from Brân while Brân is away
conquering Ireland. There are enormous
differences in detail between the Brân of the Mabinogi
and the Brennius of Geoffrey, but one point in
common: Brân/Brennius is triumphant and wins
empire when outside of Britain, and is often a
wanderer across the ocean; but he loses and/or is
defeated inside Britain. And when it is not
by Belinus (Geoffrey), it is by Casswallawn (Mabinogi).
Brennius and Brân are givers of magnificent
banquets and general largesse; it is by his
banquets and generosity that Brennius binds the
people of the Allobrogi to himself, and the
penultimate episode of the story of Brân’s
wars in Ireland is the unsurpassed, indeed
insuperable banquet that he offered to the most
loyal of his followers (including the ever-living
bard Taliesin), a banquet that lasted eighty
years and was accompanied by the glorious music
of the birds of Rhiannon. As we have seen
time and again, banquets are a feature of the
royal function, which places Brennius and Brân
decidedly within the area of royalty.
What does this mean? Starting
from the fact that Beli/Casswallawn is evidently
inferior to the universal monarch Caesar but
superior to Brân, it is possible to read this as
a mythological version of a hierarchy of princes,
expressing in typical Celtic fashion a legal
order of rank by means of stories of prehistoric
conquest in which the higher nature conquers the
lower. First in the narrative sequence, and
lowest on the rung, there is Brân: a kind of
prince who succeeds abroad, outside the broadest
circle of the nation - Britain, in the legends as
we have them - but who, within the circle of the
nation itself, has the status of a defeated
person (not of a dead person; even when Brân
dies, it is not Casswallawn who kills him –
rather, Casswallawn cuts off any possibility that
he or his heirs might recover lordship over the
home island). His defeat subjects him to
the power of the next rank, namely Beli (part of
whose mythology was later taken over by
Casswallawn).
Beli, we have seen, stands for a
kind of purely local, isolated, scattered social
existence, without the bonds brought in by Elen
when she builds her many roads to unify Britain.
Above Beli, mythological representative of the teyrnedd
or tyranni, the kinglets in their big
houses, stands the family of the kings of all
Britain, Eudav and his children, who gain power
not by their own strength, but by their alliance
with the highest king of the world, the one true
emperor. At this point (and at this point
alone) it is possible to feel an echo of a
non-Celtic conception, the early mediaeval view
of the king of a single nation as a local
reflection of the status of the Emperor, an
"Emperor in his own country"; with the
Emperor being the last and highest term of all
progressions of majesty.
A number of issues are answered by
this theory. The name Bran is not very
common anywhere in the Celtic world, but wherever
it turns up (except perhaps for Fionn mac
Cumhail's hunting dog) it can be seen as
reflecting a role either of wanderer, or of
outcast, or of dispossessed. Morfrân son
of Tegid is deprived of the status of mightiest
sage by Gwion Bach. Bran son of Febal is a
wanderer on the oceans outside Ireland, who meets
with disaster, turning to dust, when he returns
to the home soil; and though the Irish Children
of Lir, as unfortunate as the Welsh Children of
Llyr, include no Bran or Branwen, it is their
peculiar fate to be driven away from Ireland till
the day of their death. Geoffrey's Brian is
the nephew of the exiled Cadwallo, whose magician
enemy Pellitus (whose name probably echoes Beli)
has the power to keep Cadwallo out of the island
altogether; in this case, it is Cadwallo rather
than Brian who is the dispossessed exile, but
Brian shares his destiny, opposes his enemy, and
vanishes from the scene once Cadwallo
victoriously returns to butcher the English. Geoffrey's
Brennius is continuously triumphant outside
Britain, twice making himself a prospective
patriarch by marrying a princess and thus,
according to the rules of Celtic legend, founding
kingdoms. But his brother and lord Belinus
is capable of invalidating the first of his
marriages, showing his superiority in power and
law; and his second marriage apparently produces
no children.
Geoffrey did not follow the story
of the Mabinogi, in which
“Casswallawn” rebels against Brân
while the latter is conquering Ireland; almost
certainly, he did not know it - it is one of
those stories that enter the written tradition in
Welsh and not in Latin. His version
assigned to them a variant of the Contending
Brothers legend we have met in the chapter on
Hengist and Horsa. Nevertheless, the issue
could not possibly be clearer, or closer. Brennius
thinks that his brother, who is High King of
Britain, has given him the worse half of the
island; he rebels; he loses – as he always
must, it seems, while fighting his brother on
British soil – and is driven out, only to
contract two successive royal marriages, the
second of which makes him lord of a large part of
Gaul. When he comes back for a showdown,
his own mother spells the issue out to him:
“What else did Belinus do to you, apart from
promoting you from your position as a petty
princeling to that of a mighty king? Add to
this the fact that the quarrel which arose
between the two of you was started by you
yourself, not by him…”. Not only
is Belinus superior to Brennius, but his
influence on Brennius’ life is entirely
positive, and it is only Brennius’ own
rebellious jealousy, stoked up by wicked men,
that prevents peace. (We remember that one
of the names of the Irish Nuada is Elcmar,
”the jealous”.) When the two
brothers eventually make peace, they are together
strong enough to sack Rome itself; but it is through
Belinus that the succession of British kings must
pass; Brennius dies abroad and, as far as we
know, has no descendants.
Brân son of Llyr, too, has no
children; he has to adopt his own nephew Gwern as
an heir – and Gwern dies in the final battle
against the Irish. And this apparent
sterility of Brennius and Brân is in my view
connected with their peculiar connection with
death. Scholars have spoken glibly of
Otherworld Banquets in connection with Brân; but
if we place the core of the character, as I do,
not in notions of death and/or immortality, but
in a cycle of royal legends whose core is royal
power, then we begin to see that his banquet is
very peculiar indeed. Kings offer banquets
to their followers; but Brân only enters this
proper stage of royalty when he is dead. It
is when he is dead and beheaded that he can feast
his men as nobody has been feasted before or
since; and it is also when he is dead that he can
perform the royal function of defending his
island kingdom, by having his head buried in
London. And this goes with another strange
contradiction: the lowest grade of royalty is the
tigernos, the man in the Big House –
but Brân has no house and never had. When
he comes to claim rule over Ireland, the Irish
build him the first hall he has ever entered, as
homage to his overlordship. Even so, this
hall and the royalty it entails, are in fact
destined to fail. The sacks of flour
carried into the hall to supply a great banquet
– be it noted that, unlike his later banquet
in Gwales, this one fails; as does his royalty
– carry in fact the burden of revolt against
the supposed lord of the hall, armed warriors;
and even though Brân’s counsellor Evnissien
murders them all, there is battle within the hall
anyway, caused by Evnissien himself when he
murders the boy Gwern, who was the heir both of
Brân himself and of his enemy Matholwch of
Ireland. No royalty will pass through a
living Brân; but the dead and beheaded Brân not
only feasts his retinue, but does so in a magical
palace (for it is when one of his followers opens
a window that the whole experience comes to an
end), which he never had while alive.
I believe that, Brennius/Brân,
far from being identifiable exclusively with the
dead, can be shown to be the archetype of
chieftains who were very much alive. It can
be no coincidence that the two known historical
Gaulish leaders called Brennius were the
heads of wandering bands - and what is more,
wandering bands which did not manage to conquer a
territory for themselves. The Italian
Brennius made havoc around Latium, but his
adventures resulted in no lasting settlement (and
recent archaeology puts into doubt the picture of
utter devastation that tradition gives of the
Gallic sack of Rome); the Brennius who, a century
later, looted continental Greece and desecrated
Delphi, died during the retreat. If either
of them had actually conquered a kingdom, I
rather suspect that he would never have become
known to us by a name that seems to designate a
landless prince; and conversely, a leader who
fails to conquer land in the outside, non-Celtic
world, may not unfairly be seen as a failed king,
a king who never was – whose kingship is
dead.
In short, while Beli and
Nudd/Nuada may represent a maimed or inferior
form of royalty, Brân represents a failed form;
he is the face of everything in the course of
history that falls, that loses, that dies, and
whose fall, and defeat, and death, are a
necessary part of the evolution of the world.
A dead Brân will be the strength and defence of
succeeding kings. He even has his own
magical hall on the island of Gwales, near
Pembroke, where he holds his great feast for his
retainers as a true king should. After all,
if is through the death of Brân that the island
is defended, it is no less so through the death
of many nameless warriors down the ages; if it is
through the death of Brân and the end of his
line – the cessation of his dynasty’s
fertility – that many other lines and
dynasties can continue and be fertile, that is no
less than history, with its record of extinct
dynasties and dead warriors who never had the
chance to have a heir.
The fall of Brân, followed by the
royal rule of Beli and by his conquest by Caesar,
represen three levels or stages of monarchy; a
triad of kingships, in fact, following upon the
originating kingship of Lludd, which sums up
everything that kingship is to society at large
in the Celtic mind. And the reason why
Lludd is kept separate from Beli, even though
they represent the same level of kingship, is
that Beli, unlike Lludd, is qualified by the two
other kingships that on either side of his in the
mythological triptych: that of Brân, the
beheaded figure of the failed and dead king, and
that of Caesar, the universal king, king over
other kings.
Notes
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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