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Appendix 6: More
about the legend of the Fortress and the
Dragons
Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
There are many important features
of the legend of the wondrous boy, the fortress,
and the dragons, which I have not covered in the
main text, because they are not relevant to the
study of the historical Vitalinus/ Vortigern; but
which ought to be covered in an appendix, to
clarify the connection between the two legends,
remove possible red herrings, and enlarge our
understanding of Celtic culture and
"religion".
The story does not actually begin
in the time of Vortigern and Emrys, but in an
earlier age: that of Beli and Lludd, two
legendary early kings of Britain who seem
identifiable with pagan Celtic deities,
Nodons/Nuada and Beli Mawr. Both of these
seem to represent minor or "maimed"
form of royalty, and they may be identifiable
with each other, or at least closely connected.
Beli, as we have seen, was a mythological figure
of the class of teyrnedd or tyranni,
which, in the earliest Welsh tradition, are the
lesser kings, monarchs of small groups which
carry a sort of permanent defeat and subjection
in the very nature of their royalty, always being
defeated by "Roman" heroes like Maxen
and Ulkessar/Julius Caesar. Nuada was the roi
fainéant of the Tuatha De Danann, the human gods of Ireland, who
accepted their subjection to the demonic Fomoire
and was positively irritated when Lug, the
shining divine hero, turned up in The fate of
the children of Tuirenn to start a war of
liberation; in a different account, he lost an
arm in the same war of liberation, thus
disastrously handing the kingship over to the
wicked Bres. Nuada is probably the same as
Elcmar, whose characteristic in several tales of
gods is to be overcome, either by the Dagda - one
of the three supreme gods, type of the great
ancestor, paternal and kingly - or by the Dagda's
son, Oengus. To the Dagda, he loses his
wife (and what that means in terms of maimed
power and royalty in a Celtic perspective can
clearly be guessed); to Oengus, son of the same
woman and of the Dagda, he loses, with the
Dagda's active help, his own seat - exactly like
that favourite Roman target, Beli. The name
Elcmar means, by common consent, "the
envious one"; and we are reminded of the
ambitious and immoderate character that goes so
well with natural defeat in the class of teyrnedd
and tyranni[3].
In the story Lludd and Lleverys,
Lludd is a good king of Britain, subject in spite
of himself to three plagues from whom he asks his
brother Lleverys - who lives overseas as king of
a "France" which, in the story, has one
or two things in common with Fairyland - to
rescue him by his wise advice. Lleverys
has been identified, on philological grounds,
with Lleu, that is Lug; and it is notable that,
in Ireland, it is Lug who rescues Nuada and his
people from the grasping oppression of the
Fomoire. The oppression of Lludd and his
people is just as grasping and just as
supernatural, but it is threefold: the presence
of a magical race (called the Coranyaid)
who can overhear any conversation within the
kingdom of Britain; a terrible scream that
resounds every May Eve, depriving men of their
strength and women and the land of their
fertility; and the mysterious and continuous
theft of the king's provisions, which, each time,
leaves only enough to be consumed in one night.
Thanks to Lleverys' wisdom, each
of the threats is met and defeated. The
Coranyaid are destroyed with a magic dust; the
thief of the royal stores - a mighty wizard - is
met and wrestled down by king Lludd himself, in
spite of a powerful sleeping spell; and the
source of the shriek is tracked down. Following
Lleverys' advice, Lludd has the whole island
measured, and finds that its centre is in…
Oxford (a geographical enormity which Oxford men
to this day will gladly endorse); there he has a
hole dug in the ground, traps the two dragons in
a single vat of best mead, wraps them in a silk
coverlet, and, removing the vat from the hole (it
is not clear whether the dragons were above or
below the ground as they fought, but they fell
into the vat when they were wearied), finds the
"strongest place in his kingdom" and
buries them there. The place in question is
Dinas Emrys in Eryri; and yes, the two dragons
are the same ones that Vortigern and Emrys are to
meet much, much later...
The story is one of foundation of
royalty as the capstone of civil society. The
very basics of human life and of human
living-together are being assaulted. The
terrible scream strikes at the kingdom's
generative force; the thefts strike at the
produce already assembled, which the king is to
redistribute; the Coranyaid’s mastery of
communication makes ordinary human intercourse
(which, because of the Celtic redistributive
exchange system, has its centre at the royal
court) impossible, or at least fraught with
danger. Thus the kingdom is in effect
disarticulated and destroyed at every level of
human activity from primary production to
enjoyment, for the all-hearing tribe assault the
safety of individual relationships which form
part of the whole social network. This is
not therefore, in Dumézilian terms, a
second-function, military threat, nor a
first-function one to law and sovereignty –
nobody challenged Lludd's actual right to rule
– but a threat against the peaceful
functioning, the economic activities, the
fertility, and the simple living-together of men;
all of them third-function concerns, for the
ordinary living-together of men belongs to the
third function. The Roman third-function
god is Quirinus, co-uiri-nus, the lord of
men-together, co-uiri; the Germanic
third-function god, Freyr, is the veraldar
goð, the god of men-though-generations, ver-ald.
Lludd resolves the three threats
by carrying out three actions of a king. Firstly,
he convenes an assembly of all the people in his
land, and it is at this assembly that the
Coranyaid are shrivelled by magic dust. The
convening of an assembly, what the Irish called
an Oenach, was a natural part of the work
of a Celtic king, reasserting annually the unity
and identity of his people; and it is perhaps a
part of the symbolism that the feast that
celebrates the natural connection of men –
encounters, talk, law (at the Oenach,
existing laws were read out and new laws
proclaimed), commerce and general human contact
– also witnesses the destruction of the
Coranyaid’s unnatural and damaging mastery
of human communication, whose very perfection
disrupted normal human intercourse in the
kingdom.
The King’s struggle with an
intruder is part of his warrior duties; and the
fact that everyone save himself is cast under a
spell of sleep by the thief raises echoes in the
closely connected Latin culture, where the Vestal
Virgins ritually warned the King: Ugilasne,
Rex? Uigila! Dost thou watch, O
King? Be watchful! Uigilare
means being watchful in the night, when everyone
else is asleep. The king is he who watches
when all others sleep; but he only does so by
supernatural sanction. Lludd receives is
instruction to watch over the goods of his
kingdom by Lleverys, that is Lug; the Latin King,
by the Virgin Vestals. Finally, the
measuring out of all his kingdom, which includes
the discovery of its central point, has to do
with something we have already encountered: the
Celtic conceptions of territorial kingdoms as
permanent entities, whose frontiers are as stable
and as fixed as anything in the realm of enduring
realities. To reckon its size and
boundaries, therefore, is to make oneself
acquainted with, even to reveal, the enduring
truth of this one individual object, the kingdom
of Britain, a truth that abides across time.
The assembly of all the men in the
kingdom and the measuring out of all the land in
the kingdom indicate that the establishment of
order, protection and sanity has to do with
bringing together the whole kingdom, or seeing it
as a totality. All the land has to be
reckoned and measured before the two dragons are
found; all the men of the kingdom have to come
together before the disastrous Coranyaid are
removed. The settings of the story are also
part of its analytical nature: the king’s
protective activities take place, one among human
beings, one in the context of the size and shape
of the kingdom – that is, of the actual
material land itself – and the third, the
tale of the thieving wizard, in the context of
the products of the earth, food and drink. That
is, the kingdom is analyzed in terms of its human
population, its geographical extension, and its
produce. It is perhaps worth noticing that
the two terms land and produce, together,
constitute what we would call wealth; and it
follows that the Celtic mentality did not regard
the land as wealth in the same way as we do,
marketable, transferable, liable to ownership.
As a component of Lludd’s kingdom, it is a
unit, bound to him and clearly separated from the
produce, the food and drink – and, one
supposes, the timber, building stone, minerals
and other goods produced from the earth - which
alone are liable to change hands. This is
probably the ideological ground of the
redistributive exchange system we analyzed
earlier. The land is regarded as a unit,
not to be parcelled or sold, married to the King
alone; and it follows that all its increase,
though it can pass through many hands, must
inevitably start from his.
From the point of view of the
story, this means that that the wizard’s
assault on the King’s stores must involve as
much an idea of totality, of an aspect of the
whole kingdom, as the others. The threat to
the redistributive function of the Celtic king
involves his military power (and therefore must
be met by the strength of the King’s good
right arm): if wealth cannot be protected in the
fortress of the king, it cannot be protected at
all. But the reason to meet it with all
possible power is that the thief is assaulting
all the products of the land, for the whole
kingdom. It is not only the king's ability
to give banquets that the mysterious thief
assaults, but the exchange of wealth for all the
kingdom, and with it its social structure and its
network of obligations. Or rather, the
king’s own ability to give these banquets is
itself a manifestation, even an inextricable
feature, of this wholeness of wealth; which
explains the importance we have seen them to
have. If the assaults are repeated, it is
because the products of the land are renewed: an
assault on the totality of human life on the
island (such as the Coranyaid’s) need be
carried out only once, but an assault on the
fertility of its land and people, to be
comprehensive, has to be as regular and repeated
as these things themselves are.
This is the same kind of
analytical narrative thought we encountered when
analyzing A; but while this is also an analysis
of royalty, it works at quite a different level.
The core of A is the mutual obligations of lower
and higher levels of royalty, with the highest
royalty – that of the Romans –
establishing a legal relationship of suzerainty
over the monarchy or monarchies of the Britons
and incurring the corresponding duty of defending
them from the hordes of chaos (that is the Picts
and Scots), in whom no proper monarchy can be
perceived at all. A takes Royalty, as such,
for granted; what matters is the relationship of
British with Roman monarchy, i.e. of tyranni
and rectores, of teyrnedd and gwledig.
Here, however, there is no higher or lower
monarchy: what matters is to establish monarchy
itself as the element of sanity, reunion,
protection and delimitation in the existence of a
single kingdom. The element of challenge to
the royal power of redistribution, as a feature
of the king's whole majesty, is particularly
clear in the showdown between the king and the
wizard-thief, a man of immense stature and
formidably armed, who is however defeated by the
valiant Lludd, after which he makes submission to
him, promising to be his man and to restore all
his losses. The restoration of the king's
wealth is at one and the same time the
restoration of his majesty - including over this
new subject. In other words, this legend
refers to the nature of monarchy at its most
basic level. This is its connection with
the third function; while the monarchical aspect
of human society is itself one of the highest,
this is a third function within the monarchical
aspect of human society. No wonder that the
legend cycle dates it to before the arrival of
the Romans.
Not only is this story is an
antefact to the tale of Vortigern and the
dragons, it insists on the fact that it is one.
Now what is interesting is that the Irish cycle
of Conn, Art and Cormac also has somebody called
Nuada turning up at the edges of the Irish
legend, and near its earliest beginnings. The
father of the unfortunate Ailill the earless was
the Munster patriarch Mug Nuadat, "Slave of
Nuada"; and the Nuada whom he served was
supposed to be a druid who ordered - what a
coincidence, eh? - the building of a royal
fortress. This is the royal fortress of
Leinster at Almu, the Hill of Allen, later the residence of
Finn and the Fianna. Now, according to
F.J.Byrne, the synchronism between Eogan Mor
(a.k.a. Mug Nuadat) and Conn is a late invention,
probably, he feels, derived from a derogatory
northern name for the south of Ireland, and
specifically for Munster - Leth Moga, the
slave's half. Eogan Mor, without any Nuada
or any slave name, is certainly the patriarch of
the dominant tribes of Munster, the Eoganachta;
the insulting name Mug Nuadat must have been
imposed on him by partisans of the northern
supremacy of the Ui Neill. That is, Munster
tradition proper can have known nothing either of
(a) a “slave” king building a royal
fortress at the command of a druid, or (b) the
name Nuada. The synchronism between Mug
Nuadat and Conn was probably worked out to bring
Munster into Ui Neill dynastic mythology, and
then exploited to shove the guilt of Mag Mugrama
away from Conn and on to the hereditary enemies
to the south.
Therefore these elements - the
name Nuada, and the building of a royal fortress
by a king commanded by a druid - may be separated
from the legend of Eogan Mor. They do not
belong in Munster or Leinster, but in Ui Neill
legend. Therefore they are clearly an
antefact of the woes of the Ui Neill patriarch
Conn. Mug Nuadat, whoever he was, built the
fortress for Nuada Necht, who, under the guise of
a druid, was in fact the ancestor deity of
Leinster; which makes Mug Nuadat and all his
descendants inferior to, "slaves of",
Nuada's Leinster. Leinster itself, in the
brothers Rees' scheme of interpretation, takes
the place of the third function, the lowest
freeborn rank of society, in a cosmography in
which Connachta - the province of the descendants
of Conn - is the royal, first-function land, and
Tara, the seat of Conn himself, the centre of
Ireland. In other words, the attribution of
Nuada, the roi fainéant god who loses his
throne to Lug, to Leinster, is quite in keeping
with the secondary nature of Lludd, Beli, and
Nuada Airgetlam.
Conn took the royalty of Tara from
a fading roi fainéant from Leinster
called Cathair Mor. According to The
songs of the house of Buchet[6], Cathair had proved
unable to restrain his many sons, who had abused
the hospitality of the professional
guest-receiver Buchet (ancient Ireland knew a
category of rich free men whose profession, or
rather social position, was to receive and
entertain guests; obviously a third-function
preoccupation) till Buchet was forced to complain
in the name of the ancient laws of Eriu - only to
find that the king was unable to restrain his
sons and the only advice he could give him was to
leave. There is an internal collapse within
the royal function in that the giving of banquets
– which, as we have seen, ought to be a
major feature of the royal function itself –
is actually impeded by the king’s many and
greedy sons. That the king has many sons
should be good news, and certainly it does not
reflect badly on his fertility (we should
remember that his successor, Conn, has only two);
but the fertility has grown rank and overgrown,
and started feeding, effectively, on itself.
When Conn marries Buchet’s beloved,
beautiful and just daughter, he takes to himself
the better part of the third function that his
predecessor had abused. The marriage of
Conn with Ethne Thoebfota was remembered as an
ideal union, the lady being as noble as she was
fair, and coincided with the noontide of Irish
monarchy, when the magic of the king’s
sexual lordship gave the island three harvests a
year, rivers full of salmon, and trees
ever-groaning with fruit.
Every Irishman, hearing the story
of Conn and Buchet, would instinctively have
compared Conaire Mor’s many and greedy sons
with Conn’s tiny and ill-fated, but heroic,
brood of two. This reminds us that,
according to my analysis, the core of the legend
is in the crisis of succession from Conn to Art
to the illegitimate and unrecognized Cormac,
which begins with Conn’s having only one son
to succeed him. In other words, this is
another aspect of the Ui Neill legend, radiating
outwards from the great central shock of the
near-extinction of the Connachta, to embrace
Conaire. Conaire is represented as
everything Conn is not: fertile indeed, but
without the strength of a true king, so that even
his fertility runs against him.
This surely represents another
Connachta/Ui Neill slur on another
province’s great hero, like connecting Eogan
Mor with the insulting name Mug Nuada and –
before the chronological discrepancy was realized
– with the horrors of Mag Mucrama; Conaire
Mor was a Leinster hero, claimed to have been
High King of Tara and all Ireland. Ui Neill
fingerprints are visible everywhere; this, no
less than that of Vortigern, is, in every
respect, a family legend. Its purpose is to
identify the destinies of the dynasty with that
of the country itself (I repeat that I do not for
a minute believe that its insulting, reductive
views of Eogan Mor and Cathair Mor had anything
to do with the way these heroes were seen in
Munster and Leinster) and its triumph in later
tradition, erasing or modifying any competing
accounts, is a function of the political success
of the Ui Neill.
This is actually unlike what we
find in Britain, where there is no indication
whatever that any Vortigernid branch ever
recovered the national power of their (supposed)
ancestor. The success of the Vortigernid
version of history is one of the most remarkable
phenomena of British history, and to be frank, I
am at a loss to explain it. The seminal
position of Nennius, whose work soon spread
across Europe - let alone Britain - may have
something to do with it; but it is also possible
that it was due to a certain lack of competition.
Such a story, I mean, would not
have been told of just any royal house, in a
culture where kings were a dime a dozen; or, if
it had, it would not have been believed. A
story that welds the destinies of a dynasty with
those of the whole island, Ireland or Britain,
must depend on a good dynastic claim to have just
such a position - high kings, whether challenged
or not, of all the country. And how many
dynasties, in Britain, could or would make such a
claim? As dynasties? Only the
Ambrosiads come to mind. Now, the
traditions of the successors of Ambrosius seem to
have been destroyed during Arthur’s
revolution, and anyway there are indications that
they tried, until quite late, to maintain a Roman
tradition of political and legal writing; in
other words, they would not have had house bards
to work their dynastic claims into a purely
Celtic picture of history. The Ambrosiad
recovery testified by Gildas cannot have lasted
long; what is more, to judge by the distribution
of Ambres- place-names, the centre of its
dynastic power must have been in central south
Britain - an area which fell to the English early
(570-590) and totally. As for Arthur, he
seems, first, to have risen from a quite
unimportant position, and ,second, to have left
no heirs; it follows that his dynasty before him
would not have seen any chance of identifying
their destinies with those of their country, and
that after him there was no dynasty to do so.
No dynasty other than the Vortigernids, so far as
we can see, ever claimed sovereignty over all
Britain; and therefore no other dynasty would
have the occasion or interest in creating a
national pseudo-history with themselves in the
centre.
The elements of the story are of
course earlier than their dynastic use; they
represent an interpretative legend of royalty
that would naturally attach itself to any house
whose ultimate royal title was evident and
enduring. The story started with the god of
the lowest level of kingship, Nuada/Nudd/Lludd,
interpreted as the basic picture of a king,
endowed with all the basic duties of a king; and
it develops from there until it reaches the point
of separation of the various levels of kingship -
at which point historical reality begins to
obtrude. But the use of continuing plot
threads - such as the story of the dragons -
leads the story back to its prehistoric,
supernatural origins. After all, this is
what it is meant to do: explain the contemporary
power (or claims) of a particular royal house in
terms of the eternal realities of kingship.
Indeed, most of the elements of Lludd’s
struggle against the destroyers of kingship and
society reappear in the tale of Vortigern’s
fortress.
It would seem that only one of
Nudd’s three plagues has any relevance to
what was to follow; but it is not as simple as
that. The Nennian account conflates rather
clumsily two of the three: the building materials
vanish overnight from the place where they are
gathered. It is a non sequitur to
connect this, as Nennius does, with the two
fighting dragons; how could the fighting of two
dragons could make wood and stones vanish? The
episode this reminds us of is the thieving
magician. Geoffrey, who had another source,
says that the building materials would collapse
into the earth. This is a good bit closer
to the closest legend in the Irish – that of
Lugaid's bad judgement, in which it was an
already built wall which collapsed under the
weight of the king's injustice – except that
here it precedes the bad judgement. But the
similarity of Nennius' overnight supernatural
theft to Lludd's third plague forbids us to think
that Nennius simply made up this feature; rather,
it strongly suggests that elements of Lludd
and Lleverys were already in existence when
the sources of Nennius and Geoffrey were first
written down, and that the disasters to befall
Vortigern's fortress were in some way connected
with them. It is possible that more than
one disaster may have struck it, directly
modelled on an earlier version of Lludd and
Lleverys.
On the other hand, there is no
doubt in my mind that, despite its evident
archaic features, Lludd and Lleverys as we
have it is quite late. Casswallawn has
already become a standard part of the legend,
Oxford is in existence (and already, in some
people's view, the centre of Britain), the
kingdom of France (which did not begin to be a
permanent entity until the 900s) is an immemorial
part of the landscape. In short, we would
be very bold to date the form of the story as we
have it to any time before the twelve hundreds.
There is even a clear Galfridian influence: the
author had to explain that apart from the
standard three Galfridian sons of Beli
(Geoffrey's Heli) there was a fourth, to
wit Lleverys. The reason to underline this
is obviously that this fourth son was unknown to
Geoffrey.
It follows that we cannot trust Lludd
and Lleverys' statement that Lludd captured
the two dragons and removed them from
"Oxford" to Eryri. If such a late
story places the original home of the dragons in
the centre of Britain and far from Eryri, only to
move them there at its end, then we may freely
suspect that it was intended to account for a
discrepancy, and that a tradition existed that
placed the dragons not in Eryri at all, but in
the centre of the island. It is frightening to
think how much Welsh tradition seems to have been
lost. Time and again, we come across
evidence for otherwise unknown alternative
accounts of legends. The importance of this
one is that it would bring the Welsh legend that
much closer to the Irish: both in that both would
turn out not only to be stretched out across
several generations - the Welsh from Lludd to
Vortigern and Ambrosius, the Irish from Conn to
Cormac – but also to be placed, not on an
eccentric mountain-top "at the furthest ends
of the kingdom", but in its geographical and
cultural centre. The Irish tale centres on
the possession of Tara, the centre of Ireland;
the Welsh, on the possession of a fortress
“at the extreme ends of Vortigern’s
kingdom”, in Snowdon. This description
is in clear contradiction with the emphasis on
Tara that is at the heart of the Irish legend
(whose Ui Neill sponsors had every reason to want
to play up the national importance of Tara); and
does not clearly agree, either, with my view that
Vortigern’s “very protected
fortress” represented the height of
sovereign power, that the Saxons never could
seize, and which is always represented in Ireland
by Tara.
Tara as royal centre has more than
one parallel in Britain. Lludd and
Lleverys assures us that the geographical
centre of Britain is Oxford – which is
nonsense geographically if not culturally –
but Lludd was also said to have founded London,
the island's capital, that is its centre in
another way. Now London and the setting of
the Burial of the Dragons share a common
mythological role: they are two of the three
places where "fortunate burials"
occurred, which, had they not been unburied,
would have magically protected the island from
Saxon invasion for ever. The head of Brân
the Blessed was buried in London (on a so-called
White Hill), looking towards France; the two
dragons were buried in Dinas Emrys (or rather, as
I suggested, in Oxford). These two
Fortunate Burials are certainly part of the same
legend cycle, since Brân, as we have seen in
Appendix I, was an essential basic element of the
great story of monarchy.
Now the third Fortunate Burial
concerns none other than Vortimer, Vortigern's
heroic son, figure of empire. His bones
were buried in the principal ports of the island,
to form a magical barrier against the Saxons;
but, out of love for Ronwen, his own father
unburied them. So says the triad of the
Three Fortunate Burials. This, compared to
Nennius, is a startling novelty - Nennius simply
says that his followers disobeyed his last words,
and did not bury him in a sea-harbour (a later
gloss makes them bury him in Lincoln). Even
Geoffrey does not charge Vortigern with the
heinous unburial of his son: according to his
account, Vortimer was to be buried in "the
port where the Saxons usually landed", but
his followers disobeyed his orders and buried him
in London instead.
The vagueness and contradictions
in the story of Vortimer's failed burial suggests
misunderstanding or mistransmission. We
have seen that the story of Vortigern and his
heroic son must have come into existence before
the final end of Gildasian Britain, in a Britain
already partitioned with the Saxons but still
largely dominated by the British. We notice
therefore that the parallel Irish story, told of
Patrick’s opponent Loegaire, buried standing
up and facing the country of his enemies,
concerns land borders and have to do with
enemies coming "thus far and no
further". Loegaire himself was hardly
unconnected with the Connachta/Ui Neill legend of
monarchy: he was the heir of the great Niall
himself, and a part of the process by which the
crown of Tara became identified with the Ui
Neill. He was buried upright to face
prospective enemies from Leinster, which was the
kingdom from which came the High King –
Conaire – which his ancestor Conn was said
to have superseded; and clearly, a threat to Ui
Neill overlordship from rich and fertile Leinster
could be perceived.
I think that the legend of
Vortimer was conceived in the sixth century, its
role within O was to appropriate to the imaginary
Vortigernid hero of heroes, the Vortamo-Rix,
the fundamental aspects of Ambrosius’ own
claim to the gratitude of latter days. Part
of that is his title as guarantor of legal land
sharings (from which Pascent’s own land
title is said to come). I suspect that
Vortimer was said to have marked a land border to
hold the Saxons for ever, thus coming ahead even
of Ambrosius’ role as land sharer. This
legend would be typical of the sixth century in
that it saw the Saxons as unwelcome but defeated
and restricted to one limited territory from
which they do not stray; it would lose its
significance in the seventh, when the whole
notion of imposing a settlement on the barbarians
failed, with borders falling again and again, and
the only solution to the Saxons must have seemed
to try to drive them from the shores of Britain
altogether. Vortimer’s legend,
therefore, was shifted to the seashore or to the
ports, to imagine a permanent magical prohibition
to barbarian settlement in Britain; and a reason
would have to be found for the failure of this
magical burial – obviously, that he had been
unburied, or that his instructions had been
ignored and he had not been buried where he
wanted. But the legends could not agree on
the revision, which is why Nennius, Nennius’
glossators, Geoffrey, and the Triads, all
contradict each other. Of the various
places proposed for the tomb of Vortimer, Lincoln
seems much the likeliest (not for the first time,
anonymous glosses contain interesting and
credible information); it is known to have stood
at the border with the Saxons, and to have
resisted them for a long time.
A parallel for the invention of
Vortimer – not for the legend itself, but
for the attitudes that led to its invention
– would be the Ulster legend of Maccuil
Dimane (see Appendix V), in which St.Patrick is
placed in a position, with respect to Maccuil,
higher and earlier even than Baptism. There
is no evidence in the legend of Vortimer that he
was ever regarded as responsible for the sharing
of land within the borders of unconquered
Britain, but if he was identified with the
borders imposed on the Saxons, then he would be
responsible for the shape of the new Britain even
ahead of and above Ambrosius. In both
cases, the authors of the new legend would be
trying to stake a superior claim to a role or
territory, preceding and as it were encompassing
the existing claim: Conindrus and Rupilius had
baptized Maccuil/ Maughold, but Patrick was his
spiritual master even before Baptism; Ambrosius
had freed Britain and shared her land (including
Pascent’s portion) but Vortimer had first
fought the Saxons, and, by his Fortunate Burial,
had set limits they could not pass – a more
fundamental land sharing. A similar kind of
vaulting over previously fundamental claims,
seeking an even higher position of founder, would
be N’s response to N1, placing Archbishop
Guithelinus upstream of the founder Constantine
himself, let alone Ambrosius.
We are in the maddening situation
of having a story, that of Vortigern and Emrys,
clearly grounded in fifth- and sixth-century
politics, and whose first version known to us
belongs to the ninth century, but clearly built
to mirror a story which must be earlier,
including two archaic characters identified with
pagan gods, but which is found in its entirety
only in a thirteenth-century tale. However,
what does seem acceptable is that the three
places of the Three Fortunate Burials all share
features of Tara as sacral and political centre
of Ireland. London is, as Tara claims to
be, the political capital; it was in Roman times,
and again when the Triads and Lludd and
Lleverys were compiled. Oxford, like
Tara, is the centre of the island; and the place
of Vortimer’s burial, Lincoln or wherever,
has in common with Tara that it is the place
where a great king of the past (whose name
designates him as “the highest of
kings” of the island) was buried facing the
enemy, so that they should not prevail over his
people and that monarchy should not pass away
from his family. The Leinstermen menaced
the Connachta people and the Ui Neill supremacy;
the Saxons threatened the British people, but we
must also remember that Vortimer, with his
imperial name, incarnates the Vortigernid
self-image and hopes of imperial restoration.
In short, it seems possible (though terribly
nebulous) that at the start of this
multiplication of fortunate tokens and burial
places there was a threefold division of the idea
of a central place of the country containing one
or more fortunate burials which insured the
country for ever. Its qualities were shared
between three separate locations, London -
founded by Lludd and protected, according to
which version you choose, either by Bran's head
or by Vortimer's bones - the "centre of the
island", where the dragons were originally
buried, and the burial-place of Vortimer,
wherever it was.
The great fortress of Dinas
Emrys is not part of this central triad; and
it is worth remarking that it has, in this, an
exact Irish equivalent. The fortress that
Mug Nuadat dug for Nuada at the Hill of Allen is
not in any way identifiable with Tara. When
Lludd, whose name is the same as Nuada’s,
transfers the two dragons from Oxford to Eryri,
he is moving them away from one of the three
central places and forming a separate place in
the far lands of the kingdom. The site is
to be kept in reserve until the kingdom’s
uttermost need, when Vortigern will resort to it
to thwart the Saxon plan to destroy him. This
connects the primordial legends of Brân, Beli
and Lludd with the much later period (within the
mythological time-table as much as within actual
history) of Vortigern, and places Vortigern and,
consequently, Vortimer, within the mainstream of
the royal legend of Britain; therefore the burial
of Vortimer is indeed connected, not only by
triadic convenience, but by narrative structure,
to the royal legend of the island. We must
therefore consider its elements as part of its
larger flow.
The fortress of Nuada corresponds
to the fortress of Lludd and Vortigern in certain
general terms: in being dug by order of the royal
founder Nuada, or Lludd – the name is the
same; in not pertaining to the one centre of the
island (Tara), and in having something to do with
the uttermost ends of the kingdom. For it
was the fort of the Fianna, an independent band of
young warriors whose commander had the rank of
King and who were particularly connected with the
High King of Tara. The Fianna was an
opposite term both to the settled societies in
Ireland and to the world of the family and
blood-kinship, to which they opposed a world of
elective affinities based on similarity of age
(what we might call all boys together). They were
given as their own competence such lands as are
unsettled, unconquered and wild, outside existing
territorial lordships: the wild lands and the
sea, "her cliffs and her estuaries, her mast
and her "sea-fruit", her salmon, her
hunting and her venery", leaving to the
territorial lords "her wealth and her
treasure, her cattle and her fortresses".
Therefore, “their” fortress had
something to do with the unsettled world beyond
the normal run of fortresses, and with “the
uttermost ends of the kingdom”. It is
still part of the kingdom, in that the Fianna are
a part of Ireland – indeed, they are
particularly connected with its high king; but
though it is not anywhere near its outer edge, it
nevertheless pertains to it by its association
with all in the kingdom that is uncultivated,
unsettled, wild.
This suggests a reason why
Vortigern’s great fortress, rather than the
triad of centres of the country (whatever those
were), is the setting for the story of the
wondrous boy and the dragons, whose Irish
parallel takes place at Tara: that in a situation
where a dramatic collapse had left no resources
in the normal societal provinces of the three
functions, the king might resort to this outer
world, to the realm of unsettled things, what
Dumézil would have called an extra-functional
area, and Dr.Nicholas Allen would call the fourth
function. In Ireland, the Hill of Allen had
no such role in extreme royal distress, but the
existence of the independent Fianna was supposed
to be a support for the High King, though legend
had it that they were destroyed by another High
King. Though, as I said, nowhere near the
ends of the island (it is close to Kildare) its
location, a hill standing in the middle of a
desolate bog, certainly suggests isolation and
wildness. In actual history, Allen was
never a fortress; it was a cult-place, and there
is good reason to believe that Finn himself was
originally an object of worship, a god if you
will, with a special connection with arcane
wisdom.
Taken together, all these factors
suggest that cultic reasons might ultimately lurk
behind the very divergent views of this site.
Neither the Hill of Allen, nor indeed Dinas Emrys
in Eryri, were actually at the extreme ends of
their respective countries; but Dinas Emrys in
Gwynedd is described as such, and the Hill of
Allen is attributed to a militia that is
otherwise regarded as altogether outside the
regular world of Ireland. It would be
typical of cult places connected with such ideas
to be, not actually impossible to reach, but
separated in some way from normal territory, and
both the Hill of Allen and Dinas Emrys are in
unpleasant and difficult regions, Dinas Emrys on
Snowdon, the Hill of Allen in the middle of a
bog. The close connection of these isolated
places with the royalty of the island is part of
the ground-ideas of the legend complex.
It is no use to try and
reconstruct an “original” version of
the two legends, for it is clear that it simply
represents a number of ideas that must have been
applied timelessly, again and again, with
variations. Both in Ireland and in Britain,
we find it applied very definitely to a family
which is historically connected with a claim to
the crown of the whole country, the Vortigernids,
the Ui Neill (and the Connachta upstream of
them). It is therefore pointless to try and
imagine what shape the Irish group of narrative
ideas had before the house of Conn arose in the
West at some point between Ptolemy’s
informants and the day of Niall; nor what it had
in North Britain before the house of Vortigern
and Pascent felt the need to place in a
comprehensible frame its rivalry with the
Ambrosiads, its claim to royal status, and the
shadow of the Saxons. The origin of this
narrative is in a time beyond our reach; perhaps
in the Central European hills from Burgundy to
Bohemia, where the Celtic ethnos can first be
perceived; perhaps even earlier, in an
Indo-European past that can only be imagined from
the marks it left on later cultures.
But though variation is the norm,
it is variation within a group of fundamental
ideas. To the question: why should it not
drift away from its roots until it is no longer
recognizable and no longer makes sense in its
original terms?, the answer is: these things
happen, but so long as the story is used within
the context of certain ideas, and, what is more,
of certain direct political needs, such as to
understand and validate certain definite
institutions , its function guarantees that the
story will remain within certain parameters.
Kings and those around them need to have their
own understanding of the role of monarchy within
human society, and, indeed, of human society
itself: hence, a “history” of monarchy
begins with the establishment of monarchy as the
centre of sense and stability. As this is
concerned with the effect of monarchy looking
downwards, to the mass of the people and to the
physical basis of human life, rather than upwards
to the higher levels of society and of existence,
this level of monarchy is inevitably connected
with the third function, the lowest function of
the free world, the function of fertility, wealth
and material life. On the other hand, as
soon as monarchy is established, the problems
arise of the relationship between monarchies and
of the place of monarchy in the dimension of the
sacred or of wisdom; and that is why the next
stage involves clashes between monarchies, the
establishment of upper and lower levels –
with one supreme level set off from all the rest
– and the appearance of great sages; in
other words, it moves to the second and to the
first functions. This is an inevitable
effect of the existence of certain social
institutions – monarchy, bardism, a
priesthood of sages, a supposedly free population
bound to the soil, redistributive exchange –
and of a certain set of basic ideas about them,
from which, time after time, successive royal
groups will draw their self-explanation and their
self-justification.
The cycle of legends reaches its
climax with the manifestation on earth of a
wondrous child, who can be one of two things:
either the rightful king, who has lain unnoticed
all this time, or a sage of supreme holiness,
whose word is the word of truth itself. Both
the Irish and the Welsh story show this variation
in different ways. In Ireland, the boy sage
and the boy king, Segda and Cormac, are
manifested one after the other, in successive
generations; in Wales, they turn up in different
versions of the same legend. In Nennius,
the wondrous boy is the future king elected by
Fate; in Geoffrey, he is a sage who, in the
course of exposing the whole picture of the
truth, shows that Vortigern is doomed. If
he will escape the Saxons, he will fall into the
hands of the sons of Constantine.
In the Welsh legend, the two young
heroes are distinguished very clearly by the
quality of their word. The word of the boy
Merlin does not by itself affect political
conditions: rather, it reveals the hidden (or
hypocritically concealed) patterns of the world,
and shows to Vortigern how and why his death is
inevitable. In a sense, this ought not even
to be regarded as a moral condemnation, since the
death of every man is in fact inevitable, and the
sage who is questioned simply reveals how, and
where, the inevitable will take place. In
the case of Vortigern, his fate is tied up with
his two great crimes, having usurped the throne
and having called in the Saxons; but even the
most blameless heroes (except for those who
vanish from the world and are never seen again)
have their own fates, which awaits them at a
particular time and place. Merlin does
nothing at all to further the fate of Vortigern,
let alone to inflict it; in the words of another
epic wizard, “That is not my doing. I
merely foretell”. The word of Emrys
in Nennius, on the other hand, is directly
effective: he takes the crown from Vortigern and
orders him to find a lesser, and, as soon as he
says it, it is done. Conversely, the only
truth he reveals is the truth which is to do with
Emrys himself: when he reveals the struggle of
the dragons under the fortress, as we have seen,
he reveals the struggle of Vortigern’s house
and his. Merlin stands entirely outside,
taking the role which Pythagoras taught was the
loftiest among all human roles – the role of
the beholder. What
Merlin’s word affects is the druids of
Vortigern’s household, whom he shames to
their faces. The Irish character whom we
must regard as his counterpart, Segda, has an
even more radical effect on the druids: his
mother decrees their death by hanging.
Except for the common ground of a
failed High King and a wondrous boy whose
appearance decrees the king’s fate, there is
little in common between the Welsh and Irish
stories. The Irish story ignores the Hill
of Allen altogether, and both the failed
sacrifice of Segda and, much later, the
self-revelation of Cormac, take place within
Tara; it is the walls of Tara, not those of the
“uttermost fortress”, that collapse
under the weight of royal untruth, while the Hill
of Allen simply continues as an unnoticed sort of
shadow parallel to the great royal fortress,
developing its own almost separate mythology in
the persons of Finn and the Fianna – which,
however, comes back to the heart of Ui Neill
dynastic legend in that they are intimately
connected with Cormac. Although it is
difficult to tell whether it was the Welsh or the
Irish story that deviated from a core idea, in
the direction of greater or lesser connection of
the “fortress on the outer edge” with
the central legend of the kings, it seems clear
that the Welsh story is affected by history.
It is under the threat of Ronwein's Saxon kin
that the fortress is built in the uncomfortable
surroundings of Eryri. The corresponding
threat, that of the hosts of Beine Brit, comes
much later in the Irish story and involves no
fortress at all.
Conversely, I feel sure that the
two boy characters have suffered heavily in the
development of the Irish legend. Segda,
whose position designates him as the parallel of
Merlin, says nothing whatever except for his
repeated demands that the king of Eriu be obeyed;
it is his mother who takes the role, revealing
the nature of events and shaming the druids.
If we can judge from the existence of a Welsh
parallel (which, however, would be expected to
come closer to any Welsh than to any Irish story,
other things being equal), her sentence of death
on the druids is also surprising and excessive:
in the story of Taliesin shaming the bards, which
is flagrantly similar to that of Merlin shaming
the druids, the boy hero degrades but does not
destroy Maelgwn’s court poets. Indeed,
we would not expect him to, given that the point
of the story is teaching bardism, not destroying
it. It is possible to suspect, here, the
results of Christian animus against the pagan
priesthood; on the other hand, it is true that in
other Indo-European cultures there were stories
of duels of wisdom whose stake was the life of
the loser. Òðinn and the giant
Vafþruðnir question each other until the giant
is asked a question he cannot answer, and admits
that he is about to die; and Homer was said to
have died when he was asked a riddle he could not
answer.
There are however obvious traces
that a good deal of significance has fallen out,
not from any non-existent archetype, but from the
legend of Conn as it was told earlier, through
what can only be described as Ui Neill
censorship. In particular, we have no idea
to what tribal realities the miracle of the
one-legged creature fighting and defeating the
twelve-legged one alluded to, though it certainly
signified the victory of a single High King over
a tribal confederation. And while Wonderful
Judgements are attributed to Segda’s
grandfather Fergus Fialbrethach, the only truly
Wonderful Judgement in the story is performed by
the boy Cormac when he reveals his royal nature
by correcting Lugaid’s invalid judgement
about the sheep. As compared with the Welsh
story, the Irish seems almost to druidize the
boy-King, Cormac the wondrous judge with his
superhuman insight; which may account for the
fading of any individual quality in the other
wonder boy, Segda, who cannot, in the story as we
have it, be treated as the archetype of a druid.
His mother is certainly a sage and savant, with
the insight of a druid – she needs do no
more than to cast a glance over Conn’s court
to divine the evil hidden in it – and with a
capacity for cursing which, in the surviving
material, is most often associated with poets;
but I suspect that the assertion of Cormac, final
term and culmination of the whole story, has
tended to rather skew the presentation of other
characters.
Another difference between Ireland
and Wales is that, in Ireland, the legend of the
contending beasts is found not in the Conn cycle
at all, but in the Ulster cycle, where it is
visibly out of place, since the two figures who
contend are connected with Connaught and
Munster. It is possible that this might
be related to the otherwise unexplained picture
of the one-legged and the twelve-legged birds,
and that the story may have arisen when the king
of Tara, of Connachta race, was contending with a
coalition of, perhaps, twelve (the number is
suspiciously round) Munster-led kings. It
is even possible that a trace of this, reduced to
farce, may survive in the revolt of nine Munster
kings against Medb and Ailill in the Tain,
when they realized that Findabair was in love
with someone else and that they had been played
for fools.
The point is that both stories
have a considerable amount of contact with
historical reality: "Vortigern" and
Ambrosius were historical figures, and whatever
the truth of the Battle of Mag Mucrama, the house
of Niall of the Nine Hostages certainly
represents one of the most massive historical
facts in Ireland. The fact that the British
legend has something to say about a hot political
potato of the time – Ambrosius’
legitimacy and, above all, the legitimacy of his
father – seems to correspond with the fact
that some decidedly political features – the
struggle of the two birds, and the rise of Cormac
himself to power – do seem to be preserved
in the Irish legend, though we can no longer
discern their significance. Ambrosius'
eventual revelation that he is the son of a Roman
noble makes his mother a liar and, in my view,
may show some rewriting. The myth of the
discovery of a boy without a father is found
elsewhere in the Indo-European world for a type
of the "first man", hinting that the
legend may originally have seen him as a first
ancestor. This, of course, would not be in
keeping with the Ambrosiad view that his father
had nimirum worn the purple; and it is
worth remarking that Geoffrey's pseudo-genealogy
of the House of Constantine preserves the notion
that Ambrosius was a legitimate king, which this
equally legendary account denies. Indeed,
the notion that Ambrosius "has no
father" has no correspondent in Ireland,
where the paternity of the wondrous boy is
carefully established.
This seems to me to show the
traces of a titanic battle of the books (and the
bardic songs; the Vortigernid legend of the two
dragons probably formed in bardic circles loyal
to what was by then a Northern, Celticized
dynasty) of educated circles loyal to
Vortigernid-Pascentiad interests, against
supporters of the Ambrosiads such as Gildas.
The house of Ambrosius vanished in the English
catastrophe; the first redactor of N in the 630s
found out that Ambrosius was the son of kings,
but not what kings, and tied him up with the
"founder" of independent Britain,
Constantine the father of Constans. On the
other hand, there was a continuity on the
Vortigernid side, almost certainly connected with
the survival of the dynasty, which means that a
body of legends about Vortigern survived, though
increasingly influenced and blackened by the rise
of the black legend of Vortigern, corresponding
with the growing realization of the unbreakable
nature of Saxon victory. The legend of the
two dragons concerned, originally, a dynastic
catastrophe, a loss of power among British
dynasties; its Saxon element, which originally
framed it, became its core.
Whatever the truth of my various
political guesses, however, what is clearly at
the core of this cycle of legends is a lengthy,
analytical account of the origins of royalty from
the god of lower royalty, Nuada/
Nodons/Nudd/Lludd, through various stages of
development, until myth and analysis come to
touch history in the establishment of reigning
dynasties – or dynasties who, in the case of
the Vortigernids, wish they were reigning.
It does not descend to the contemporary times of
the storytellers themselves; in both cases, such
historical figures as feature at the climax of
the legend-cycle, Vortigern, Cormac, are long in
the past as compared with the earliest known
existence of their legend. I have shown
evidence that the literary and intellectual level
of the first author of O is close to that of
Gildas, and therefore at least a century after
Vortigern; our earliest possible accounts of Conn
are even later. But these kings are
foundational: they stand at the beginning of
“things as they are” in the time of the
storytellers, and therefore their legend is the
last stage of the development of monarchy on
Earth. After them, things were established
in a given pattern, of which they were the
originators; at the point where legend crosses
over into history.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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