[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It is at the victory celebrations that Uther first sees Ygerna, wife of Gorlois, and falls in love with her.Angered, Gorlois withdraws to Cornwall, and Uther, inflamed by lust, pursues him.Ygerna is placed for safety in the fortress of Tintagel.There was nothing for it but to summon Merlin, who transforms Uther into the likeness of Gorlois to gain entry to the castle.While Gorlois is being killed in an unwise sally from a nearby fortress, Arthur’s parents, Uther and Ygerna, are united.‘That night she conceived Arthur, the most famous of men, who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery’ (HRB VIII.19, Thorpe 1966:207).Digging up Arthur I – Tintagel 1998It was a broken stone, used to cover a drain.It was a piece of slate, poorly etched with Dark Age British names.It was also ‘the find of a life-time’; ‘an extremely exciting discovery’; an artefact where ‘myth meets history’; so said Dr Geoffrey Wainwright of English Heritage.Professor Christopher Morris described the physically uninspiring piece of stone as ‘priceless’ and ‘very exciting’.Professor Morris clarified that his ‘excitement’ was based on the evidence the slate provided ‘that skills of reading and writing were handed down in a non-religious context and that [one of the men mentioned on it] was a person of considerable status’.This was slightly disingenuous, as the ‘context’ of the object was re-use as a drain cover and the inscription itself hardly a high-status work.The press interest was not prompted by the inherent value of a Dark Age inscription.Dr Wainwright obliged with the connection the journalists were seeking: ‘It is remarkable that a stone from the sixth century has been discovered with the name of Arthnou (sic) inscribed upon it at Tintagel, a place with which the mythical King Arthur has long been associated’ (Smith 1998).The stone was found during excavations at Tintagel.The spectacular site is dominated by the ruins of ‘King Arthur’s Castle’, actually Earl Richard of Cornwall’s thirteenth-century fortress, built perhaps to hark back to the legends.When archaeologists turned up large amounts of high-status sixth-century material, Tintagel was at first described as a monastic site (Ashe 1968).This theory eventually had to yield ground, as no other monastic features could be discovered, while at the same time similar luxury goods, including the distinctive imported pottery dubbed ‘Tintagel ware’, were unearthed at other clearly secular sixth-century locations.It is now accepted that Tintagel was a major secular centre for the Kingdom of Dumnonia, much as Geoffrey of Monmouth describes it.Tintagel’s undoubted importance during the reign of Arthur, one of the locations where we might expect to find traces of the tyrant Constantine which might clarify much of Gildas’s world, has been utterly obscured by the site’s supposed Arthurian connections.The slate, described by its discoverer Kevin Brady as ‘a red herring’ and ‘a very tenuous link at best’, does not mention Arthur at all.The fragmentary inscription appears to read:Patern.ColiavificitArtognov.Col.Ficit.Professor Charles Thomas offered a tentative translation as ‘Artognou, father of a descendant of Coll has had this made’.This translation seems based on a partial transcription of the text, omitting the second part and unaware of the ‘n’ which appears at the end of ‘Pater’.I follow Andrew Smith’s proposed translation, in which both Patern and Artognou are named as donors (Smith 1998).The most striking feature for most commentators was the name ‘Artognou’, seen as very similar to that of Arthur.In fact, its only similarities are its first three letters, presumably derived from the same Celtic root.The names are not the same and there has never been any question that ‘Arthur’ was a garbled version of the hero’s real name.In all the sources we have studied, the name has been given only as ‘Arthur’.These sources are independent and none of them gives any hint in all their manuscript variants that a slightly different ‘Art.’ name lay behind that of Arthur.The only name which we can reasonably expect to find on any sixth-century inscription relating to Arthur is Arthur itself, or accepted Latin versions of the same.Whoever he might have been, Artognou was not Arthur.Even if the name had actually been ‘Arthur’, the ‘traditions’ and ‘coincidences’ linking him to Tintagel do not feature him as the ‘father of a descendant of Coll’.Smith suggests a more plausible reading of the stone, which does give a vague Arthurian connection.‘Patern.’ is readily recognisable as the name Paternus, Padarn in Welsh, the name of, for example, the sixth-century saint we encountered previously.The following line reads not ‘of a descendant of Coll’, but ‘of Grandfather Coll’.Now, if Paternus has anything to do with Grandfather Coll, then the likelihood is he is his grandson.The inscription would then read ‘Paternus, descendant of Grandfather Coll made it’.The reappearance of ‘Col.Ficit’ at the bottom suggests that the inscription continued ‘Artognou, descendant of Grandfather Coll made it’, a joint dedication by two members of the same clan.Interestingly enough, a legendary Cornish figure named Coll appears in two triads we have already noted.He is one of the powerful swineherds tending pigs in Cornwall.According to the triad, one of his pigs gave birth to Palug’s cat, killed by Kai in Pa gur.Coll is also one of the three enchanters and appears in the ‘Triad of the Three Great Enchantments’, along with Uther Pendragon.Wainwright made much of the ‘coincidence’ of the Artognou name and Tintagel.A slightly more intriguing coincidence is that of Tintagel, Coll and Uther Pendragon, featuring in local tales of enchantment [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]