Arthurian Place Names of Wales

ing the book straight through could therefore result in some tonal whiplash. Organization aside, Critical Toponymies works well as a textbook. The classic papers, in addition to recent work that highlights current approaches, provides a solid resource for the student not yet familiarized with the literature. The clarity of the onomastic examples sets the book up rather well for use in a course that introduces critical theory and problematizing power relations. While these are complicated concepts to grasp, the illustration of such concepts through place-names could be a very useful tool for an educator. The book could also play a role in a course that traces the history of onomastics – as well, of course, as one explicitly about naming practices.

Antiquarians," mostly the sixteenth through to the early twentieth century. And chapter five, "From Tourists to the Internet," focuses on the continuing fascination with the legend. Lloyd mines all these sources to produce what claims to be the core of the book but is labeled an appendix, a 40-page annotated gazetteer of all the 158 place names that he has identified with an Arthurian connection in Wales.
Considering the importance of Wales in the development of the Arthurian legend, the number of authentic Arthurian place names is sparse. One reason is that in the earliest texts it is difficult to locate with any certainty the places mentioned. And the name Arthur does not appear in the earliest Latin texts. The earliest known reference to an Arthur-like figure is in a work of about 540 called De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain), by Gildas. His theme is that the sins of the Britons brought about the Saxon invasions of the late fifth century. After a series of conflicts, the Battle of Mount Badon led to a British victory and a period of calm. The British army was commanded by one Ambrosius Aurelianus. Mount Badon has been identified with Bath. Ambrosius Aurelianus clearly foreshadows the figure later to be called Arthur.
The first important source to use the name Arthur is Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), a brief history compiled by Nennius possibly as early as 830 but surviving only in manuscripts from the twelfth century. It starts with a fanciful description of the early history of Britain, including the idea that the first to colonize Britain was the eponymous Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas. Toward the end of his history, Nennius describes the Saxon invasions, including a list of 12 battles fought in defense of Britain. The hero of these conflicts was Arthur, not a king but a dux bellorum ("leader of battles"). Although the list includes locations, only two have been satisfactorily identified, and only one is in Wales, Urbes Legiones ("city of the legions"), a Roman fortress that is most likely Caerleon, a modern suburb of Newport. The other is the already-mentioned Mount Badon, where in the battle Arthur alone slew 960 men in one day.
The geographical vagueness of these early sources, Lloyd suggests, "made Arthur into a mysterious heroic figure and … [created] a blank canvas on which a new view of the history of Britain could be portrayed" (14).
The earliest manuscript of Historia Brittonum has been dated to about 1138, but parts of it, especially a section called Mirabilia (Marvels), were probably written much earlier.
Mirabilia lists 18 places in Britain where marvelous events took place; eight of these are in Wales, and two mention Arthur. In the eastern county Brecknockshire there is a hill on which are three rock piles, or cairns. On the top of one, according to Mirabilia, is a stone with the footprint of a dog said to be Arthur's hound, Cafal. If the stone is removed, it always appears in the same spot the next day. At the other site, now in Herefordshire but formerly part of Wales, is a cairn supposed to be the tomb of Amir, the son of Arthur. The marvelous feature of this cairn is that whenever someone measures it, it is never the same, "sometimes six feet, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen" (16).
Several Welsh saints' lives, written in Latin, appeared before Historia Brittonum. They date from the late thirteenth century, and some document sites in Wales associated with Arthur. One, Vita Cadoci (Life of [St] Cadog), is the earliest text to put Arthur himself rather than his dog or his son in Wales. On a hill in Glamorgan a man finds "three vigorous champions, Arthur and his two knights … sitting on top of the aforesaid hill playing with dice" (20). The two knights are Cai and Bedwyr, Sir Kay and Sir Bedivere of later versions. Modern maps identify the hill as Mynydd Fochrhiw, on top of which is a large cairn. Vita Cadoci is the earliest source to refer to Arthur as rex ("king"), noting that he is king of Britannia. Lloyd argues that Britannia in this instance means the area west of Mercia and not the entire island; thus Arthur is King of Wales. In the Vita, Arthur demands cattle from a man he has defeated, but St Cadog turns the cattle into ferns. The site of this miracle was named Tredunnock ("fern homestead"), and a small village with that name still stands on the River Usk just northeast of Caerleon. Lloyd includes the name of this village in his list.
Prior to the 1130s, then, only scattered references to Arthur found their way into Latin documents. It is likely that stories about Arthur circulated among Welsh speakers, although the extant manuscripts in the Welsh language cannot be dated before 1250. Long before that time, in about 1138, a Welshman named Geoffrey of Monmouth had crafted a Latin story that laid down the main elements of the legend. Geoffrey was a twelfth-century clergyman whose Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) claims to be a translation of "a very old book in the British tongue," but most scholars agree that, though he relied on many scattered sources, most of the details in the book come from Geoffrey's imagination. Lloyd says that Geoffrey transformed Arthur, a relatively unimportant warrior, into "the central figure in the most popular legendary cycle of the Middle Ages" (24).
King Arthur's adventures are the most memorable part of Geoffrey's book but far from the only part, since Geoffrey sets out to give the whole story of Britain, from the coming of Brutus to the generations after Arthur. Much of what became part of the familiar story of Arthur is in Geoffrey's book. Through Merlin's magic, Arthur is conceived in Tintagel Castle, and when he is 15 he is chosen king. He defeats the Saxons, the Scots, and the Picts and then conquers Norway and captures Paris. When the emperor of Rome insists that he pay tribute, Arthur marches on Rome. But when he hears that his nephew, Mordred, has taken up with Queen Guinevere (first mentioned here), Arthur abandons his siege of Rome and returns to Britain. In a final battle with Mordred, he is mortally wounded and taken to Avalon to be cured.
Geoffrey's account of Arthur's adventures passed as authentic history for centuries, with few doubters until the seventeenth century. Geoffrey's Historia was widely influential, first in France, where in 1155 a poet named Wace translated large portions of Geoffrey's work into Anglo-Norman. Wace put a good bit of emphasis on Wales but he does not identify any sites there. His lasting contribution was to be the first writer to mention the Round Table. Wace was more interested in writing romance than (pseudo-)history, and that interest continued in the most important French contributor to Arthuriana, Chr etien de Troyes, the first writer to introduce Lancelot and the Grail. Five of Chr etien's poetic romances survive, all composed between 1170 and 1182. Chr etien's first romance, Erec and Enide, places Arthur's court in Cardigan -Geoffrey had placed it at Caerleon. Lloyd suggests that Chr etien puts the court in Cardiff because of a friendship between King Henry II and Lord Rhys, ruler of southwest Wales. Chr etien served in the court of Marie of France, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, thus the step-daughter of Henry II.
Chr etien's fifth romance, Le Conte du Graal, or Perceval, also opens in Wales but mentions no places by name. A naive Welsh ladreally a bumpkinsets out to find King Arthur, who at the time is holding court in Carlisle, in northwest England. Perceval, who is knighted, is the first knight to glimpse the Grail.
The popularity of Chr etien's poetic romances led to a series of prose romances in French. These stories, often called the Vulgate Cycle, are aimed at a popular rather than a courtly audience, and they contributed much to the growing legend of King Arthur and his knights, introducing new elements and elaborating on some of the old ones. The Grail, for example, introduced without explanation by Chr etien, becomes the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of the crucified Christ and then took to Britain for safekeeping. The Vulgate Cycle also develops the stories of Lancelot and Galahad, making Galahad the only knight pure enough to finally find the Grail.
Sir Thomas Malory, whose expansive retelling in the late fifteenth century of the Arthur story defined the legend for the next several centuries, had access to the anonymous Vulgate material, and many parts of Le Morte D'Arthur are direct translations. The French stories do not locate any sites in Wales, but Malory occasionally inserts a name in Wales, such as Caerleon, Cardiff, and Caernarfon, but he places Camelot in Winchester. William Caxton, who edited and printed Malory's work in 1485 and gave it the title Le Morte D'Arthur, seems to disagree. In recounting the physical evidence for the historical existence of King Arthur, including the Round Table in Winchester and Arthur's grave in Glastonbury, he says that the remains of Camelot are in Wales. Lloyd assumes that Caxton was thinking of the Roman ruins in Caerleon. While Caxton seems to believe that the stories of King Arthur are true, it is not clear if Malory believed so, since he treats the material as if it is fiction.
Lloyd's chapter on Welsh texts is his most complex. None of the surviving manuscripts predate the important French texts, the earliest one from about 1250, nearly a century after Chr etien's time and over two centuries after Geoffrey's. Only five Welsh Arthurian romances are extant, and three of these are based on Chr etien's stories.
By the fifteenth century Welsh writers seem to have forgotten Arthur and his possible presence in Wales. "In over 400 years of Welsh poetry," Lloyd concludes, "there is only one possible association of Arthur with an identifiable location, and even that is doubtful" (79). Perhaps part of the reason is that England had kidnapped Arthur and made him a king of England and not of Britain. The Welsh began to look for their own heroes, quasi-historical figures like Cynan, Cadwaladr, and Owain. "Why express your hopes for regaining your sovereignty," Lloyd asks, "around the same heroic figure used by the people who had taken it away … ?" (89).
Malory's makes clear that Arthur is the King of England, not of Britain, but Le Morte D'Arthur came at a time when Arthur's connection to Wales was about to change. It was finished and printed in 1485, the same year that Henry Tudor and the Lancastrians defeated Richard III and the Yorkists at the Battle of Bosworth Field, bringing an end to the Wars of the Roses, and Henry Tudor became Henry VII. He was born in Wales and his paternal ancestry was Welsh. Henry's first son was born in Winchester and named Arthur, with the idea that he would become King Arthur II. Unfortunately, the young Arthur died in 1502, and in 1509 the crown passed to his younger brother, Henry VIII.
In the early sixteenth century, the Welsh began to see Henry VII as the fulfillment of a prophecy that the Welsh nobility would regain the sovereignty lost when Edward I conquered Wales in the late thirteenth century The Tudor period marks the beginning of the English Renaissance and the rise of Humanistic scholarship. In 1508 Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae was printed for the first time, leading to a renewed interest in whether Geoffrey's work was history or fiction. This argument continued in England for the next century and in Wales even longer. Those in favor of the historicity of Arthur began to search Welsh manuscripts for place names that would prove his existence. Scholars found place names they claimed to support the historicity of Arthur. Showing that there was an almost desperate attempt in the post-medieval period to prove that Arthur existed, Lloyd documents 21 Arthurian place names from 1536 to 1597, with another 31 from 1600 through 1697, while from the previous three centuries, from 1100 to 1478, he finds only 27.
Interest in the Arthurian story and in the Middle Ages in general declined in England in the eighteenth century. But in Wales interest continued. Lloyd finds, between 1716 and 1799, at least 24 Arthurian place names. Among these, in Flintshire, is Cist Arthur (Arthur's chest or coffer), documented as of 1737. It is (or was) on Moel Arthur (a moel is a conical hill), which had been noted in 1694. In the 1740s Ffynnon Arthur (Arthur's fountain, in Pembrokeshire) and Llys Arthur (Arthur's hall or palace, in Ceredigion/ Cardigan) appear. And between 1750 and 1764 are four features with the name Coetan Arthur. A coetan is a cromlech, defined in Wales as a flat stone atop two vertical stones, a common prehistoric artifact throughout Celtic lands. At least four other cromlechs bearing the name Coetan Arthur are documented in earlier sources, 1684-1696, and from 1818 to 1922 eight more, for a total of 16. Coetan is apparently a Welsh variant of Quoit: two sites bear the name Arthur's Quoit and another King Arthur's Quoits. If that word sounds familiar, it is the name of a game in which contestants toss rings onto a post. In earlier versions, flat stones were tossed, and since Arthur was sometimes visualized as a giant, some of the stones were believed to have been accurately hurled to create these megalithic monuments. The cover of Lloyd's book features a photograph of the Coetan Arthur near St David's, showing a single upright stone with a long flat stone leaning against it. The large number of features bearing this name, Lloyd suggests, may mean that the two words together formed a generic for any similar feature.
As the eighteenth century came to a close there was renewed interest in Wales history and legend, especially by English poets and travelers. Lloyd's final chapter, "From Tourists to the Internet," points out that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars limited travel on the continent from 1789 until 1815, which led to an increase in the number of English travelers in Wales. In 1757 the popular English pre-Romantic poet Thomas Gray had published "The Bard," a poem about a poet-prophet facing the armies of King Edward I, and in response Some Specimens of Welsh Poetry, intended for English readers was published. Interestingly, none of the poems had the Arthurian story as their subject.
But in the nineteenth century, interest in the Middle Ages and specifically in the Arthurian story increased. Long out of print, Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur was reprinted in 1817. Later in the century, artists in the pre-Raphaelite movement painted scenes from the story, and, most significantly, Tennyson made the story an important part of his poetic career, starting in 1832 with "The Lady of Shalott" and culminating in a full retelling of the whole legend in Idylls of the King, completed in 1885. There were hundreds of other authors and artists who used some part of the Arthurian legend in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
In the years from 1800 until 1898, Lloyd found 41 sites bearing Arthurian place names and another 14 from 1901 until 1938. While the sites were newly identified, the names themselves were repeated several times for similar features, as in Coetan Arthur, Carreg (or Cerrig) Arthur (Arthur's Stone), Ffynnon Arthur (Arthur's fountain or well), and Cadair Arthur (Arthur's Chair, a mountain col or saddle).
Lloyd's final chapter title, "From Tourism to the Internet," seems a bit misleading, but the popularity of the Arthurian legend continues to this day in books, movies, and other media, and there are in Wales several websites guiding tourists to sites supposedly connected to King Arthur. Lloyd acknowledges that the folkloristic aspect of the story may be somewhat strained. The example of King Arthur's throwing large stones does not appear in the earliest tourist guides until after 1830. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, Lloyd says, "a seeming need for elaboration developed and well-known sites acquired folk tales explaining the association with Arthur for the first time" (137). Names of most of the sites documented in the book are of minor sites.
Scott Lloyd has produced a valuable book which probably will not be superseded for a long time. The documentation is full and meticulous, 37 full pages (25% of the narrative text), 772 endnotes. Scattered throughout are photographs, sketches, and maps. A useful feature is a chronological list of names, documenting the first date that a name appears on a specific site. This is cross-referenced to the glossary, which provides brief annotations for each of the names and frequently points to a page in the narrative for a fuller discussion. The glossary is alphabetical within each of the 13 historical counties in Wales (rather than the more recent political divisions), and in each case the nearest community is listed. As mentioned earlier, precise locations are given using the British National Grid.
The book is clearly but densely written and sometimes assumes knowledge that the average reader may not have. He seldom translates Welsh generics into English. He also sometimes hastily summarizes the texts, and many of those he brings in offer little or nothing in the way of place names. However, the book is a wonderful introduction to obscure texts and scholarship dealing with the story of King Arthur, while downplaying or ignoring more familiar versions. Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur is mentioned on just a few pages, Tennyson's Idylls of the King on just three, and T. H. White's The Once and Future King not at all. But these and many more popular versions have little or nothing of onomastic interest to offer.

University of South Dakota (Emeritus)
THOMAS J. GASQUE