Who was King Arthur's mother? 1/3

(And we're back to things Arthurian.)

 

Igerna.

 

No one knows where she came from.

They say she’s of the fairy folk, 

blown in on the wind,

washed up on the strand, 

though he can’t imagine her 

surprised and shipwrecked on the beach.

She would have glided over the wave tops

unruffled by the tempest, using 

her drowning companions as stepping stones. 

Rumour says Ireland, or the Western Isles,

but where family is defining,

she’s no one’s daughter. No one at court

remembers when she first arrived, 

nor how. She might have been a slave. 

But she had captivated Gorlois

and that prim, moral man, 

was soon creeping to her bed at night

while his wife was sleeping solitary in his.

                                                                        From ‘The Fabled Third’ (To be published in 2025).

 

It’s perhaps significant that while ‘who was Arthur’s father’ has been the subject of scholarly dispute (see previous posts on Uther), his mother seems to have created much less interest. In R.S.Loomis’s encyclopaedic ‘Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages’ (1959) she didn’t even rate an entry in the index. Blackwell’s huge ‘Companion to Arthurian Literature’ (2009) gives her three entries but none of them is more than a passing references to her role in the story. 

 

In Culhwch and Olwen, ‘the oldest Arthurian tale’, the story turns on Arthur’s relationship with Culhwch. By inference, Arthur’s unnamed mother would seem to be a daughter of Amlawd Wledic, and she has sisters and brothers.

 

Whether Geoffrey of Monmouth knew any of this is debatable. An online search  produces various sites that confidently declare that Ygerne or Igerna is from the Welsh Eigyr.  It would take a better linguist than me to disprove this, but I’m not convinced. In the ‘Vulgate version’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth (hereafter GOM) she is Igerna. In his exhaustive study of names in GOM J.S.P Tatlock had nothing to say about her name except that it had only been found as a male name, Iger or Igner in Brittany. 

In Laȝamon's Brut there is a passing reference to her mother and others in her family, but as it’s not in his immediate source, it could just be a conventional compliment. 

Realistically, she is not a character in the modern sense. She has a narrative function: to give birth to Arthur, and that’s all you need to know. But having said that, it’s worth tracking her from Geoffrey, via Wace, to Laȝamon. It is only in the latter that she speaks. 

(IN the next post: Geoffrey tells the story and Wace blackens Uther's good name.)

The Battle of Hastings October 1066

These words worked the long day Harold died,
when Norman French swept up the slope of Senlac Hill

and English grammar broke and bled into the dusk.

Harold’s rotted in his unmarked grave,

but the tattered remnants of his word hoard

have colonised the globe. Linguistic vertigo:

fall and find yourself, there in the shield wall,

beating battle-axe on war-board, chanting

“Out! Out! Out!” as the chain-mailed tide,

grey as the Channel, flows up the hill.

From 'Lady Godiva and Me.'

Translating Culhwch and Olwen; The Great Boar Hunt and David Jones

The hunting of the great boar, Twrch Trwyth, in Culhwch and Olwen is a magnificent piece of writing. 

Jones' The Hunt is not so much a translation as a response, and it too is magnificent.

I have finished the first draft of my translation. Olwen and Culhwch are sleeping together, Ysbadadden's shaved and mutilated head is on a stick, possibly visible from their bedroom window, and no one could tally the men who have died to bring about this ending. 

Arthur gathered the hosts, 
of the three Islands of Britain,
and the three adjacent islands, 
and of Brittany, Normandy, 
and the Summer country
 

And let it be proclaimed,

the hunting of the hog,

has been sung by David Jones

and neither Taliesin nor Aneirin

nor Dafydd ap Gwilym himself

The Early Bards, 

the Not So Early bards, 

the Poets of the Princes, 

the Poets of the Well to Do

the keepers of old lore, or

the skilled translators of his vanished tongue,

(loving this story in elegant prose translations)

nor modern experts in the intricate cynghanedd 

nor any poet of that other language,

could sing it better. 

 

My recording of The Hunt by David Jones is here:

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/4/2/david-jones-the-hunt

 

There’s a recording of David Jones reading The Hunt with a short introduction here:

https://bebrowed.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/david-jones-reads-the-hunt/