Monday, October 28, 2024

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.)

No comments: