02-14-2010, 08:51 PM
Quote:Oh! And I forgot!
Robert is right on the moola. By the time we get the first mention of "Arthur," three hundred years have passed. Nennius was recording legend, not history. We have no sign, anywhere, that an "Arthur" existed. Perhaps someone called the "bear" did. The probability that two units of Taifali landed in Britain is a much better bet. What we are inferring is that they probably didn't use lances but did use laces. 8)
Here are my 2 cents on the matter. I personally find no reason to doubt that Arthur was a real man who lived in the late 5th-early 6th century AD and was victorious in a certain number of battles against the Saxons - maybe he fought 12 battles, maybe he didn't - it's impossible to say now, barring the discovery of new texts or (by some miracle) inscriptions.
The HB collects much that is legendary, but also much that is genuine history - why should the Arthurian battle list be assigned to legend just because Arthur became a popular subject of the poets and story tellers centuries later? If Arthur is legendary, why should the HB's Vortimer be accepted as an historical person, when he has no more documentation to support him than Arthur does?
Anyway, it is certain that Arthur's name did not simply mean "The Bear" (that would simply be Art in Archaic Welsh, not Artur, as we find in the HB, et al.). The exact etymology of Arthur's name is complex and probably not suitable for a message board such as this. If the name is a loan from Latin Artorius (which, itself, seems to have been a loan from Messapic, a non-Italic language spoken in Italy and related to Illyrian, or perhaps Etruscan, a non-Italic and non-Indo-European language), then any etymological speculation involving bears is rather irrelevant, as the original meaning of the name in Messapic (or Etruscan) is not likely to have survived once it entered Latin, no less centuries later when it was borrowed by Brittonic speakers. It's all somewhat of a silly game, anyway - if Arthur was a real man, what relevance is the original meaning of his name to anything?
Christopher Gwinn
