“Ym ty ny doi.
Onysguaredi”.(“Into my house you shalt not come/Unless you prevail”).
- From “Pa Gur yv y Porthawr”, a 12th-Century Welsh poem
Dangerous Thinking
There are things that we know that get filed away in our brains, all the factlets and the trivia we absorb, that tend to go on to simply rest quietly in the drawers we’ve placed them in. Our imagination, that reluctant librarian, whittled down to being a jaded functionary by years of disappointment, will sometimes uncover some of the more amazing things. What’s more is that, on very rare occasions, that wizened old librarian will take two of the better old files, mix them up, and create something excellent. Sometimes this can be a genuine ‘Eureka!’ moment, sometimes just frivolous nonsense.
Annoyingly, what can seem at first to be a great discovery may in fact fail to pan out. Worryingly, the same phenomenon often leads to an individual refusing to let go of their faux ‘Eureka!’ moment, believing that each subsequent action based on it is equally as awesome and, thus, valid, or real.
Such wilful egoism often breeds other lapses in judgment: “This idea is so good” is, at first, more a wish than a belief, never mind a fact. If told to oneself enough, it becomes a pseudo-reality. Then the already spreading tendrils of faulty ‘information’ that burst forth from the original failure tap into regular, established thoughts elsewhere in your head (this, by the way, as also at the root of the dreaded ‘conspiracy theory’). Failure, when bolstered by the will to succeed, or the will to be right, or to look smart, will breed further failure.
Adherence to the scientific method, it seems, has very little worth when we really, really want a thing to be true.
NB: the term ‘Conspiracy theory’ is used to discredit critical thinking and probing questions just as often as it is an apt descriptor of the wildly off-kilter version of what is described above (it’s a bit of a misnomer anyway: they are usually more of a ‘conspiracy hypothesis’, but you know what I mean).
The internal tyranny of a failed hypothesis is a hard thing to break. One way that I’ve found useful is to approach such dot-joining bad ideas with an initial sense of care: to treat the new idea as though it were an unexploded WWII bomb, followed by letting the idea be judged by others once “made safe” (to be stress tested for logical errors, that is). This approach lives alongside the more direct, awfully-worded, yet perpetually useful tip offered to me by a veteran BBC Comedy writer:
“Get comfortable with killing your babies before they learn to talk. Once it says ‘Daddy?’, you’ll never let it go, allowing the little demon to eat your whole project, joke by joke”.
- An excellent comic who had some weird metaphors
This, I find, has only worked with writing, you’ll be VERY glad to read! With other sorts of ideas, I have found that my approach works better: prevention is much better than infanticide.
So how does one take two bits of radical info, carefully test its stability, then put it out to the ether for judgement?
I’ll show you; let’s do it in real time, right now!
Seeds
I was listening to a video by the excellent history YouTuber Cambrian Chronicles as I was driving the other day. It had auto-played from some other video that had pumped through my car’s speakers on the long road down to Pembrokeshire. It was about the various animals now extinct on the island of Great Britain (link to it here), and where they feature in our mythology/topography. After the video’s first section, the subject reminded me of another video I’d recently watched (embedded below) by another great historian online, John White of Crecganford .
For those of you who haven’t watched the video, White highlights the fascinating phenomenon of taboo words in the ancient world. It boils down to: unless you want to summon something, don’t say its name. One such thing that ancient northern Europeans avoided summoning, perhaps above all else, was a bear.
I don’t know if you’ve been to Siberia, but there are a few bears knocking about up there.
I don’t know if you’ve been to southern Portugal, but bears are rather thin on the ground in those parts.
Considering these facts, it is no wonder that the northernmost peoples of Eurasia don’t have a specific word for our ursine neighbours, relying on euphemisms. Considering that saying a name may summon the named thing, this is perfectly logical within the confines of a specific religio-cultural language game. Here are some examples:
‘Bear’:
English = brown, ‘Bjorn’: Old Norse = brown
Proto Indo-European word for ‘brown’ = *bher.
You can see a patter here. But other cultures picked a different “nickname”:
‘Medved’: Russian = honey eater, ‘Niedzwiedz’: Polish = honey eater
Proto Indo-European (re-construction of) ‘honey eater’ = *mhedu- and h₁ed-.
In Baltic languages, the euphemism for the bear is “the hairy/shaggy one” (‘lokys’ in Lithuanian). Everything except the animal’s proper name.
So what was it?
It seems to have been “*rkso-” meaning something like “the destroyer” (the closest word to retain this meaning is “rakshas” in Sanskrit, meaning ‘harm’).
Most other European languages, the ones from places where there were comparatively fewer hairy monsters, or even no bears at all (and, when there were some bears, probably of a smaller variety by the time Indo-European herdsmen came to the continent), they take their words from the Proto Indo-European original.
The Italians have their “orso”, the French have “ours(e)”, the Greeks have “aρκούδα” (arkoúda). All of these stem from the original word spoken by the farming settlers who populated Europe thousands of years ago. The northern cousins of this newly established family seem to have gotten tired of saying the word, only to have their homes raided and children eaten by these hairy, brown, honey-hunting destroyers.
Understandably so, I might add.
So they forged a taboo. Without calling out for them by using their name, they reasoned that the bear would not come. They still did, of course, given that bears don’t actually appear if you say their true name. But with a taboo against using the name, well, now you needn’t blame old Gustav for mentioning a bear’s true name the week before it came and ate Hildegard.
Germination
But it was the consideration of all this in the context of my own culture that forced the dangerous ‘Eureka!’ moment out of the corners of my mind. You see, as with our Mediterranean cousins, the Britons (today, the Cymry - or ‘the Welsh’) have the word “arth” meaning “bear”, the same root as the romance languages .
The other factlet bobbing around in the sea of trivia in my head: the word arth is, according to most academics in relevant disciplines, the root of the name Arthur. A rather auspicious name in our mythos, to be sure (Arthur probably either means: the ‘Bear Man’ - from “arth” - bear, and “gwr” - man; or alternatively, ‘the Bear King’ -*Arto-rīg-ios, shortened to “arth” - bear, and “rhi” - king).
So… (deep breath)
does this REALLY mean that the name of the legendary warlord of the Britons, the very hero who won many battles against the invading Saxons in our mythological cycle, saving his fellow Cymry , nearly ridding the island of this scourge, until he eventually died, prophesised to return and vanquish our enemies once and for all some day (that’d be the modern-day English… sorry, chaps - there’s no voting when there’s a re-incarnated warrior king involved), thus saving the Brythonic people in our hour of need…
is named after a creature that the Germanic people, including the Anglo-Saxon invaders of course, flat out refused to say out loud because of their taboo borne from an all-consuming fear that it may actually appear?
The name that originally means ‘The Destroyer’?
Hmm.
“How very interesting”, chirped my pattern-seeking neocortex on noticing this. “Run with this. Go! GO!!!”
“Careful now", answered my aforementioned technique for new ideas. “Better ask an expert or two first”.
I shouldn’t claim that this is the case just because I see a (ABSOLUTELY AWESOME LOOKING) pattern. It is prudent to point that our hero, Arthur, was himself was prone to such foolish lapses into hasty assumptions:
“You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
- Dennis the Peasant, from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975)
Bloom
So, in that spirit:
What do you think historians, linguists, lexicographers, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, and folklorists?
Am I on to something when I suggest that Arthur may have been named for ‘bears’ as a taunt, or a grim promise, from the Welsh who invented him, aimed at our mortal enemies/now-very-much-appreciated-and-beloved-neighbours?
Does this give credence to the idea that he did not exist as an historical figure, rather providing another evidentiary point that he is an amalgamation of many such warring heroes (Caractacus, Ambrosius Aurelianus, Riotamus, et al), with the tales woven about this Terminator-like warrior designed to put the fear of God (or, at least, a bear attack) in the enemy? A vengeful king whose name could not be uttered aloud, lest it summon him - does any of this seem plausible?
Or is my conjecture just too fanciful, a leap far too ambitious to possibly survive the drop? Or has it been proffered before (I have had a look - I don’t think so, but would love to know otherwise)?
Most importantly, how does one go about testing this beyond the basic logical premise I have outlined?
Feel free to chime in on this, or to use it as a starting point on your own research journey. Or, as I will be doing it, bring it up as an interesting aside when telling one of the many great tales that include Arthur.
At any rate, food for thought at least.
Drizzled with honey, of course.