Born Under the Sign of the Little Bear

THE PENDRAGWNS

OF THE ISLES

BY SEAMAS O’RI

VOLUME II

BOOK IV

BORN UNDER THE SIGN OF THE LITTLE BEAR,

THE LOVE STORY OF UTHR AND EIGYR

BOOK V

THE UPBRINGING,

THE TALE OF GYNER GRAYBEARD ABOUT HIS FOSTER-SON

BOOK VI

HARK YE UNBELIEVERS, IHAVE COME!

THE TALE OF THE SWORD IN THE STONE

BOOK VII

ALETTER TO MY DEAR WIFE
* INTRODUCTION *

Uthr Pendragwn is the Welsh spelling for the name of King Arthur's father. He received his appellation of Pendragwn meaning 'Head Dragon' from the nickname of his elder brother, Emrys Ben-Eur, known to British history as Ambrosius Aurelian. Emrys was a Romanized Celt who took up the fallen banner of his people and led them in the defense of their nation against the foreign invaders who sought their lands, wealth and lives. According to St. Gildas, Emrys was the greatest and most worthy war-leader of his day and surpassed all his successors in glory and honor. Thus, Uthr had to follow in his brother's

larger-than-life footsteps that he could to his regret never quite fill.

Unlike his noble-hearted brother, Uthr (Uther Pendragon in English) is remembered as a brutish man's man, an autocrat claiming to exercise absolute power. In legend, he even went so far as to wage a terrible war to win another man's wife by whom he eventually had Arthur. Thus, he is the Lord of Misrule, a mighty warrior ill suited to govern a great kingdom wisely; and only the statecraft of his late brother's by-blow, Emrys Myrddin the Prophet of the Goddess, could keep him from running amuck. Of course, Myrddin is the ancient Welsh name of the legendary Merlin.

The first book then is the story of Uthr's illicit love affair and the conception of the young hero to come by the most enchanting woman of the age. She is Eigyr the Unparalleled Beauty, and Myrddin would play a major role in bringing the two together in order to get a son by them whom he knew would be the young hero to come.

The second story as told by Gyner Graybeard involves the last years of Uthr Pendragwn's reign and its aftermath. At the instigation of Myrddin, the infant son of Uthr has been placed into the care of Gyner and his pious wife, Non (St. Nonna), Myrddin's maternal aunt and the mother of Dewi Sant (St. David, the patron saint of Wales). Uthr has given up his son, because Myrddin has told him he will soon die and if his son is not taken away to safety he, too, will die at the hands of those who would have Uthr's fallen scepter.

Through the eyes of this self-righteous old warrior, the events of his day and the sins of Uthr that someday are bound to be visited upon his young son are opened and examined like bloody wounds oozing with poisonous pus that corrupts the flesh. In his honesty, Gyner spares no one, for he is a simple man, faithful and true, that kind who knows not how to lie or be less than totally frank. Therefore, he is a bit of a self-admitted bore; but as the

foster-father of the young hero to come, his story is important, for it is under his tutelage that Uthr's boy will grow into manhood and become the hero whose legend will transcend time. Gyner's teachings, then, will form the bedrock from which the young hero shall spring onto center stage, which is to say in order to understand his young charge one must first understand the old warrior who will be responsible for raising him.

In the following book, the young hero to come announces his arrival to claim his birthright. Narrating his own story, he tells how stouthearted Gyner Graybeard raised him to be noble and true and how his lifelong relationship with Gyner's heroic son, Gai the Fair, was forged in fire to make an unbeatable team. Among his tales, he relates how he slays the monstrous afanc, a prehistoric creature, to gain the first step in the rite of manhood and, then, his crowning achievement of how he alone is able to draw the Sword of Power from the stone in order to ascend the royal cader of his dead father. Using this sword from the stone, he wins his first victory and with it the head of his enemy to complete by ancient custom his passage to manhood.

In this sullen land, once called the Island of the Mighty, Celtic warriors carried the Cult of the Severed Head to pitiless extents. On pagan altars in forest glens, votaries brought their grisly battle-trophies, the heads of the vanquished and live captives, to be committed to the flames as offerings to their god of war, Camulos, who gave his name to Camelot.

The Celts also had a stag cult, and the white stag prominently featured in Arthurian literature would appear to have been the totem of this particular cult that was apparently dedicated to the antlered-god Cernunnos. In Celtic mythology, Cernunnos was the consort of the moon-goddess. She oversaw the reincarnation of human souls brought to her moon for safekeeping until they could be reborn again. Thus, she ruled supreme over this cycle of rebirth, and Cernunnos served her; and as depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a Celtic

artifact found in Denmark and belonging to the La Tene period of circa 100 BC, he is enthroned in the cross-legged lotus position, holding a human sacrifice in each hand, sacrifices not to him but to the goddess both he and mankind served.

Of course, Cernunnos was more to the goddess than merely her consort. In reality, he was her sacred-king; and like royal princes selected by matriarchs to be their sacred-kings, Cernunnos was also sacrificed in his time. First castrated and then cut up into pieces, he was placed into the goddess' cauldron representing her womb, cooked and reborn as a god again in the common regeneration cycle found in one form or another in the mythology of almost all Aryan tribes everywhere they went.

At Carnac in Brittany, it was Cernunnos who raised the sacred stones, the finest collection of dolmens in the entire world. His cult was so strong among the Bretons the Church canonized him as St. Cornely to win over his worshippers. Corineus, the legendary founder of Cornwall, is thought to have been the first to bring his rites to Britain, establishing his shrine on St. Michael's Mount in MountBay, showing how important he must have been for the Church to have replaced him with one of the four archangels. Among the Gaels of Ireland, he was known as Cromm Cruaich; and until the coming of St. Patrick, he ruled supreme over the annual sacrifices at Mag Slecht, the 'Plain of Adoration', in CountyCavan, where it's said the people returned one-third of their newborn children into the god's keeping before his gold-plated idol.

Although there can be no doubt human sacrifice certainly did play a role in Cernunnos' rites, it must be remembered the Celts believed in their reincarnation under the goddess' watchful care. Thus, her consort and his cult presided over this process of furnishing souls for her protection before their rebirth; and the great nemetons where he held sway were the most sacred religious centers in all the land, because the souls of his votaries departed this world for her moon from these sites making them of extreme importance in the Celts' religious practices which unquestionably formed the core of their

culture and society.

The exact relationship of the White Stag Cult to the Cult of the Severed Head is purely a matter of speculation. A possible conjecture would indicate they were rival Celtic cults, the former representing the powers of light and the latter the powers of darkness, in the eternal struggle between good and evil and that they battled against one another for the souls of the Brotherhood of the Blessed Horn, the secret fellowship established to protect the most holy of holies, the goddess' Horn of Plenty. This horn, sometimes pictured as a cauldron and later as a grail, represents the White Goddess, the Goddess of Prosperity and Abundance. She was the Celtic as well as the universal Great Mother, and the solar gods, the powers of light, were her children, including the moon-goddess, her revered daughter.

Here, then, in the darkest, deepest recesses of this time long past, lives the secret of a man who came to stem the onrushing tide of foreign invaders. At first, his name was given to be Arthgwyr, meaning 'Bear Man'; but he eventually would become known as Arthfawr Pendragwn, the most noted sacred-king of the ancient Brythons.

Whether severed heads formed any part of the worship of Camulos, or whether Arthfawr propitiated the Celtic war-god with human sacrifices on the field of battle as had his ancestors, is not entirely proven. However, the favorite of the god for whom his own castle is named, readily won the hallowed aspect of a demigod, making his dream of magnifying the glory of the arms of Brythain all the easier due to the fear his reputation instilled in his enemies, who, indeed, might well have feared for their heads from this Celtic

sacred-king.

As the rightful bearer of the Sword of Power, Caledfwlch, later known as Excalibur, the Pendragwn of the Isles asserted his divine and indefeasible right to the dominion of the known world, in like manner as Attila the Scourge of God had previously claimed upon the acquisition of the Sword of Mars. Much in the fashion of Attila, the vehemence with which Arthfawr brandished Caledfwlch compelled the multitude to earnestly believe he and he alone could wield the sacred sword with his ever-invincible arm.

As both the cauldron and the Horn of Plenty represented the yoni of the goddess, so this sword was of itself the emblem of the god's lingam. This was the source of its power, for surely it came from the father of all the solar deities and served only his chosen vicegerent here on earth, the only one who could draw it forth from the stone, another yoni symbol of the goddess.

But the fact the Saesnaegs or Saxons were only temporarily halted in their conquest of the Island of the Mighty remains as the sole evidence of Arthfawr's existence. Indeed, the dreaded Brythonic ruler who momentarily stemmed the onrushing tide, however great he was, fell, and his people and the gods whom they worshipped were scattered like leaves driven before the wind, thus passing into the twilight borne down by the pagan sword of Woden and the hammer of Donar.

Graeme Fife has eloquently written: "Nostalgia for a lost but promised-again glorious age lingers as deep in the human heart as ever. Love may go wrong, be inconstant, be less than what it might be, yet romance does not die."[1] As Mr. Fife has written, Arthfawr's legend does in fact supply the nostalgia and romance that speaks to us, peppered by battles and glory, but by tragic love and true love most of all.

Today, it seems we need to believe in a time better than our own, a time when men were men, and women were women, a lost time, a time we might wish to return to; and maybe, we shall, for, like Jesus, Arthfawr promised to come back one day, if only we believe. Is not this belief the very heart of the nostalgia and romance alluded to by Mr. Fife?

One wonders what Arthfawr would think if he did return to this modern world. Perhaps, as in Rhonabwy's dream, he would say of us in sad disappointment: "To think that men of this kind shall come to rule this land, after those who ruled it before them."

Yes, how he might lament that the perpetuation of his memory and of his glorious deeds were left, ironically, to the seed of the subsequent races to hold sway over his Island and to writers from distant lands, some unknown in his own day. How he might blanch to learn the name of the once and future Pendragwn has become but a footnote in history, believed by most to be the name of a mythical character, or, at best, one of those half legendary, half historical men exalted only in fiction. How he might feel sorrow to discover he had left behind an acephalous nation, a draughty mausoleum, "where conquest has been misnamed empire and desolation is called peace."

The narrator of the last book in the volume is Gai the Fair, also called 'the Giant' due to his enormous stature. He is Arthfawr's elder foster-brother. Together, they unify the people of the Island of Brythain to fight against their common foe, the foreign invaders come to kill and displace them. Like his own father, Gai is a stouthearted warrior who becomes the first champion of the Order of the Round Table, founded by his little brother, Arthfawr, whom Gai continues to call by his earlier name of Arthgwyr. As Pendragwn of the Isles, Arthfawr aims to bring law and order to the realm, with Gai as his Champion of Champions.

Many years after the events have actually taken place, Gai writes a letter to his wife, telling her all about the restoration of Caer Camulos, known to us as Camelot, and about the early adventures and battles which catapulted Arthfawr to fame and glory. In this tale, Gai paints a very personal and complete picture of his beloved brother, including his faults as well as his good side, and does the same for himself, even confessing to his wife about a tragic love affair he himself had had before their marriage.

As in the entire series, the ancient names, whether Celtic or Latin, are used, because those are the names the narrators would have known. Therefore, a very useful companion book contains a Dramatis Personae and Glossary as well as a few maps. The Dramatis Personae lists all the characters, by family or other category and with family ancestries where applicable, and enclosed in brackets after the characters' names are some of the many other names by which they have been known in the medieval romances. The Dramatis Personae also contains short descriptions for each of the gods in the Celtic pantheon, explaining their individual powers and where possible giving comparisons to those Greek and/or Roman gods who might be considered as their counterparts. And for those readers desiring further information regarding people, places and things, a full Glossary of all the Celtic and Roman place-names and terms used and which might be unknown to the reader is a part of the companion book, including the aforementioned maps to help the reader locate sites, tribal territories, and other designations.

Seamas O'Ri

Miami, Florida, 2000

BOOK IV

BORN UNDER THE SIGN OF THE LITTLE BEAR,

THE LOVE STORY OF UTHR AND EIGYR

CHAPTER I

* THE PROPHET'S VISION *

Of my words herein transcribed, I haven't striven to speak of events unknown to

me firsthand, nor have I taken information from any other source, except my own

personal involvement and eye witness recollection of the occurrences making up

a part of my own life's story. Others may give a different account of these

events as they themselves remember them, but if you wish to hear the true story

from the principal participant himself, then, harken onto my words and learn

the truth from the mouth of him who knows better than anyone else what really

happened.

I am Uthr ap Bendigeid Custennin and I sit upon the cader of Bryth the

Dardan. My reign has been fraught by an accursed war, and grief, death's first

attendant, marches across my domain, wailing countless threnodies in lament of

the slain.

Fields lay fallow, orphans and widows starve to death, and carrion birds

feed on the fathers, husbands, sons and brothers who'll never come home again.

The spirit of my people is wavering. They want an end to this overlong war,

and little independent revolts against it have sprung up everywhere,

threatening to topple my hard-won imperium into the dust.

The situation is quite unhappily plain: I can't hope to retain my

subjects' respect or their obedience, since one goes hand in hand with the

other, if I can't conclude a speedy and just treaty of peace. If I fail, my

rivals for the laurels of Brythain will undoubtedly challenge me, and I could

lose the title of Pendragwn--the imperial dignity I created from my late

brother's appellation for the owrelairdship of the Brythonic Isles.