The True Location of King Arthur’s Court of Gelliwig in Cerniw
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
- Welsh tradition strongly associates King Arthur with the royal court of Gelliwig in a region called Cerniw. Where was this place really?
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Hi caleb, yes the confusion lies really in the spelling, yet Cornwall is Kernow, whereas Gelliwig lies in those lands between Cardiff and Newport known as Cerniw. And as you say its a question of basic geography in relation to sources we have, alongside various placenames. Also the great 'boar' in the mabinogi specifically tracks across southern Wales coming across from Ireland. I believe this ' boar' and its 9 piglets are this great army led by "the king of the Affrikans" Gormund, remnants of the Vandal nation that would go on to found Mercia.
Well done Caleb. It is high time that someone made this clear.
Wilson & Blackett research that is.
Thanks for this. In The Keys to Avalon, Blake and Lloyd give a whole revised geography of the Arthurian material showing that it is confined to Wales and has been wrongly mapped onto Britain as a whole. This includes identifying Kernyw with the area around the Llyn peninsula and things like Ceint being not Kent but Gwent and Llundain being not London but Ludlow.
Good to see others doing good research and adding in common sense. Why after skirmishes/battls would you then ride presumably heavily fatigued 150 miles to recuperate only then to return to protect your kingdom?
I would suggest that Cerniw or Cernyw was what the Gower Peninsula was once known as, we know that after the Romans left Britain, what is now Wales started sectioning off into 3 regions essentially the “Kingdoms” of “North Wales”, “South Wales” and “Mid-South Wales”
What came to be known as “Mid-South Wales” in latter traditional materials was more often known as Cernyw in the early days.
A fairly small region which according to tradition was founded out of the western chunk of the once Silurian territory in the early 5th century by Eugenius (the son of Magnus Maximus according to later claims)
This was west of Gwent and Glywysing and was what we know today as the Gower Peninsula.
Pasgen ap Urien was King of Gwyr around early 6th Century.
Gwyr is the Welsh for the Gower so suggesting that the Gower was a Kingdom at one point and maybe what was once Cernyw
Why is this the most likely location, well the Gower Peninsula is directly west of Gwent and Glywysing, Gwyr was once a Kingdom, so a small Kingdom in the Mid-South of what is now Wales, as the early traditions claim Cernyw was and it is on the south coast so if the Mercians (The Boars) where heading towards Cernyw (the Gower Peninsula) they would have to pass through Gwent and Glywysing and King Arthur territory and pushing them down would be pushing them into the Severn Sea (Bristol Channel) and for the most convincing part, it’s the name itself, Cernyw.
Cernyw means horn land, land shaped like a horn
The root is Carn, which with the addition of yw causes a vowel infection, so the A of Carn becomes an E.
Carn means a prominence; a horn; a heap; a hilt of a weapon; the hoof of an animal.
Yw means is; be; it is
So in context of naming a place Cernyw, you are saying it is a horn, so in the context of land, the land is horned shaped and the Gower Peninsula is horn shaped, hence Peninsula.
This also applies to Cornwall however there is a slight difference with Cornwall is that is Corniu, this is significant because the Cornish did not change their alphabet like the Welsh did so the i didn’t change to the y like in Welsh and the u didn’t change to the w like in Welsh, so despite them being the exact same word, meaning the exact same thing, because the Welsh orthography changed (numerous times) over the millennia, this is why we know Cerniw/Cernyw refers to a place in Wales as opposed to Cerniu/Kerniu in Cornish.
Cerniw is often also applied to Cornwall from a Welsh perspective and so often when people see the word Cerniw they automatically associate it with Cornwall not understanding the meaning and application of the term and that it could be used for any peninsula not just Cornwall, Cornwall just retained that name.
In Welsh/Brythonic Gelliwig would have been a fairly common name for a place at one point as it was toponymic name but no longer the case as a “Gelliwig” would no longer be a thing as time went on and habitational practices changed.
Gelli itself is still a very common term used in names of places in Wales though.
Gelli is the mutated version of Celli, the soft mutation of C is G and this G is not the same as the standard G despite it looking the same letter, they are distinct letters and the mutated version of C has only been depicted as a G letter since the Middle Ages and this will crop up later with the second part of the name(Gwîg)
Gelliwig is a compound of Celli + Gwîg
Celli means an grove; a bower; an arbour
Gwîg means a strait place; a corner nook or angle; a cove; a small retreat or opening in the woods in which Britons (Welsh) generally built their hamlets and hence traditionally used the term to denote a fortress/place of security/town which was hidden away in an opening amongst the trees, making it more inconspicuous.
These were more common back in the day because woods and forests were more plentiful and the need to be more hidden away was greater.
Over the years it came to be a general term for a settlement, a town/village/hamlet and also a street/alley owing to its use as a term for a strait.
It also, in one of those strange instances of associations with the actual meaning, also came to be a term for a wood/forest/grove because of the fact the term was used to describe a settlement in a clearing within a wood/forest, the term often got wrongly applied to the wood/forest as opposed to the entire thing, which lead to having words like coedwig for a forest/wood where coed means wood/timber/trees, so literal translation being a wood of wood or a forest of trees etc
I don’t know if you can get a wood/forest of something other than wood/trees but it’s kind of like the River Avon or Afon Afon, the River River
Gwîg is where we get the -wick/-wich in English
-wick being an alternate form of -wich which in Middle English was -wic and in Old English was -wīc and was adopted into Old English from the Welsh (g)wîg, (g)wîg ending in the Welsh letter G that was once a C, it became a C in the Middle Ages which is why you see variations of names like Meuric and Tewdric for Meurig and Tewdrig for example so when wīc was adopted into Old English it would have still been spelt wîc in Welsh or in the transitional period at least.
I should add that I am not claiming that the Welsh word wasn’t adopted from say Latin, I just know that the “establishment” narrative is probably that it came from some Germanic word which is spelt and pronounced differently, be that a deliberate narrative or just the typical refusal to use Welsh as a reference language when deciding on the etymology of words, like the native language of Britain would have absolutely no influence of the English language, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans couldn’t possibly adopt words of the natives of the land.
We know for example the Warwick was at one point surrounded by dense woodlands so it would have been a settlement within an opening amongst the woods/forest which is what the word gwîg meant originally and the War part means a weir.
I can’t find any name for “Warwick” prior to it becoming Warwick in the 10 century, however we do know that a settlement did exist prior to it being named Warwick so I am guessing they adopted the existing name into the new name which is why it ends in wick and not burh which technically it would have been, if being a typically named Anglo-Saxon fortified settlement, which is what Warwick was built by Æthelflæd to be.
The river that flows through Warwick being the River Avon so they retained the Welsh name of the river too, so for an ancient Brythonic settlement, it would have been an ideal site for a Gwîg, an opening in a forest with a river flowing through it and with the tradition of naming places toponymically, it would almost certainly contained the word Gwîg in it’s name.
So with all that in mind, Gelliwig would be somewhere between Mercia and the Gower Peninsula and in what is now the Gwent/South Glamorgan/Mid Glamorgan area of Wales in order for them to be forced south and into the Severn Sea to be possible.
So if as you say, Llanwytherin was once called Gelliwig, then this would indeed fit those parameters geographically and would have a good claim to be the location of the Gelliwig in the story.
This is a very informative comment. I would add that there is a tradition of palace of Arthur in Gower which is recorded in the Life of St Cenydd.
@@orgolwg is that the reference to King Arthur’s court in Aber Llwchwr?
@@Penddraig7 so the wording is that St Cenydd was born about a mile from King Arthur's Palace in Gower. No more than that, but the Llwchwr area has been suggested.
You're not the first to figure this out, Wilson & Blackett were. But thanks for the reminder.