Научная работа моего ученика 11 класса Дедегкаева Солтана на республиканском конкурсе молодых исследователей.
творческая работа учащихся по английскому языку (11 класс) на тему

                         XII Региональный конкурс молодых исследователей

                                                    «Ступень в науку»

                                                Секция : Зарубежная лингвистика

                                              Тема работы: «Ossetian background of the legend of  King Arthur»

                                                 Автор работы:

                                                 Дедегкаев Солтан Артурович

                                                  Место выполнения работы :                            

                                                   МБОУ СОШ  № 26,11 класс,

                                                   г.Владикавказ

                                                  Научный руководитель :

                                                  Тибилова Индиана Борисовна ,

                                                   педагог высшей квалификационной категории

                                                  Владикавказ,2014-2015  

                                                                                                                                         

                                                              CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………..с.4-5

Chapter 1.Theoritical part……………………………………………………………………………с.6-11

THEORETICAL CONCEPT OF MYTHOLOGY……………………………………………………с.6-8

DEALING WITH THE HISTORICAL KING ARTHUR……………………………………………..с.8

Geoffrey Ashe’s Riothamus theory………………………………………………………………….с.8-11  

Chapter 2. CAUCASUS CONCEPTION OF ARTHURIAN CYCLE ……………………………..с.11-12

 Chapter 3. Littleton and Malcor’s Iranian theory……………..……………………………………с.13-14

The Arthur – Batraz Connection…………………………………………………………………….с.15-18

The Lancelot – Batraz Connection…………………………………………….…………………….с.18-21

The Round Table of King Arthur and the Round table of Nart. ……………………………………….с.22

CONCLUSIONS……………………………………/………………………………………………….с.23

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………c.25

  Actuality of the problem: similarities of many things in the surrounding of King Arthur and Nart legends has attracted the attention of many British and Ossetian historians lately as each nation is greatly interested in its history. Nowadays this theme is one of the most popular ones.  

For the purpose of my paper: we are going to use the descriptive andcomparative analysis. We aim to describe the theoretical concept presented by Linda Malcor and C. Scott Littleton, portray King Arthur under their perspective and depict the Iranian models imported to European mythological framework. Afterwards, we would like to compare Malcor and Littleton’s theory with other theories and try to critically evaluate its position within Arthurian discourse.

The tasks: to show the Iranian roots of the legends of King Arthur and their connection with Nart legends, the parallels between the main heroes.   First, I will have a look at Littleton and Malcor’s interpretation of Arthur’s historicity, then the parallels between Arthur and Batraz and Batraz and Lancelot will be shown on illustrative examples taken form the Nart sagas and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (in the case of Arthur) and on the similarities of the lives of the two heroes (in the case of Lancelot).

The methods of investigation: 1. Theoretical 

                                                        1.Analysis of the literature.

                                                         2.Analysis of the sites of the Internet.

                                                         3.Analysis of the articles from the newspapers ,journals,                

                                                          vocabluaries.  

                                                          4.Presentation

                                                     INTRODUCTION

The story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table is perhaps the best known and the most influential legend in the world. No other legend or myth has had greater influence on modern culture. As John Colarusso says in his foreword to Littleton and Malcor’s book “no one writes plays or musicals based on the Rg Veda, on the Iliad or Odyssey, on Beowulf or, with the exception of Wagner, on the Norse tales.” Yet there is a number of stories, theatre plays even computer games based on the Arthurian cycle, directors still shoot movie about Arthur and there are Arthurian societies all around the world – The International Arthurian Society or Casque and G4auntlet to name a few. In other words, the legend today is still alive. For most of us Arthur and his knights represent the embodiment of chivalry and as the common wisdom has it, nothing could be more English than the story of Camelot and the Holy Grail. His name evokes a wide range of other characters and motifs from Merlin, the wizard or the fair queen Guinevere to the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde; it also makes us think of the Round Table and Arthur’s noble followers; we think of Camelot, his royal city; of Excalibur, the amazing sword… 

We often consider Arthur to be one of the first Christian knights, the pure derivate of Roman and Christian culture, moreover, the ideal and prototype of European nobility and Christian ethics. But to think of about exotic origins of the myth? Connecting King Arthur with the Middle East and the vast Iranian steppes? That would seem absurd. However in my thesis I will try to show that the legend of King Arthur may have completely different roots than most of us believe. I aim to show the similarities between the Arthurian legends and the legends of a remote European region and its ancient civilization – the Caucasus and the Scythians. The starting point of my thesis is the controversial work by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor From Scythia to Camelot, considered by a lot of scholars the most important book written on this topic. Victor H. Mair in his essay C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor’s From Scythia to Camelot even claims that “it is also quite simply one of the most significant scholarly works on any subject in the humanities   written during this century”. In their book the authors prove that the very core of the Arthurian cycle derives from ancient Iranian peoples who came from the Eurasian steppes, approximately the place of present-day Georgia.

However, they do not claim that the Arthurian cycle is exclusively Scythian. Several important figures aretransparently Celtic, such as Arthur's father Uther Pendragon (in Welsh, the namemeans “Glorious Head of the Troops”) or Queen Guinevere (Irish Finnabair meaning“Born on the White”). There are also apparent influences such as Christian, Germanic and others, but the Scythian ones remain the main focus of my thesis. I should also mention that Littleton and Malcor were not the first to come with the discovery of the Scythian connection. Throughout my work I will mention other names, such as Kemp Malone, J. P. Mallory and other scholars whose ideas and propositions made it possible for the work to be written. What makes it so important among all other papers, essays or books dealing with this topic, is its complexity and thoroughness. In the first chapter of my thesis, I will mention the concept of mythology, its position in culture and answer the question how is it possible that Arthurian myths were influenced by such a distant source but we fail to notice it. In the second chapter I will outline three theories of origin of historical King Arthur. One of the theories, the “Sarmatian connection” will be then analyzed in greater details in the third and final chapters and I will conclude the whole paper with outlining a position Littleton and Malcor’s work takes among other works on this topic.                  

                     THEORETICAL CONCEPT OF MYTHOLOGY.

  Before getting to the main point of my paper I would like to write a couple remarks on mythology as such. Being an important part and as indicated in the introduction one of the most influential legend in the whole world, I think the whole Arthurian cycle deserves a closer look at the theoretical background of myths. In this short contribution I will have a look at what mythology is, what is its function and how does it change through the ages. The word itself can be said to have several meanings but generally it refers to any invented story, something which is untrue.

 Mostly it is used to indicate a traditional story dating way to the past with some moral or social significance trying to interpret some aspect of the world we live in. “Professionals distinguish between mythology, legend and folktale. Very briefly, myths are considered true by the people who tell them; they are usually set near the beginning of time and often concern the origins of things. Legends are also regarded as true, but are set later in history when the world was much as it is today. Folklore is considered false by the people telling it, and its setting in time and space is usually irrelevant. Myths are considered sacred, legends are more often secular, and folktales aren't taken seriously, at least not literally.”4 Still there exist lots of overlaps in between the categories and the terms are often used interchangeably. All these concepts are rooted in culture and therefore are subordinated to the rules of given culture framework. As Jurij M. Lotman claims culture does not exist independently on its observer, we are always part of some culture. Lotman says:“Culture does not exist outside observer’s mind, traditional model of subject (culture) and object (observer) is just one-sided and conventional abstraction.”5 Jiří Pavelka adds: “Culture does not create men. Men create culture. Culture conserves meanings men give to world surrounding him.” These meanings are saved in so called concepts of world – organized archive of historical memory, which are bounded in space and time and which are controlled by dominant power structures of that time. These world view complexes are preserved in mythology, religion, tradition, philosophy or even science.7

  We are born to given space-time, which determines which concepts we can acquire; moreover, the knowledge of common and dominant concepts is essential precondition of successful communication act. The process of creating new concepts and forgetting the old ones is never ending. The question remains how we can explain interdigitation of mythical elements derived from different concepts of world unifying in completely new concept. What is the mechanism of such unification? We can use Lotman’s explanation8 based on Lebnitz’s concept of Monas. Monas are elementary unit of meaning which is intangible and is comprised only by “semiotic-informational being”. Different Monas can interact among themselves and create higher multipolar units. Monas are isomorphic. Every Monas is an entity as a whole and at the same time it constitutes a part of a higher level unit. However, having created such higher unit Monas is not destroyed or Transformed. New text does not destroy the old one; both can exist at the same time.  For example: Antic culture had been transformed by Christianity and therefore reshaped into Christian Middle Ages culture. However, Antic model had not been destroyed by this remodeling; it had survived as a minor “text” and was rediscovered during the time of Renaisance. Analogically, heathen culture had not been destroyed by Christianity, only forced to become minor and was rediscovered in 20th century by anthropologists and archeologists. Many Celtic feasts are once again being celebrated. Under the Lotman’s perspective we perceive culture as a system comprised by Monas, whose interaction creates higher meaningful units. Therefore, we can consider whole Arthurian cycle to be created from different Monas from different cultures unified in one complex set. In the same time all these Monas exist in other units and interactions so that we are able to find them, describe and compare them.

 Description of myths and legends means description of different Monas constituting it.

               DEALING WITH THE HISTORICAL KING ARTHUR

 In this chapter I will try to outline a few theories concerning historicity of King Arthur and suggest a couple answers to the question whether any real Arthur existed. It is definitely not a complete list of all the existing theories and approaches, which was not the purpose of this work. It only wants to show bigger or smaller differences in individual approaches and compare them to the one I consider the most probable of them all. At this point it is necessary to say that none of the existing can be taken as completely right or wrong. Working with historical material will never bring us absolute certainty, we can only say what is more probable and what is less probable and try to bring as much evidence and support or our claim as we can. Arthur became popular in the 12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth published his Historia Regum Britanniae (1136 or 38). The character of Arthur himself was mentioned in other works before,9 but Historia was the first to elaborate his whole biography. Then other authors came 10 adding their ideas and motifs, expanding and elaborating the story, making it a tangle impossible for us today to untangle. So the first question that comes to mind is: Did King Arthur really exist? Although having only two possible answers, there is no clear onefold solution the academic society today would agree on. In the next paragraphs I am going to show a couple theories put forward by Arthurian scholars.

                                 Geoffrey Ashe’s Riothamus theory

According to Geoffrey Ashe the question of Arthur’s existence is not even the right one to ask. The story was created by medieval romancers who did not care much about the credibility of their stories, they “told stories that their patrons and readers could understand, stories about things belonging to their world, however anachronistic the result.” According to this statement we might say that the legend is a medieval fiction with no real basis whatsoever. Yet on the other hand, Ashe claims that the Middle Ages creators of the legend would “deny simply inventing out of nothing.” They believed that a long time ago, Arthur was a real person. So the fruitful question to ask is not whether King Arthur existed or not, but “What facts is the legend rooted in, how did it originate?” 12 Ashe argues that King Arthur was a historical King in Brittany known to history as Riothamus13, a title meaning “Greatest- King”. According to Ashe, the legend is rooted in Britain’s post-Roman history when the Britons recovered from the Roman supremacy and for a brief period of time went through an era of fragile unity (before the Anglo-Saxon tribes came). In these days Britain is said to be in the hands of a ruler called Vortigern.14 It was him who invited Saxons to Britain as auxiliary troops to help him fight against his enemies. As more and more Saxons came, he lost control over them and was taken over by Hengist, the Saxon leader who afterwards ravaged and plundered the country. This would go on were not for the new Briton leaders who recovered the country and confined the Saxons to a limited area. Arthur is said to be the greatest among them. Yet after his passing there was no one to stop the Saxon advance. This is a very simplified version of the story. Although the history of those days is shadowy and vague, Ashe still manages to find some historical basis to the story. First of all there is no doubt that Vortigern existed since he is mentioned by Anglo-Saxon writers who were certainly not influenced by British legends. Some allusions about him may also be found in the work of Gildas, a monk living in the 6th century, who speaks about Britain in the post-Roman period being led by a superbus tyrannus, who invited the Saxons in. Second, between the years 440 and 460 the number of Saxons immigrating to the country increased, their demands could not be met and they mutinied. Nevertheless towards the end of the period indicated they withdrew and the Britons were looking for new leaders. Gildas also speaks about the increasing migration of Saxons to Brittany, their eventual withdrawal and victorious battle of Badon but he does not mention a word about Arthur. The same is true for Bede’s history written in 731 and for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle published later. There is also a second clue Ashe gives to show when the story started and that is Arthur’s name. As he claims the name “Arthur” is a Welsh form of the Roman Artorius and a man of this name “whether real or invented, cannot be dated much later than the post-Roman period when Britons were still being called by Roman names.”

However the main source for Ashe is a text that has “long been dismissed as Arthurian evidence, on the ground that the date (1019) was spurious and it was merely copied from the later and greater book of Geoffrey of Monmouth.”16 The text is called Legend of St.Geoznovius and it was written by a person stating his name as William. In this text, that is by genre history more than anything else Arthur appears among other events that are correct according to our present knowledge. William takes Arthur as the King of Britons and Vortigern’s successor fight to Gaul. And there the cycle gets full – a man referred to as Riothamus, King of Britons can be also found in other sources. The man whom Jordanes, a 6th century historian calls Riothamus, the King of Brittones is the same person whom William calls Arthur. The reality of that person is also being proved by a letter written to Riothamus around the year 460 by Sidonius a 5th century Gaul bishop and author. As to this point, Ashe’s theory sounds convincing. The time, the events and the characters of the story seem to correspond to historical facts as we know them. But there is still a little catch. And that is the meaning of the term Jordanes and Sidonius use the “King of “Brittones.”

Does it mean Bretons or Britons? If the word means Britons, people from the island nation of Britain, then the implication is that a British king crossed the English Channel and was holding court in Gaul. Taken in conjunction with the sixth century testimony of Jordanes’ work Gothic History and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s quasi-historical Historia Regum Britanniae, a reasonably convincing case can be made that Geoffrey’s Arthur and Jordanes’ and Sidonius’ Riothamus are really the same person. On the other hand, if “Brittones” means Bretons, natives of the land of Brittany, then the Arthur-Riothamus equation begins to unravel So, which is it, Britons or Bretons? The meaning really depends on the translation you read and so either meaning is possible and in conclusion the whole true-letter-case is not much helpful to us. It only proves that there existed some Riothamus but was he the model for Arthur Ashe speaks about?

             CAUCASUS CONCEPTION OF ARTHURIAN CYCLE

In the following chapter I will show the parallels between the Nart and Arthurian legends and heroes. First, I will have a look at Littleton and Malcor’s interpretation of Arthur’s historicity, then the parallels between Arthur and Batraz and Batraz and Lancelot will be shown on illustrative examples taken form the Nart sagas and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (in the case of Arthur) and on the similarities of the lives of the two heroes (in the case of Lancelot). And towards the end of the chapter some surprising facts about the figures of Arthur and Lancelot will arise. But let me start this chapter with a little glossary of terms that might be found confusing or cause misunderstanding. The terms listed below are only brief descriptions of the terms that come up in chapters of this paper. They are arranged in alphabetical order. Terminology Alans – an Iranian warlike nomadic group, one of the Sarmatian peoples, speaking Iranian language. According to some Chinese chronicles they had supremacy over the tribal union creating a powerful confederation of Sarmatian tribes from the second half of the 1st to the 4th century. Iazyges – a nomadic tribe speaking Iranian language; a branch of the Sarmatian people who around the year 200 BC, swept westward from central Asia onto the steppes of what is now Ukraine. In 175, after an unsuccessful clash with the Roman Empire, they made peace with Marcus Aurelius and were forced to provide the Romans with 8,000 cavalry to serve in the Roman army as auxiliaries.

Some 5,500 of these were shipped off to Britain, where (according to some theories) they played a part in the development of the Arthurian legend. Nart sagas  – a series of tales originating from the ancient Caucasus Mountains. Forming the basic mythology of the four tribes living in that area, they can be equated to Greek myths (with which they share some motifs). According to Littleton and Malcor they are the derivation base for the Arthurian legends brought to Britain by Alans settled in northern France. Ossetians – people living in the region of Ossetia in the northern Caucasus, speaking Iranian language, descending from Iranian tribes such as Alans, Sarmatians and Scythians. Their territory is currently divided into two parts: the North Ossetia-Alania in Russia and South Ossetia in Georgia. “Though threatened politically, militarily, and culturally from many directions, they still maintain their surprisingly archaic Iranian language and with it a body of oral narrative referred to as the Nart sagas.”

The Ossetians consider themselves as a separate ethnic group. In 1989 after the collapse of the Soviet Union the two Ossetias declared union. But Georgia disagreed claiming South Ossetia as its integral part which provoked a civil war. Today South Ossetia is still considered a part of Georgia but some parts of the region are politically independent. Minor fights are continuing till present days.34 Sarmatians – a multi-ethnic confederacy, or a federation of Iranian nomadic tribes occupying the area on the plains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, north of the Caucasus. That confederacy endured until the arrival of Huns in the 4th century. Afterwards the union disintegrated. Scythians – ancient nomadic peoples speaking Iranian language inhabiting an area in Eurasia called Scythia the location and extent of which varied over time. They represent a kindred tribe to Sarmatians who gradually overwhelmed them during the 4th century. They are described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BC as a wealthy and prosperous tribe residing in the steppe between the Dnepr and Don rivers that were menace to the Greek Black Sea colonial ports.

                                 Littleton and Malcor’s Iranian theory

As indicated above, Littleton and Malcor seek Arthur’s roots and origins in the ancient Caucasus and the lost civilization of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and their surviving descendants, the Ossetians. According to them it is clear that the core of the Arthurian legends is not to be found in the Celtic tradition26 but rather in the tradition of Northeast Iranian epic. They say that the Celtic elements in the legends are obvious (e.g. the figure of Guinevre whose name links her to Irish Finnabair) butall of them are later addition to a material with a completely different origins. The initial idea came from J. P. Mallory (then a doctoral candidate at the University of California, now a senior lecturer at the University of Belfast), who in conversation with C. Scott Littleton mentioned his observations that a contingent of heavily armed Sarmatian troops was sent to Britain at the end of Marcomannian War in the year 175 AD. According to Mallory, descendants of these soldiers survived in Britain at least until the fourth century, maybe even longer. Littleton happened to had read some articles by a French medievalist Joël Grisward pointing out the parallels between Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and an old saga told by the Ossetians about their most important hero, Batraz. Remarkable resemblances could be found especially in the deaths of both heroes. Both, Batraz and Arthur, posses a magical sword, that is to be thrown into water before their deaths. They are both cheated at first but in the end their servants obey, cast the sword in the water, than something extraordinary happens and when the happening is reported to them, both heroes can die peacefully. There are of course discrepancies in details (e.g. there is no hand rising from the water in the Batraz legend) but the parallels are so close that it is impossible to ignore them.

Knowing that Ossetians are the last surviving descendants of the ancient Alans, who were almost indistinguishable from Sarmatians, it was then obvious for Littleton to come with the conclusion of the “Sarmatian Connection”. In the Roman History by Dio Cassius Littleton found a passage about the Marcomanian War. Leading a nomadic way of life various groups of northern Iranians spread to surrounding areas “including the Mediterranean littoral and Europe. In the course of their wanderings, they came into contact, and eventually conflict, with the Romans.”27= The main conflict was the above mentioned Marcomannian War in 175 AD when the Sarmatians were defeated by the troops of Marcus Aurelius. Afterwards around 8,000 Sarmatian cavalrymen from a tribe called the Iazyges had to join the Roman legions and 5,500 of those were sent to Britain as auxiliary troops to help defending Hadrian’s Wall. After their service these warriors settled in Roman veterans´ colony near modern Ribchester in Lancashire. And this is how, according to Littleton, the first traces of Arthurian legends were brought to Britain.

Littleton also found information about their first commander, a Roman officer Lucius Artorius Castus commissioned to guard the Hadrian’s Wall in the 2nd century AD. In his book he follows the idea of Kemp Malone28, who as the first suggested Castus as the historical basis for King Arthur29. Then other similarities between the Sarmatian and Arthurian heroes came with one exception that resisted interpretation within the scope of the suggested “Sarmatian connection”, and that was the figure of Lancelot. And this is the place where Linda Malcor comes on stage. Although Littleton accepted the idea of Lancelot being a major Celtic component of the legend, Malcor did not agree and tried to find the Iranian connection that had shaped Arthur for Lancelot as well. Eventually she came with the “Alano-Sarmatian connection” and the  etymology of names, and she proposed *(A)lan(u)s--Lot for Lancelot. The Alans were one Iranian nomadic group among the Sarmatians, the first cousins of the Iazyges, who together with Germanic tribes settled in Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of the 5th century. They “had brought with them an independent reflex of the common Northeast Iranian steppe epic tradition. In addition, the Lot region of southern Gaul was a center of Alan activity, as well as power.” Since this theory comprises the basis of my work, I will elaborate the above mentioned ideas in a broader context in the core chapter of the paper.

                               The Arthur – Batraz Connection

Perhaps the best known story of the Arthurian cycle is that about his death. And it is also the one story where we can find the most apparent parallels with the legend of Batraz, the mythical leader and the greatest warrior of the Narts. Let me sum up the Batraz story first. After slaughtering a vast number of Narts in revenge for their complicity in his father’s death and after resisting all the afflictions that God could throw at him, Batraz takes pity on the handful of survivors. He tells them that he has satisfied his need for vengeance and that he himself is ready for death, adding that “I cannot die until my sword has been thrown into the sea.” This latter stipulation causes great concern among the Narts, as the sword is so heavy that only Batraz can wield it with ease. In desperation they decide to deceive him. Hiding the sword they report back that it has been disposed of in accordance with his instructions. But when Batraz asks, “What prodigious things did you see when my sword fell into the sea?” they reply, “Nothing” - an answer that Batraz recognizes as a lie, since he alone knows what will happen when his sword enters the water. When the Narts finally manage to drag the wondrous weapon to the coast and consign it to the water, the sea becomes turbulent, boils, and turns blood-red. As soon as this is reported to Batraz, he dies, secure in the knowledge that his last wish has been fulfilled.39

Before pointing out the obvious I attach a somewhat longer excerpt from Malory’s Le Morte speaking about the death of Arthur. Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to yonder water side, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest. My lord, said Bedivere, your commandment shall be done, and lightly bring you word again. So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of precious stones; and then he said to himself: If I throw this rich sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss. And then Sir Bedivere hid Excalibur under a tree. And so, as soon as he might, he came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water, and had thrown the sword in the water. What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my commandment; as thou art to me lief and dear, spare not, but throw it in. Then Sir Bedivere returned again, and took the sword in his hand; and then him thought sin and shame to throw away that noble sword, and so he hid the sword, and returned again, and told to the king that he had been at the water, and done his commandment. What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters wap and waves wan. Ah, traitor untrue, said King Arthur, now hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, thou that hast been to me so lief and dear? and thou art named a noble knight, and would betray me for the richness of the sword. But now go again lightly, for thy long tarrying putteth me in great jeopardy of my life, for I have taken cold. And but if thou do now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands; for thou wouldst for my rich sword see me dead.

Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water. So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he saw. The parallels are striking – the needs to throw the sword into the water, the attempts to deceive their ruler and the magical happening when the deed is finally done are all too similar to be accidental. The death scene is usually preceded by a battle between Arthur and Mordred which in some cases has particularly Sarmatian overtones as Littlleton and Malcor claim. During the battle as Arthur and Mordred fight, they keep on knocking off an adder-like creature that sits on their helms. When it is knocked off Arthur’s helmet, it sits on Mordred’s and vice versa and it is said to prove the worthiness of the combatants. “The two warriors fight under these emblems in much the same manner as the Sarmatian leaders fought under the serpent banner“.

The important note here that clarifies the connection is that a serpent is one of the earliest objects that peoples of Sarmatia worshipped and, as already mentioned, it was the sign they carried on their banners and shields. The episodes speaking about the deaths of the heroes are not the only  connecting element of Arthur and Batraz. There is also the “Sword in the Stone” episode that indicates the two heroes originated from one source. Looking for the image of the sword in the stone in the early Arthurian works (such as Welsh romances or Geoffrey of Monmouth) would be unsuccessful as well as it is not included in the Nart sagas. The episode as such appears later in almost every medieval Arthurian text (e.g. Malory’s Le Morte and for the very first time in Robert de Boron’s Merlin). Yet the image of a sword is a strong binding element of the two stories – both Arthur and Batraz are associated with a magical sword. In the case of Arthur, it is necessary to distinguish between his two swords; Caliburnus being the first and Excalibur the second. According to the tradition Arthur broke Caliburnus in a battle against a knight defending a fountain (modern tradition replaces the fountain with a river or a stream) and was then instructed by Merlin to throw the pieces into the water. Arthur does as instructed and he gets Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. Batraz like Arthur got his sword with the aid of his stepmother. Although having no name, it is a clear counterpart of Excalibur and both the swords must be eventually returned to where they came from, the water. That is the “water-sword” connection but is there also a parallel talking about the “sword in the stone”? Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian of the 4th century AD, is not the only one to describe the “primitive” religion of the Alans as follows “their only idea of religion is to plunge a naked sword into the earth with barbaric ceremonies, and they worship that with great respect, as Mars, the presiding deity of the regions over which they wander.”  The cult of the sword seems to be deeply rooted in the steppe cultures. The Scythias for example worshiped Ares at his temple which consisted (as Herodotus describes) of heaps of brushwood piled up, flat on the top, steep on three sides, sloped on the fourth and at the top of the pile and ancient sword is planted as an image of the god. So the idea of the sword embedded in a stone may come from the Alanic sword cult itself or – as Littleton suggests – and it is only a theory as he writes a “yet unattested ritual in which young men proved themselves worthy of being members of the war band.”  By pulling the sword out of the stone, Arthur demonstrates not only that he is a legitimate heir to the throne but also that he is ready to be a knight. Let me once more emphasize that it is a motif reconstructed by Littleton but that the same motif of extracting a sword or a spear from the earth or even a tree is found in the Nart sagas as well.

                                          The Lancelot – Batraz Connection

As the authors indicate both heroes, Arthur as well as Lancelot, were derived from the same person – the Scythian hero Batraz. The connection is even easier to recognize in the case of Lancelot, since he has his prototype in the legends of ancient Alans, who are closer to modern Ossetians than the Scythians just for the pure interval that separates the two tribes’ departure for the west. The Iazyges came to Britain in the 2nd century AD and so had more time to assimilate and accept the culture of the Celts than the Alans who cae to Gaul some three hundred years later. Littleton accepted the figure of Lancelot as being of pure Celtic origins, the reflection of the Celtic figure Lug. The Arthurian legends – claims this hypothesis –originated in Wales and in the 6th century were carried by Celts fleeing from the Saxons. However, Linda Malcor came with the idea that these traditions originated with the Alans of Gaul and she supports her claim with etymological and other evidence I will mention below. During her examination interesting parallels were discovered not only between Batraz and Arthur and Batraz and Lancelot, but also between the two Arthurians heroes, Arthur and Lancelot. Therefore she suggests that both, Arthur as well as Lancelot developed from the same prototype and that Lancelot is the “continental version of the figure represented by Arthur in the insular legends.”

The first thing Littleton and Malcor had to do is to show the gaps and mistakes in the Welsh connection of Lancelot to Lug. They agree that there are some parallels between the stories about the two men but on the other hand there are many more differences. In this place it is important to mention one fact. The legends of Lancelot are clearly of continental origin. The name Lancelot du Lac first appears in Breton stories and legends, then his figure emerges in the work of Chrétien de Troyes and sometime later (between 1194 and 1205) a Swiss poet, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven writes a story called Lanzelet. And last there is the narrative Lancelot attributed to a Welsh cleric (but this attribution is believed to be false). The work is written in French but what is most important; the author has little knowledge of the geography of southeast Britain and almost no knowledge of the geography of Wales. And at this point the Welsh connection fades away. But despite these facts there still exist supporters of the Welsh hypothesis, Roger Sherman Loomis (mentioned in note 13) being one of them.

One reason Loomis gives to support his Welsh theory is the water-fairy Lancelot is connected with. Loomis claims that mainly Celtic fairies are attached to water, but he misses the fact that in the 6th century AD the Celts were fleeing to continent and they definitely brought their traditions with them. The second problem is that – being of a continental origin – the legend of Lancelot is more probable to have taken the water-fairy from other than Celtic tradition, e.g. Teutonic. Although we cannot claim for sure from which source was the figure of water-fairy really taken, both eventualities are possible, the above mentioned idea at least weakens the “only- Welsh” origin.

Second reason of Loomis is also disputable. He claims that the Arthurian material originating on the continent exhibits knowledge of Welsh geography. Well, this is true for some sources, others and among them the legends of Lancelot, lack in identifying the exact places and if there are some geographical names mentioned, they are impossible to locate. And thirdly there is the etymology of Lancelot’s name. Loomis suggests the Welsh Llwch Llawynnawc as the model. There is a problem though. He relies solely on the written form of the name and on its written transmission neglecting oral tradition.

Malcor proposes following etymology:

Alanus à Lot

→ Alans à Lot

or

Alanz à Lot

→ (A)lanz à Lot

→ (A)lanç-à-lot

26

→ (A)lancelot48

The theory is then as follows: the lanc- sequence might be derived from the Latin Alanus (Alan plus the Latin singular ending –us) which was then Gallicized into Alanus à Lot. Due to a long contact between the Alanic tribes ant the Teutonic tribes in the north the place-names tend to use the Germanis possessive s (Alezon meaning Alans’ town). whereas in the south, where the contact is not only with Teutonic tribes but also with Roman culture, they tend to use the Germanic possessive together with Latin one, e.g. à or de. This would then bring the meaning Alans of Lot and rose the question where was such a place? Littleton and Malcor manage to find answer to this question as well. The Alanic settlement in Gaul was densest in the region surrounding the Lot River, thus Lancelot then bears the meaning Alan of the Lot (river). I am now getting to the connection of Lancelot and Batraz. As Littleton and Malcor state there is a bigger number of similarities that can be found between those two heroes than between Batraz and Arthur. Batraz is a member of the Boratæ family; Lancelot’s uncle and cousin are both named Boort. Both Batraz and Lancelot (unlike Arthur) are associated from birth with a female guardian. Batraz is born near the Black Sea soon after his father is murdered, Lancelot’s place of birth is unknown but he is found as an infant near a lake while his father is dying. Thus both Lancelot and Batraz are often given the epithet of the Lake (du Lac) in the case of Lancelot or of the Sea in the case of Batraz. Both get their swords from a woman who is somehow connected to water; Arthur on the other hand receives his sword from the Lady of the Lake only in the story retold by Malory. And other parallels could be found connected to the Holy Grail and its Ossetic counterpart the Nartamongæ. Despite all those connections Littleton and Malcor are not able to find a historical person behind Lancelot. The “real” Arthur has a real history, the one of Riothamus, also for example the figure of Tristan has his historical counterpart (the son of King Mark Conomar), but there is nobody for Lancelot. “The lack of a clear cut man-behind-the-legend may have worked in our favor,” write Littleton and Malcor. “The stories told by the Alans would have developed freely until they were recorded in writing during the 12th century. Arthur and Lancelot thus become reflections of the same hero.” When the descendants of the Iazyges met Alans in Gaul, the two stories intertwined and were adapted. And that is why we can find a lot of similarities in the tales of the two knights.

                                              CONCLUSIONS

1. This paper states that there are a lot of similarities in the legend of king Arthur and Nart legends

2. The parallels between the death of Iranian hero Batraz and King Arthur and the motif of magical sword on the one hand and the connection of Batraz and Lancelot on the other hand show that the Iranian roots of the legend are obvious

3. We can draw the conclusion removing the layers of other characters that the Iranian tribe of lazyges came to the British Isles in the second century (A .D.) and the Alans came in the 5th century AD

4. Parallels between Holy Grail of Arthurs legends and cult of holy cup in Iranian world (Ossetian Wacamongᴂ) are also well-known. The other name of the cup was «Nartamongᴂ».

H.Bailey wrote about one more name of the cup- “Iranamongᴂ”. Almost all scientists consider the self name of Ossetians “ir-ron” coming from “arya”- noble. Both cups are magic: they can fly in the air. Such image has more likely Ossetian, not Celtie roots.

5. The connection between the Round Table of King Arthur and Nart and Ossetian “fing” with 3 legs and round form are striking. According to V.I.Abaev its round form was typical for Sarmatians and Alans “military democracy” and doesn’t touch ancient Celtic traditions and was also an important part of traditions connected with death and dead.

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