London’s Etymology

It is strange that the meaning of the place-name London has not been nailed by now. But in England a wilful ignorance of Celticity has often been to blame for gaps in the jigsaw puzzle of prehistory. Classical prejudice in favour of Greco-Roman culture and political tensions about Westminster rule of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland underpin discussions. Fashionable theories update the old blindspots. That current editor, Steven O’Brien – author of Britannic Myths – is an adept of the Celtic mysteries is good reason to broach the issue in the pages of The London Magazine.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, ‘the etymology of the name is uncertain’. A lot of suggestions have accumulated but none wins out, despite the scholarly competitiveness. The problem is twofold: dismissal of the Celtic, and an isolationist approach that ignores the bigger picture. London is not a unique place-name. It is a local variant of a widely recurring place-name.

A telling symbol of Celtic censorship is the Sundial of London History at Tower Hill. A well-designed public monument begins in 43 A.D. with the Roman conquest. One would think the Romans invented London rather than invaded it. A mental blockade survives alongside the Roman wall. A well-attested millennium of Celtic habitation is deleted. A very English sundial shows no interest in a prehistoric sun god.

Historians, since Tacitus, generally agree that Londinium was the first verifiable name of the city. Latin variations include Londinio, Londiniensi and Londiniensium. A fragment of a letter from 65 AD, found as recently as 2016, bears the inscription: Londinio Mogentio i.e. ‘In London to Mogontius’. As Roman Camulodunum was a Latinisation of Camulodunon ‘the fort of Camulus’ (a ram-horned war god), it is usually thought that Londinium is a Latinisation of another Celtic place-name. But what? And what did it mean?

Brilliant people have tried to solve the problem. The most clever suggestions have been half-right. William Camden, the Elizabethan antiquarian who so astutely mentored Ben Jonson, believed that the ‘Lon’ was a derivation of the Welsh ‘llyn’ (grove) and that ‘don’ was from ‘dun’ (stronghold/fort/ settlement). London thus meant ‘city of the grove’. Camden is right about the ‘don’. He is also right to look to a Celtic word for the meaning of ‘Lon’. But he looked at the wrong word. He should have been looking for a name, not a thing, a theonym, not a noun.

More recently, a less clever suggestion has been adopted by the Museum of London. Philologist Richard Coates claims London is derived from an Indo-European compound ‘Plowonida’ which means ‘wide, fast-flowing river’. The Celts updated it to ‘Londonjon’, which the Romans turned to ‘Londinium’, the Saxons to ‘Lundenwic’, King Alfred to ‘Lundenburg’, the Normans to ‘Lundres’, and Chaucer to ‘Londoun’.

The Plowonida theory has been attacked by Lacey Wallace, author of The Origin of Roman London, as ‘somewhat tenuous’. Coates himself admits it is ‘tentative’ and that ‘compound names are comparatively rare for rivers in the Indo-European area’. But Coates was searching for ‘a non-mythic speculation’.

Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography skips through a plethora of half-right suggestions. ‘Llyn’ and ‘don’ become ‘lake’ and ‘stronghold’; ‘Laindon’ is from ‘long hill’; ‘londos’ is a Celtic word for ‘fierce’, perhaps explaining the bad manners of past and present Londoners. Ackroyd cites the most influential etymologist of London: Geoffrey of Monmouth. According to the Bishop’s bestseller of 1136 A.D., The History of the Kings of Britain, the etymology of ‘Britain’ stems from Brutus, greatgrandson of the Trojan Aeneas, who founded London as ‘New Troy’. A Celtic tribe, the Trinovantes, inherited that legacy. London may have been called ‘Trinovantium’. If so, a native high king supplanted Brutus because London was subsequently dedicated to the historic personage, King Lud. The mythological New Troy becomes the historical Lud’s Town.

In the magnificent ‘Story of Lludd and Llevelys’ from the Mabinogion we find in the very opening paragraph one of the most astonishing passages ever written about London:

Beli the Great, the son of Manogan, had three sons, Lludd, and Caswallawn, and Nynyaw; and according to the story he had a fourth son called Llevelys. And after the death of Beli, the kingdom of the Island of Britain fell into the hands of Lludd his eldest son; and Lludd ruled prosperously, and rebuilt the walls of London, and encompassed it about with numberless towers. And after that he bade the citizens build houses therein, such as no houses in the kingdoms could equal. And moreover he was a mighty warrior, and generous and liberal in giving meat and drink to all that sought them. And though he had many castles and cities this one loved he more than any. And he dwelt therein most part of the year, and therefore was it called Caer Lludd, and at last Caer London. And after the stranger-race came there, it was called London, or Lwndrys.

Lud is a worthy culture-hero, namechecked in such postmodernist literary works as Lud Heat by Iain Sinclair. Note how he ‘rebuilt the walls of London’. London was already a walled city before the Romans came. Lud usually gets the thumbs up from Londonists, even if they’re English, and was perhaps the first Londonist. His enthusiasm is as authentic as it is infectious. If Lud was, as the Mabinogian says, the brother of Caswallawn who fought against Caesar in 54 B.C., we can imagine Caswallawn as master of Camulodunon while Lud was happily seated in London. Lud is supposedly buried in the vicinity of Ludgate, where a statue of him once decorated the gate itself, but can now be seen at St Dunstan-in-the-West on Ludgate Hill.

However, as the ‘Plowonida’ thesis cuts the Celtic from the ‘London’ equation, another philological thesis does the same for the etymology of ‘Ludgate’. We might have thought Ludgate was indisputable, but no; it says on the infallible Wikipedia that ‘the true etymology of the term Ludgate is

from the Old English ‘hild geat’, a common Old English compound meaning postern or swing gate’. Here, instead of ‘Indo-European’, the Anglocentrists deploy ‘Old English’ against the Celtic.

Ackroyd himself wisely concludes his cursory examination by saying that the etymology of London is ‘mysterious’ whilst affirming ‘the legends of a thousand years may contain profound and particular truths’.

The Welsh historian Norman Davies has done much to redress Celtic censorship in his ambitious tome about Ireland and Britain, The Isles. His first mention of London is at the time of Julius Caesar’s invasions in 5554 BC. After the legions departed, ‘it was the chiefs and tribes which had confronted them, together with their cities Camulodunum and Lughdun, that came to the fore’. The unexplained ‘Lughdun’ adds a Celtic complexity. Later, writing of Claudius’s invasion, Davies uses a variant: ‘From there it was only two days march to Lugh’s Town and the Tamesis’.

Davies accredits the first unit of the etymological compound not to ‘Lud’ but to ‘Lugh’, a god from the Irish pantheon, oft compared to a Celtic Apollo. His name is found in the Irish season ‘Lughnasa’ (popularised by Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa) and the Scottish Lammas.

Herein lies the mystery: is London named after a Welsh king or an Irish god? But even this question ignores the bigger continental picture. W. B. Yeats’s friend from the Rhymers’ Club, the mythologist T. W. Rolleston, hails Lugh as ‘the sun god par excellence of all Celtica’. Lugh is the Irish version of a pan-Celtic deity venerated throughout pre-Christian Europe.

The Scottish historian and biographer Graham Robb, in his monumental study of Celtic France The Ancient Paths, makes another tentative contribution. The Gaulish sun god ‘Lugus’ is omnipresent for the twowheeled author. Robb cycles to such sites as the Temple of Lugus at Puy de Dome, as well as the mysterious Loon Plage near Dunkirk, and of course the capital of Roman Gaul, Lyon, which was called Lugdunum. Its derivation is exactly that of ‘fortress of Lugus’. Robb reveals that Loon

Plage was also formerly an island known as Lugdunum. ‘Lugdunum’ he adds, ‘shared its name with several other important Celtic towns: Laon, Leiden, Loudoun, Lyon, and perhaps London’.

In the Wikipedia entry for Lugus, it is claimed that the Scottish Loudoun and Lothian are named after Lugus, the Welsh Dinlieu, and even the English Luton. Again the question begs: if Luton is permitted to derive from Lugh’s Town, why not London?

Let us look at another English city: Carlisle. The Romans called it Luguvallum. This again signified the ‘fortress of Lugh’ but the ‘vallum’ incorporated the nearby Hadrian’s Wall. To take its modern form, it returned to Welsh Brythonic roots. ‘Car’ is from ‘Caer’ (i.e ‘seat’ or ‘chair’) and ‘lisle’ is from Lleu, the Welsh form of Lugh and Lugus. If such important strategic Romano-Celtic cities as Carlisle and Lyon can be derived from from Lugh’s Dun, why not London? What if philologists insisted on ‘a nonmythic speculation’ for Carlisle and Lyon?

The prejudice against mythology is because mythology is unscientific. But what is more scientific than empirical example after empirical example of place-names honouring the same god? Lugo, Lugones and Leon in Spain offer further Celtiberian examples. It was a good system. You could name different places after the same god because regional and tribal variations in dialect ensured each place-name was unique. Confronted with multiple specimens of Lugh and his fortresses, ‘Plowonida’ and ‘hild geat’ look more and more like pedantic interpolations, the modern memes of ambitious specialists.

We know a lot more about Lugh than Lugus because Ireland was not subject to the Roman Empire and its stories were not suppressed by the imperium. Lugus was Romanised to Mercury, after Julius Caesar had spotted similarities between Lugus and the ‘inventor of all arts’. In the Irish Book of Invasions, we read how Lugh, god of light, slew his grandfather Balor of the Evil Eye, god of darkness, in the Second Battle of Moytura. This is pagan dualism, Western Europe’s equivalent of the Zoroastrian or

Mithraic. It is a great myth that has the power of integrating the psyche. No wonder Lugh was enshrined throughout the cities of Celtic Europe. In Ireland, Dunlewey is an Anglicisation of Dun Luiche, the fort of Lugh.

Londoners can recall from the Mabinogion passage that Lud was the son of Beli. Are they Lugh and Balor in a Britannic telling? Or is there a possibility that London was earlier named after the Celtic god Lugh, and that Ludgate was later named after the British King Lud? Maybe future archeological finds will inform us. Lugh seems too Gaelic. Lleu seems too Welsh. Lud – though historic king, not mythological god – wins by default. It is tempting to examine the title of ‘The Story of Lludd and Llevelys’ and imagine the two brothers as somehow embodying Lugh and Lugus, overseeing their British and Gaulish domains. What makes Lud so attractive is his Londonophilia. Surely if anyone deserved to have a city named after him, it was this wise and benevolent ruler, one who would be welcomed back any time to deal with the problems faced by Londoners today: homelessness, foodbanks, security, not to mention dragons of the underworld.

If in doubt, go to Shakespeare. In his Celtic tragicomedy Cymbeline, he four times calls London ‘Lud’s Town’. At the play’s close, a victorious Cymbeline concludes a Pax Romana and directs his tribes to seal the new arrangement with a pagan ritual:

Laud we the gods; And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our blest altars. Publish we this peace To all our subjects. Set we forward: let A Roman and a British ensign wave Friendly together: so through Lud’s-town march: And in the temple of great Jupiter Our peace we’ll ratify; seal it with feasts. Set on there! Never was a war did cease, Ere bloody hands were wash’d, with such a peace.