Watery Graves
Three British rivers named after mythical dead people
The Humber in 1836 - 2,800 years after the Huns’ invasion
The Humber
Come with me, if you will, on the 250 bus from Hull to Grimsby. Ten minutes into the journey, our road curves towards the estuary and makes its one-mile slingshot between the concrete pillars of the Humber Bridge. The distance is so great that the engineers had to compensate for the curvature of the Earth in their calculations.
Below, the brown waters churn like a wet dream of chocolate ice cream, and our eyes strain for redshanks on the mud banks. Gulls soar disappointedly over the uninviting waters, having heard from their ancestors how ferries used to criss-cross the river, loaded with humans who were happy to pass chunks of cheese sandwich and sausage roll their way.
The gulls and their dreams of tossed sarnies fade as the bus makes its winding way through Barton and Barrow on the south bank. The highlight of a journey admittedly low on highlights has passed.
With ample time for reverie (another hour and a half before we hit Grimsby), what does the name ‘Humber’ conjure for you, oh fellow passenger of the 250 bus? Fishing boats and Cod Wars? The middle section of the word ‘Northumberland’? The white elephant of the famous ‘bridge from nowhere to nowhere’? All good answers. But to me, it’s redolent with Trojans, warfare, and the Huns…
According to the ninth-century bestseller Historia Brittonum, Britain was founded in the twelfth-century BCE by Brutus, grandson of Aeneas of Troy. Geoffrey of Monmouth elaborated on the legend in his twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, describing the partition of Britain under Brutus’ three sons. Albanactus (who ruled the north half of the island), Locrinus (who ruled the southern bit), and Camber (who ruled what later became Wales) were tasked with deterring the island’s first post-Trojan invaders, the Huns, who had left their homeland in Scythia - a region to the north of the Caspian and Black Seas - to seek Viking-like blood and glory.
Albanactus failed to rise to the challenge and was killed on the battlefield by Humber, leader of the Huns. Emboldened, the mercenary army sailed down the east coast to the southern border of Albanactus’ kingdom and faced the combined forces of Locrinus and Camber at a certain yet-to-be-named estuary. The Brits triumphed, and Humber drowned as he tried to retreat to his moored fleet. Since then, the river has been known as… the Locrinus.
Not really. But in reality, the origin of the name Humber is guesswork. It may stem from Celtic roots, with the meaning ‘good water’, or ‘well-watered place’, or it may be from a pre-Celtic word meaning simply ‘river’, with cognates in modern welsh aber.
Kings Albanactus, Locrinus, and Camber, as imagined in 1461
The Severn
Humber’s shadow (an appropriate image, given the alternative-but-unlikely theory that the word stems from the Latin umbro, meaning “to cover with shadows”) stretches down to the Severn.
After the defeat of the Huns in Humber’s brown waters, King Locrinus captured the enemy fleet, whose cargo included Estrildis, the kidnapped daughter of the King of Germany. She was allowed to live in Britain along with a handful of battle-weary Scythian Huns, and Locrinus fell in love with her.
The romance was complicated by two tricky political details. First, the King of Germany wanted his daughter back; second, Locrinus was married to Guendoline, daughter of Corineus, the mighty ruler of Cornwall.
Locrinus’ plan was devious: the German king was told his daughter had drowned, and Estrildis was installed in a subterranean palace in Britain’s capital city, Troinovant (aka New Troy, later known as London). The affair continued for several years and Estrildis bore a daughter, Hafren (also known as Sabrina or Severn… at which point you can probably see where all this is heading).
Emboldened by the birth of his daughter, Locrinus allowed his German lover to emerge from her underground love dungeon and declared he would divorce Guendoline and marry Estrildis. The former, every bit as warlike as her father Corineus, led the country into its first civil war. Cornwall was loyal to her, and as that’s where most of the British army was based, Guendoline triumphed. Locrinus and Estrildis were captured and executed, and poor Hafren/Severn was drowned in the river that separated Cornwall from Cambria. The river has since been known as the Estrildis.
Sorry, same joke. But the story of the Severn was not over. Legend maintains that Severina survived (and when your legend is an offshoot of dodgy mythology, you’re definitely on the opposite of solid ground). The princess was given the kiss of life – and, indeed, immortality – by the river god Nereus (moonlighting from his usual job as a Greek sea god), who probably thought it terribly unfair that the river should be called The Severn rather than the Nereus.
Nereus sent water nymphs – naiads – to rescue Severn and bring her to his soggy palace, and the two lived happily ever after as water deities.
This happy ending isn’t in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s original version of the drowning of Princess Severn, but comes from a combination of Spencer’s Faerie Queene (1590) and Milton’s Comus (1634).
In reality, the origin of the name Severn is as muddy as the Humber’s. It may come from an early Celtic word meaning something like “fallow land in the summertime”. As that sounds a bit unlikely, I prefer the notion that the name is from the Brythonic Hafron (one of the drowned girl’s alternative names in the legend), with a possible meaning of “the prow of the wave”, a reference to the sudden rush of the Severn bore, when white-crested waves roll between the river banks.
Then again, it may simply be based on the British/Welsh word for river, afon.
The Soar
Lear being awkward
King Lear first appears in English literature as Leir, son of King Bladud, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. All versions of the legend describe King Leir/Lear demanding praise from his three daughters and receiving none from honest-to-a-fault Cordelia. Shakespeare makes everything overly tragic by killing Lear and Cordelia in his final scene, but Geoffrey allows Cordelia to survive and briefly rule as Queen of Britain (although she later dies miserably in prison after a bout of civil war).
After ascending the throne, Cordelia buries Leir in a vault in Caer Leir (Leicester), part of an underwater temple. In transation, Geoffrey states:
[Cordelia] buried her father in a certain vault, which she ordered to be made for him under the river Soar, in Leicester, and which had been built originally under the ground to the honour of the god Janus.
Since then, the river has been known as… The Soar.
This isn’t a third outing for the same joke. The Soar was, and is, known by that name. It probably derives from the pre-Celtic root “ser-”, meaning “to flow”. Fortunately, there are other theories that bring the story back to Leir.
In 1701, William Somner suggested that the Soar was once been called the Leir, with forms including Ligera or Ligora. The name is related to the French Loire, which means “silt”. Somner’s suggestion is that the names Leicester (originally Ligora-ceaster, the Anglo-Saxon successor to the Roman name Legorensis Civitatis), along with Loughborough and Leire (nearby settlements), originate from the river’s original name, Leir. This Leir, Somner asserted, was a local water deity, the same as Ler in Irish mythology and Llyr in the Welsh Mabinogion. Llyr is the father of the gods Manawydan, Bran, and Branwen, and the name is rooted in the Gaelic word ler, meaning “sea”.
The river, then, isn’t named after Leir/Lear/Lir/Llyr, strictly speaking, and the links between Geoffrey’s Leir and the Celtic gods is disputed. But that’s a Soar point.
