Mons Graupius Identified
Factor 4. The name: Mons Graupius
Ancient names within a society evolve naturally over time but also unnaturally due to outside influences. Naturally is the process of evolution in the manner a word is spoken. Culture can directly affect dialect and human nature itself will frequently soften words, with letters giving harsh staccato sounds being commonly dropped or burred in usage.
An example can be seen in the myriad dialects in the British Isles and the different emphasis each of these put on various parts of a word. This is more dramatically seen in the USA where a regional dialect went one step further and formalised such changes in common usage there with a spelling different from that in the original mother tongue.
This softening or dropping of emphasis in the pronunciation of letters is more extreme and relevant to the current discussion than “you say tomato, I say tomAto.”
This is illustrated by “butter” in common British usage becoming “buddur” in some American usage. Even in Britain though the process is developed, in the far south east of England “butter” has become “buttah” as the “R” – famously inconvenient to southern tongues- is dropped.
In the electronic information highway era this sort of process is carried at an accelerated rate and mediums such as “text-speak” can illustrate an extreme example of how a word can be shortened to make it easier, quicker and less bothersome. Of relevance to this are dypthongs in ancient spellings (groupings of co-joined vowels), particularly Celtic tongues which developed and saw many dropped over time in the general softening process.
Unnatural change comes about when an existing language is submerged beneath that of an incoming or conquering elite. The language of the tribes - Brythonic - survives now only rarely in some place names in southern Scotland, particularly to the west. The place name Lanark is a good example.
A not entirely irrelevant factor concerning Brythonic (Old Welsh) is that it was the language used by JRR Tolkien as a role model for “elvish” in his highly entertaining novel the Lord of the Rings. The recent movies, accurately portraying this style of language amply demonstrate just how different pronunciation in this spoken form is from Latin or Germanic (English) based languages which are extremely guttural and harsh by comparison.
In the south and east English influence erased all of the original Brythonic “P Celtic” place names. In the highlands Gaelic may sometimes yet still recall a variation of an original Brythonic place name where this was understood and part fashioned into a “Q Celtic” Gaelic equivalent name.
One common misconception of the name Mons Graupius however must be dealt with straight away.
The “Grampian” Mountains and the modern political area associated with them do not reliably point to the location of the battle.
These mountains were named after Mons Graupius by the early Aberdonian historian Hector Boece in the 16th C AD.
Boece was an early exponent of the partisan approach of championing a site close to home. In so doing he initiated the transmogrification of the traditional name for the mountainous core of old Scotland: Drumalban – literally “spine of Scotland”– via a fictitious piece of fancy “Granzeban,” eventually arriving at Grampian. The “M” is an imposition from Drumalban but necessary for the deception!
This name has subsequently stuck and is the classic example of the “cart pushing the horse” in the philological quest for the original name of the battle site.
Boece’s singularly partisan act has been the root of more common misconception on the location for the site of Mons Graupius than any other and remains to this day a pervasive influence, even among Scotland’s historical institutions.
Another point which must be clarified is that just as “Grampian” was Boece’s deliberate mis-spelling of Tacitus’s “Graupius”, then first letter “G” is certainly the Latin pronunciation of the original Celtic “C” -the Romans normally took their cue from the existing Celtic name for a site.
Graupius therefore is “Craupius”.
By peeling off another layer of Latinising accretions; the “us” or “ius” suffix we arrive at the core word; Craup(i).
By appropriately identifying the likely original Celtic spelling of this Latin pronunciation we arrive at the commonly accepted root word; Croup, Croupi or Croupii.
From here we may now start searching.
The meaning of Croup is the subject of scholarly debate. Welsh “Crwb” means bump and some suggest that this may have been a descriptive quality that was attached in antiquity on account of the visual characteristics of the hill.
Another suggestion has been that Croup could be the name for a hill, a people, or a region in which the foregoing were located.
This means that the hill the Roman identified -with the necessary Latin prefix/title for hill (not mountain!) “Mons”- could be rendered as simply as “bump shaped hill”, the “Hill of the Croupii” or “Hill at the Croup”
©2009 Roman Scotland. All Rights Reserved
First Published February 2009
