New Book Reveals The Aeneid Was Based on British Sources

Historian Bernard Jones has written a fascinating new book, The Voyage of Aeneas of Troy, which reveals that Virgil’s Aeneid was probably not original to Virgil but based on historical fact and a centuries-old poem he may have received orally or in written form that dated back a thousand years. In fact, Jones argues that every detail of The Aeneid can be traced as geographically accurate, which by extension strongly suggests it is not based on just a legend but a historical voyage. Most surprising of all, the events of The Aeneid did not take place in the Mediterranean as commonly believed and as the poem indicates; by analyzing the poem’s geographical references, Jones discovered it was originally set in ancient Britain and its surrounding seas.

The Voyage of Aeneas of Troy is the sequel to Jones’ earlier book The Discovery of Troy and Its Lost History. In that book, he made a similar argument that Troy was actually in ancient Britain, even arguing that Homer was himself British. Here, he continues the argument, describing how Aeneas and his companions fled from Troy and traveled about Britain and the North Sea into areas like the modern-day Netherlands before returning to Britain and establishing a new Trojan civilization. In time, Aeneas’ descendants, including Brutus for whom Britain is named, also traveled and made new settlements. Over time, some of the descendants traveled to what are the modern-day Netherlands and Belgium and some of them became ancestors to the Franks. These groups, as they moved south through Europe, would have provided an opportunity for Virgil to hear the story of The Aeneid and record it in writing, perhaps for the first time. However, for whatever reason, Virgil chose to alter or slightly disguise place names to equate the British places in the original poem with those in the Mediterranean. Jones also notes that Virgil never finished The Aeneid but was revising it at the time of his death; he asked that it be destroyed, which might have happened if the Emperor Augustus had not decided it should be preserved. We may never know if Virgil wanted the poem destroyed to keep secret the actual locations mentioned in the poem, or if he just felt artistic angst over an incomplete work being read by the world.

How Virgil might have gained access to the poem and why he decided to transfer the action to the Mediterranean may never be known. Jones argues that the poem intentionally contains a secret code that was intended to hide the geographical details of the poem but that also reveals the true map of Aeneas’ voyages. In fact, Jones goes to great lengths to determine the physical distances from one place to the next that Aeneas traveled. The Aeneid does not discuss miles or kilometers but it does give directions—east, west, two days’ journey, etc.—that do not match the distances from one place to another in the Mediterranean, but they do match the distances in Britain.

As for place names, the similarities between many places in Britain and in the Mediterranean is astounding. For example, the Scilly Isles in Britain are disguised as Sicily in The Aeneid. The geographical features of specific parts of both areas are also similar. Jones discusses how Scotland, when turned upside down, resembles the Peloponnese and maps in the book show how the Bristol Channel is similar to the Adriatic Sea. Jones provides numerous maps throughout the book as well as charts showing place names and their meanings.

Some of the places in The Aeneid, of course, seem to be mythical, but Jones provides geographical locations even for these. Charybdis, the famous whirlpool encountered by both Aeneas and Odysseus in The Odyssey, does not actually exist in the Mediterranean, but Jones makes a compelling argument for it existing at Mount’s Bay off Land’s End. The cliffs of the Sirens turns out to be the Needles off the Isle of Wight.

I will confess my knowledge of Mediterranean and even British geography leaves much to be desired, and I am sure this book will be controversial, but I cannot help admiring the years of in-depth research Jones invested to write this book. He takes into account everything from sea levels three thousand years ago to descriptions in The Aeneid that he followed almost religiously as a guide to try to create comparisons between them and the landscape of Britain. He was amazed himself by the similarities and revelations he discovered.

Even if you end up being skeptical of Jones’ research, I think he makes a compelling argument. I also found it enjoyable to revisit the story of Aeneas and be reminded of his many adventures and how they might have taken place in Britain. Modern scholars tend to assume many of the genealogical claims of our ancestors, such as Brutus founding Britain, are fake and were created in the wake of Christianity to tie different peoples to a greater biblical narrative so everyone could be neatly shown to be descended from the sons of Noah, as argued in Anthony Adolph’s book Brutus of Troy and the Quest for the Ancestry of the British. However, archeologists have made surprising finds in the historical record based on paying closer attention to ancient works they assumed were only metaphorical. Furthermore, it can’t be denied that the Normans and Anglo-Saxon invasions led to the loss and repression of much that the ancient Britons knew and believed to the point where even speaking and reading Welsh was outlawed into the nineteenth century. The jury may still be out on whether Aeneas’ journeys were in Britain rather than the Mediterranean, but I think The Voyage of Aeneas of Troy is a book that deserves to be read and discussed, and as Jones himself is the first to assert, much more research remains to be done to confirm many of his beliefs. We may never know the full truth, but just like with the legend of King Arthur, who is an alleged descendant of Aeneas, the possibilities are fascinating, and the more effort we make to learn the truth, the more we learn about the past, even if the truth itself remains elusive.

I hope you will take this chance to journey with Aeneas again or even for the first time and discover how truly remarkable a work The Aeneid is with Jones as your tour guide.

For more information about Bernard Jones and his works on ancient Troy and Aeneas, visit https://www.trojanhistory.com/

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Children of Arthur series, which includes the novels Arthur’s Legacy, Melusine’s Gift, Ogier’s Prayer, Lilith’s Love, and Arthur’s Bosom. He has also written the nonfiction scholarly work King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, books on Gothic literature, and many historical novels and history books about Upper Michigan. You can learn more about Tyler at www.ChildrenofArthur.com, www.GothicWanderer.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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King Arthur’s Ancestor, the Legendary Brutus of Troy, Is Focus of New Biography

The tale of Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy and the legendary founder of Britain, has long been the subject of historical speculation and national pride for the British.

As a lover of all things Arthurian, I’ve long been fascinated by the story of Brutus as well as the debate that has ensued over his historicity. Consequently, I was thrilled to receive a review copy of Anthony Adolph’s new book Brutus of Troy and the Quest for the Ancestry of the British from publisher Pen & Sword.

“Brutus of Troy” is the first full-length exploration of all versions of the Brutus legend, from its origins in the Trojan War to why the British cling to it.

For those not familiar with Brutus’ story, I’ll briefly summarize it before discussing Adolph’s book.

When Troy fell, as told in Homer, Aeneas, a cousin to King Priam and hence a prince of Troy, fled from the city. His story is told in Virgil’s Aeneid. Eventually, Aeneas arrives in Italy and his descendants, Romulus and Remus, found Rome. Brutus, a cousin to Rome’s founders, is Aeneas’ great-grandson. Brutus accidentally kills his father and is sent into exile. He travels to Greece where he finds a group of enslaved Trojans whom he helps to achieve their freedom. They then travel across the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and to Britain, which they colonize. Consequently, Brutus’ name is given to the island, Britain supposedly being a version of Brutus. The island, however, is occupied by giants, including Gogmagog, whom Brutus defeats. In time, Brutus’ descendants are successive kings of Britain, which leads down to the time of King Arthur and, eventually, through a Welsh line to Henry VII, making all successive monarchs of Great Britain Brutus’ descendants.

Various versions of Brutus’ story differ slightly in the details, but that’s the story in a nutshell. The question is—is the story true, and if not, why has it been so popular and mattered so much to the British?

Anthony Adolph sets out to answer those questions in Brutus of Troy. I admit that my initial desire to read this book came from my hope that Adolph would prove that the story of Brutus was undeniably true. After all, I’ve read books by authors like Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett, who believe the erasure of Brutus as a historical figure is a longstanding effort by the English to repress and destroy the Welsh sense of identity. I have no doubt that the English did plenty to oppress the Welsh over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean a Welsh legend is historical fact. Still, I’ve longed to believe Brutus’ story is true. After all, I can trace my own ancestry back to the Plantagenet kings of England, and Brutus was one of their alleged ancestors through the Welsh king Llewellyn the Great of Wales, and that would make Brutus my ancestor. It would also (and I’m being a bit facetious here) mean that since Brutus’ great-great-grandmother was Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, I am descended from the Greek Gods. (Now I know where I get my natural beauty.)

Adolph himself wanted to believe the story of Brutus, but the more he researched it, the more unlikely it seemed, and in the end, he had to conclude it is just a myth. Bummer. But that doesn’t mean that Brutus’ tale isn’t still a major part of the heritage of all modern-day Britons and their cousins in the United States and around the globe. Therefore, to understand the significance of Brutus’ legend, we need to look at how it developed.

A good bulk of Adolph’s book answers the question of how the story arose and why it became popular. He discusses how the Roman influence on Britain led to the Britons’ familiarity with classical literature, including the tales of Homer and Virgil about Troy. The arrival of Christianity in Britain also played a role. The British wished to link themselves to the classical and civilized world, to give themselves a substantial history, and so they manipulated genealogies to create the figure of Brutus and to make him the ancestor of their own Welsh kings. They also wanted to understand their place in the human family. They were not alone in this desire; the Irish, the French, and even the Norse made similar efforts, as Adolph describes—they found a way to manipulate genealogies to claim that the Trojans were the descendants of the biblical Noah, and later, the British created the tale of Joseph of Arimathea and even Christ coming to Britain. Joseph’s daughter, Anna, married Beli Mawr, a descendant of Brutus, and so the British became part of a line stretching back to Adam and Eve.

Yes, I still wish the tale of Brutus was true, but Adolph’s logic in explaining the tale’s evolution makes perfect sense and calls to mind another book I recently read, Myths of the Rune Stone by David Krueger about a Viking rune stone discovered in Minnesota in the late nineteenth century by a Scandinavian farmer. The stone was “proof” that the Vikings had traveled to Minnesota in the fourteenth century. Krueger explores how this stone was probably forged by the Scandinavian immigrants to Minnesota as a way to claim they had a right to the land they had taken from the Native Americans because their ancestors had been there before them. Similar claims are made regarding the Trojans in Britain—some people have even theorized that Troy was in Britain and the Trojans were driven out when Troy fell, so Brutus was leading a return to their homeland for his people. In any case, it comes as no surprise that people will manipulate the facts to create the history they want for themselves, and over time, what is false becomes perceived as the truth, and so for about a thousand years, the British people believed they were descendants of Brutus and his fellow Trojans.

Adolph goes on to explore how the legend of Brutus developed over time from the early medieval writing of Nennius to the elaborate History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and then into the Renaissance period, eighteenth century, and Victorian age. Adolph exhausts his subject, summarizing and quoting from every work about Brutus that he could find, including works by Milton, Pope, Blake, and Wordsworth. While I appreciated his thoroughness, I had to admit that I found many of these summaries boring to read because they repeated the Brutus story over and over, just noting the differences and similarities, and most of the poems about Brutus were not first-rate. I agree with Adolph, however, that William Blake’s version of the story was probably the best. Adolph concludes by mentioning modern fiction that incorporates the myth, including Hades’ Daughter (2003) by Australian novelist Sara Douglass, which portrays a darker version of Brutus and even suggests he later reincarnated as William the Conqueror.

This painting by Federico Barocci depicts Brutus’ great-grandfather, Aeneas, fleeing from Troy with his father Anchises on his shoulders.

Adolph also looks at efforts since the nineteenth century to prove the Brutus myth to be true, especially the work of the Victorian writer Rev. Richard Williams Morgan, whose works continue to be used by pseudo-historians but reflect creative scholarship and intentional twisting of history to fit his agenda of what he wants to believe.

Brutus of Troy concludes by looking at how the legend of Brutus has become part of British culture and how Brutus has become associated with various places in London (the New Troy that legend said he founded). Most notable of these is the Tower of London, where Brutus is said to be buried.

I especially appreciated the genealogy charts in the book that show how the current British royal family would be descended from Brutus and from Adam and Eve, if the genealogies were true, as well as showing Brutus’ relationship to other members of the Trojan royal family and its descendants, including Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Finally, there are forty-five plate images in the middle of the book as well as illustrations throughout the rest of the book that depict places associated with Brutus and artwork based on his story. A particularly handy reference included is a timeline of the Brutus myth from the fall of Troy through the publications of various versions of his story, and of course, there is an extensive bibliography.

Brutus of Troy really made me understand better the role that the Brutus legend has played throughout British history and why it has stayed alive for centuries. It also made me want to read more of Anthony Adolph’s books since he is an avid writer about history and genealogy and the author of nine other books, including Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors and In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors.

Finally, of course, King Arthur gets a brief mention in terms of how he fits into the Brutus family tree. People interested in British history, genealogy, or the Arthurian legend will definitely want to add Brutus of Troy to their permanent collections.

For more information about Brutus of Troy and Anthony Adolph, visit Adolph’s website at http://anthonyadolph.co.uk/ or the publisher’s website at http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Brutus-of-Troy-Hardback/p/11213

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Tyler Tichelaar, Ph.D., is the author of The Children of Arthur, a five-book historical fantasy series, of which the first three books—Arthur’s Legacy, Melusine’s Gift, and Ogier’s Prayer—are now in print. He is also the author of King Arthur’s Children, a scholarly exploration of Arthur’s descendants in history and fiction, as well as many other books. You can learn more about him at www.ChildrenofArthur.com and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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