Innogen is a character in the Historia Regum Britanniae and subsequent medieval British pseudo-history. She was said to have been a Greek princess, the daughter of King Pandrasus, and to have become Britain's first Queen consort as the wife of Brutus of Troy, the purported first king of Britain who was said to have lived around the 12th century BC. Her sons Locrinus, Camber, and Albanactus went on to rule Loegria, Cambria, and Alba respectively.
Innogen first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). She was the eldest daughter of the Greek king Pandrasus, and was given in marriage to Brutus of Troy after he united the enslaved Trojans in Greece and defeated Pandrasus to gain their freedom. [1]
When Innogen left Greece with Brutus and the Trojans, she was inconsolable at leaving her parents and country. They travelled through the Mediterranean, around the coast of Iberia and Gaul, and arrived in Britain, where it was prophesied that Brutus would found an empire. [1]
Innogen had three sons with Brutus, who divided his kingdom between them after his death: the eldest, Locrinus, inherited Loegria (England except for Cornwall, which belonged to Brutus' general Corineus); Camber inherited Cambria (Wales); and the youngest, Albanactus, inherited Alba (Scotland). [2]
Her great-great grandson Ebraucus named one of his thirty daughters Ignogni, who was sent along with her sisters to Alba Silvius in Italy, where they were married to the Trojan nobility there. [3]
Academic Fiona Tolhurst suggests that Innogen performs a pivotal function in the foundation of Brutus' Britain, by providing legitimacy to his rule through her bloodline, in the same way that Lavinia did for Aeneas. [4]
Innogen or its equivalent appeared in early Celtic documentations of the legend of Brutus likely to identify her only as being the daughter of Pandrasus, rather than to indicate her proper name.[ citation needed ]
Innogen's name is spelled a number of different ways in the Historia Regum Britanniae , with the best readings being Innogen and Ignogen, [5] but other spellings include Ignoge, Euogen, and Ygnogen. [6]
The name is likely to be Celtic in origin, from Gaelic inghean (Irish iníon and Scottish Gaelic nighean), meaning 'daughter', [7] 'girl', or 'maiden'. [8] [9] However, Innogen could instead be derived from the Latin name Innocentia, [5] with a possible intermediate Celtic form of the name being Enogent. [10] Since Innogen is a Greek character, other theories have suggested that it was intended to be a Greek name, with possible reconstructions ἐκγόνη (Ecgone, 'a daughter') or —ιγόνη (—igone), from the final part of a name such as Erigone or Antigone. [6] [note 1] Some sources claim Innogen means 'beloved child' in Greek. [11] The name Imogen is also attested from before the Historia Regum Britanniae. [12] [note 2]
Modern uses of the name Imogen probably derive from a misspelling of Innogen in the 1623 First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline . Shakespeare probably took the name from a retelling of the story of Innogen and Brutus in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), and had used the name Innogen once before for a non-speaking 'ghost character' in Much Ado About Nothing (1600). An early description of Cymbeline by Simon Forman in 1611 consistently spells the name of the character as "Innogen", and the spelling of the character's name as "Imogen" in the First Folio appears to have been a result of "scribal or compositorial error". [13]
Innogen was mentioned in the funeral orations of Anne of Brittany in 1514. In the oration, Guillaume Parvi traced Anne's ancestry back to Innogen, and recounted a story that explained the origin of her family's heraldic ermine coat of arms. According to the story, during a hunt at Le Croisic, a stoat being pursued by Brutus' dogs took refuge with Innogen, who saved and fed it, and adopted it for ordre et armes ('order and arms '). [14]
Edmund Spenser mentioned Innogen in book two, canto ten of The Faerie Queene (1590), as "fayre Inogene of Italy". [15]
Innogen was a character in a lost play by Henry Chettle and John Day entitled The Conquest of Brute with the first finding of the Bath which was performed by the Lord Admiral's Men at the Rose in December 1598.
Brutus, also called Brute of Troy, is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas, known in medieval British legend as the eponymous founder and first king of Britain. This legend first appears in the Historia Brittonum, an anonymous 9th-century historical compilation to which commentary was added by Nennius, but is best known from the account given by the 12th-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae.
Corineus, in medieval British legend, was a prodigious warrior, a fighter of giants, and the eponymous founder of Cornwall.
Cambria is a name for Wales, being the Latinised form of the Welsh name for the country, Cymru. The term was not in use during the Roman or the early medieval period. After the Anglo-Saxon settlement of much of Britain, a territorial distinction developed between the new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the remaining Celtic British kingdoms. Latin being the primary language of scholarship in Western Christendom, medieval writers commonly used either the older term Britannia, as the territory still inhabited by Britons, or Wallia, a term derived from Old English, to refer to Wales. The term Cambria is first attested in Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century as an alternative to both of these, since Britannia was now ambiguous and Wallia a foreign import, but remained rare until late in the Middle Ages.
Locrinus was a legendary king of the Britons, as recounted by the 12th-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae.
Camber, also Kamber, was the legendary first king of Cambria, according to the Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first part of his influential 12th-century pseudohistory Historia Regum Britanniae. According to Geoffrey, Cambria, the classical name for Wales, was named for him.
Estrildis was the beloved mistress of King Locrinus of the Britons and the mother of his daughter Habren, according to the 12th-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Queen Gwendolen, also known as Gwendolin, or Gwendolyn was a legendary ruler of ancient Britain. She is said to have been queen during the 11th century BC.
Leir was a legendary king of the Britons whose story was recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain. According to Geoffrey's genealogy of the British dynasty, Leir's reign would have occurred around the 8th century BC, around the time of the founding of Rome. The story was modified and retold by William Shakespeare in his Jacobean tragedy King Lear.
Historia regum Britanniae, originally called De gestis Britonum, is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It chronicles the lives of the kings of the Britons over the course of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the British nation and continuing until the Anglo-Saxons assumed control of much of Britain around the 7th century. It is one of the central pieces of the Matter of Britain.
Arvirargus was a legendary, and possibly historical, British king of the 1st century AD. A shadowy historical Arviragus is known only from a cryptic reference in a satirical poem by Juvenal, in which a giant turbot presented to the Roman emperor Domitian is said to be an omen that "you will capture some king, or Arviragus will fall from his British chariot-pole".
Logres is King Arthur's realm in the Matter of Britain. It derives from the medieval Welsh word Lloegyr, a name of uncertain origin referring to South and Eastern England.
Guiderius is a legendary British king according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and related texts. He can probably be identified as deriving from the historical Togodumnus.
Ermine in heraldry is a "fur", a type of tincture, consisting of a white background with a pattern of black shapes representing the winter coat of the stoat. The linings of medieval coronation cloaks and some other garments, usually reserved for use by high-ranking peers and royalty, were made by sewing many ermine furs together to produce a luxurious white fur with patterns of hanging black-tipped tails. Due largely to the association of the ermine fur with the linings of coronation cloaks, crowns and peerage caps, the heraldic tincture of ermine was usually reserved to similar applications in heraldry. In heraldry it has become especially associated with the Duchy of Brittany and breton heraldry.
Hafren is a legendary British princess who was drowned in the River Severn by her repudiated stepmother Gwendolen. The legend appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudohistorical chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae. According to Geoffrey, Hafren is the eponym of the Severn, which bears one of Britain's most ancient river names.
Alba Silvius was in Roman mythology the fifth king of Alba Longa. He was the son of Latinus Silvius and the father of Atys. He reigned thirty-nine years.
Lloegyr is the medieval Welsh name for a region of Britain (Prydain). The exact borders are unknown, but some modern scholars hypothesize it ran south and east of a line extending from the Humber Estuary to the Severn Estuary, exclusive of Cornwall and Devon. The people of Lloegyr were called Lloegyrwys without distinction of ethnicity, the term applying to both Britons and Anglo-Saxons.
Le Croisic is a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department, western France. It is part of the urban area of Saint-Nazaire.
Gogmagog was a legendary giant in Welsh and later English mythology. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, he was a giant inhabitant of Albion, thrown off a cliff during a wrestling match with Corineus. Gogmagog was the last of the Giants found by Brutus and his men inhabiting the land of Albion.
Pandrasus is the fictional king of Greece and father of Innogen in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-history Historia Regum Britanniae.
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