Albion

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This article is about the archaic name for Great Britain. For other meanings, see Albion (disambiguation)

Albion (in Ptolemy Alouion), is the most ancient name of Great Britain, though sometimes used (incorrectly) to refer specifically to England.

Occasionally it instead refers to only Scotland, whose name in Gaelic is Alba (and similarly, in Irish, and Yr Alban in Welsh^[1]). Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History (iv.xvi.102) applies it unequivocally to Great Britain. The name Great Britain originates with the Picts, a people present in Britain before the Celts.^[2] The Britons and early Welsh of the south knew them, in the P-Celtic form of "Cruithne", as Prydyn; the terms "Britain" and "Briton" come from the same root. "It was itself named Albion, while all the islands about which we shall soon briefly speak were called the Britanniae." The name Albion was taken by medieval writers from Pliny and Ptolemy.

The name is of Celtic origin, with an exact cognate in Welsh elfydd "earth, world", from the Proto-Indo-European root that denotes both "white" and "mountain", but the Romans took it as connected with albus (white), in reference to the chalk "White Cliffs of Dover", and Alfred Holder's Alt-Keltischer Sprachschatz (1896) unhesitatingly translates it Weissland ("white-land"). The early writer (6th century BC) whose periplus was translated by Avienus at the end of the 4th century AD (see Massaliote Periplus) does not use the name Britannia; he speaks of nesos 'Iernon kai 'Albionon (island of the Ierni and the Albiones). So Pytheas of Massilia (4th century BC) speaks of Albion and 'Ierne. From the fact that there was a tribe called the Albiones on the north coast of Spain in Asturias, some scholars have placed Albion in that neighbourhood (see G. F. Unger, Rhein. Mus. xxxviii., 1883, pp. 156-196).

The pejorative sobriquet perfidious Albion takes its meaning from this old name for Britain.

[edit] Pop Culture Reference

• In the video game Destroy All Humans! 2, the British level is named Albion, instead of London.
• In the video game Fable, the game takes place in the land of Albion.

[edit] References

1. ^ Welsh Lexicon Forms. Cardiff University, Cardiff School of Computer Science. Retrieved 19 January 2006.
2. ^ Old Irish cruth and Welsh pryd are the Q- and P-Celtic forms respectively of a word meaning "form" or "shape": taken to be a reference to the Picts' practice of tattooing their bodies. See The Scottish Place-Name Society and MacBain's Dictionary.