The companion hero to Brutus in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, was Corineus. He was also a Trojan but like Brutus was not born in Troy and joined forces with Brutus before he reached Albion or Britain. The Ravenna Cosmography has a probable memory of his name in the form Purocorinaeus, an evident error for Durocorinaeus. Duro means strength or stronghold and corinaeus is a remarkably similar spelling of the name Geoffrey gives several centuries later; that is Corineus (ie his stronghold). The Ravenna list place names are featured in another article in this series called A Roman tour of British Place Names in which the possible Roman fort at Morwenstow is a possible site, one mile south of Cornakey and Cory; which perhaps convey a memory of the name.
Another similar Romano-British place name is Durocornovium which is Wanborough in Wiltshire. This lies a few miles SSE of Cirencester or ancient Corinium which again appears to convey a memory of the same name Corineus. Corinium has horned god effigies and iconography which suggests that Corineus is in fact another name for the Gaulish god Cernunnos. In Celtic, corn and cern means horn and at Cerne Abbas in Dorset the Giant with his enormous phallus is clearly the horned god personified, armed with a huge club. Geoffrey's Corineus was armed with a large axe and the forest god in the Welsh Mabinogion tale Lady of the Fountain, like the horned god Dagda in Ireland, both wielded huge clubs, which we know from Gaulish iconography symbolised the thunderbolt. Corineus may have been a human, but he shared both the name and characteristics of a god. This feature, whereby a man or woman shares the same name and characteristics as a deity is fairly common in Indo-European history. Gerald J Larson Myth in Indo-European Antiquity p124, notes that Greek kopuvn, staff or club, was cognate with kepauvos meaning thunder. This is probably cognate in turn with Cernunnos. Nonnos (Dionysiakon VI,I,165) states that Zagreous or Dionysus, son of Zeus and Persephone, was called kereon brephos or the horned infant (ie a bull) and while still an infant, Zagreous climbed upon Zeus's throne and brandished the thunderbolt. Hence, kereon means horn, cognate with kepauvos as thunder. Around Totnes itself are several similar names. Corringdon and Corringdon Ball is Correndon 1284, Corndon 1282 and Correndon Ball 1575. This and Corndon further north on Dartmoor cannot mean corn because they are on Dartmoor where corn isn't grown. Cornwood was Cornehude 1086, Curnwod 1262. Cornworthy was Corneorda 1086, Corneworthi 1205. Further afield are several Corndon and similar names, such as Corneal at St Dominick in Cornwall, Cornhale 1305, and of course Geoffrey's claim for Cornwall itself being named from Corineus, hence the Cornovii tribe, people of the horned god.
A lost Cornwode manor 1086 was in Barnstaple Hundred. Also in Devon were lost place names, Curnbroke 1291 and Corndich 1297. In Inwardleigh Parish, North Devon, is Curworthy, Corneurde 1086, Curewrthi 1219. Devon Place Names explains such names as Old English ceorh or churn or as corn meaning crane (cf Irish corr meaning crane), but the Ravenna name Durocorinaeus and Corinium for Cirencester, make this less likely and the Cornovii/Cornwall spelling underlines this. Corndon Tor on Dartmoor has three cairns which might imply that the Tor was called Carneddau originally, meaning cairns in Welsh. Cairn or carn itself, is from the same root as corn in British meaning horn, with its origins in the same horned deity. However, it is remarkable that all the earliest spellings are consistently corn, which makes it seem likely that corn meaning horn was the original spelling.
If Corineus was a memory of the horned god Cernunnos, then it might explain his role as a giant slayer of Gogmagog and the mighty axe he carried being similar to the giant club of the horned god. Corynaeus in Virgil was a Trojan priest who shares none of these gigantic attributes and fights the Rutulians with a burning brand from his altar in Book XII of The Aeneid, in quite a human guise.. If Corineus was taken from The Aeneid,why then, did he not draw on the more obvious names Troyes and Paris as Trojan names in his history? The fact that so many place names around Totnes ,in a period predating Geoffrey, support the basis of his history that Brutus and Corineus came to this area, is now indicated by the above evidence, at least from the viewpoint of the Indo-European standpoint that these articles have proposed. The more this evidence mounts up, the more conundrums it throws up. Remember also, that the Romans themselves could have had a motive for being jealous of the British- Trojan link, which is why in Nennius the British version which agrees with Geoffrey, more or less, is paralleled by a pro-Roman version which claims Brutus was a Roman consul; as in Virgil, and that the British descended from the Roman race. Clearly someone before AD800 had an axe to grind and providing some support for the existence, at that time of Geoffrey's lost source, the Liber Vetustissimus; which may, incidentally, be the Good Book of Oxford, named as a source in the introduction to Gaimar's L'Estoire des Engleis (History of the English) 1136-7 and contemporary with Geoffrey's Historia.
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