ANNWN - Otherworld or Netherworld?

It has been observed that Celtic otherworlds take three forms: in caves or under the hills, beneath lakes or seas, or on far-away islands. In a recent article about the Welsh name for the Otherworld, Bernard Mees and Nick Nicholas remark that "only the Welsh name Annwfn ... suggests an etymological notion of an otherworld" [*]. Suggested Brythonic orgins of the name are *an-dubnos ('not-world' or 'not-deep'[deep-notness?]) or *ande-dubnos ('underworld' or 'under-deep'). Also discussed is a Gaulish word antumnos, used in calling upon Dis or Prosperpine and therefore suggesting a nether world of darkness rather than a paradisal parallel realm.

The probable Greek origin of antumnos also suggests a dark, underworld location. The authors of the article find it unlikely that the supposed Brythonic term *an-dubnos was used without knowledge of its associations with the Greek Underworld. This may imply that its later associations with the 'Hell' of Christian tradition is not entirely a later overlay. Rather, as Mees and Nicholas suggest "... the entrance of the term to early Brythonic might even be plausibly connected with the development of the dual nature of the Insular Otherworld and Graeco-Roman influence: paradisaical and ageless on the one hand, sinister and Stygian on the other."

In this view, it seems that the Brythonic Celts wanted it both ways, not wishing to abandon the idea of a blissful parallel dimension to their own world but also paradoxically seeing it as a dark Underworld where the souls of the dead reside. If the fabric of these alternatives appear to have little in common with each other is this because, for us, ancestors and other-beings seem to require differently imagined locations?

Could we imagine otherwise?

___________________________
* Studia Celtica XLVI (2012) pp.23->

Charles Williams in Logres

Shouldering shapes through the skies rise and run,

through town and time; Merlin beheld

the beasts of Broceliande, the fish of Nimue,

hierarchic, republican, the glory of Logres,

patterns of the Logos in the depth of the sun.

Taliessin in the crowd beheld the compelled brutes,
wildness formalized, images of mathematics,

star and moon, dolphin and pelican,

lion and leopard, changing their measure.
Over the mob's noise rose gushing the sound of the flutes.

Gawaine's thistle, Bedivere's rose, drew near:
flutes infiltrating the light of candles.

Through the magical sound of the fire-strewn air,
spirit, burning to sweetness of body,
exposed in the midst of its bloom the young queen Guinevere.

So Charles Williams, a poet largely forgotten now, but one who attempted a re-drafting of the Arthurian cycle for his own times (1886-1945) entirely as a conjuration of his own imagination rather than as a summary of existing knowledge, though he was steeped in such knowledge. His Taliesin inhabits the land of Logres as a fully realised inhabitant of a visionary realm, but note above the echo of Logres in Logos - a place where the spoken word gives rise to a world of myth. If he tended to weave spells out of abstractions, he also knew when to draw them into concrete images. Out of the maze of symbols that 'sound of flutes' wafts through the air and the candles flames burn 'to sweetness of body'. If Logres is realised through visions of Byzantium it nevertheless is realised as a place the imagination can inhabit. Like John Cowper Powys (who in some ways he is utterly unlike) he made the place his own. As we each of us must if we wish to spend time in such places.

'XV Kalendas Ianuarius Eponae'

(Fifteen days [before] the beginning of January - Epona's Day)

- a stone inscription from northern Italy -

*

Earthlight glistens
on the ivy leaf

Sunlight falls on the holly bough

The red fire stirs in the kindling

We count three days to the longest night

Three more till the glimmer of a longer day

Then seven to the eve of New Year Calends

These days we count from the feast of Epona

First festival of the year's turning. 

The Treasures of Arthur

"You shall receive the gift that your mouth and tongue speak, as far as wind dries, as far as rain wets, as far as sun reaches, as far as sea stretches, as far as the earth is -

except for
my ship
my cloak
Caledfwlch, my sword
Rhongomyniad, my spear
Wyneb Gwrthucher, my shield
Carnwennan, my knife
and Gwenhwyvar, my wife."  

His ship is Prydwen, in which he sailed to the Otherworld (Annwfn) to get the cauldron of rebirth;
His cloak made the wearer invisible;
His sword's name suggests it cuts a breach in battle;
His spear's name means 'spear-striker';
His shield is the face of evening;
His knife's name signifies his fondness for its white haft;
… and his Wife
her name means 'White Enchantress'.

Such things he reserved for himself.
Anything else, had Culhwch named it, his generosity would bestow it.

(from Culhwch and Olwen)

Midsummer

The Sun sails high in a never dark sky
And Mabon rides the tide of Summer


Tall are the grasses grown in the field
And the Breeze sighs through them singing of Summer


The Forest's adorned with a crown of green
And beneath plays the God in the glades of Summer


The harp of Maponos vibrates the air
And late, in the twilight, still it's Summer.

Reconstructionism and Celtic Studies

A topic that I have turned to on a number of occasions is the question of the use of medieval folklore and literarure as late sources for the reconstruction of pagan mythology. I discussed it previously on this blog HERE. In a reconsideration of this question I have turned once again to a book that was a considerable influence on my thinking on the subject when I first read it many years ago: W. J. Gruffydd's Rhiannon (1953). Gruffydd, who was a poet in Welsh as well as a scholar, approached the medieval Welsh tales in the 'Four Branches' of Y Mabinogi, in common with many others, as literary constructions built on the remnants of earlier mythology. In attempting to reconstruct that mythology he proposed a series of transformations and substitutions leading from the original myths to the medieval stories.

Inevitably words like 'corruption' and 'contamination' appeared in his analysis of the changes he described. But it would be wrong to lump him entirely with the school of anthropology that saw the agents of the changes, as Matthew Arnold's disparaging remark puts it, “pillaging an antiquity of which they scarcely possessed the secret". He was in fact critical of approaches like those of James Frazer whose monumental work The Golden Bough he says "has diverted attention from the pure mythology - what may be called the history - of the divine beings of the ancient world to their cultural significance, and this has in turn resulted in much unprofitable speculation and darkening of counsel"(* p.100). It is in his concentration on the story of the gods, in pursuit of what he calls 'storyology', that Gruffydd seeks the history of a story that might have many versions and whose characters might have different names in these different versions. The story, in this view, is universal, and will be told in different ways in different cultures. But if the intent of analysis is to relate a cultural significance, or an historically based local variation , then the clear lines of the story itself can be lost in the process. So whatever literary works such as Y Mabinogi can tell us about the literary art of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, about the craft of their author, about the cultural life of the times in which they were composed and even, as some now argue, about historical events that surrounded them, all of this is subordinate to the story they contain.

What is that story? Gruffydd asserts that it was the same story that was told in the Ancient World of Ishtar and Attis, of Demeter and Persephone; and in the Brythonic world, of Matrona and Maponos in one version and Rigantona and Gweir (Pryderi) in another. The point is not that these are are exactly 'equivalent' deities, rather that they are different personalities acting out the same story: the divine mother searches for the lost child and has to go to the Otherworld or the Nether Regions to retrieve him or her. Gruffydd's analysis of Y Mabinogi therefore seeks to show how this story is contained in the first and the third of these tales. The parallel myths of the god and goddess Rigantona and Tigernonos on the one hand and Vironos and Matrona on the other, each pair with a divine child who features in recorded mythology as Maponos, became fused together in one story, suggesting that in the medieval Welsh tales "the story of Rhiannon and Gweir is so precisely that of Modron and Mabon that the corresponding characters have become interchangeable."(*p.103). However mistaken Gruffydd might be in the specificity of his account, or in reshaping the tales to fit his analysis, his insistence on the primacy of the story or the myth of the Horse Goddess, her Husband and her Son, preserves the notion that gods can inhabit stories and that we can find them there and respond to their characters however much literary re-shaping and combination of themes has occurred during their transmission.


(*)Quotations from W. J. Gruffydd's Rhiannon (University of Wales Press, 1953).

Norse and Celtic (again)

I commented about two years ago about parallels between Norse and Celtic lore, picking up some thematic contrasts and comparisons. Themes of folklore have often been shown to be international, with the same motifs cropping up in different contexts in different cultures. In this sense the fundamentals of human stories do not vary enormously across cultures. But is there likely to be any  cultural similarities between speakers of distinct languages? Many have thought there should be on the basis of them inhabiting similar geographical areas and also a perceived similarity between the art of the two cultural groups. The argument against is the fact that the languages  are distinct. Cultural links between speakers of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic are clear on historical and geographical criteria but also on the fact that the languages are very close to each other and to an extent mutually intelligible. Similarities with German and English, though more distant, are reflected in common mythological backgrounds. With the change of language to Celtic, the mythological background also seems to be distinct. The origin of Celtic speakers may be unclear with identified sources in central Europe and/or the Iberian peninsula. But it is clear that in historical times the two groups overlapped in parts of north-west Europe.

To make this even more complex, there is a debate within Celtic Studies as to the extent of interaction between Welsh and Irish speakers in the historical period and so on the question of a common inheritance for speakers of languages that were no more mutually intelligible than Welsh and Old English. But interaction there must have been between speakers of different languages both on the British mainland and farther afield. Consider that the character who gives his name to the Icelandic Njál's Saga has a name that is Irish in origin. Vikings moved between Ireland and different parts of Britain interacting with both Celts and Saxons. Is there any evidence of anything they have in common apart from aspects of their material culture which might be expected to exhibit similarities given that they inhabited overlapping geographical areas in the same historical period?

In the Völsunga Saga it is said of Sigurd that "he is known in all the tongues north of the Greek Ocean and so it must remain as long as the world endures". I seem to remember something similar being said as the reason for the many different names of Ódinn, so that many different people would be able to know him. "All the tongues north of the Greek Ocean" is certainly pretty inclusive. But differences in language can also be exclusive. Is there a way across this divide?

A recent book* discussing some work done by Tolkien on similarities in e.g. i-mutation in English and i-affection in Welsh led him to the conclusion that " the different languages of North-Western Europe functioned, despite their differences, as in some ways a single philological province, subject to the same influences." Could such a flicker of commonality be of enough significance  to throw light  on deeper cultural currents that might unite these disparate language groups. Or did Matthew Arnold get it right when he pronounced on the contrasting temperaments of Celt and Saxon?

*Tolkien and Wales by Carl Phelpstead