GORSEDD ARBERTH

Thomas the Rhymer

2012-01-23T22:57:00.000Z

A classic piece of traditional folk singing here - I think Thomas the Rhymer really does need a Scottish accent.

It would be great if Karine Polwart recorded it.

Ysbaddaden Pencawr

2011-12-29T00:30:00.001Z

(Cwmcarn Forest Art)

A synopsis

The giant leered, the props holding up his eye-lids dripped tears so salty the tides of a dead sea flowed across his cheeks , washed the spittle on his chin and dried in a dawn that left his age behind, a residue on an arid shore.

From which Olwen walked onto grass moist with dew so that white flowers sprang in her footsteps.

And Culhwch to accompany her into the living day of their new age.

This is the life of myth, glossing intimations of ogrish fathers in images of fantastic proportions.

Gleaning from a jealous stepmother sending her stepson to certain death, an heroic ride to Arthur’s court and the hunting of a boar of power as condition for a marriage.

Were dragons slain? Or arrangements made to preserve appearances?

The Birth of Pryderi

2011-12-14T21:50:00.000Z

From the First Branch of Y Mabinogi

(Rhiannon's baby has been snatched away,

then the action switches to Teyrnon in Gwent):

Teyrnon had the mare brought into the house, then he armed himself for his vigil. As darkness fell, the mare gives birth to a large, good-looking foal, standing up on its feet. Teyrnon gets up to admire the sturdiness of the foal. As he does so, he hears a mighty commotion - and, following this commotion an enormous claw appears through the window, seizing the colt by its mane. Then what Teyrnon does is draw his sword and cut the arm from the elbow down - so that most of the arm, together with the colt, is inside the house.

Then he hears the sound of a commotion and a scream together. He opens the door and follows the commotion. He can't see where it is coming from as the night is so dark. But he keeps going towards it. Then he remembers that the door is open and goes back. By the door what does he see but a small child in swaddling clothes, wrapped in a sheet of brocaded silk. He picks up the boy, and observes that he is strong for his age.

The Enchanted Fort

2011-11-21T17:39:00.000Z

From the Third Branch of Y Mabinogi

[Manawydan and Pryderi are following a shining white boar which leads them to an empty fort into which the boar has disappeared. Pryderi wants to follow. Manawydan says]:

“It is not a good idea to go into the fort. We have not seen the fort here before and my advice is not to go near it.” But Pryderi replies, “I will not abandon my hounds” and, in spite of Manawydan’s counsel, goes to the fort.

[…..]

After waiting to see if Pryderi will return, Manawydan returns home without him.

When he comes in, Rhiannon looks up and asks “Your companion and the dogs, where are they?” He told her the tale. “Indeed, you were a poor companion, and it’s a good companion that you have lost”. With that word she went off to where he said the fort was.

She saw that the gate was open, and it was not hidden. In she came and discovered Pryderi grasping a basin [attached to a fountain] and said “Oh my lord, what are you doing here?” She took hold of the basin. As soon as she does this, her hands also stick to the basin and her feet to the base of the fountain, and she is struck dumb.

As soon as night fell, behold, a great tumult, a shower of mist, and the fort disappears with them in it

Did a Woman Write The Four Branches of the Mabinogi?

2011-09-06T00:04:00.000+01:00

I am prompted to consider this question following an intervention on the Caerfeddwyd forum recently by Andrew Breeze to promote his view that the author of Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi was a woman and, in particular that the woman in question was Gwenllian (1090-1136). She is otherwise famous as a ‘warrior princess’ for leading an attack on Cydweli castle against the Normans, during which she was killed. Although I was familiar with this theory, I had not read Andrew Breeze’s book The Origins of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, so I located a copy and read the chapter in which the argument is set out.

The first part of the argument, that the views and the feelings expressed present a woman’s perspective on events, is quite persuasive as literary analysis and, in this respect, makes the case that a woman could have written the tales on the basis of characterization and the presentation of the sympathies of female characters - especially Rhiannon. Indeed I found myself quite won over to the view that female perspectives are strongly apparent here. This might have provided an interesting preamble to a discussion about the ways in which characters can inhabit stories or whether feminine perspectives can, necessarily, only be advanced by women.

But to move from this sort of reading of a text to the attempt to establish not only that the author definitely was a woman, but also to identify a specific character from the historical record, is, it seems to me, unjustified. The consensus view is that there is no way of knowing who the author was. There is no reason, of course, why this should not be challenged. But Andrew Breeze’s specific arguments for the authorship of Gwenllian seem to me to be rather forced and unconvincing. I don't, for instance, find the idea that the style of the poems of Hywel ap Owain Gwynedd has anything to say about the likelihood of his aunt Gwenllian displaying similarities in her prose style.

Other views could be advanced on stylistic grounds that, for example, the Fourth branch feels as if it were written by someone different from the First and Third branches and probably also the Second branch. That is a literary judgement which I might be inclined promote on the grounds of my own careful reading. But given the lack of firm evidence of authorship, there would be little point in doing more than recording it as an impression.

There has been a reaction against the tendency to see the tales as degraded pagan myths and the consequent attempts to reconstruct their mythical sources. Instead, it is argued, we should see the tales in the context of the historical period in which they were composed in their current forms. But if this leads, as it often does, to attempts to reconstruct political, historical or biographical facts that are not manifest in the texts, then arguably the same sort of errors of critical judgement may ensue. Where supposed mythical origins are based on thematic or philological identifications, these might be seen as a firmer base than speculations about political or historical significance.

I have argued in earlier posts that gods can inhabit folktales, stories and other cultural exchanges without it being necessary to prove an historical development from earlier myths, as enlightening as such proofs that are available may be to those who wish to read the tales in this way. Similarly, it is surely enough to find strongly feminine perspectives in the narrative or the characterization of the tales without this meaning that we have to identify a female author for them where no evidence of authorship exists.

Andrew Breeze indicates that he finds it difficult to live with the "nothing is concluded" of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, so needs to arrive at a firm conclusion. I think here of the view of John Keats in what he called 'Negative Capability', that is the ability to respond creatively while also "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

Personally I'm happy to live with 'negative capability' in this respect, and don't read the tales primarily as containing political or historical messages of the specificity assigned to them in the book. Rather they speak through their author of deeper things. Not just because of the supposed mythological origins but also because all literature has this as its primary function rather than being an adjunct to historical study.

It may be that it was Gwenllian who composed the Four Branches out of disparate elements from folklore and oral tales and made the literary creation that they are. Just as it may be that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Edward de Vere, The Earl of Oxford, as some choose to suppose and try to prove. But I find such speculations less interesting than the way we are spoken to directly from the text: 'The play's the thing ...'.

Ronald Hutton and the Gods

2011-08-14T22:44:00.002+01:00

I have been wondering whether to add a further post to the sequence of Thomas posts before putting an edited version together and placing them HERE. What I thought remained to be done was to draw out the suggestions that I have made in some of the posts that we read across different texts to see the same figure of the woman from the Otherworld on a horse emerging in different guises. Here as Rhiannon, there as the ‘Queen of Elfland’, elsewhere in another guise. Who is she?

Such a figure might be said to evolve or transform herself over time in different stories about her. Is this a cultural process or is something deeper going on?

I am led to such reflections by consideration of an article by Ronald Hutton in the current issue of Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies in which he casts doubt on the interpretation of characters in medieval stories - in particular those collected in The Mabinogion – as survivals of pagan gods. For example, he questions the back construction of the Brythonic goddess *Rigantona on linguistic evidence alone from Rhiannon whose name has been seen as a plausible development from *Rigantona. In the process of doing this he also casts doubt on the sovereignty argument, which sees goddesses as conferring sovereignty on kings or tribal leaders, as “a back-projection from medieval texts” rather than anything that can be attested in Antiquity. Hutton also casts doubt on the connection of Mabon with the undisputed Brythonic god Maponos, and of Lleu with Lugh , and in the process casts doubt on the provenance of Lugus as a pan-celtic deity. Hutton has apparently undertaken this review as an historian attempting to bring a broader understanding to the subject than is often brought by those working within narrower single disciplines such as philology, archaeology or folklore studies.

One of the points Hutton makes is that, in some cases, many of the elements in these medieval stories are international folklore motifs rather than themes restricted to Celtic cultures and that the borrowing of a name might take place without the attribution of the borrowed identity being also transferred. So the transfer of, for example, an epithet of Lugh in Ireland to Lleu in a story composed in Wales, does not imply any meaningful transfer of the deity status of Lugh to a Welsh context. Such arguments, alongside those of denying pagan survivals on the basis of linguistic evidence alone, will no doubt be assessed in responses from other scholars within the fields cited by Hutton. He also hopes that the arguments will be considered by others interested in the subject. What of those who have sought to construct a religious practice centred on Brythonic deities? For them many of the characters in what Hutton calls “wonder tales, in which apparently human characters frequently possess magical abilities” are seen as gods. Experiencing them as such is often validated by, though not entirely dependent upon, the fact that scholars have confirmed this view.

Whether one chooses to regard the gods as inhabiting the human psyche and therefore able to emerge when needed, as figures that can form and reform across cultures adapting different identities, or as beings with their own lives who choose to enter human consciousness in different ways at different times or in different places; to those for whom the gods are real in any of these ways, the problems raised by Hutton will not be problems at all. Whatever scholarship may bring to bear on the history of religion, the lives and messages of the proponents of religion and the provenance of various religious practices, it cannot address the question of the existence or otherwise of a god or gods. Gods, by definition, just are.

The recognition of a goddess on horseback possessing Otherworld qualities in the story of Rhiannon is not in itself dependent on scholarly identification of a likely divine source for her name. The fact that similar, but independent, stories exist which are equally expressive, such as the Scottish Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, are better reinforcements of human responses to the mythical life of the deity. And the expression of the mythical pattern in the folklore of different cultures is a further reinforcement of this feeling rather than an argument against it. If there are other medieval tales of women on magical horses moving at uncanny paces, as cited by Hutton referring to work by Jessica Hemming, this will further reinforce that view. So data used by Hutton to prove a particular point about the lack of specific continuity within a particular culture, might be seen as validating the view he is trying to invalidate. How can this be so?

To answer this, we could take the approach of Hutton as an engagement on an axis between scepticism about the pagan origins of medieval characters and at the other end of the axis, say, the theories of Caitlin Matthews who provides a systematic set of correspondences between these characters and Brythonic deities and supposed religious practices. The scholars cited by Hutton are nowhere near this extreme end of the spectrum but do, in varying degrees, affirm the correspondence between pagan deities and medieval fictional characters. Brythonic pagans will of course draw succour from such views, but, I suggest, should not base their religious practices on them. If, instead, we think along an axis at right angles, or some other angle, off this continuum, and suggest that historical correspondence is not the point so much as the identification of the nature of deity, then the questions will b e different ones. Can the gods choose to reveal themselves by inhabiting stories? Does it matter (to them or us) if we actually call them gods? Can stories generate themselves as a vehicle for such a process and transform themselves over time? Such questions may seem fantastic in the context of the debate along the historical continuum axis. But if these matters are to be approached by those who think of themselves as adherents of a pagan religion, then they are questions that will be to the fore, informed by research and conclusions developed on the other axis – and indeed further other axes – but not ultimately determined by them.

Would one be deluded in asking such questions? That is something that can be asked of religious believers in any faith. The Welsh Quaker poet Waldo Williams asked it of himself, and concluded that no adherents of any religion had anything but their own experiences to rely on. ‘Belief’ can be a matter of communal or social choice, but this doesn’t necessarily entail experience of a deity. Those who do have such experiences will, perhaps, turn to scholarship to inform them of the history of such belief, and they may themselves undertake the sort of investigation of the sources of texts such as I have engaged upon in recent posts on the ‘Thomas’ legend. They may conclude as a result of such researches that certain texts are, or are not, linked to other texts or part of a systematic religious practice at a particular place and time. But this is a separate consideration to the one which may inform their appreciation of stories as expressions of particular aspects of deity.

True Thomas - Parallel Themes and Resonances

2011-08-01T00:26:00.001+01:00

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

John Waterhouse

In addition to the Ballad and the 'Prophecies' of True Thomas, there is a body of Scottish fairy lore associated with Thomas. His coming and goings from the Otherworld feature in many tales such as this one->.

Whether these stem from the Ballad, or are a parallel development with the Ballad, is difficult to establish. Just as it is difficult to be certain whether either or both of these came from the tale which opens the 'Prophecies' or whether all stem from a common earlier source.

What is likely is that Thomas became a magnet for the folklore of the Otherworld, attracting stories to himself whose themes are also expressed elsewhere. He became a typological figure of the Otherworld journeyer, moving backwards and forwards across the borders of the two worlds.

In the first branch of Y Mabinogi Pwyll moves across that border and returns with the title 'Pen Annwn' , and by being an Otherworld ruler as well as a ruler of Dyfed, his visitation from the Horse Goddess legitimates his rule. For Thomas the benefits are otherwise. But the idea of gaining insight, poetic or prophetic knowledge, or sovereign legitimacy is all bundled into this meme of the Otherworld's influence on human affairs. The application of such memes might vary across political, theological and cultural spheres as well as in different historical periods. Like much of the fabric of medieval life which was taken up in later periods, this tale became part of the ideology of poetic Romanticism when John Keats adopted the persona of Thomas as a thrall to the Muse. His own situation as a consumptive poet with little prospect of a long life, or of being able to pursue the woman he was attracted to, also determined a tragic context for his version. So here Thomas becomes a doomed and lovelorn Romantic poet in medieval guise, as depicted by John Waterhouse's painting based on Keat's poem, both of which express a barely supressed sexuality and resonances of guilt, elements included in one episode of the 'Prophecies'; but also a lost sovereignty, a chance not realised, a beguiling by an Otherworld that remains unattainable. Is that the quintessential modern expression of this meme?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow

With anguish moist and fever dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look’d at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

“I love thee true.”

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep,

And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream’d

On the cold hill’s side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

True Thomas : What Can We Say About Sources?

2011-07-29T00:27:00.000+01:00

The Remains of Thomas of Erceldoune's Tower in modern-day Earlston

Having looked at the parallel narratives of the ‘Prophecies’ and the Ballad, what can now be said of the likely source of each of them? We know that the earliest manuscript of the ‘Prophecies’ is from the 14th century and that it is supposed to be the work of the historical Thomas of Erceldoune who lived over a hundred years earlier. There are two reason to think that the four extant manuscripts stem from an earlier version rather than being accurate copies of an earlier text. The first is that, although the story seems to have originated in Scotland, the language suggests that the author was from the North of England. This suggests an adaptation of a Scottish tale. Some commentators have felt that the change from the First Person to the Third Person, and then back again, also suggests a source in an earlier version. The tales begins “As I went out …” and continues using ‘I’ until Thomas sees the Lady. The narration then changes with “He said …” and remains in the Third Person through all the central events until “My lovely lady said to me” when she informs Thomas that they are to return. It then remains in the First Person. Was there an earlier version entirely in the First Person, told by Thomas of Erceldoune, and if so was he relating on his own account a story already known to him? This trail ends here.

What of the Ballad? We can trace the record back a little beyond its first emergence in print. Two version appeared early in the Nineteenth Century, one from Walter Scott and the other from Robert Jamieson. Information about how their versions were obtained is contained in the letters of Robert Anderson, a doctor from Edinburgh who was also a literary historian. He published Lives of the English Poets in 1795 and a critical edition of the works of Samuel Johnson in 1815. He carried on an extensive correspondence with other literary men including Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry had been published in 1765. (*) In communicating with Percy about Scottish border ballads in September 1800, Anderson refers to “a pretty large MS collection of old Scottish ballads, communicated by Mrs Brown, wife of Dr Brown, minister of Falkirk”. He reports that Mrs Brown “learned them all when she was a child by hearing them sung by her mother and an old maid-servant”. Mrs Brown had also been visted by Robert Jamieson earlier that year. Anderson then relates that, together with Robert Jamieson, he visited Walter Scott and they discussed the Ballad of True Thomas which had been obtained from Mrs Brown. Anderson spoke of his "suspicion of modern manufacture, in which Scott had secretly anticipated me”, as Mrs Brown was fond of ballads and herself wrote verse. But he concluded that “her character places her above the suspicion of literary imposture”, a view which James Murray, the editor of the ‘Prophecies’ treated with some skepticism.

But it should be noted that, in December 1800, Anderson again wrote to Percy about some ballads that had been passed to Wm Tytler by Professor Thomas Gordon of Aberdeen in 1783. Gordon was Mrs Brown’s father. These ballads had come from the same woman later identified by Mrs Brown, together with an aunt, a Mrs Farquharson, although Gordon does not mention his wife as a source. Mrs Brown herself later wrote to Tytler’s son who had enquired about the ballads, saying “I do not pretend that these ballads are correct in any way as they are written down entirely from my recollection, for I never saw one of them in print or manuscript”.

As Mrs Brown seems to have communicated a large number of ballads to a variety of different people, all apparently from memory, it is possible that she did not give all of them exactly the same versions. But this does not explain the considerable difference between Scott’s and Jamieson’s versions. And it does seem odd that she is the only source for the Ballad. We might wish to consider here that Anderson also reported to Percy that Jamieson proposed to publish his own collection of old ballads “with interpolated stanzas written by himself”. These later appeared as Popular Ballads and Songs(1806). We might think that Jamieson was more likely to anglicize the ballad in order to popularise it, or that Scott would be more likely to want to keep the Scottish flavour. Jamieson’s version certainly has all the indications of an adaptation by him in line with his stated intentions. Scott, however, was clearly also working from the ‘Prophecies’. He set out his version of the Ballad followed by a second section by himself but based on the ‘Prophecies’ and a third section in which he imaginatively created an epilogue. These are scrupulously separated. But could he have been influenced, or more than influenced, by the ‘Prophecies’ in transcribing a text of the ‘traditional’ Ballad obtained from Mrs Brown’s dictation?

-*-

* For Anderson’s correspondence, see

Illustrations of Literary History of the Eighteenth Century by J B Nicholls (1848)

More on True Thomas and the Lady

2011-07-21T19:46:00.001+01:00

I want in this post to continue the outline of the narrative of the first part of the ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Erceldoune, outlining points of similarity and difference to the Ballad. In the last post I did this up to the point where the Lady turns into a hideous hag-like figure. This incident is not in the Ballad. But the figure of the ‘Loathly Lady’ is well known in medieval literature. Chaucer used it in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Usually, the hero has to kiss the Loathly Lady, or agree to marry her, after which she becomes a beautiful young woman. ‘Kissing the Hag’ is a test, when a hero has to prove himself worthy and these stories are usually interpreted as ‘sovereignty’ themes, the would-be king or leader having to wed the land as winter as well as summer. But the pattern seems to be reversed here. Thomas has done a lot more than kiss the Lady, and the result is that she is transformed from beauty to hideousness. The ‘test’ here, if it is a test, is that Thomas has to accompany the Lady in her hideous form back to her own land, leaving ‘Middle Earth’ behind them . This involves a frightening journey underground and through water.

In the Ballad, after Thomas has kissed the Elfin Queen, she takes him up on her horse and they ride ‘swifter than the wind’ across a desert leaving the ‘living land’ behind them. In the ‘Prophecies’, following the lady’s transformation, Thomas is distraught and reverts to addressing her as the Queen of Heaven, supposing what they have done will bring him great trouble. But in one of the manuscript sources of the ‘Prophecies’ the wording suggests, rather, that he prays separately to the Virgin Mary and although this is less clear in the other manuscripts, it is a possible reading there too. The Lady’s response is to guide him to a ‘secret’ way under the hill where it is ‘dark as midnight mirk’ and where he must wade through a river. He hears nothing but the constant sound of running water for three days before arriving in a fair garden. In guiding him through the terrible ways to the Otherworld, the Lady, though having refused the title, seems to offer him the help and protection he prays for to ‘Mary mild’. Though he is faint with hunger and reaches out to eat some of the fruit in the garden, she tells him not to touch it or he will never return. This is a common theme of visits to the Otherworld and again, here, the lady is his guide and protector.

The briefer narrative of the Ballad dispenses with most of this but does include references to riding through rivers of blood. Both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’, though not in the same place in the narrative, have a scene where the Lady tells Thomas to put his head upon her knee while she points out the different road that could be taken. The Ballad has three of these: ‘the road to righteousness’, ‘the road to wickedness, which some call the road to heaven’, and the ‘bonnie road across the ferny brae’ which will take them to Elfland. In the ‘Prophecies’, the five roads identified are to heaven, to paradise, to purgatory, to hell, and to a castle on a hill which is their destination. The Ballad makes its point without these theological distinctions, simply asserting that ‘Elfland’ is different from heaven and hell.

In the version of the Ballad given by Walter Scott (but not in a later, possibly corrupt version) the Elfin Queen, rather than warning Thomas not to eat the fruit, offers him an apple which will give him ‘a tongue that can never lie’. We are then simply told that he returns after seven years wearing a coat ‘of the even cloth’ and ‘shoes of velvet green’. In both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’ Thomas is told not to speak while he is in the Otherworld. In the ‘Prophecies’ the reason given for this is that the Lady doesn’t want him to be questioned by her husband in case he reveals what they have been up to. The Ballad has no explanation except that if he does speak he will never return home.

As they ride towards the castle, the Lady’s beauty returns to her. Thomas stays there for what seems like three days but he is told it is three years (compare the Ballad’s seven years). He must leave, the Lady tells him, as the ‘foul fiend of hell’ will come to claim one of the company and if Thomas is there she fears it will be him. There is a parallel here with the story of Tamlane. Fytte One ends with the lady bringing Thomas back to the Eildon Tree. In fyttes two and three she keeps trying to take leave of him with repeated statements like ‘I must wend my way’ and ‘I may no longer dwell’. But Thomas keeps asking her for ‘ferlies’ and a series of prophecies are delivered.

And the Mabinogi? There are no obvious parallels, but consider the ‘penance’ that Rhiannon has to perform at the horse block when she is suspected of killing her son. She doesn’t become a loathly lady, but she has to endure a humiliation and a diminution in status until Pryderi is returned. As for Pwyll, he is ‘tested’ by the incident when Gwawl, the prospective husband Rhiannon does not want, outwits him and he needs Rhiannon’s help to regain the advantage.

The Rhymer, The Prophet and The Lady

2011-07-17T22:11:00.000+01:00

The Tree planted at the 'Rhymer's Stone' to mark the spot of the 'Eildon Tree'

The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer runs to between eighty and ninety lines according to which of the several versions are consulted. The corresponding narrative in Fytte One of the ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Erceldoune runs to 308 lines, with a partial extension into Fytte Two. So the material in the ‘Prophecies’ is obviously more detailed. This will need several posts to cover the different things I’d like to discuss, though I might eventually put them all together elsewhere.

The Ballad is widely available in different versions. My standard reference in these discussions will be to the version that appeared in Walter Scott’s Border Minstrelsy(1802). A slightly anglicized version of this can be found HERE

The texts from the various manuscript sources for the ‘Prophecies’ were published in James Murray’s Early English Texts Society edition in 1875. The earliest manuscript source dates from c.1430, a little more than a hundred years after the historical Thomas of Erceldoune died.

Here are the opening lines of the ‘Prophecies’ in their transcribed original form. I give this for a flavour of the text, but will after this quote from the text in my translation from the northern dialect of Middle English in which it is written.

Als j me wente Þis Eldres daye
Ffull faste in mynd makand my mone,
In a mery mornynge of Maye
By huntle bankkes my selfe alone,
I herde Þe jaye & Þe throstyll cokke,
The Mawys menyde hir of hir songe,
Þe wodewale beryde als a belle
That alle Þe wode a-bowte me ronge.
Allonne in longynge thus als j laye
Vndre-nethe a semely tree,
J was whare [of] a lady gaye
Come rydynge ouer a longe lee.
If j solde sytt to domesdaye,
With my tongue, to wrobbe and wrye,
Certanely Þat lady gaye
Neuer bese scho askryede for mee.
Hir palfraye was a dappill graye
Swylke one ne saghe j neuer none
Als dose Þe sonne on someres daye
Þat faire lady hir selfe scho schone.
Hir selle it was of roelle bone
Full semely was Þat syghte to see
Stefly sett with precyous stones
And compaste all with crapotee,
Stones of Oryente, grete plente,
Hir hare abowte hir hede it hange;
Scho rade ouer Þat lange lee
A whylle scho blewe, a-noÞer scho sange.

The first thing to notice here is that, unlike the Ballad, this is written in the first person. The Ballad is about Thomas. This purports to be written by him, though there are parts of the narrative that change to third person narration and I will discuss these in a future post. Another difference is that the Ballad launches straight into the action while the ‘Prophecies’ spend some time setting the scene. It is a May Morning, the birds are singing and, as the Lady comes riding towards him, she is described in great detail. Thomas is overwhelmed. He says, ‘If I were to live until Doomsday, I couldn’t describe her splendour’. She is ‘shining like the sun on a summer’s day’ as she approaches with her jewel be-studded trappings. As she comes, she sings out and blows upon her horn like a hunter. It takes 72 lines to describe her approach. The Ballad does it in eight lines.

Now, for comparison, consider this from the First Branch of Y Mabinogi:
“As they were sitting on this hill a woman dressed in shining gold brocade and riding a great pale horse approached the highway which ran past them. Anyone who saw the horse would have said it was moving at a slow steady pace as it drew adjacent to the hill. "Men," said Pwyll, "does anyone know that horsewoman?" "No, lord," they answered. "Then let someone go and find out who she is." A man rose to go after her but by the time he reached the highway she had already gone past. He tried to follow her on foot, but she drew farther ahead of him. When he saw his pursuit was in vain he returned and told Pwyll, "Lord, it is pointless for anyone to follow her on foot." "All right. Go to the court and take the fastest horse you know and go after her." The man fetched the horse and set out after her. Once he reached open country his spurs found his mount, but no matter how much he urged the steed onward the farther ahead she drew, all the while going at the same pace as before.”

These and other parallels will be considered later.

As the Lady approaches him, Thomas assumes that she is must be the Virgin Mary and he addresses her as such, but she informs him he is mistaken. She is, rather, as the ballad has it, The Queen of Elfland, though in the ‘Prophecies’ she simply says that she is from ‘another country’. Rhiannon, in Y Mabinogi is clearly of a faery nature from the outset and not mistaken for Mary, though she only identifies herself by her name and her father’s name.

In the Ballad, the Queen invites Thomas to give her a kiss and then almost immediately carries him off to Elfland after identifying other possible roads they could take. But in the ‘Prophecies’ much more happens. After being told that she is not Mary, Thomas begins to suggest that they ‘lie down’ together. At first she refuses, saying that it would ‘mar’ and ‘spill’ her beauty. But Thomas persists and she then agrees:

Down then came that lady bright
Underneath the greenwood spray
And if the story tells it right
Seven times with her he lay.
She said ‘man you like your play'

But after this, as she predicted, she is transformed and her appearance is hideous. All of this is covered by the kiss in the Ballad, after which he is under her spell. In Y Mabinogi, Rhiannon tells Pwyll she has come because she wants him for a husband and he agrees to visit her to formalize the arrangement.

At which point, I’ll pause and postpone more until the next post.

The Prophecies of True Thomas

2011-07-07T21:51:00.000+01:00

The Rhymer's Stone

The identity of Taliesin in the Welsh literary tradition has been mixed up with his status as the repository of legendary and prophetic material which clearly must be later than the supposed dates for the bard of Urien of Rheged in the sixth or seventh centuries. Much the same is true of Arthur as a legendary chieftain supposed to have lived at around the same time or a little earlier. The real identities of these figures, such as they can be established at all, are therefore uncertain. I find myself reflecting on these matters in the context of a much later case of an historical character who has gained legendary status. Thomas of Ercildoune has for some time been known to me as a character in the Scots ballad of ‘True Thomas’, or ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, who was carried off by the Queen of Faery and given ‘true speech’. During a recent trip to Scotland I visited the place where this is said to have happened. It is possible to follow a trail from the medieval abbey in Melrose up onto the Eildon Hills and then to descend to Huntley Bank by Bogle Burn (‘Goblin Brook’) and down to the ‘Rhymer’s Stone’, a memorial to mark the spot where Thomas sat, according to the ballad, under the ‘Eildon Tree’. A hawthorn has also been planted by the memorial stone to represent this tree.

As well as exploring the physical geography of the ballad I have also been researching its background. It appears in most anthologies of traditional ballads, having featured in Child’s English and Scottish Ballads(1862) and in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Robert Graves discussed the ballad in his ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’ The White Goddess (1949) and suggested that the true speech conferred on Thomas was the gift of poetic inspiration. He also points out that the ballad was a source of John Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. I had for some time, therefore, thought of the ballad as having independent existence arising from an oral tradition and representing a typological expression of a folklore motif of the Faery Queen on a horse. In this way it is possible to link it with other such expressions in, for instance, the ballad of Tamlane and, indeed, other literary formulations of the motif like the arrival of Rhiannon on a white horse in the First Branch of Y Mabinogi. This sort of typological approach enables one to see the use of the motif by poets such as Keats as touching on archetypal themes in both the written and the oral tradition of story telling or, we might say, myth making.

While still being persuaded of the validity of this approach, there is another way of viewing the bare facts. Thomas was an historical character who lived in the thirteenth century in a tower – now a ruin but still partly standing – in the village of Ercildoune (now Earlston) in the Tweed Valley. He was dubbed ‘The Rhymer’ because of his reputation for penning prophetic verses. But like Taliesin before him many later events became attached to his list of prophecies, in the case of Thomas mostly related to conflicts between England and Scotland. He is said to be the author of a work in three ‘fyttes’ or sections containing prophecies in Fytte Two and Three but telling the story of his being carried off by the Faery Queen in Fytte One. Here his acquisition of the gift for ‘true speech’ from the Queen is the validation of his power as a prophet. The earliest of several manuscripts containing this work – the so-called ‘Thornton Manuscript’, a collection of various romance and prophetic writing - has been dated to the decade 1430-1440, over a hundred years after Thomas’s death.

This work, it is believed, is the source of the ballad. But the work is written in a northern dialect of Middle English, not Scots. And while Fytte One contains the same story as the ballad, the details differ. In his edition of various manuscript versions of the ‘Prophesies’ for the Early English Texts Society in 1875, James Murray argues the case for the textual integrity of the whole work in three fyttes in spite of the feelings of Child and others that the story of Fytte One was distinct as a literary product and deserved to be considered separately. Murray also suggests it may not be too much to suppose that “Thomas of Ercildoune may, from his literary tastes, have been the repository of such traditional rhymes” and that he may have known of an independent version of the story in Fytte One and used it as a way of giving “currency to the idea of his own prophetic powers”. Or that a later author put together a compilation of Thomas’s prophecies, adding others of his own, and linked them to the story of his being carried away to Faery in the same way. Indeed, Murray points out that at some stages of its literary reception the prophecies had been regarded with more interest than the folktale. These were common currency in the political discourse of the time and were often used to justify, or whip up support for, particular causes. The author of the Complaynt of Scotland (1529) refers to “diuerse prophane prophesies of merlyne and other ald corruptit vaticinaris the quhilkis hes affirmit in rusty ryme” while James V (of Scotland) was entertained with “prophisies of Rymour, Beid and Marlyng”.

Placing the prophecies alongside those of Merlin, and therefore in the same context as those ascribed to Myrddin and Taliesin, brings the material into focus alongside Welsh texts and predictions of conflicts between the different peoples inhabiting Britain after the Romans left, and throughout the Middle Ages. But we do at least know that Thomas Learmount of Ercildoune existed and that some of the prophecies concerning the area around the Eildon Hills and the valley of the River Tweed provide a setting which make it likely that he was their author. Walter Scott, who was also an inhabitant of this area, may therefore be seen to have had an interest in promoting the ballad and there is some debate as to the previous provenance of the version that he printed in his collection. If it was, indeed, a recent literary production based on Fytte One of the ‘Prophesies’ then the idea that the story had an independent existence in the oral tradition could be questioned. Scott was certainly enthusiastic about Thomas’s legendary status and he even tried to appropriate it by incorporating a ‘Rhymer’s Glen’ into his estate at Abbotsford a few miles away from the spot where the ‘Eildon Tree’ was located. But many have felt that the story has a life of its own beyond the context of the times during which the prophecies were significant. And having a context outside of a particular historical time frame is one indication of a story with the typological, or mythical, significance referred to earlier.

A closer look, therefore, at the ballad, alongside the story in Fytte One of the ‘Prophesies’ is an ongoing project and may feature in a future post.

Invocation to MAPONOS

2011-06-18T19:22:00.001+01:00

Andedion uediiu –mi diiiuion risu naritu Maponon

Aruernatin: lotites sni eθθic sos briχtia Anderon

(Gaulish tablet found in a sacred spring at Chamelières)

which, freely interpreted, is rendered as:

Maponos of the deep, great god

I come to thee with this plea:

Bring the spirits of the Otherworld

To inspire us who are before thee.

Ancestors

2011-04-25T23:44:00.002+01:00

One way of thinking about ancestors is in terms of family lines running back and breaking out in a complex web as we go back significantly. If we are not thinking in terms of immediate past family, then another way of approaching the ancestors is through cultural and other traditions that seem to be transmitting themselves through us, because of emotional, instinctive or intellectual attachments to certain images, tales, traditions or other cultural artifacts.

But we could also take quite another view: instead of tracing linear connections back through a tangle of such lines, what if we thought about lateral connections running out from these? What has the rest of the biosphere fed into what I am, both recently (the particles out of which I and my recent forebears have been constructed) and much further back (the genetic inheritance shared in common with other creatures)?

To begin thinking about such things we might look at the traditions recorded for the pre-Hellenic Arkadians of Greece who sent young men out to live as wolves as a rite of passage into adulthood. The first ancestor of the Arkadians was Lykaon, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus as a punishment for cannibilism. Lykaon's daughter – Kallisto – was turned into a bear following an amorous encounter with Zeus. These rites of passage seem, therefore, to be a temporary act of reversion to an ancestral wildness for young males before they embrace the responsibility of adulthood. Perhaps young females might have lived as bears? It has been suggested that later legends of werewolves may originate in such practices, the men becoming 'wolf-kin' during their reversion to ancestral lives.

Consider, too, in this respect, the banishment from the tribe of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy in the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi as deer, boar and wolves for three successive years before being allowed to return to human life. Consider too that, in the Third Branch, the enchantment on Dyfed causes loss of domestication in the land, but it continues to teem with wildlife. In some Norse material there are suggestions of reversions to earlier ancestry in stories involving shape-shifting. Or think about the Greek stories lying behind Homer’s Odysssey. Odysseus has a grandfather called Autolykos (‘wolf-self’, or werewolf) said to be close to the god Hermes. The name is used by Shakespeare (from Ovid) as Autolycos, described as ‘a rogue’ in the character list for A Winter’s Tale, where he functions as a trickster “littered under Mercury” and remains outside the domestic circle of even the most peripheral characters of in the play. Zachariah Mason’s recent fictional re-telling* of some of the background to The Odyssey has this passage where Odysseus tells of visiting his grandfather:

“… he told me that his father’s father had counted both bears and men among his kin, this in the days before the red-hairs came. Though the blood is running thin, he said, the change still sometimes comes. He took me to a glade in a dark wood, drew a dagger with a wavy blade and cut deep into his wrists. I thought he was killing himself before my very eyes and was going to run for help, but fur erupted from his wounds and surged over his arms. His hands became padded paws with yellow half-moon claws and his irises turned mirror-green. The change stopped there and he soon reverted to the shape of a man, exhausted and dissatisfied.”

It was a power he was losing. His uncle had it, but had gone off to the woods and not returned.

Stories, what can they tell us? That at some layer of being our animal selves are waiting to emerge, and may do so fictionally if not actually, in such stories, in dreams, in myths of ancestry? Could we control allowing them to do so? Could we become wolves or bears, live in a land that had reverted to wildness and return to the human world renewed? If not actually, in stories, in dreams, through rites based on myths of ancestry? And what would we have learned from our ancestors in doing so?

(* see book cover above)

Rigantona : A Dedication

2011-04-18T20:15:00.000+01:00

Rigantona, I strew rose petals about your altar
For your coming from the Otherworld.

Spring is all about us ,
The hawthorn tree has leaves
Emerging from the Otherworld.

I feel your presence in the blossoming boughs,
In the flowers of the fields,
In the green leaves and the many-coloured petals.

These petals from another year I have kept for you
Until roses bloom again
And you ride
Through the gates of the Otherworld
Across the land in splendour.

Rigantona, I strew rose petals about your altar
For your coming from the Otherworld.

Selkie Lore

2011-04-06T22:50:00.000+01:00

Ursilla went to the rock
She saw the Selkie there
And as the waves washed against the rock
She shed seven tears.

The Selkie made a pact
To come at the seventh stream
So on the night of the high spring tide
He came in human form.

Her cold beauty shone
As they walked beneath the Moon
He looked at her with his his clear grey eyes
As deep as welling springs.

Like a river running free
Across a beach to the waves
She gave up all her sweetness then
To a salty embrace.

It is said that she had a child
That was born with webbed toes
But all this happened too long ago
For anyone to know.

(Adapted from an Orkney folk tale - a version of which is HERE)

John Cowper Powys : Mathrafal

2011-01-28T00:03:00.000Z

Mathrafal

The most interesting use of Brythonic legendary history for modern fictional purposes is, I think, contained in the later novels of John Cowper Powys. This is done on a grand scale in Porius where the conversations of Taliesin and Myrddin Wyllt are incorporated into a narrative which portrays post-Roman Britain as something of a melting pot of different races and cultures including aboriginal giants. He had drawn upon similar material in his novel Owen Glendower which is a rather more accessibleand and tightly organised work plotted around the historical events of Owain Glyndŵr's uprising in the 14th century but no less fictionalised in terms of the personalities of the characters and far from being an 'historical novel' in the way the term is often understood. In that novel the aboriginal Brythons are represented by Broch o Meifod in his court at Mathrafal, itself magnifenctly presented as a last bastion of a disappearing world. Broch makes an alliance with Glyndŵr, an alliance between the last of the Brythons and the representative of the inheritors of that earlier melting pot further complicated by links to the Norman aristocracy.

In the introduction to Porius, Powys had drawn parallels between the 6th and the 20th centuries. He comments that “As the old gods were departing then, so the old gods are departing now”. If, by the time of Owain Glyndŵr, we might think those gods would therefore be in full retreat, they nevertheless haunt the pages of that book too. Owain himself achieves legendary status before disappearing from his Principality of Wales to become a Prince of the Otherworld.

For Powys such material is always evoked as much to portray a personal quest as to illustrate historical, legendary or mythological events. But in the best passages of his works these things come together. At the end of the novel, Owain is cremated by Broch o Meifod and his son Meredith is taking his father's remains for burial. Here are some edited extracts from the last pages:

"Absolutely motionless – with its head lifted as it sniffed the dawn air – there stood before him on an isolated rock a magnificently-horned stag. ....."

"And now, as the sight of those majestic horns against the dawn brought back memory upon memory, he felt that each one of these images was much more than an owl's cry, a buzzard's vigil, a salmon's leap, a mountain summit above the mist. What were they, what did they have in them, that they could bring such comfort? ......"

"But there came over him now a vision of Arthur's ship Prydwen sailing between Hell and Heaven, and yet motionless in the depths of a single soul, its great dragon wings reflected in fathomless water...."

"'What's that sad-faced man smiling for?' Cried the oldest winged creature in Edeyrnion the croaking raven of Llangar, to his aged mate, as they swooped down over Meredith's quickened steps.
'Nis gwn! I don't know! Nis gwn!' croaked the other, and as the pair rose on their heavy-flapping wings and sailed away eastwards, mounting up in huge spiral circles higher and higher as they followed the river's flow, it seemed to the man watching them as if there were something in that vast broken landscape that echoed that hollow answer in his ears as long as he could remember."

"But the great birds soared on, heedless of the echoes; soared on till to Meredith's vision they were dots and specks in the remote distance. He knew not where they were flying. But in his thoughts they were flying over the rocky crest of the Berwyns; they were flying over the fallen roof-tree of Sycharth; they were flying to towards the mounded turf and the scattered stones that were all that was left of Mathrafal."

And so it seems that the old world passes away. But of course, as pervasive as the myth of departing is, it never does. Those old gods, as W P Ker once remarked, even in defeat, 'think that defeat no refutation'.

White

2011-01-18T00:20:00.000Z

Three unconnected quotations on whiteness at this ‘white’ time of year:

“In some cases the colour may have symbolic significance, for example the ‘pale white horse’ of Rhiannon. White is often linked with supernatural in the Four Branches (compare the white boar in the Third Branch, and the white dogs of the King of the Otherworld in the First), while ‘fairies riding white horses’ is an international motif. The colour of Rhiannon’s horse may, therefore, have been an indication to a medieval audience of her Otherworld status.”

Sioned Davies The Horse in Celtic Culture

She 's mounted on her milk-white steed,
She 's ta'en true Thomas up behind;
And aye, whene'er her bridle rang,
The steed gaed swifter than the wind.

O they rade on, and farther on,
The steed gaed swifter than the wind;
Until they reach'd a desert wide,
And living land was left behind.

from 'The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer' (anon)

“So the green Earth is first no colour and then green.
Spirits who walk, who know
All is untouchable, and, knowing this, touch so,
Who know the music by which white is seen,
See the worlds colours in flashes come and go.
The marguerite’s petal is white, is wet with rain,
Is white, then loses white, and then is white again
Not from time’s course, but from the living spring,
Miraculous whiteness, a petal, a wing,
Like light, like lightning, soft thunder, white as jet,
Ageing on ageless breaths. The ages are not yet.”

Vernon Watkins from ‘Music of Colours’

Mererid and the Deluge

2011-01-09T01:13:00.004Z

The popular version of the legend of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the sunken land beneath the sea in Cardigan Bay, West Wales, is that a character called Seithenyn got drunk and failed to close the sluice gates before the tide came in, and so the sea drowned the land. This version is comparatively recent, though it allows one of Iolo Morganwg's phony triads featuring Seithenyn as one of the three great drunkards of Ynys Prydain. In the older story Seithenyn was not the culpable drunkard but the king of Maes Gwyddno. The story is told in verses in the Black Book of Carmarthen of a young woman called Mererid who removes a vital stone to allow the water in becuase she is distraught at the death of her lover who has been killed in battle on behalf of Seithenyn. The verse accuses her of pride ('traha') and suggests that she cries to God in remorse for what she has done . It has been suggested that one of the verses may have been responsible for the later 'drunkard' story:

Diaspad mererid y ar gwineu kadir
kedaul duu ae goreu
gnaud guydi gormot eisseu

translated originally as

Meredid's cry over strong wines
bounteous God has wrought it:
after excess comes privation.

However, the words 'gwineu kadir' do not in the opinion of recent scholars mean 'strong wines' but refer to the chesnut coloured horse Mererid rides (gwineu = 'reddish-brown).

But is the tale of Mererid herself a rationalisation of an even earlier story? John Rhŷs suggests that there are parallels with well legends in which the guardian of the well or spring might, if violated or offended, release the cap on the conduit from a vast deposit of water - perhaps from the Other World - which then inundates the area around the spring. This Rhŷs suggests, is the origin of several lake legends such as those of Llyn Llech Owen; and at Llyn y Fan , as is well known, an Other World woman came through to our world carrying her own taboo of violation.

If the story of Mererid ('pearl') is such a rationalisation then we must regard the legend as a fluid(!) story, changing according to the predelictions of different ages, and decide if this particular restructuring of the 'original' has meaning for us; if the return of the water world speaks to our condition in the 21st century. If so the significance it carries of lands inundated because the guardian of the gateway to the waterworld has been angered, is potentially greater than the playful interaction with legend, however deeply embedded in archetypal imagery of the deluge, but may become a dynamic image of our own experience of a deluge that flows through legendary gateways into our own dry comfort zone. Then we may think:

The oyster containing Mererid's pearl
Is no mermaid's tale or
Cultured setting of disaster:
Intact it seals our future.

Mari Lwyd

2010-12-30T23:55:00.000Z

We bring from Cader Idris

And those ancient valleys,

Mari of your sorrows,

Queen of the starry fillies.

Hers the white art that rouses

Light in the darkest palace,

Though black as a mole's burrow:

Truly we come to bless.

Great light you shall gather,

For Mari here is holy;

She saw the dark thorns harrow

Your god crowned with holly.

(from Vernon Watkins' poem 'The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd')

Solstice

2010-12-20T20:08:00.000Z

At the Winter Solstice we might consider the turn of a tide, a pause in a cycle, a point of reversal, an opportunity for new life, new strength, new visions, but all as yet in embryo, untried, undeveloped, potential.

For this is a time for reflection rather than action, for rest rather than exertion, for a clear view rather than one filled with many things.

So find some time for silent reflection, for contemplation, for the nurturing of new strength as yet unfulfilled.

As time is paused, at a point of balance, take a moment of time out of time and consider the words of William Penn in 1699: “True silence … is to the spirit what sleep is to the body”.

May your Solstice Night be a Silent Night, for then there is time for rejoicing.

Rachel Bromwich

2010-12-18T23:16:00.000Z

Three Great Scholarly Works of Ynys Prydein:

Trioedd Ynys Prydein
Culhwch and Olwen
Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym
Rachel Bromwich 1915-2010

Cara Wallia Derelicta

2010-12-11T11:18:00.002Z

The inscription above by David Jones is in a mixture of Welsh and Latin. It reads
Cara Wallia derelicta....Literally 'Dear, abandoned Wales' (though David Jones himself once rendered it 'Poor buggered-up Wales'), 'on the feast day of Damaseus, Friday the Eleventh day of December, then was all Wales cast down' (the last bit of that is a line from the Elegy to Llywelyn the Last native Prince of Wales who was killed on that day). The inscription goes on to suggest a lineage for Llywelyn such as that claimed by Geoffrey of Monmouth for Arthur, but using the Latin of Virgil mixed with the Welsh of Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch:

The ineluctable hour of Troy has come
A leader's head, a dragon's head was upon him
Fair Llywelyn's head, a shock to the world
That an iron stake has pierced it.

(Llywelyn's body was buried at Abbey Cwm Hir in Wales but his head was impaled on London Bridge.)

And then, still echoing the Elegy from Llywelyn's bard:

'There is no counsel, no closure, no opening' (this running up the side of the inscription).

So here, on the 'first day after ten' of December, this is in memory of that winter - ab hieme - 1282.

Light ebbs yet, and the turn of a tide is slow, but certain.

Horse Sonnets

2010-12-03T19:44:00.002Z

{I}

The cottage is from an older world

Than the road that runs past it.

Sitting in its bedroom viewing trees

In the far distance I relish,

From my sick bed, the Sunday

Quietness in this busy time of the world

As if the noise had been carried away

By the analgesic that dissolves my pain.

And in the afterglow of this moment

Bridged by the growing and the shrinking

Sound of a car, the quiet returns

With a clatter of hooves on the road

Which I know I can share

With those others that lived here before.

{II}

And then the strangeness of it all, the ghostly

Clop of those hooves and the reality of those horses.

With only the sound to go by I must reconstruct

That substantiality, the hard muscle and yellow teeth,

And the rider: I see a tall woman with a black hard hat.

Or I can refuse the specific location of sound in solidity

Posit riders from the spirit world, the wild hunt,

Phantom steeds in the quiet of the afternoon.

Even so, the imagination, capable of so much,

Returns to its roots in the real, reviews what it remembers

Making what I might see if I went to the window,

In spite of the semi-delirium of fever,

To wonder if horses from the Otherworld

Would have such hooves as beat the hardness of the road.

{III}

Ranging along the bridleways of being

Thoughts drift to an old story of a woman

On a white horse who came into the world

Much as my thoughts drift in and out of it:

Elusive, though she rode a straight path

At a steady pace, she would not be caught

By any who followed her save one she sought

And he only by asking her to stay awhile.

Then her horse stood, and she in the saddle

Conversed with her veil cast aside,

All her glamour revealed

So the pact was soon sealed

That in one year, if he came, she would be his bride

And so it was, though delayed till he showed his mettle.

{IV}

In the high field above the trees is a horse

We can visit, and in walking weather

We take her an apple and she comes to the gate

For it and each of the children force

Themselves to hold a piece in their palm and her nether

Lip slobbers them as she takes it, and they concentrate

On holding the hand out flat. Their hands are wet

When they climb from the gate with shining eyes

For they have touched another life and a world

That is not theirs beckons, but under their own skies

Where there are things to discover, banners to be unfurled.

We look out at them and the horse through a glaze

Which is between us and their country and its untrodden ways.

Discovering Another World / Darganfod Byd Arall

2010-10-28T14:35:00.001+01:00

Last night the Morlan Centre in Aberystwyth put on the above event at which Welsh-language author, playwright and poet Aled Jones Williams – who is also an ex-Anglican priest – spoke of some spiritual insights he had gained from the Mabinogi stories and the tale of Taliesin. He was joined by Lama Shenpen Hookham who runs a Buddhist hermitage in North Wales. Both speakers had clearly found spiritual inspiration from these stories. For Aled Jones Williams this was part of a personal journey out of alcoholism. For Lama Shempen Hookham it was related to the finding of the right place to establish the hermitage.

These personal insights apart, what came out of the discussion which followed was the notion of spiritually significant places and whether what gives them significance is the place itself or the stories told about it. Aled Jones Williams had begun by speaking of stories as “psychological states” and defined fundamentalist approaches to religion as an attack on myth and, therefore, on language (conversely, he saw the currently prevalent ‘myth of the market’ as “demonic”). Clearly if places, and the stories told about them, are psychological states, then it is what we bring to a place that makes it significant, either for individuals or for those who have a share in a cultural heritage focused on a particular landscape.

But in spite of what Aled Jones Williams said about the fundamentalist desire for the story to be literally true, there were some including, I think, Lama Shempen Hookham, who wanted to promote the idea that a place might be significant in its own right. Here the discussion could have diverted into a discussion of spirits of place. Although it did not, there was a consideration of how places may acquire a context allowing an individual to respond to, or get a response from, a particular place. There was some play on the Welsh word for ‘civilisation’ – ‘diwylliant’, which contains the equivalent of the elements ‘un-‘ and ‘wild’, as part of the context for making a place accessible in this way. From here it is possible to move from the personal to the wider cultural implications of the existence of special places.

I have often felt particular places to have special qualities, but have not always been able to define those qualities. The experience of the place then seems ‘wild’, an experience of nature in the raw, of something ‘other’. That is one way of experiencing a special place. But if you know a story about a place, if you know it not just as part of a ‘personal’ story, but as a story that is shared, and has been shared, by generations of ancestors linked to the land in and around the place, that is another way of knowing it. Stories and places each have lives of their own. But when they share a life and we share it too, then the place itself becomes part of a community and it is not so much ‘other’ as ‘here’. Are the most significant places those where the sense of wildness or otherness underlies the sense of belonging that conveys ‘here’ rather than ‘there’? Where the genius loci is part of the domestic space.

In the third branch of the Mabinogi, when the enchantment is cast on Dyfed, the land reverts to wildness. It does not cease to be fruitful in terms of wild nature, but its cultivated fields and homesteads are gone. It becomes anghyuaned. In this wild state, strange things happen, the gates to the Other World are open and Rhiannon goes through them. When the enchantment is lifted she returns and domestication is restored. Many debates about religion share this dichotomy between the domesticated and the wild, though it is often confused. We might think of three categories of religious perception:

• That direct experience is paramount, so God, gods, spirits of place, religious truths can be apprehended personally as revelation, and seem not to require the intervention of language;
• That these things are experienced culturally within language and a social framework that is inevitably human so such experiences are relative and fluid across cultures and over time;
• That a particular text is absolutely and definitively true and that all other texts or experiences are in error.

Clearly that last position, though prevalent, is a perverse restriction of the second and should be resisted. But the interaction between the first, or mystical tradition, and the second or cultural tradition is necessary and fruitful so that it can be argued that the two need to be held in some sort of tension for religion to remain vital. Certainly each depends on the other. Confronted by wildness the human response is to want to shape it. Deprived of wildness we wish to make it present. The Birds of Rhiannon sing to us out of just such a complex of desires.

Teyrnon Twrf Liant

2010-10-14T00:34:00.000+01:00

The Severn Bore

In the First Branch of Y Mabinogi it is said that Teyrnon Twrf Liant is Lord over Gwent Is-goed (Gwent Below the Forest). This forest stretched across the south-eastern corner of Wales to the River Severn. The remaining woodlands of Wentwood above the town of Newport and near to the remains of the Roman fortress of Caerleon - or the Arthurian court of Caer Llion - are a remant of this forest. There are also large tracts of forested land along the valley of the River Wye either side of the current border between England and Wales. There is also the Forest of Dean stretching between the River Wye and the River Severn. Most of this latter forest is now in the English county of Gloucestershire, though it has always seemed to me to be an extended border enclave between the two lands, such is its liminal quality. Certainly it would have been part of the imagined territory of Teyrnon whose name 'Twrf Liant'(Roar of the Flood Tide?) has been linked to the phenomenon of the Severn Bore.

I witnessed this event - not for the first time - on a recent visit to the area to enjoy the autumn colours in the forest, re-visiting paths and trackways winding through the great oaks and other trees that are the inhabitants of this realm. The Severn Bore itself is a fascinating occurence. It is caused because of the huge width of the extensive estuary of the river. At particular high tides this causes a sudden rush of water into the tidal stretch where the river narrows nearly as far up as the city of Gloucester (Caer Loyw). Standing expectantly watching the waters flow steadily towards the sea, watchers are suddenly confronted by a huge wave rushing up-river against the current. As it rushes past the flow of the river is reversed and the river continues to rise for some time until it eventually subsides and begins to sink down again as its usual direction of flow is restored.

'Teyrnon' is a modernised form of 'Tigernonos' (Great Lord). In the medieval tale he is the foster father of Pryderi, son of Rhiannon or Rigantona (Great Queen). Pryderi was snatched from his mother soon after birth, as was Mabon son of Modron, or Maponos son of Matrona. It is often the case that typological motifs are paired or doubled, indicating mythological origins. These characters continue their psychic presence in stories making their own ways through the world. So here, in these woods where I walk, I can imagine the boyhood of the Divine Son whose father resides by the roaring waters of the River Goddess Habren, or Sabrina.

Walking the forest paths from Lydbrook on the Wye to Lydney on the Severn (where there was a temple to Nodens) is to walk enchanted paths as Autumn shifts the spectrum of colour from greens to rust and yellow-browns. It is to be aware, also, of deep currents of myth, legend and story which enliven the physical landscape in the psyche so the river, the water brooks and the forested hills are inhabited not just in place but also in time.

Propositions and Questions about Maponos and Poetic Inspiration

2010-10-07T15:49:00.001+01:00

If – as is attested – Mabon Son of Modron is Maponos Son of Matrona, the divine Son of the divine Mother, and if also – as is attested – he is the spirit of Poetic Inspiration such as is embodied in the inspired [literally*] possession of the Awenyddion as mentioned by Gerald of Wales, and therefore he is the inspired source of their prophecies, and if, cognate with this, The Spirit of Poetry mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary as inspiring the young lad who engages in a rhyming competition with the female poet and may be linked – as is attested – to Aeongus Óg, and if this same inspired possession is the source of Henry Vaughan's account of the poetic spirit actually entering the young shepherd in the form of a hawk carried by a “a beautifull young man with a garland of green leafs upon his head, & an hawk upon his fist: with a quiver full of arrows att his back”

Then is there a link between the God of Youth and the Spirit of Poetry which survives in the fragments of story making their own way through the world as episodes in a medieval tale, accounts of poetic & prophetic inspiration and illustrative glosses on words in an exegetical grammar?

But if (as argued by Robert Graves) the source of that inspiration is a goddess rather than a god, whether as Muse or, in the native tradition, the Queen of Faëry as embodied in ballads such as those about Thomas of Ercildoune or Thomas the Rhymer Who also features in native faërie lore, or in poems such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats which are also making their own independent ways through the world,

Then should we, as Graves suggests, perceive a transfer of power from feminine to masculine deities as the source of inspiration as evinced by Apollo’s inspiration of the priestess at Delphi?

And if so, does the release of Mabon (who was snatched from his mother when three days old) from a dungeon below Caer Loyw in Culhwch and Olwen signify a release of that prophetic and youthful power into the world by the warrior Arthur and how are we to compare this to the adoption of prophetic power by Taliesin from a brew prepared by Ceridwen whose own cauldron of Inspiration – like that retrieved from the Otherworld by Arthur – became a source of male rather than female power?

Or should gender not be an issue here?

‘Inspiration’ – from ‘inspirare’, to breathe in.

Tales of Arthur

2010-07-21T22:51:00.000+01:00

Earlier this evening John K Bollard read from his translation of the Arthurian tales contained in the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as 'The Mabinogion'. This took place in the campus bookshop at the University in Aberystwyth. He was joined by his wife Margaret Lloyd who read from her own collection of poems based on Arthurian themes and also by Anthony Griffiths whose photographs accompany the translations and who has also published a book of photographs capturing the wildness of Elenydd, the mountain fastness at the centre of Wales. Anthony Griffiths, an accomplished musician, entertained those who attended by playing his guitar. It was, then, a multi-valent event.

John Bollard, in breaking up the 'Mabinogion' tales into three volumes, also breaks the corporate identity bestowed upon them by Lady Charlotte Guest when she published the first translation in the Nineteenth Century. The eleven tales that make up the corpus are only really a corpus at all in that they were discovered bound together in manuscript collections known as The Red Book of Hergest and The White Book of Rhydderch. The 'Four Branches' of Y Mabinogi certainly form a group and may be by the same author. These formed the first of the volumes translated by Bollard together with Griffiths' photographs which themselves underline how deeply rooted in the landscape of Wales these tales are. By the second volume Companion Tales to Y Mabinogi, a series 'Landscape and Legend of Wales' had been established. Anthony Griffiths' photographs again researched the places in 'How Culhwch Got Olwen' and the 'native tales' and it was clear that a mythic presentation of landscape was emerging from the interaction of text and photographs.

In the latest volume Tales of Arthur this interaction is more problematic. In these tales we are very much in the medieval 'present' rather than a mythic past. Arthur is a king or emperor and his men are knights. Like the French romances with which these three tales can be compared the knights ride off from Caer Llion on Usk into enchanted landscapes with little specific correlation with the actual geography of the land. Photographs here were clearly a problem and many of the pictures have no specific links with the text or illustrate Arthurian place names, making the point that these show how much Arthur is part of the geography of Wales even if that geography cannot be specifically linked to the tales. This, in itself, underlines the justification for breaking up 'The Mabinogion'. These tales, certainly, are different from the other tales in the collection and deserve to be presented in their own right.

The Veil of Melangell

2010-06-27T21:53:00.000+01:00

Walking up the slope from the river in the treeshade

I stopped as I saw her on the path

The hare stopped too.

Then loped silently over the bank into the field.

I walked on up the slope and through the gap

Looking up and down for the hare

along the bank.

Then, on the other side of the field, I saw

Just her ears in the grass as she moved,

But saw nothing when she was still.
She moved towards a hollow

Where the sheep had not cropped

and the growth was tall.

She was hidden in the skirts of Melangell

And did not emerge in the stretch of time
that I lingered.

Our Lady of the Hares – Melangell –

Hid a hare from a hunter. I was not hunting

But saw in the being of the hare

Something I sought as if it were prey:

Mysterious, vibrant and alive with meaning

Hidden in the folds of Melangell’s skirts

So that she is the keeper of the veil

Cast over the pulse of life; the elusive,

Fleeting glimpse of the hare on the path.

Nikolai Tolstoy on 'Y Mabinogi'

2010-06-17T23:30:00.000+01:00

The three short-listed authors for the English-language 'Wales Book of the Year' Award

I Spy Pinhole Eye, Philip Gross (Cinnamon Press)

Carry Me Home, Terri Wiltshire (Macmillan)

The Compilation of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Nikolai Tolstoy
(The Edwin Mellen Press)

The Wales Book of the Year Award has come up with something of a surprise in its English language category short list. One of the chosen books is Nikolai Tolstoy's The Compilation of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. I haven't yet read it and Amazon are currently selling it for £85 so unless the award leads to a cheaper version I don't suppose its sales will be widespread. Tolstoy's book on the Myrddin legend was a piece of popular scholarship that has many detractors among specialists. In the current book I understand he attempts to place the tales in the context of eleventh century historical events. This might not be to the taste of those who were enthusiastic about his portrayal of Myrddin as a remnant druid.Whether it will please the academic community any better is another question. I'd be interested to hear from readers of this blog who might have the answer.

WHITE RAVENS

2010-05-25T15:12:00.001+01:00

As indicated in the previous post, Seren Books have commissioned a series of short novels based on approaches to Y Mabinogi and two have so far been published.

The adaptation of the First Branch by Russell Celyn Jones as The Ninth Wave suffers, I think, from some of the problems identified in his approach to the material. It rather schematically transfers story lines and characters to a setting in the near future, strips out almost everything that is magical and locates the action in and around the city of Swansea. The writing is sparse with short sentences predominating and it wears its literary techniques on its sleeve (the author teaches creative writing).

The adaptation of the Second Branch by Owen Sheers as White Ravens is much more successful. The narrative from the original is nested into a frame story by an Ancient Mariner like figure and itself ingeniously adapts motifs from the medieval narrative. Moving between the present and the 1940s it sustains a realistic story in a modern setting while at the same time retaining the mythological aura of the original. The writing is skilfully executed and the whole thing hangs together as a story in its own right as well as an adaptation of the earlier material. Its use of that material is both free and fluent but also firmly rooted in the original.

Although Owen Sheers has a better sense of mythological themes, neither adaptation really captures the numinousness and the magical aura of the original: Rhiannon riding past and moving out of range of her pursuers without appearing to speed up, the strangeness of her penance at the horse block, the sojourn with the head of Bran on Gwales …. This would be a difficult thing to do in a modern narrative that sought to avoid the fantasy genre of other recent adaptations.

Two more titles are on the way from Seren, one by Niall Griffiths and one by Gwyneth Lewis, presumably based on the two remaining branches of Y Mabinogi. The series editor, however, speaks of “the eleven stories in The Mabinogion” so it might be that adaptations of the other tales will also eventually appear. It will be interesting to see what can be done with Culhwch and Olwen. The prospect of adapting some of the other tales is, to say the least, intriguing.

Re-writing the Mabinogi

2010-05-17T22:01:00.001+01:00

Seren Books are currently publishing a series of novels based on Y Mabinogi . Two have so far been published: Owen Sheers’ White Ravens and Russell Celyn Jones’ The Ninth Wave. I don’t want to comment now on the novels themselves, though I might do so in the future. Rather I want to say something about the view taken of the original texts. I’m prompted to do this by an article in the current number of The New Welsh Review by Russell Celyn Jones on his re-working of the First branch: Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed. The use of such material for modern fiction is, of course, quite justified and there is no reason why a modern author should feel constrained by the need to accurately represent the original tales. Even if an author chooses to use them, for instance, as a jumping off point for a narrative that eventually turns out to be unrecognisable as a representation of the original tales, that too is a quite legitimate imaginative exercise.

So what is there to take issue with? Russell Celyn Jones says in the article that he first encountered ‘The Mabinogion’ at school. He says that he was unimpressed with it in spite of being told how important it was by his teachers (understandable enough, many pupils have the same experience with Shakespeare), but thought a little better of it when he read it while at university. He doesn’t say what translations he used for his earlier readings (he does not read Welsh) but says that for the re-working project he wanted to achieve ‘distance’ so chose an American translator (Jeffrey Gantz). I would have been inclined to sample a few translators and would certainly not want to take Gantz’s as definitive but I emphasise the point about translation because he then goes on to say that “The Mabinogion doesn’t read as well as The Iliad or The Odyssey. This may have something to do with the Greek epics being attributed to a single author. With Homer there is more coherence. In handing down the stories of The Mabinogion orally, details were lost and only the outline survived.”

Jones also objects that the tales are not sufficiently “rooted in the landscape” [!]. He describes the story he is adapting as “arid” and expresses the need to “breathe oxygen” into a “revered text” and “to bring its characters to real life using modern fictional techniques”. He wants to make what is magical psychological; what is whimsical realistic. At the same time he wants to retain “the mythical character of the original”.

There are a number of things to take issue with here, not least the apparent failure to take the text on its own terms and approach it with a proper understanding of what to expect from it. One is tempted ask ‘why bother’? But he does find, on his adult re-reading, that there are potentially exciting story lines than he can develop and this is what he has attempted to adapt. Again, fair enough. But the implication that the Homeric epics were not handed down, that the Four Branches were not, as many scholars believe, a literary construction by a single author feeds further misconceptions. As does the comparison between one translation of a medieval Welsh text and (presumably?) translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad. To say that one “doesn’t read as well” as the other seems way off the mark. I need no convincing of the value of reading the Odyssey but this is a quite different type of narrative and anyway to compare translations of texts is not the same as comparing readings of the originals.

The concern with the details of the story focuses on the scene where Pryderi is snatched by the creature that Teyrnon encounters when it snatches his foal on May Eve. He says that all the action here seems to happen ‘off-stage’ like a Greek tragedy. It may be that there are layers of folklore or myth that are implied but which the medieval author chose not to develop or didn’t fully understand. But Jones perceives a failure of story-telling here which he ascribes to the suggestion that some details are missing. So we have a modern novelist finding fault with a medieval narrative because not enough information about relationships is supplied: “With not a single glimpse of interiority, it resembles more a report in a newspaper”.

He is also working on the assumption that the extant text is an incomplete version of an Ur text, an approach that is often rejected when it is advanced by Celtic revivalists. This, again, leads to an assumption that the medieval author didn’t know his business, or, as he puts it, “the medieval oral-telling tradition has failed to keep pace with the modern reader’s expectations.”

It is fair enough for a modern author to say what he needs to do in constructing a novel to meet these expectations, but what is said here simply suggests a lack of engagement with the material he is supposed to be adapting.

Merlin, Fictional Characters and the Gods

2010-04-29T20:40:00.003+01:00

In the current issue of PLANET magazine I review Stephen Knight’s book MERLIN Knowledge and Power Through the Ages (Cornell University Press, £18.95). His approach is similar to that he brought to his earlier study of the Robin Hood legend. On the one hand he identifies his subject as a character with identifiable characteristics but on the other hand he emphasises the mythic rather than the personal nature of these characteristics. He has little time for what he calls the “re-formation of knowledge in the service of individual identity” , an approach which involves trying to prove that Robin Hood or Merlin were real historical characters living at a specified time in the past. Attempts have been made to do just that for both of these characters which have the air about them of those who argue for the literal truth of stories in the Bible or other religious tales. Wanting to believe that fragments of ancient rope found on Mount Ararat might be from Noah’s Ark is just one recent example of this tendency.

Saying this is not to say absolutely that there could not have been an historical person that fed into the legendary identity of Robin Hood, or a bardic Myrddin who became the Merlin of legend. It is to say that the really interesting thing about such characters is their legendary status rather than any possible actual historical existence. The same can be said of Taliesin, Arthur and many other legendary figures. What they became as their stories grew expanded beyond the confines of a particular age, let alone a particular life. In trying to show that Merlin figuratively represents Knowledge and its relation to the power structures of particular ages, Knight is able to present Merlin as embodying the relationship between Knowledge and Power in different historical periods. Sometimes he is able to instruct those in power, sometimes he is used by them and sometimes he is marginalised. Interestingly Knight sees such Knowledge in our own age as serving the interests of individuals rather than institutions.

How might such an analysis be extended to the deeper mythic significance of characters seen to have their origins not in remarkable individuals but deities from a distant past? Surely no-one would confuse these with real people? Perhaps not. But a similar process seems to operate when these deities continue their mythic lives in later ages in folk tales, poetry or fictional writing. What happens here is in some ways the reverse of the process described above. In at least one version of the way this works a goddess or god is reduced in status to that of a character in a story and may, in the story, be interacting with other characters whose status is uncertain or who do not have any significant life outside the story. Here, it is not so much that we want to find out who this character really was but who(s)he really is. If a character in a story, a legend or other narrative embodies a mythic significance, and if the stories told about such characters speak to us directly at the mythic level, then should we be so literalistic as to worry about how they correspond to identified deities in the past and how much the redactors of the story did, or did not, understand this? Linguistic evidence may provide us with such a link and we might regard this as a bonus. But given the paucity of information about such deities in the past; and given the fact that even as deities their character may have varied at different times in that past, shouldn’t we be thinking rather about how we can build a relationship with them in the present?

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter contains the line “Hard are gods for mortals to see”, and stories about them are never going to be definitive. But the story of Rhiannon riding out of Annwn in a love tryst is powerful enough for me to regard it as an evocative image of the Queen of Faery on her white horse even without the identified linguistic link back to the goddess Rigantona. Mabon Son of Modron can be identified as Maponos Son of Matrona, so the image of him being released from a dark dungeon into the light of day takes on a mythic dimension which enables a mythic interpretation of an otherwise random episode in the story of How Culhwch Won Olwen.

And here the link with legendary characters such as Robin Hood and Merlin can be made. The mythic lives of such figures enable them to be seen as operating at the level of social forces such as Knight’s interpretations suggest. But the mythic life can also operate at the level of religious symbolism. Arthur, who rescues Mabon, may or may not have been a Dark Age warrior. But here he is the bright Sun shining and banishing the darkness of Winter. The gods are not always so hard to see. But sometimes they may pretend to be real people!

The Oldest Animals

2010-04-10T00:10:00.003+01:00

I mentioned Cors Fochno (Borth Bog) in my last post and responding to comments said I would say something about the Llyffant (Toad). Most people know the story of the 'Oldest Animals' as an episode in the tale Culhwch and Olwen (my blog on this here) where the animals help Arthur's men to find Mabon son of Modron. But the tale exists independently of Culhwch, both in Welsh and as an international folk tale motif, though the actual animals are different in different cultures.

An extant version in Welsh which mentions the Toad (not featured in the Culhwch episode)
is the account of Thomas Williams of Trefriw who recorded it in 1594. George Borrow repeated the story in his Wild Wales (1862) and claimed to have seen it "in an old, tattered Welsh story book". Here is my translation of a version printed in 1766 which seems to have been taken from the manuscript of Thomas Williams:

The Eagle of Gwernabwy and his wife had been married for a long time and they had lots of children together but now she was dead and he was alone. So he thought he would marry the Owl of Cwm Cowlwyd, but first he wanted to know how old she was to make sure of the lineage of any children he had with her.

So he went first to the Stag of Rhedynfre, and found him lying by an old withered oak tree, and asked him how old the owl was. The Stag said “I knew this oak as an acorn which is now lying without leaf or bark upon it, and there has been no wear on it at all except that I rub myself against it every day, but I never saw the Owl either older or younger than she is today. But there is one that’s older than me: the Salmon of Glyn Llifon.

The Eagle went to him and asked the age of the Owl. He said “ I know I am a year old for every scale on my skin and for every speck in my belly and I never saw the Owl except as she is now. But there is one older than me, and that is the Blackbird of Cilgwri.”

The Eagle went and found the blackbird sitting on a small stone and asked the age of the Owl. The Blackbird said “Do you see this stone under me? It is no bigger than a man could hold in one hand, but I have seen it when it was as heavy as a hundred oxen could pull. There has been no wear on it at all except that I have dried my beak on it each night and struck my wings against it as I arose each morning. And I have never known the Owl older or younger than she is today. But there is one older than me, and that is the Toad of Cors Fochno. If he doesn’t know the age of the Owl, no-one does.

The Eagle went to the Toad and asked the Owl’s age. His answer was “I’ve never eaten anything but what I could get from the earth, and I never got enough of that. Do you see the two large hills by the Bog? I saw that land when it was flat. And nothing has made them except the little that I have excreted. And I have never known the Owl except as an old witch singing ‘tw hw, tw hw’ and frightening children as she does today.”

Therefore, the Eagle of Gwernaby, the Stag of Rhedynfre, the Salmon of Glyn Llifon, the Blackbird of Cilgwri, the Toad of Cors Fochno, and the Owl of Cwm Cowlwyd are the oldest animals in the world.

***

Borth Bog is a fitting place for one of the oldest animals to live. It is not an easy place to traverse. But I often skirt the edges of it, its dykes and ditches, and sometimes venture out onto its open spaces or into its alder carrs or willow thickets.Then I think of the Toad in the sphagnum moss and the owl in the woods of the surrounding hills and the witch who is said to have haunted the bog in the past. As for the hills, there are, for sure, two small islands of green rising out of the flat land, below the mountains that rise to the east and stretch inland.

***

There is a discussion (in Welsh) by Thomas Jones of the manuscript sources referred to above in The National Library of Wales Journal VII (1951)

Bedd Taliesin

2010-04-06T22:35:00.000+01:00

Bedd Taliesin with Sarn Elen in the background

There is a village not far from where I live called Tre Taliesin. Many people will say that it is so named because it is the birthplace of the legendary poet. In fact the name was changed c. 1820 from Comins y Tafarn Bach ('Common of the Little Tavern') because the chapel elders didn't want the village associated with a defunct drinking establishment. The new name was taken from a burial mound on the line of an old Roman road on the ridge above the village. The mound is known as Bedd Taliesin (Taliesin's Grave). It is claimed that a large skull was recovered from the mound before 1800, but the mound is dated to the Bronze Age by archaeologists, in which case it cannot be the grave of a supposed 6th century poet. A discussion of past explorations of the mound can be found HERE.

The Roman road on which it stands is known as Sarn Elen and it runs across West Wales between the Roman towns of Maridunum (Carmarthen) and Segontium (Caernarfon). The origins of the legendary name Sarn Elen are disputed but it has been linked to the story 'The Dream of Macsen Wledig' usually included in the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion. But this Elen is more likely to be the daughter of Eudaf, a British chieftain who held Segontium in the 4th century. If links between the road and any particular Elen or Helen are disputed, the existence of the road is not. In some places it is no longer visible, in others it is now part of the public highway. The stretch of the road besides which Bedd Taliesin stands follows high ground between the Roman forts of Trawscoed in the Ystwyth valley and Pennal in the Dyfi valley.

I walked up to it recently following a path along the River Clettwr which it crosses on a ridge along the western edge of the Cambrian Mountains. The steep, wooded sides of the valley enclose a green, mossy place where the river rushes down through rocks to the sea. At the top of the valley several streams cascade down from higher ground to swirl together under an old bridge crossed by a single-lane gated road.This is Sarn Elen, tarmaced here but continuing further north as a green track before disappearing into a forestry plantation.

I followed the road down from the bridge to where it passes the mound. Like most things associated with Taliesin, myth, legend and history are a tangle that cannot easily be undone.When did the mound get it's current name? Certainly Edward Lhuyd knew it in the 17th century. Before that we can't be sure.

From the mound I left Sarn Elen and crossed fields full of sheep with lambs and dropped down into a forestry plantation to follow a track which eventually led back to my starting point. From this track there are dramatic views over Borth Bog (Cors Fochno) and the Dyfi Estuary. These are places with their own stories with which the legendary Taliesin is entangled.

The wind had rain in it. I took it as a blessing.

Borth Bog from the forestry track

Aengus Óg

2010-03-19T16:48:00.000Z

A distant sense of Aengus Óg
No more than knowledge of this god
Is brought to bear upon my mind

And yet I hear a nearer sound:
A harp elusive on the wind
So close that I can hear the strings

Could it be for me they sing
Like birds in the early summer dawn
Or the sigh of wind through bending grasses,

Or do I merely hear what passes
On the breeze for others to perceive?
Perhaps, but then a listening ear

Is also there, a curious stare
Wondering who might be hovering
At the edges of the whispered speech

And so I wait a turn to speak
And, if invited, say my piece
As yet unsure how to approach this god.

LLEU

2010-03-03T16:22:00.000Z

‘Llech Ronw’ (Gronw’s Stone)

Bryn Saeth, near Afon Cynfael

When you were an eagle
And hung in a tree,
flesh falling to field,
slipping between the worlds
invisibly
came a pig, transforming
flesh back to flesh

* * *

O little pig
so long I have endured pain
I am worn and weary

O little pig
I am neither alive nor dead
Rhiannon’s birds call over the waters

O little pig
the wild one teaches me
like Myrddin I long to be free

O little pig
I am full of fear,
carry my news to Gwydion

* * *
Then you were a man
with a long spear
to pierce stone;
like an eagle’s beak
it tore flesh from bone.

{This conflates verses ascribed to Myrddin in the Black Book of Carmarthen and part of the story in the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi, and more besides. For which conflations I humbly claim poetic licence.}

Tŷ Ddewi

2010-02-28T16:48:00.001Z

Pentre Ifan

Tŷ Ddewi (St Davids), as cathedral cities go, is more like a large village than anything you’d expect of such a place. It sits on a headland at the end of the northern peninsula of St Bride’s Bay (with the village of St Brides at the end of the southern peninsula). So Bride, or Brigid, is equally celebrated in the naming of places in this land- and sea-scape. Co-incidentally, further north up the coast in Ceredigion, there is a village called Llannon, suggesting that it contains a church dedicated to Non (who was David’s mother). But the name of the parish is Llansanffraed, suggesting that it is named after Bride.

There are several islands off this coast, one of the farthest out being Grassholm, the island identified as Gwales where, in the second branch of Y Mabinogi, Bran’s head was taken and time stood still. From nearby Abergwaun (Fishguard) ferries cross to Ireland and this continues a tradition of links between the two lands going back to the earliest times. A walk up the valley of the Gwaun can take you to places that evoke the Otherworld atmosphere of Y Mabinogi in the texture of the landscape and the quality of the light that always feels special and different from anywhere else. The cromlech at Pentre Ifan, for instance, suggestive itself of the Bronze Age that made it, stands in a landscape of rocky outcrops, the mountain of Carn Ingli, looking across to Preseli. A path from here leads through a gnarled and atmospheric woodland that itself feels like an enchanted forest.

I recently walked along the coastline west of Tŷ Ddewi, the stretch facing Ramsey Island just off the rocky headland. Seals coasted in the waters below. Farther out porpoises dived out of the water chasing a shoal of fish with gannets in attendance to take advantage. Among other treasures gathered that day was the sight of a pair of choughs on the clifftop, their red legs making them unmistakable.

Back in Tŷ Ddewi, or just beyond the Cathedral, is Non’s Well. Here, according to the most common of the stories relating the birth of Dewi, the spring is said to have gushed forth when he was born, The ancient standing stones in the field have led to suggestions that it was a holy place long before the birth of Christ. This may well be an example of the adoption of a long-established cultic site, linking the spring to the Welsh saint to continue its importance as a religious centre.

There are many such echoes in this landscape. Listen to these words of the poet Waldo Williams, referring to a long poem of his called Tŷ Ddewi, “I had quite a remarkable experience out on Carn Llidi … Sometimes you feel yourself at one with the land around you, as if some wonderful communion comes about between you – and that, I think, was one of the main spurs for me to write Tŷ Ddewi – it was personal.” (my translation)

Such communion between an individual and the landscape is, of course, possible anywhere. But somehow in Pembrokeshire, and more particularly in the Preseli Hills, it always seems probable rather than merely possible.

The Dream of Rhonabwy

2010-02-11T15:51:00.002Z

Arthur and Owein in Rhonabwy's Dream

There’s an interesting article by Catherine McKenna in the current issue of Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies. She has in the past written suggestively about Rhiannon and Manawydan, so I read this piece on The Dream of Rhonabwy eagerly. The tale is not one that would normally attract the seeker of remnant myths. Its view backwards to the Arthurian world of Culhwch and Olwen, if to be taken seriously at all, is best represented by the words of Arthur himself who expresses his sadness on learning the nature of the men who keep the Island of Britain in the time of Rhonabwy compared to those who kept it in his own day. But the chief purpose of the tale as a whole is generally taken to be satirical or at least parodic of the material which it contains.

If something is the object of parody, then it must exist independently of that parody. McKenna’s discussion focuses on the dream that takes up most of the tale, setting it in the context of the literature of medieval dream interpretation. She also points out the possible joke in the scene where the dreamer moves from a flea-ridden bed to what he thinks might be a more comfortable place to sleep: under a yellow ox-hide on a dais. This is an ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ joke because sleeping under such skins was known to bring prophetic visions and so he would still not get a good night’s sleep. And so it is. This part of the essay is not new knowledge but McKenna cites several other scholars and so usefully brings together a consensus of opinion on this matter. So Sioned Davies writes that “Rhonabwy falls asleep on a yellow ox-skin and is granted a vision, reflecting the ritual of the Irish poet-seers who were said to lie on the hides of bulls to acquire hidden knowledge”, and Angela Carson that “his sleeping on an ox-skin opened to Rhonabwy the possibility of receiving wisdom from the otherworld”. Further critics are cited to underline the parodic nature of the vision in Rhonabwy’s dream. But McKenna also cites a reference in Geoffrey of Monmouth as a possible source, where the prophecy that Brutus and his band of Trojans should come to Britain is given as “he lay down on the skin of a hind”. She also refers to the scene in Book VII of Virgil’s Aeneid where Latinus “lay ensconced at rest on fleecy hides when a sudden voice broke from the grove’s depth.

McKenna concludes that “For the learned reader of that period Breudwyt Ronabwy was surely a reminder that while we must try to read the signs offered to us by prophecy, the stars, the weather, our dreams, and our bodies, and to find meaning in both story and history, interpretation is at every level a process as perilous as it is vital.” What dreams and visions might mean was surely a problem for medieval Christians who would worry that they were not being led astray by the agents of Satan. Or it might be, as it certainly would have been in the ancient world, simply a matter of getting it right (or even just ‘getting it’!).

But the last word should be from the tale itself. McKenna’s reference to the learned reader refers back to the need for ‘book learning’, at least for the medieval audience of the tale, in knowing what needed to be known. As the tale’s concluding paragraph puts it, after Rhonabwy awoke having slept three night and days, “here is the reason why no-one, neither bard not story-teller, knows the Dream without a book – by reason of the number of colours that were on the horses, and all that variety of rare colours both on the arms and their trappings, and on the precious mantles, and their magic stones.”

Imbolc

2010-01-31T18:47:00.001Z

Snowdrops break the seal of Spring

As light laps at the gloaming

Ffraid - or Bride - your blessings come

Bright candles bid you welcome.

Of Saints, Angels and Wolves

2010-01-26T00:07:00.000Z

February, month of the quickening,

month of Brigid the Threefold,

muse healer, goddess of fire.

Ruth Bidgood

As Imbolc approaches I’m revisiting a collection of poems by Ruth Bidgood (*) which includes a ‘radio ode’ commissioned by the BBC. I published the ode some time after it was broadcast in a magazine I was editing at the time but it did not appear in book form until much later. The ode is called ‘Hymn to Sant Ffraid’ and is written for three voices. How could the Welsh Ffraid be cognate with the Irish Brigid if the latter was an actual person living in Kildare? Donald Alchin, who provides an ‘Afterword’ in which he discusses this question, quotes the work of Mary Low:

“One of Brigit’s character traits as a young woman is to be always giving things away: bacon to a dog, butter to the poor, her father’s sword to a beggar.”

and again:

“Brigit the saint inherits a great deal from Brigit the goddess … Brigit the goddess is not a single figure however, there seem to have been several different Brigits, many of whom have associations with fire. These Brigits, daughters of the Dagda, are described in Cormac’s Glossary as the goddesses of poetry, leechcraft and smithcraft.”

In a prose prelude to the poem, Ruth Bidgood herself concludes that Brigid was previously a “fertility goddess cum muse”. The poem rather more subtly, and at greater length, outlines this development of a saint/goddess associated with the earliest emergence of Spring in February, “freeing the river to flow into time of seed”. The three voices weave around each other to tell the story of “a saint of cloudy western hills, moorland rivers, of sea brume and secretive islands”; also of an association with the growing light after the darkness of December and January and of protection as symbolised by the hearth “the mothering fire/in the midst of the house”.

Donald Allchin characterises the way Ruth Bidgood writes about Ffraid as wholly appropriate to the elusive, interwoven strands of myth and legend that have gathered around the goddess/saint over centuries. If he has much to say about Ffraid, surprisingly Allchin says much less about Melangell, the subject of another poem sequence published here. Parts of the sequence were, in fact, originally published separately but were brought together for the anthology about Melangell The Hare That Hides Within, and adopted from there. It is surprising because, apart from the fact that Donald Allchin has written about Melangell elsewhere, there are many parallels between her and Ffraid. Both came from Ireland because they wanted to avoid an arranged marriage, both founded a sanctuary and were said to be concerned with the protection of the vulnerable and both were integrated into the natural environment of Western Britain. True, Melangell’s cult was more localised, being centred on the remote valley of Pennant in North Wales and chiefly known because she gave refuge to a hare and out-faced the hunter who was pursuing it. But the appearance here of poems to these separate figures certainly underlines the similarities both of the stories told about them and in the way in which they are conceived by this poet.

The collection also contains the sequence ‘Singing to Wolves’, five poems about particular places along the border between England and Wales. The title is a comment ascribed to a bored monk of Llanthony Abbey who abandoned the wildness of the place; but it is re-allocated to a young girl picking daisies, imagined by the poet to be one who might be inclined “to risk-encircled beauty” and to embrace her wild nature by “the sweet/unprofitable singing to wolves”.

Ruth Bidgood is a poet whose work is informed by perceptions of the numinous. She says of Ffraid, “You were a poem waiting to be written. / Found and revealed, you make for us / resonances with things nameless, deep, ancient, and to come.” Goddesses, saints, angels, even wolves incarnate her spiritual perceptions, which are always located in the natural environment, and are in that sense icons of our need for otherness. But they invite us, as with the poem ‘Angel with Crwth’, not to be spectators to their music of the spheres, but creators of such music.

* Symbols of Plenty Ruth Bidgood Canterbury Press £9.99

Dwynwen

2010-01-25T20:46:00.003Z

DYDD SANTES DWYNWEN

(25 January)

Vexilla Regis / Sir Bedivere's Horse

2010-01-20T00:23:00.000Z

Vexilla Regis (pencil & watercolour)

by David Jones

While on the subject of Arthurian deposits ... One thing leads to another and so here is a delightfully eccentric way of 'interpreting' the painting above.The poet Jean Earle wrote this poem in her eighties with all the willed mischievousness of a young tyro.

Sir Bedivere's Horse

David Jones, dreaming ‘Vexilla Regis’.
Painted the souls of trees
On lumpish hills, such as spiral
My birthplace. Beyond the foremost,
Tallest and roughest Tree,
Run the wild horses.

Dreamer myself,
I know one is Sir Bedivere’s horse.
I was once Sir Bedivere’s squire.

How we sagged, after we lost Arthur!
Wandering purposeless –
The forest stiff in a winter
Like glass fur. So scarce the forage ….
Sir, at his blackest hour,
Poorly with fever,

Hardly spoke, grieving. The horse thin,
Carrying both of us. “At last”, I said,
“We are coming
To World’s Edge. My brother lives near,
In a fortified house.
You could lie down?”

So we had shelter. But Sir, brooding,
Rode his dear creature out,
Returned alone. “I have freed him,
To your hills”. “But where’s the bridle?”
Bed, not at all himself,
Had left it hanging.

“Sir, he’ll starve! Caught in some coppice,
Like the ram sacrifice
In holy writ”. Sir refolded
His great hurt as he did his long legs,
Closed off his mind from me,
Covered his face.

People there thought it a shame, to live
Stuck with a darkened knight
Who licked his wound while cursing
Lost battles. The pain Sir Bedivere
Nursed was as everywhere
As the King’s grave ….

Life will go on. I was young, afire –
Finding the horse, I’d go
Adventuring. Try my mettle
Some new road. Sir Bed would not miss
All my uncourtly ways.
Scarce a brilliant squire ….

Where the Honddu, in a rushy foaming
Hurries its little fishes,
I found the horse – fast in a tangle
Of witchwood, that might have killed him,
Strangled him with the reins,
Had I not come.

Ripe for love, sniffing his sweat and steam,
Gathered the wild mares,
Enticing him. It needed
My utmost muscle and finesse –
Muddied and almost thrown –
Till I unwound him.

Crazed for freedom; and the whinnying, hot
Mares – oh, the animal
Was as myself, was a brother
In prison. I slashed the brute loose.
Whatever might curb his life
Now – I would not.

With the soft act, Sir Bedivere’s
Quixotic chivalry
Came home to me. It was oddly
Endearing. Return to him, then –
Muddy; but maybe not
Quite a bad squire?

Such whiffs of mediaeval spice
David Jones loved: yet his fey brush
Deft with running shapes,
May not have known –
Through the layered myth –
Which was Sir Bedivere’s horse.

The title of the painting comes from a Latin hymn Vexilla Regis prodeunt ... (Forth come the standards of the King) written in Gaul in the 5th century. The symbolic imagery of the painting refers, among others things, to the Crucifixion (there's a robin with a 'bloodstained' breast). But what about those horses? Jean Earle was not so eccentric in the light of this from David Jones' letters:"the rushing ponies are, more or less, the horses of the Roman cavalry, turned to grass and gone wild off to the hills. This idea, probably, in turn comes from something in Malory's Morte D'Arthur when, right at the end, after the death of Guenevere, and the break up of the round table, Lancelot and the other knights let their armed horses free to roam where they will ... and gone off to be hermits and the like." (Dai Greatcoat p.149 ...)

The Defence of Guenevere

2010-01-18T15:49:00.005Z

Guenevere by William Morris

I was browsing through some poetry by William Morris recently. I re-read some of his poems, like ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ (which appears in many anthologies) quite regularly. But it’s a while since I’ve dipped more extensively into the delights of his recreated medieval world. Here’s an extract from ‘The Defence of Guenevere’. Accused by Gawain and others of having an affair with Lancelot, she addresses her accusers in a long speech while awaiting the rescue which finally arrives when Lancelot rides in. It is only a temporary rescue as she has to return and the resulting conflict leads to the war in which Arthur dies. So it is, anyway, in the account of Malory and earlier medieval authors, though this owes little to the Welsh sources of the legend. But Morris's Terza Rima is delicious. Here is Guenevere remembering her first meeting with Lancelot:

"From out my memory; I hear thrushes sing,

And wheresoever I may be, straightway

Thoughts of it all come up with most fresh sting:

"I was half mad with beauty on that day,

And went without my ladies all alone,

In a quiet garden walled round every way;

"I was right joyful of that wall of stone,

That shut the flowers and trees up with the sky,

And trebled all the beauty: to the bone,

"Yea right through to my heart, grown very shy

With weary thoughts, it pierced, and made me glad;

Exceedingly glad, and I knew verily,

"A little thing just then had made me mad;

I dared not think, as I was wont to do,

Sometimes, upon my beauty; if I had

"Held out my long hand up against the blue,

And, looking on the tenderly darken'd fingers,

Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through,

"There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers,

Round by the edges; what should I have done,

If this had joined with yellow spotted singers,

"And startling green drawn upward by the sun?

But shouting, loosed out, see now! all my hair,

And trancedly stood watching the west wind run

"With faintest half-heard breathing sound: why there

I lose my head e'en now in doing this;

But shortly listen: In that garden fair

"Came Launcelot walking; this is true, the kiss

Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,

I scarce dare talk of the remember'd bliss,

"When both our mouths went wandering in one way,

And aching sorely, met among the leaves;

Our hands being left behind strained far away.

"Never within a yard of my bright sleeves

Had Launcelot come before: and now so nigh!

After that day why is it Guenevere grieves?

***

The whole poem from which this extract is taken can be viewed:

HERE

The Mari Lwyd and New Year

2009-12-31T17:08:00.002Z

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' 'Mari Lwyd' Series

Mari Lwyd , Horse of the Frost, Star-horse and White Horse of the Sea, is carried to us.

[…..]

Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.

A knock of the sands on the glass of the grave,
A knock on the sands of the shore,
A knock of the horse’s head of the wave,
A beggar’s knock on the door.
A knock of a moth and the pane of light,
In the beat of the blood a knock.
Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.

The sands in the glass, the shrinking sands,
And the picklock, picklock, picklock, hands.

Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.

The above is a short extract from Vernon Watkin’s poem The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd first published in 1941. The whole poem covers more than twenty pages and alternates different voices, together with an ‘announcer’ to convey the New Year custom in Wales of carrying a horse’s head from house to house. The critic David Wright, and editor of Vernon Watkins poetry, calls it a : “dialogue and dialectic of the dead and living, the eternal and ephemeral, the spiritual and corporeal, the transcendental and material, art and philistinism, God and Mammon”. Here is the poet’s own note to the poem following its first publication:

“Mari Lwyd - the Grey Mari, the Grey Mare – was a white or grey horse’s head modelled in wood, painted, and hung with ribbons, carried from house to house on the last night of the year.
The carriers were usually a party of singers, wits, and impromptu poets, who, on the pretext of blessing, boasting of the sanctity of what they carried, tried to gain entrance to a house for the sake of obtaining food and drink. The method they used was to challenge those within to a rhyming contest. The inmates would keep them out so long as they were not in want of a rhyme, but when they failed to reply to the challenger the right of entry was gained. The singers would then bring their horse’s head in, lay it on the table, and eat and drink with the losers of the contest.
The singers came every year to my father’s house; and listening to them at midnight, I found myself imagining a skull, a horse’s skull decked with ribbons, followed and surrounded by all kinds of drunken claims and holy deceptions. I have attempted to bring together those who are separated. The last breath of the year is their threshold, the moment of supreme forgiveness, confusion and understanding, the profane and sacred moment impossible to realize while the clock-hands divide the Living from the Dead.”
* *
*
In spite of the well-established tradition of this custom at New Year, I have always felt it fitted more appropriately with Samhain. Not so much because this is supposed to be the Celtic New Year, but because that is when the Outer Dark most threatens the gathered light of the hearth. Was the custom shifted long enough back in the past to have come down to us as a festival of the calendar NewYear (when, after all, the Light is beginning to return) or am I missing something?

See also my discussion of the same poet’s Ballad of the Outer Dark HERE

Mabinog's Liturgy

2009-12-23T00:02:00.003Z

Nativity with Beasts and Shepherds

(Dum Medium Silentium Tenerent Omnia)
drypoint, 1928, on wove paper

by David Jones

In the middle silences of this night’s course the blackthorn blows white on Orcop Hill.

They do say that on this night

in the warm byres

shippons, hoggots and out-barns of Britain

in the closes and the pannage-runs and on the sweet lawns of Britain

the breathing animals-all

do kneel.

Some may say as on this night

the narrow grey-rib wolves

from the dark virgin wolds and indigenous thickets of Britain,

though very hungry and already over the fosse, kneel content on the shelving berm.

If these are but grannies’ tales

maybe that on this night

the nine crones of Glevum in Britannia Prima, and the three heath-hags that do and do and do

north of the Bodotria

in a wild beyond the Agger Antonini

and all the many sisters of Afagddu

that practise transaccidentation from Sabrina Sea to Dindaethwy

in Mona Insula

tell their aves

unreversed.

(from the ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ section of The Anathémata by David Jones)

__________________________

David Jones (1895-1974), in his work as both an artist and a writer, made extensive use of allusive symbolism. Here are some glosses on the text above for those that need to know.

Orcop Hill
David Jones reports that he spoke to a farmer in Herefordshire in 1949 who claimed to have seen the thorn blossoming on Christmas Eve. The farmer also related the legend that animals knelt at this time, though it was outside his personal experience.

Shippons ... pannage-runs
Cow sheds ... pig pastures.

Glevum
Gloucester (for the nine crones see 'Peredur' in The Mabinogion)

Bodotria
Firth of Forth

Agger Antonini     )
Antonine Wall
Afagddu                )    These three rhyme
Cerridwen's son
Sabrina Sea          )
Bristol Channel

Transaccidentation
Transformation brought about by sorcery (but with a suggestion of transubstantiation)

Dindaethwy
The seas around Wales

Mona Insula
The Isle of Anglesey

Aves unreversed
Even those practising the black arts are redeemed here.

Winter Solstice

2009-12-21T14:50:00.000Z

It is now the marker of time marks time
When light shifts in the dark
Upon itself and ebb turns back
To flow as the land lies stark

EPONALIA

2009-12-18T00:02:00.000Z

The Roman festival of Eponalia is celebrated on 18th December

Here is a reference to her worship from The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (second century c.e.):

"These thoughts were interrupted by my catching sight of a statue of the goddess Epona seated in a small shrine centrally placed, where a pillar supported the roof-beams in the middle of a stable. The statue had been devotedly garlanded with freshly picked roses. So in an ecstasy of hope on identifying this assurance of salvation, I stretched out my forelegs and with all the strength I could muster, I rose energetically on my hind legs. "

The Birds of Rhiannon

2009-12-13T00:02:00.001Z

Following my translation of Gwenallt’s ‘Rhiannon’ in the previous post, here is another translation of an earlier poem by him: ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’. This is more Romantic in nature than the later poem. The striking thing about both poems is the implication of Wales (and here Ireland too) in a state of crisis. Since the poem was published in Ysgubau’r Awen (‘Sweepings of the Muse’) in 1939 both countries have become more vibrant and confident places. The main reference here is to the Second Branch of Y Mabinogi where those returning from Ireland with the head of Brân are serenaded by the song of Rhiannon’s birds following a devastating battle. There is also a reference to Culhwch and Olwen where the song is said to "wake the dead and lull the living to sleep". But in spite of these specific allusions, a sense of contemporary relevance is rarely absent from Gwenallt’s work.

This is a freer translation than last time (y weilgi werdd becomes ‘the wolf-grey sea’!) so I give the English version only. For Gwenallt’s poems in Welsh the volume illustrated above is the definitive collection.

~ ~

Birds of Rhiannon, weave your enchantment
Over the waves of the wolf-grey sea;
Wake us to the joys of the world again,
From woes that worry us set us free.

Great are the hurts of Wales and Erin,
Laid waste by strife and sore with grief,
There’s no-one to lead them out of the troubles,
No poet to succour their hopeless life.

Bring back the dead with mellifluous music
Give hope to the living on their fleeting way,
Shape us a song that sings our story
An echo of lost harmony.

Birds of Rhiannon, weave your enchantment
Over the waves of the wolf-grey sea;
Wake us to the joys of the world again,
From woes that worry us set us free.

Gwenallt : Rhiannon as Wales

2009-12-05T00:09:00.007Z

Gwenallt (1899-1969)

Mythic characters are often made use of for a variety of purposes. It is in their nature. For modern Brythonic pagans Rhiannon is Rigantona, the ‘Great Queen’, a Goddess. Academic discussion of her nature as illustrated by extant stories has suggested that she was linked with sovereignty. More popularly she is linked with erotic power, a woman who knows what she wants and makes sure she gets it. Stevie Nick’s 1970’s song (which must have given the name to many women outside Wales) with its climactic ‘Dreams unwind/love’s a state of mind’ refrain [watch it here], is another example of her diverse appearances. Within Wales, the nature of her story and knowledge of its precise details might be thought to limit the outer reaches of interpretation. But reading the poem ‘Rhiannon’ by the Welsh-language poet Gwenallt I was struck by the way in which he re-constructs the story in the First branch of Y Mabinogi to turn the sovereignty goddess into an image of modern industrial Wales suffering humiliation, and uses the return of Pryderi as a symbol of returning pride and self-respect. The narrative of the poem seems to depart from the emphasis of the medieval story, particularly the statement that “it was chance that anyone should allow themselves to be carried” when she was made to offer herself as a horse to visitors to the court. Her ‘penance’, which the medieval story makes clear she accepts is, in the poem, imposed upon her. The story she relates to visitors is not, as suggested in the tale, the ‘official’ version, but her true story which only those who love her continue to believe.

Here is the Welsh text of the poem followed by my translation:

Rhiannon

Fe sefi di, Riannon, o hyd wrth dy esgynfaen,

Â gwaed yr ellast a’i chenawon ar dy wyneb a’th wallt,

Ac yno yn Arberth drwy’r oesoedd ymhob rhyw dywydd

Y buost yn adrodd dy gyfranc ac yn goddef dy benyd hallt.

Fe gariest ar dy gefn y gwestai a’r pellennig,

Gweision gwladwriaeth estron a gwŷr dy lys dy hun,

Sachiedau o lo a gefeiliau o ddur ac alcam,

Pynnau o flawd a gwenith. Ni wrthododd yr un.

Y mae’r gwŷr a’th gâr yn magu dy blentyn eurwallt,

Yn gwybod mai gwir dy gyfranc ac annheg dy sarhad,

A phan olchir gwaed yr ellast a’i chenawon o’th wyneb,

Cei dy blentyn, Pryderi, i’th gôl ac i orsedd dy wlad.

Still you stand, Rhiannon, beside your horse-block

With blood of the bitch and her pups on your face and your hair,

In Arberth, through the ages, and in all weathers

You told your tale and bore your penance there.

You carried on your back the guests and strangers

From foreign lands, men of your own court too,

Sacks of coal and pincers of steel and tin,

Packs of flour and wheat. No-one said no.

Those who love you are rearing your golden-haired child

Knowing your tale is true and unfair your shame,

And when you wash the blood of the bitch and her pups from your face

Your child Pryderi will come to your bosom, your land and its throne.

Rhiannon in the Enchanted Fort

2009-11-29T22:10:00.001Z

The last leaves hung yellow and brown and ragged on the trees, so it was easy to keep the white boar in sight as he ran through them. And so to follow him to the clearing and watch him run into a courtyard of a place that was not there before. Then Pryderi followed the boar into the courtyard but he did not return. When Rhiannon heard this she went herself after her son into the enchanted place. And it received her and enclosed her within itself and could be seen no more.

This candle is lit as a vigil against her going and as a focus of meditation while she is there.

Severed Heads

2009-11-17T00:19:00.002Z

There is an episode in the Second Branch of Y Mabinogi where the mortally injured Brân asks the other survivors of the battle in Ireland to cut off his head:

'Take the head' said he 'and bring it to the White Hill in London, and bury it with its face towards France. And you will be on the road a long time. In Harlech you will be seven years in feasting, the birds of Rhiannon singing to you. The head will be as good company to you as it was at its best when it was ever on me. And you will be at Gwales in Penfro for eighty years. Until you open the door facing Aber Henvelen on the side facing Cornwall, you will be able to abide there, along with the head with you uncorrupted. But when you open that door, you will not be able to remain there. You will make for London and bury the head.

Severed heads, it has been claimed, were an integral part of pagan celtic religious practice.[i] Be that as it may, I have been struck by the frequency of the occurrence of decapitation in surviving folklore narratives. Among folktales I have read recently, I have noted the following:

§ A frog who is really a prince who has had a spell cast upon him. The common base theme of a girl who is prepared to kiss him, or let him sleep with her, in order for him to be turned back to human form, is extended in some tales where she is required to cut off his head in order for the transformation to take place.

(Example:The Well at Worlds End)

§ A princess transformed into a white hind and hunted by a young man on a quest who follows her into a cave and is then required to cut off the head and throw it into a well in order to transform the hind into a woman who, in her human form, is imprisoned in an enchanted castle.

(‘The King of England’ source: School of Scottish Studies

§ A young man on a quest who has to undergo a series of trials with each of three brothers living along separate stages of his quest route. These are old and grotesque but on his return journey he has to cut off the head of each of the brothers in turn and throw them into wells after which they are transformed into young men and their lands are renewed to prosperity, as here:

“The young prince dismounts, and puts his horse in the stable, and they go in to have some refreshments, for I can assure you he wanted some; and after telling everything that passed, which the old gentleman was very pleased to hear, they both went for a walk together, the young prince looking around and seeing the place looking dreadful, as did the old man. He could scarcely walk from his toe-nails curling up like ram's horns that had not been cut for many hundred years, and big long hair. They come to a well, and the old man gives the prince a sword, and tells him to cut his head off, and throw it in that well. The young man has to do it against his wish, but has to do it. No sooner has he flung the head in the well, than up springs one of the finest young gentlemen you would wish to see; and instead of the old house and the frightful-looking place, it was changed into a beautiful hall and grounds.”

from ‘The King of England and his Three Sons’ retold by Joseph Jacobs

All of the above happen to be from tales collected in Scotland. All have the theme of renewal by beheading and there is also the element of throwing the head into a well as part of this process. What are we to make of this?

If the well is to be regarded as a source of life and, in this context, re-birth, and the head as the part that can be re-born, a symbolic structure could be re-constructed. But that, somehow, escapes the mysterious subtext that suggestively underlies these tales. The story of Brân in Y Mabinogi is clearly a medieval story incorporating Other-world elements in the Birds of Rhiannon and the dwelling on a time-suspended island. The folk tales, similarly, deal in enchanted castles, shape-shifting and other transformations. Though simply told they often hint at psychic depths as well as deep things in the world we inhabit.

A frog in a well is ..... just a frog in a well - until it speaks. To engage with such things is to engage with strangeness. Often travellers in these strange worlds are asked to kill their helpers in order to renew a vital part of themselves. Is such psychic questing only about individual fulfilment or initiation? Or does it extend beyond the individual into the domain of myth when the land itself is renewed? Thinking about it, it is difficult to separate these two categories. And why should we want to?

[i] Discussed by Anne Ross in Pagan Celtic Britain -Chapter Two (1967)

MERLIN

2009-11-05T00:05:00.001Z

“This prophecy Merlin shall make,
for I live before his time”

(The Fool in King Lear)

Everyone knows who Merlin is – or do they?

For many the stories about a wizard who aids King Arthur are an integral part of the Arthurian Romance tradition. But trace that tradition back far enough and both Arthur and Merlin have separate existences unrelated to each other. The two were brought together by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136). Geoffrey had previously published a series of Prophecies of Merlin and included these in his ‘History’. Some years later he wrote a long verse ‘Life of Merlin’ which draws upon pre-existing Welsh legendary material about a character called Myrddin who lived as a wild man in the Caledonian forest. Gerald of Wales, writing later in the twelfth century, speaks explicitly of two Merlins: Merlin Ambrosius and Merlin Silvestris. While he is likely to have drawn these from the work of Geoffrey he may also have seen other material and claimed he had his own ancient book of the prophecies of Merlin, though he never published these.

Geoffrey based the Merlin of his ‘History’ on a character called Ambrosius mentioned by Nennius in the ninth century and attached him to the stories about King Arthur. He may not have become fully familiar with the earlier Welsh legendary material about ‘Myrddin Wyllt’ until after writing his ‘History’ and there is no mention of Arthur in his later ‘Life of Merlin’ which is based on the earlier material in Welsh, some of which has survived. This Merlin, like Taliesin, was regarded as a prophet and had a number of verses attached to his name over an extended period of time. The earliest ones, probably from the ninth or tenth centuries rather than the sixth century when he was supposed to have lived, are contained in a series called the ‘Afallenau’ because they are addressed to an apple tree which seems to afford him some sort of protection and prevent others finding him:

In this glade a sweet apple tree

From Rhydderch’s men hides me

Though many are there to see.

(Awallen peren atif in llanerch/y hanger tae hargel rac riev Ryderch/amsaethir in y bon. maon yn y chilch.)

He was living in the woods as a wild man following the Battle of Arfderydd where Gwenddolau was defeated by Rhydderch Hael. This battle is an historically attested event and is thought to have taken place at Arthuret near to the border between England and Scotland in the year 573. It is likely that the legendary ‘wild man’ stories (which have parallels in the Scottish tale of Lailoken and the Irish tale of Suibhne Geilt) became attached to the story about a survivor from the Battle of Arfderydd. There are references in the ‘Afallenau’ to Merlin having the company of a “fair, wanton maiden” ( bun wen warius) in his early days in the forest but she has left him by the time the verses are written. There is also a dialogue between Merlin and his sister Gwendydd whose son Merlin has slain in the battle and this is given as a reason for the madness that made him flee to the forest.

Armes Prydein (‘Prophecies of Britain’) in the Book of Taliesin contains the phrase “Merlin predicts …” which appears as a parallel to “The Muse predicts …” elsewhere in the poem. Also attributed to Merlin is a ‘conversation poem’ (Ymdiddan) between himself and Taliesin. And so he becomes one of the ‘Cynfeirdd’ (earliest poets writing in Welsh) located in the area known later in Wales as ‘The Old North’, and like Taliesin a bard with prophetic powers. Once his legend was established in Wales it also became associated with Carmarthen because his name seems to be contained in the Welsh form ‘Caerfyrddin’, though this actually originates in Moridunon which would naturally have developed into ‘Mer-ddin’ (Sea Fort) and the tautology ‘Caer’ would have been added when it was thought of as ‘Merlin’s Town’. At the same time, Geoffrey’s composite Merlin was gaining fame across Europe as the wizard behind the throne of King Arthur and gaining further accretions as it did so. He has been reinterpreted in our own day among other things as, e.g., Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, and reconstructed by the writer Nikolai Tolstoy, as a remnant druid and priest of Lugh surviving in the Celtic kingdoms of the North. He still has the power to conjure such images as a figure who answers the call to something embedded deep in psychic space: the magician, the wise man, the hermit removed from but integral to our cultural life.

History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books, various editions)

Life of Merlin (Vita Merlini) by Geoffrey of Monmouth (translated by Richard Barber in Myths and Legends of the British Isles, Folio Society 1998) ; also JJ Perry (Forgotten Books, 2008)

Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales by Gerald of Wales (translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books, various editions)

‘Early Stages in the Development of the Merlin Legend’ by A.O.H. Jarman in Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd (ed. Rachel Bromwich a Brinley Jones, Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1978)

Trioedd Ynys Prydain ed Rachel Bromwich (University of Wales Press, various editions) also contains useful discussion and quotations.

The poems attributed to Myrddin are contained in the manuscripts of The Black Book of Carmarthen and some are anthologised though these are hard to find in translation (the translation above is mine).

Myrddin Wyllt

2009-11-01T20:48:00.001Z

'Merlin' by Alan Lee

The Battle of Arfderydd

Like a wolf pack biting
into bone, bloody-chapped
we bit the bitter core
of that battle and gulped

Its poison; Gwenddolau sighed
his last breath as Rhydderch’s cross
was hoisted high over the earth.
I stole away by ditch and fosse.

Where could I hide but the wild wood
from Rhydderch’s men? That tree
with apples on its boughs
guards the glade the christians cannot see.

Sour apples falling to earth
forsaking ripeness
fester slowly into another year
a freight of sadness.

The cycle broken: the circle
shrunk to this one glade
in the wildwood; defeat
dogged us but I made

A spell here and grew hair
like a wild thing in the wild
wood which I wander like a wolf
under leaf shade ashamed but undefiled

***

This poem is an imaginative reconstruction of the legend of Myrddin (Merlin) in the earlier (non-Arthurian)Welsh tradition in which he is seen as a wild man hiding in the woods after the 'Battle of Arderydd' at which Gwenddolau was defeated by Rhydderch. It also refers to the theory by an early commentator (Skene) that Gwenddolau (and Myrddin) were pagan and Rhydderch represented the christian ascendancy. Myrddin was in some way hidden in the woods by an apple tree to which he addressed verses.

More on the roots and development of the Merlin legend next time.

Taliesin Pen Beirdd

2009-10-24T00:02:00.001+01:00

Three shiploads of Prydwen went into it

Except seven, none returned from Caer Sidi

(extract from the Book of Taliesin manuscript)

Who – and when – was Taliesin?

This is a question with many answers and it is necessary to be clear about precisely what we are asking. Questions about Taliesin can best be discussed by identifying four separate but interacting categories:

The Historical Poet

This view of Taliesin sees him as the bard of the Brythonic chieftain Urien in the sixth century kingdom of Rheged which extended from Strathclyde (around modern Glasgow) down into Cumbria in northern part of the Lake District. Of the mass of poems in The Book of Taliesin a few are still held to be possibly written by this poet. They mainly sing the praises of his lord in common with much of the poetry composed by tribal bards at this time. But The Book of Taliesin is a fourteenth century manuscript collection given that name when discovered in a library in the seventeenth century. So the poems in it are not, in the form we have them, from the sixth century but later copies. As, initially, no-one could read them, they were assumed to be the work of a poet writing in Old Welsh. By now it has been established that most of the poems must be much more recent than that and all are, in fact, written in Middle Welsh in the manuscript versions we have.

If that was all that could be said, Taliesin would be no better known than Aneirin, another poet from what is now southern Scotland writing around the same time, who composed a series of elegies for the members of the Gododdin tribe who were wiped out in an attack on the Angles at the battle of Catraeth (modern Catterick in Yorkshire). That is, as with Aneirin, the debate about him would mainly be restricted to scholars attempting to date the poems from linguistic and historical evidence or discussing their contribution to the successive literary tradition in Welsh.

But Taliesin, like Myrddin, a third poet identified with same area, has been mythologised in a number of ways. And if the mythologisation of Myrddin as Merlin is at least clear and transparent, Taliesin has been transformed into a much more complex wizard for later generations.

The Legendary Bard

Many of the poems in The Book of Taliesin contain prophecies which link them to historical events in the ninth and tenth centuries. Others refer to stories that link them with prose tales in Y Mabinogi. Or with legendary exploits such as the raid by Arthur on Annwfn – the Brythonic Other World – to capture a magical cauldron. What is clear from consideration of the range of poems attributed to Taliesin is that, like Arthur, his name became a magnet for disparate material but also that he became the ‘type’ of the inspired poet. When later generations of Welsh poets in the Middle Ages looked back to the sources of their tradition, the place of beginning was ‘The Old North’, an area of southern Scotland and Northern England. Here the earliest poets using Welsh after it had developed from the Brythonic language some time after the Roman occupation, were seen as forefathers of the Welsh bardic tradition - one was called ‘Tad Awen’ (Father of the Muse) though none of his poems have survived. Collectively they were called the ‘Cynfeirdd’ (the earliest poets) and Taliesin became their iconic representative. So already, by the ninth century, he was being represented as a prophet and a magical figure who was present (whether imaginatively or otherwise) at various historical and legendary events from the beginning of the world to Arthur’s raid on the Other World. He was, in the Second Branch of Y Mabinogi, one of the seven who returned with the head of Brân from Ireland and sojourned with that head in Gwales in a timeless suspension of the everyday world. This is the poet as ‘awenydd’, an inspired individual such as those described by Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century, going into a prophetic or visionary state. He could now be regarded as the Spirit of Poetry.

The Wondrous Boy

At some point, inevitably, Taliesin entered the folklore tradition. The familiar story about Gwion Bach being given the job of stirring the cauldron of the witch Cerridwen and gaining universal knowledge by tasting a drop of the contents is a familiar motif. As is the sequence of shape-shifting as Cerridwen chases him and each turn into something different until she, as a hen, gobbles him up when he is disguised as a seed. His rebirth from her womb, his survival in his new identity as Taliesin, and his subsequent exploits at the court of Maelgwn Gwynedd, link this story to the legend of the gifted poet. In one sense this is just another example of the ‘magnet’ effect mentioned above, with the name Taliesin simply being attached to existing folk tale motifs. But in another sense it indicates how the figurative shape-shifter has become a ‘type’ not just of the Spirit of Poetry but the Spirit of Wales.

The Cultural Icon

The novelist and cultural critic Emyr Humphreys wrote a cultural history of Wales called The Taliesin Tradition. He uses the figure of Taliesin to represent Wales itself and in particular its literary life. The literary magazine published in Welsh by the Welsh Academy is simply called ‘Taliesin’. He was already seen as quintessential to Welsh identity long before he was also appropriated by the modern pagan community as a ‘Celtic Shaman’ and although the term itself has little meaning in the Welsh tradition, at least part of what it might indicate is covered by Gerald’s description of ‘awenyddon’. Appropriating to paganism the poet of The Book of Taliesin is difficult not least because he firmly identifies himself as a Christian. But the bardic tradition of someone who represents the Spirit of Poetry including the talent for inspired speech is, I suggest, quite enough to be going on with. Patrick Ford puts it like this:

“Clearly the tales of Gwion Bach and Taliesin cannot be lightly dismissed as “folktale” or late developments. Perceptible in them and in their attendant poems, despite the layering of successive generations and external influences, lies the myth of the primeval poet, in whom resides all wisdom.”

Quite so.

***

The poems ascribed to the bard of Urien Rheged were published by Sir Ifor Williams The Poems of Taliesin (English edition, 1968).

Other poems have been edited by Marged Haycock : Legendary Poems from The Book of Taliesin (2007) -The Welsh text with line by line translation and extensive commentary – an essential edition.

The quotation from Patrick Ford is from the introduction to his edition of Y Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (1977) which contains the story of Gwion Bach and Taliesin.

How Culhwch Won Olwen

2009-10-13T00:02:00.005+01:00

Cei and Bedwyr with the Salmon of Llyn Llyw

come to Caer Loyw to rescue Mabon

Of the Welsh tales collectively known and translated as The Mabinogion, ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ has generally been regarded as the oldest. The material evidence for this is based on analysis of language which has now been questioned by at least one scholar, but regardless of the outcome of the debate about this, it will remain the case that the tale preserves earlier forms of folk narrative in a less developed way than other tales in the collection.

The main structural elements of the tale are two motifs that are recognised international ‘types’ of folk narrative: ‘The Jealous Stepmother’ and ‘The Giant’s Daughter’. In the first, typically the child’s mother dies and the father marries another woman who is hostile and tries to do harm to the child of the first marriage. In ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ the mother wants Culhwch to marry her daughter and when he refuses she says that he will marry no-one unless it be the daughter of Ysbadadden Pencawr, which is much the same as saying he will marry no-one or die trying. This is the outer ‘frame’ of the story which serves to propel Culhwch on his impossible quest. The inner frame of the story is the ‘Giant’s Daughter’ motif in which typically a giant or ogre will die when his daughter (who is usually not a giant) is married. So he sets any suitor a series of dangerous or impossible tasks. But the suitor manages to complete these tasks (often with help) and marry the daughter. In ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ the tasks are completed with the help of Arthur but also, and this is another common variation, with the help of certain animals.

As well as these two folk-tale motif frames, there are a number of episodes which could be tales in their own right although they emerge from the series of tasks set by the giant. Chief of these is the hunt for the boar Twrch Trwyth, but others worth noting are the ‘Oldest Animals’ episode in which each animal refers back to another who is even older and remembers past ages of the world, and (connected to this) the imprisonment of Mabon [Maponos] son of Modron [Matrona] where the remnants of an earlier myth are embedded in the tale.

Although these elements are all on the surface in the sense that they are easily identified as separate items, it is not just a roughly stitched together jumble of different elements but a unique literary construction that exceeds the sum of its parts. Gwyn Jones said that “the zest if this unknown storyteller still hits one like a bursting wave”. In addition to this literary judgement, the same critic (and co-translator) of the tale regarded it as “… a storehouse of folktale and a window on legend; a Celtic thesaurus”.

So it is possible to approach the tale as a medievalist, assessing its provenance in the contemporary context and attempting to assign a reasonably accurate date to it; as a folklorist, identifying international motifs and any specific cultural variations; as a literary critic, assessing its value as a well-told story; and more perhaps beyond these categories. How much more? The tale has attracted particular attention from psychological analysts of the Jungian school. John Layard, for instance, suggests that we shouldn’t regard the characters in the story as persons at all, but as “traditional motifs, all centring round the same theme of the heroic quest for the missing psychic substance called anima.” An approach as specific as this might well be extremely enlightening in terms of the context of the investigation, but will only be a partial view of the holistic entity which is the tale.

Similarly, a ‘myth kitty’ approach – such as readers of this blog might favour – will give us some brilliant flashes of insight through the ‘window’ that Gwyn Jones spoke of. But, in the same essay, he also stresses that there is “no question of it being put together as an historical record” and that it is “not interpretable … in a coherent fashion as portrayals or illuminations of myths”. That is, however we might choose to [re]construct the freeing of Mabon from the dungeon of Caer Loyw (Gloucester, or rather the Roman fort of Glevum) where he has lain for longer than anyone can remember, it is always going to be questionable whether the person who constructed the tale as we have it would recognise our [re]construction.

But neither would he have been aware of techniques of psychological analysis that see the tale as a quest for anima. Or rather, as a psychologist might suggest, he was not conscious of such an awareness. Can we say the same about the mythological record? It may be, strictly speaking, impossible to assess the state of knowledge and/or tacit awareness the author ever had of Modron and Mabon and their antecedents. But if we are to propose, as I think we can on literary grounds, that the author knew what he was doing, it seems churlish to propose that he was ignorant of the significance of these names. Similarly the ‘Oldest Animals’ can be , I think, validly for us a resonant echo of an animist past in which humans shared the Creation with its other inhabitants. What the medieval author made of it is, of course, anyone’s guess, but if his tale can have that effect on us, might we not suppose that this was either consciously or instinctively part of his own perception?

As for Arthur and the boar hunt, this was legendary history at the time the tale was written, with a similar hunt involving Arthur recorded by Nennius in the ninth century. With all this matter set in the context of recognised universal themes it is hardly surprising that the tale has been seen as probing both psychological and cultural depths. There is no need to construe coded or corrupted mythical schemes behind the episodes of the tale to be able to read it as containing such material. In many ways it wears them on its sleeve. And the psychological depths that lie behind those identified folklore motifs are, in themselves, soul stuff of the deepest kind.

References:

Culhwch and Olwen is contained in all the currently available translations of ‘The Mabinogion’.

The standard edition of the medieval Welsh text is available either with modern Welsh or English Introduction, Notes and Glossary: Culhwch ac Olwen ed Rachel Bromwich and Simon Evans (1977)

Quotations above are from:

Gwyn Jones Kings, Beasts and Heroes (1972)

John Layard A Celtic Quest (1975)

Y Mabinogi, Pagans and The Academy

2009-10-05T21:00:00.001+01:00

It has been said that much of the scholarly knowledge used by pagans to assess the survivals of Brythonic myth used to construct literary tales in the Middle Ages are usually at least sixty years out of date. In particular that the views of scholars of the past such as W. J. Gruffydd whose studies of Y Mabinogi in books such as Math vab Mathonwy and Rhiannon from the 1920’s to the 1950’s are now dead in the water as far as contemporary scholars are concerned. The problem is that, even for those who have access to a good library, full-length works dealing with this material since Gruffydd are hard to come by and that work that does exist is largely contained in academic journals or books with a limited circulation. An exception to this, particularly for Y Mabinogi, is the proliferation of translations which include notes and introductory essays which can provide at least an outline of the direction of contemporary scholarly opinion.

As one who has, in the past, tried to put together material pertaining to Rhiannon and her presentation in Y Mabinogi, and who relied on the arguments of Gruffydd, together with other material from Rachel Bromwich and Gwyn Jones, to make some sort of summary of scholarly work, I must include myself among those who may have relied on ‘outdated’ research to present my material. But the main reason why Gruffydd is regarded as out of date is not so much that he did not make significant advances in the study of this material, but that his view of it as a corruption of earlier mythical material which therefore needed reconstruction is now regarded as misguided. The current view is rather that we should try to understand what value the texts we have had for their medieval audience and that any attempt to reconstruct the original significance of mythical remnants is necessarily too speculative to be of any value.

But if what has been done since essentially just says “Well, really, we don’t know” or employs primarily what are referred to as ‘synchronic’ analyses (usually focused on the significance of the tales as the product of a medieval Christian society) rather than ‘diachronic’ analyses based on a range of meanings a tale might have over a longer period of time, then this leaves the pagan concerned to make the best use of scholarly material with little room for manoeuvre.

Fortunately things are not quite so bad as this simple dichotomy suggests. If ‘synchronic’ means focusing on the texts we have,and the age in which they were produced, this does not necessarily imply ruling out any consideration of mythical significance. Work by, for instance, Catherine Mckenna on Rhiannon as a sovereignty goddess usefully discusses the tales in the context of what she sees as a Celtic sovereignty myth involving Rhiannon as the Goddess whom both Pwyll and later Manawydan must wed in order to legitimate their right to rule. Such a theme, she suggests, is entirely consistent with regarding the text as conveying “the growth to full and effective lordship over Dyfed of its protagonist, Pwyll, and as a mirror or exhortation for medieval Welsh princes”. This approach regards the author/redactor of the tale as being fully aware of the mythical significance of its origins and putting them to appropriate contemporary use. In a later article McKenna extended this analysis to Manawydan in the Third Branch. Mckenna’s arguments first appeared in scholarly journals but have been re-printed in book form in volumes which have limited availability.(*)

Much more accessible is the translation of the Four Branches and the other tales by Patrick Ford (1977 ) which has a useful introduction in which he asserts that if “the integrity of the text” is to be respected we should regard the mythological elements contained in that text as at least being available to the medieval redactor(s) rather than take the view of Matthew Arnold that they were “pillaging an antiquity of which they scarcely possessed the secret”. He also suggests that the Third Branch (Manawydan) “preserves the detritus of a myth wherein the Sea God mated with the Horse Goddess”. He does not think that this myth survived into the tale as a myth, but that “the mythic significance may well have been understood in a general way by an eleventh century audience”. Such an understanding is also implied by McKenna’s argument.

Ford developed these themes further in an article in 1982 (*) In a complex argument employing structuralist understandings of the relationship between myth and narrative, Ford argues for a reading that understands that narrative can only be horizontal but a mythical reading needs to look at vertical parallels elsewhere in the text. Such a mythical reading here requires us to regard, for example, the events in the First Branch where Gwawl is the ‘badger in the bag’ and those in the Third Branch, where Manawydan has a mouse in a glove, as mythically parallel events while also being different events in the narrative scheme. Similarly, Pryderi’s disappearance at the same time as Teyrnon’s foal in the First Branch, and Rhiannon’s displacement to the horse block, and the disappearance of Pryderi and Rhiannon in the enchanted fort in the Third Branch, are to be seen as mythically parallel expressions of the same theme of cyclic fertility of the land worked out in different narrative elements in the text.

Pryderi, son of Pwyll and Rhiannon and stepson of Manawydan is, in the mythical dimension, the offspring of Other World parents who are also, in the narrative scheme, characters in a medieval tale. The contemporary narrative is necessary for the multiple expression of the mythic themes. Ford concludes:

“We need not search for an Ur-myth, nor need we assume that the text is corrupt or that the medieval redactor and his audience were ignorant of their traditions. The analysis attempted here shows that the first branch and part of the third branch of the Mabinogi are concerned, among other things, with the birth of Pryderi and his loss and return, the latter events paralleled by loss and restoration of fertility in the land. Was Pryderi human or divine? Who was his father? Because Pryderi is a divine hero, his father was lord of the otherworld. In Celtic tradition, the Lord of the other world is pre-eminently the sea-god. When he mates with the Great Queen, he partakes of her characteristic shape, which is equine. Pryderi is a hero among mortal men, though his origins are divine; the narrative concerning his birth reflects, therefore, the natural and supernatural conditions attendant upon that event. He is at once son of the mortal Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, who is also known as Lord of the Otherworld, the son of Teyrnon Twrf Liant (‘Lord of the Tempestuous Sea’), who is the mare’s consort, and the son of Rhiannon, Queen of Dyfed, whose equine nature is skilfully divided among several narrative sequences.”(*)

It may be argued that such a structuralist analysis is itself no longer the chief focus in academic opinion, or that not all of what Ford suggests would be endorsed widely. But this does, at least, adopt the synchronic approach deemed necessary while also allowing diachronic elements to interact with it. And, regardless of the exigencies of academic fashion, this is a suggestive argument that allows room for the mythical content of the tales to shine through the analysis of the medieval text without reconstructing it.

(*) Articles cited above are published in:

Catherine McKenna 'The Theme of Sovereignty in Pwyll' Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 29 (1980)

Patrick Ford 'Prolegomena to a Reading of the Mabinogi' Studia Celtica 16-17 1981-82

Both of the above republished in C W Sullivan III The Mabinogi - A Book of Essays (1996) (expensive and at the time of posting unavailable).

Catherine McKenna 'Learning Lordship : The Education of Manawydan' in Ildanach Ildinech eds Carey, Koch, Lambert (1999)

Maes yr Onnen and The Birds of Rhiannon

2009-09-24T21:51:00.000+01:00

Is the experience of the ‘spirit of place’ the experience of a particular place or the experience of The Spirit in a particular place? And how might such an experience be constructed? Consider this account from the poet R.S. Thomas who in 1947 visited one of the oldest nonconformist chapels in Wales on the banks of the River Wye. Sitting in the August sunshine while his wife Elsie did a sketch of the building (above) he had a revelation:

… it was two and a half centuries earlier on a fine August morning. And almost immediately I saw, I understood. As with St John the Divine on the island of Patmos I was ‘in the Spirit’ and I had a vision in which I could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of creation.

Although he then says that he won’t try to put the experience into words he did, some time later, write the following poem:

Maes-yr-Onnen

Though I describe it stone by stone, the chapel

Left stranded in the hurrying grass,

Painting faithfully the mossed tiles and the tree,

The one listener to the long homily

Of the ministering wind, and the dry, locked doors,

And the stale piety, mouldering within;

You cannot share with me that rarer air,

Blue as a flower and heady with the scent

Of the years past and others yet to be,

That brushed each window and outsoared the clouds’

Far foliage with its own high canopy.

You cannot hear as I, incredulous, heard

Up in the rafters, where the bell should ring,

The wild, sweet singing of Rhiannon’s birds.

R. S. Thomas would develop the theme of the moment out of time that led to eternity often in his poetry. Natural images such as a constantly welling fountain or a tree continually shedding golden leaves were used to capture this moment. But here the reference is to ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’ in the Second Branch of Y Mabinogi whose singing suspends time so that those returning from Ireland with the head of Bendigeidfran then feast for seven years before proceeding to the island of Gwales for a further eighty years during which time is suspended.

In the medieval text this is presented as part of a story and socialized as the common experience of a group of people pursuing a specific purpose. Rhiannon’s birds are voices from Faery and, in texts from earlier times, this suspension of time is often presented as a crossing of the borders into the Otherworld. For modern writers, however, it is more likely to be a solitary experience, a ‘moment’ that is ‘forever’ (think of T.S. Eliot’s rose garden in ‘Burnt Norton’). It may or may not be a metaphor for a communion with ultimate ‘reality’, a god, the God, or a presence integral to a particular place. Waldo Williams, writing in Welsh, says ‘Gwyddom gan ddyfod yr Eiliad / Ein geni i’r Awr’ (We know in that Instant / We’re born to the Hour) and this neatly captures the general idea of a split second which is also eternity.

The content of the experience may be different for each individual, and at different historical periods or in different cultural contexts. But is it the same experience? And if so, if one experiences the singing of the Birds of Rhiannon, another the whispering of the Holy Spirit and yet another a wholly secular perception of a moment when time stands still, what accounts for this difference?

David Jones' Arthur

2009-09-18T21:34:00.007+01:00

And what of Arthur in the 20th century (it is too early to speak of the 21st)?

There were T.H. White's whimsical offerings The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn but, amusing as they might be, and delightful in their own way, they cannot constitute any sort of serious Arthuriad.

There were the writings of Charles Williams, which certainly deserve to be taken seriously. His Arthurian Torso attempted an analysis of the significance of the material and his long poem Taliessin Through Logres, if eccentric, does attempt a contribution to the tradition rather than a restatement of it. But both of these, in literary terms, have vanished without a trace.

Which leaves David Jones. His luminescent account of Gwenhwyfar praying in a chapel at Christmas occupies a significant point in the labyrinth of his spectacularly labyrinthine writing The Anathemeta. Then there are the two poems (though called 'fragments') published in The Sleeping Lord. 'The Hunt' is an evocation of Arthur in the medieval Welsh tale 'How Culhwch Won Olwen' while 'The Sleeping Lord' poem itself presents Arthur as a densely symbolic figure.

These works deserve to be better known. T.S. Eliot put Jones in the same league as Ezra Pound and himself. But, in spite of 'The Waste Land', with its echoes of Jessie Weston's study of the grail legends From Ritual to Romance, in spite of Pound's self-conscious echoes of The Odyssey, neither of these came as close to a deep engagement with the mythological deposits they used as did Jones. Perhaps Joyce - a particular favourite of Jones' - did in thoroughly modernising his mythological engagement with the soul of Ireland.

Jones' "what's under works up" is nowhere more concisely expressed than in his Arthurian poems. In 'The Hunt' , Arthur hunts the boar Trwyth and engages him with due respect "life for life". 'The Sleeping Lord' on the other hand, presents a more passive figure, the very essence of the island of Britain rather than it's defender. Just listen to Jones cadences here and savour the wealth of symbolic detail:

(from the conclusion of a poem covering 26 pages):

Yet he sleeps on

very deep in his slumber:

how long has he been the sleeping lord?

are the clammy ferns

his rustling vallance

does the buried rowan

ward him from evil, or

does he ward the tanglewood

and the denizens of the wood

are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard

or are their knarred limbs

strong with his sap?

Do the small black horses

grass on the hunch of his shoulders?

are the hills his couch

or is he the couchant hills?

Are the slumbering valleys

him in slumber

are the still undulations

the still limbs of him sleeping?

Is the configuration of the land

the furrowed body of the lord

are the scarred ridges

his dented greaves

do the trickling gullies

yet drain his hog-wounds?

Does the land wait the sleeping lord

or is the wasted land

that very lord who sleeps?

Arthur of Britain?

2009-09-13T23:18:00.004+01:00

David Jones, in his long essay 'The Myth of Arthur' asserts that "the tradition of Arthur was, for the Welsh, an authentic part of their historical mythus, whereas for the English it was a literary convention mixed with local traditions as at Glastonbury ...". It is easy to lose sight of this fact. 'King Arthur and his Knights' are all too familiar. It is likely that the source material for much of the medieval Arthurian romances was Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain which was written in Latin in the Twelfth Century (Breton sources have been suggested for the French romances of Chretien de Troyes but these are not extant). Geoffrey drew upon an older 'historical' source in the work of the ninth century chronicler Nennius. It seems that he also drew upon Welsh material, some of which has survived and some has not. It is likely that he filled in both the historical and the fictional gaps by making things up. Certainly he drew things together that had not previously belonged together, bringing in Merlin from a quite different set of literary and legendary material. But his Arthur is at least a Brythonic war lord in a country that was divided both within itself and by invasion. The medieval romance tradition ignores this context and makes him very much a contemporary figure (to them) ruling a medieval court whose knights get mixed up in the Holy Grail legend. As for the great English Arthurian cycle, it is based very much on this pan-European material in spite of its sinewy engagement with the realities of knightly conflict (Sir Thomas Malory wrote his Arthurian cycle while in prison having fought in some the the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses). Malory's constant refrain is "so the Frensshe book maketh mencyon". The last books of the cycle (based in this case partly on the earlier English alliterative Morte Arthur) are a fast-moving and tragic account of illicit love and its consequences. But in the hands of Tennyson in The Idylls of the King they became a Romantic and dreamy expression of Victorian neo-medievalism. This is this 'English' Arthur that survived into the cinema age, though some more recent films have put back the harder edge of Malory's gritty realism.

But still all this is a million miles away from How Culhwch Won Olwen, or the Arthurian references in early Welsh poetry. But what did survive into the later medieval tradition was the idea that, as Malory puts it:

"Som men say in many partys of Inglonde that Kyng Arthure ys nat dede, ...... Yet I woll nat say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tumbe thys:

HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS"

The idea of a grave for Arthur in the Englynion y Beddau is 'anoeth' a word that has caused some problems of interpretation. In modern Welsh it usually means 'unwise' but can also mean 'strange'. In earlier Welsh it also had the meaning 'marvel'. So 'An unwise thought ,a grave for Arthur' or 'A great marvel, a grave for Arthur' are both possible. But the general idea is that Arthur doesn't need a grave because he is not dead but sleeping and will come again to re-claim the sovereignty of the island of Britain in a time of of need. It was an idea that the Welsh adhered to but it was firmly knocked on the head by Edward I when he had two bodies removed from a tomb at Glastonbury in 1278 in the middle of a period of conflict with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd the last native Prince of Wales. Here are Arthur and Guenevere says Edward, so he's not coming back. In such ways do myth and legend become the stuff of politics, which I suppose gets as close to the world of a Brythonic warlord as we can get.

Haf Bach Mihangel

2009-09-12T20:41:00.005+01:00

Photo: Nigel Brown / CC BY-SA 2.0

Out today with a group of Welsh-speaking walkers and naturalists. This is a qualitatively different experience from walking with an English-speaking group, not just because all the conversations are in Welsh, but also because, walking in Wales, there is more of an engagement with the land as a place that has been lived on for generations. We stopped often, sometimes to look at particular plants or trees, but also to be given an account of different field systems or to be told about people who had lived there. Family histories were related, that farm there had been occupied by the same family for generations, that one was the home of a famous bard who wrote this -: and an englyn was recited. Because the walk leader and several of the walkers were local, farmers didn't ignore us or eye us suspiciously but stopped the tractor for a chat as we went through the field where winter silage was being cut.

It was a beautiful day. High pressure is sitting over Britain and all the low pressure systems which roll towards the island over the Atlantic, giving us our mild, wet climate, are being diverted around us. It is a 'Haf Bach Mihangel' as such weather at this time of year is called in Welsh.

We traversed a small, quiet valley with very steep sides and through the woodland along the stream on the valley floor there were blackberries and hazelnuts to pick. On the valley sides hawthorns and rowan trees were a blush of autumn red with their berries all on show. It is not dramatic landscape in spite of the steep valley sides. We had begun up on a plateau and wound down into the valley across the slope. Coming back from further down the stream the ascent was steeper. But these narrow mid-Wales cwms are intimate places. You feel contained in them. As we did, too, by the September sunshine and the lush green that the high rainfall also brings. The stream rushes along the valley floor to a much wider valley running at a right angle to it some miles away. There it joins a river and has not far to go to the sea. Back on the plateau the coast was visible in the distance over the hill tops in the clear air. But it was of the quiet valleys between the hills that I thought as I journeyed homewards.

In a Woodland Cave

2009-08-30T17:09:00.004+01:00

Bride's Well
+

for Stephen

In these woods there is a place where water

Wells to a still pool in a cleft of rock

Like crystal in which an enchantress might conjure.

To enter is to inhabit a stillness as complete

And consistent as the cool water that ponds there

Beyond the ferns that arch from the steep

Rock face of the entrance to the cave.

Looking intensely at the face of the waters

No prophecy came but that I would engrave

This image on the stone of memory

And it would remain with me always

Welling in the mind's pool, constantly

Bringing a blessing of Bride's healing springs

And the tranquility such rememberance brings.

The Kerry Ridgeway / Fforddlas Ceri

2009-08-23T19:40:00.005+01:00

The village of Llanfihangel yng Ngheri from the Ridgeway

The village of Kerry (Llanfihangel yng Ngheri) in Mid Wales with its 12th century church, sits in a valley below high moorland that runs west towards the Cambrian Mountains and east across the Clun Forest to the border with England. This high ground is crossed by an ancient track which passes Bronze Age remains and is known today as the Kerry Ridgeway (Fforddlas Ceri). To walk this track on a clear day is to have a panoramic view of a great swathe of Wales and the English border counties. Up at the highest point on Kerry Hill, watched by a huge herefordshire bull guarding his herd of cows, we identified the peaks and high places that receded to the horizon in every direction. Eastwards towards the English county of Shropshire we could see 'The Long Mynd' , the jagged profile of the Stipperstones clearly outlined against the sky, and Breidden Hill. Southwards the Black Mountains receded into a haze. To the West and moving North we could clearly identify the outlines of Pumlummon, Cader Idris and the Rhinogs. Further North the mountains around Snowdon were hidden from view by lower hills nearer to us, but turning nearly full circle to the North-East the Berwyns rose to some low-drifting clouds.

To be human in such a landscape is to be small. Smaller certainly than the bull that ambled towards us as we returned to the path from the viewpoint and continued our traverse of the ridge with more immediate views of the field systems either side. The descent back into the valley brought the world in closer. A hedge of rowan trees was already red with berries and sprays of blackberries offered ripe refreshment in the hot, sticky afternoon as we left the cooling breeze of the ridge. Summer almost imperceptibly drifted - as if that very afternoon - towards Autumn. The stone benches in the porch of the old church were refreshingly cold as we sat and drank from our water bottles before entering. Inside it was cool, semi-dark and mysterious. The oak roof and the stone walls enclosed a space that had nothing spectacular about it but contained an atmosphere that hinted at hidden depths in dark corners. I pondered this a while and left, ambiguous as ever in my attitude to such places. There was still some walking to do across the valley fields to Newtown and a deadline for a train home.

Flowers of the Dunes

2009-08-14T14:25:00.003+01:00

The south-west coast of Wales is edged with a wide band of yellow sand along much of its length from Crumlin Burrows on Swansea Bay, along the northern edge of the Gower, Cefn Padraig and Cefn Sidan to the west of Llanelli and over the dunes at Penbre to Pendine and the sandy beaches of South Pembrokeshire beyond. This forms a calcium-rich habitat between the sea and the acid soils of most of West Wales. There are occasional outcrops of lime from a narrow band running between the coal measures in the south and from the old red sandstone of the Brecon Beacons further north. But it is on the sand dunes where plants of the limestone areas grow in this part of the west. At Pendine the lime-loving yellow crosswort grows in abundance on the sea side of the dunes, while on the land side there is sheep sorrel which is usually only found on acid soils. Everywhere on the dunes at Pendine the pyramidal orchid grows and also the brilliant blue vipers bugloss which has bristly hairs and protruding stamens giving the whole plant a fearsome appearance. Here too, I found the delicate round leaved brookweed in a willow wood where the dunes end, and then on a desolate patch, marsh hellborine, blue fleabane (in the dryer patches) and yellow wort among many such jewels of the greenworld, some of them seen for the first time. Most exciting of all I found, in a dry sandy patch between dune and heath, a tiny green fern which alone would have made the walk in the rain worthwhile: moonwort. Just as I always blow a kiss the New Moon when I see her silver crescent flashing in the sky, so I did to this fern, in reverence of the magic that such things bring to our lives

TALIESIN

2009-08-10T22:17:00.004+01:00

Taliesin is conjectured to be a sixth century bard of Urien, the ruler of Rheged, but has taken on a status beyond this. The 'Book of Taliesin' is a collection of poems of a prophetic nature some of which, though not all of which, may be by such an historical personage. But he has become a symbolic character. Many know the story (in fact from the sixteenth century) that he underwent several changes of form (in accordance with a well tried folklore formula) while - in his original persona as Gwion Bach - being chased by the witch Cerridwen when he tastes rather than simply stirs the contents of her cauldron. His eventual transformation into the inspired bard is a million miles away from the conjectured historical poet.

But it's a good story and has made him emblematic of metamorphosis. Emyr Humphreys uses him in just this way as a symbolic representation of Wales in his cultural history The Taliesin Tradition. No fantasies about celtic shamans here, just the astute use of a cultural icon. Staying with imaginative fiction, the novelist John Cowper Powys presents him as a brilliant cook (clearly a familiarity with cauldrons is useful here!). But like most of Powys's characters, he is an extension of the author's life illusion:

John Cowper Powys

"Taliesin had indeed worked out for himself ... a really startling philosophy of his own. This philosophy depended upon a particular special use of sensation; and its secret had the power of rendering all matter sacred and pleasure-giving to the individual soul." [from his novel Porius]

This has as much to do with the .magical quest' of J.C. Powys than anything else. Like that poem in which Taliesin is said to claim being all things in all places, Powys lived his life by just such a view of the world, but one in which ordinary things were transformed in mythic fashion. As he says in his Autobiography (itself a great work of mythic fiction) :

"Posts, palings, hedges, heaps of stones -

they were part of my very soul."

As for the historical Taliesin, here's poem I wrote quite some time ago exploring his provenance:

Taliesin

Urien Rheged’s bard, I lit a spark

In the Old North where the dark

Came early for comrades cradled

In Cymru’s egg

and an Easter that was addled.

***

Still I sang my songs for him –

Not prophecies of the coming gloom

But celebrations of munificence,

Spells cast over the abyss

in complaisance.

Listen:

Riches fall from his hand

Like spray cascading to the sand,

Beads trickle into pockets

Of poets, not gleanings got

From the chaff but gifts to lift

The heart even of strangers

In his hall. How many times

I have told him this:

“Until I gasp my last breath

And stare in the face of death,

My life wont be worth living

If I don’t praise Urien.”

This praise

For meat and mead

But not for God

Is my lord’s due, my rent

To life as it is lived here, a tithe

Of song apart from the nine that are sung

Secretly where the silent harp is strung.

***

They call this place Eden

And the river runs like silk

on its silty bed.

Light hangs in the air

late on midsummer nights

Bats flicker through the bridge’s

old stone arches.

This is shape-shifting time, hovering

on borders of history, place and occasion.

A motor-biker leans his steed

Into the curve and over the bridge

Heading for the mead hall.

A huge extractor fan wafts chip-fry onto the night air

But not here;

The vale of Eden widening westward

To Solway and Scotland:

Idon in Rheged

Running with the blood of the slain

Like wine for the victory feast.

***

Over the sea-river

In Galloway

Mary made peace with her God

But not her people

At the abbey of Dundrennan

And sailed from Scotland.

Rheged a realm divided

Taliesin’s voice dead in the lands

Of Urien, Mynyddawg and Gwallawg:

A Tudor rose;

Rules in London.

Notes:

Taliesin is supposed to be the bard of Urien of Rheged, a sixth century early-Welsh speaking area in the area now covered by Strathclyde in Scotland and northern Cumbria.

This area of southern Scotland (including Gododdin in the east) was later known as 'The Old North' by the medieval bards of Wales who looked back to the 'Gogynfeirdd' (earliest poets) as their bardic ancestors.

The River Eden in Cumbria supposed to be Idon in Rheged.

Mary Queen of Scots left Scotland across the Solway Firth for the last time before being captured and imprisoned.

'Tudor' refers not only to this but to Henry VII who was seen as fulfilling the hopes of the Welsh that one of their number should once again rule the Island of Britain.

The Well at the Wood’s End

2009-08-02T00:01:00.003+01:00

Lydney, on the banks of the Severn Estuary, is often said to get its name from Lludd or Nudd on the basis of there being the remains of a Roman Temple dedicated to Nodens there, though there are other theories about the origin of the name. I recently spent some time in the area and unsuccessfully tried to visit the site of the temple, but it is on a private estate and I was unable to gain access. I did, however, explore the Forest of Dean, which stretches from along the banks of this part of the Severn across to the River Wye. In particular I followed the course of some streams through the forest. The small river that runs down through Lydney to the Severn is called ‘The Lyd’, but only from the point where it emerges from the forest and runs down through Lydney itself. Several streams run together at this point but the main one is called ‘Cannop Brook’ and runs in a deep valley right across the forest for about ten miles or so from a source area where several springs are marked on the detailed map above the village of Lydbrook on the banks of the River Wye. So there is another ‘Lyd’ place name on the other side of the forest but no obvious association, as far as I know, with Nodens here, though the site was inhabited in Roman times. And in spite of the name of the village the brook running through it is not ‘Lydbrook’ but ‘Greathough Brook’. At least it is now, but apparently it was known in medieval times as ‘Lyd Brook’ or ‘Lud Brook’, explained in local records as ‘Loud Brook’ (Old English ‘hlud’) because of its rushing down the steep slope to the river. The stream can be followed back to two sources in the forest. One is a spring and the other a well. These two sources (‘Little Hough Brook’ and ‘Great Hough Brook’) run together under a bridge, which carries a forest road over the stream. “Hough’ (‘hock’) is puzzling. But it might have been ‘how’ (‘hill’) or ‘howe’ (‘hollow’).

The track back to the spring from this bridge is about a mile along the road running by the side of the stream, but the place from which it emerges is inaccessible and is part of the grounds of a large house, a fact which was stressed to me by the property owner who came out to enquire what I found so interesting to look at as I tried to locate it by peering over the fence! Back at the confluence, the other stream flows down through the forest and can be followed along a delightful winding path. Here is pure enchantment. For much of its course the stream is hidden in a narrow channel beneath over-arching ferns. But to wander along the steep-sided valley with its wooded slopes listening to the waters rushing through the green valley floor is to enter an enchanted place. The valley virtually sang its numen song in its tinkling waters and rustling leaves. Even when a brief shower fell I felt blessed by the drops of rain falling on my face. I slowed my pace; this walk should be for ever. At one point the stream was easily reached from the path and I knelt and touched some of the water to my forehead and spoke a blessing

But the path did have an end and I emerged from the trees onto a lane turning away from the stream now rushing swiftly down the slope from a point above, where the well is marked on the map. The lane went ahead past some ramshackle farm buildings but then turned across the slope to the well. From a path leading off the lane I could see a mound surrounded by watercress. Here was the well, a sadly neglected structure with a padlocked gate across it. It stood next to a cottage and a car was parked across the path. I was probably trespassing again! So I stood there briefly, took a few photos, and left, skirting the forest to follow a track down to a point beyond the confluence of the two streams and followed the course of Greathough Brook as far as the outskirts of Upper Lydbrook village. It was a wonderful day. Though I found no temple of Nodens or anything significant about Lludd, the streams of Lyd sang to me and are flowing through my dreams.

The Stream below the Well