Severed Heads

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?

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