The Birth of Pryderi

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.

Did a Woman Write The Four Branches of the Mabinogi?

I am prompted  to consider this question following an intervention on a 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 ...'.

White

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’

Discovering Another World / Darganfod Byd Arall

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.

Nikolai Tolstoy on 'Y Mabinogi'

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

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

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.

Y Mabinogi, Pagans and The Academy

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)

The Mabinogion and Welsh Cultural Identity

In his study of the historical development of Welsh identity – The Taliesin Tradition - Emyr Humphreys discusses Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and makes the following comment:

"In the eyes of the Welsh, Geoffrey’s book overshadowed their native prose masterpieces for centuries. It is only since the nineteenth century that they came to recognise the prose tales of the Mabinogion collection amongst the finest sustained artistic creations in their language. This single fact is in itself a clear indication of the lasting relationship between the activity we now call ‘literary criticism’ and political awareness. For the Welsh to distinguish between myth and history has always been a difficult exercise. This may be inevitable among a gifted and sensitive people, apparently condemned by historical materialism to a permanently marginal existence. In order to be coaxed into action they need to be offered a world. Nothing less could persuade them to stir out of the cocoon of their comfortable illusions. It is for this very reason that they are obliged to develop and continually assert their critical faculty: in order to avoid the fate of the folk hero who falls into the dangerous slumber, or captivity in the house of crystal, or any of the many forms of Celtic fool’s paradise. Fiction can of course catch closer glimpses of ultimate truth than mere recorded fact, but it can only do so when both the maker and the society he serves are sufficiently wide awake to make the elementary distinction. In the case of the medieval and for that matter the modern Welsh, it was and is always exaggerated expectations that led and lead them down the broad avenues towards extinction or assimilation. In the Cymric world, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, this was the chief reason why the false history of Geoffrey took precedence over the truth-bearing fiction of the romances of the Mabinogion. "

In what way could the stories in the Mabinogion be seen as ‘truth-bearing’? The writer of the above passage is an accomplished novelist and therefore sees fiction as a way of exploring truth via constructed narratives. Interestingly, he sees Geoffrey – in a later chapter of his study – as “a proto-novelist posing as an historian” who plunders the myths, poetry and folklore of the Welsh for “decorative” adornments to his pseudo-historical narrative. The author of the Four Branches of Y Mabinogi, by contrast, focuses on “figures that are recognisably human and yet free from the constrictions of a specific historical process” and succeeds in “presenting a vision of the human condition which is valid for all time”. While he certainly does not see the tales simply as repositories of a lost mythology, nor does he see them as tales that only tell us about life in the 11th or 12th centuries. He continues by citing parallels between some of the content of the tales and incidents in early Welsh poems such as Preiddiau Annwn , to say that the audience of the tales were “well acquainted with the repertoire” and that they “must have been well aware of the symphonic correspondences both between incidents and between variant versions”. But if the poetry was conservative, backward-looking and aimed at reinforcing heroic virtues, the prose could test this, play with alternatives, question for example the legal system of galanas according to which Manawydan should not demean himself by seeking justice from anyone below his status (let alone a mouse!).

If we read the tales in this way as “truth-bearing fiction” containing insights into human strengths and weaknesses, but also as using well-understood themes from legendary and mythological history (“the repertoire”) and dramatising these in terms of contemporary issues, then we can read them inclusively. This means neither saying that they are just corrupted versions of earlier myths nor saying that these myths would have meant nothing to the audience of the tales. We need to read them with a good understanding of the medieval context in which they were written but also with some appreciation of what a Welsh-speaking audience would already know: the heroic ideals of ‘The Old North’ preserved in the work of early poets who looked back to the Gogynfeirdd (the even earlier poets) as a source of cultural identity. The prose, however, offers an alternative perspective, shifting the same themes to explore psychological – even magical – dimensions of experience and therefore reconnecting with those aspects of an older mythos rather than the realpolitik and turmoil that Manawydan – in the Third Branch – notably opts out of in favour of what he hopes (vainly) will be a pastoral retreat to Dyfed. So the political and military conflict shifts from the historical to the mythical plane: from cultural and political history and pseudo-history to the culture and politics of the Otherworld. Here Time, and therefore history (pseudo or otherwise) is suspended. But if cause and effect work to different rules, the process is no less relentless.

A Scaffold for a Mouse

Setting this up seemed mean

and was judged to be so 

for it seemed to demean

Manawydan living in a dream

landscape with the life

conjured out of it like a flat plane

They moved across, Rhiannon,

Pryderi, Cigfa and he

chasing shadows to an enchanted fountain.

Against such powerful magic: a small

gesture enacted on this scaffold

quietly, determinedly, a model

Of spell-breaking – no fires on

the astral plane but calculated

unconcern in the face of persuasion

And a firm grip on a small thing

for a great purpose:  he would 

release into the world again

a woman in an asses collar;

make the rivers flow again,

awaken form to its true nature:

Mouse to pregnant woman,

stabled horse to a mare running free,

changes real magic causes to happen.

Shape-Shifting and Transformation

Having left the question of shape-shifting hanging as an afterthought last time, here are some further thoughts on interactions with animals.  These fall into three categories:


1. Personal encounters in the natural environment. I have recorded some instances in verse that had profound significance for me at the time:  HERE

Empathy rather than shape-shifting is involved in these examples.

 2. As a given subject for guided or focused meditation. I have had some significant results in travelling with animal spirit guides in this way and there is the potential for shape-shifting too as in some cases the transition between travelling with an animal guide and becoming that animal to complete the journey has been a feature of some deeper meditations.

3. Literary sources: Ovid’s Metamorphoses give well-known examples of people being involuntarily changed into animals and such transformations seem to be much more common than a willed shape-shifting. There is often an element of punishment or malicious intent here. Irish examples include people changed into salmon, deer and swans. In the Welsh tales notable examples include the boar Twrch Trwyth who is said to have been a king changed into a boar as punishment for evil deeds. In the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi. ‘Math fab Mathonwy’, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy are changed by Math as a punishment for unnecessarily causing a war and the rape of the maiden Goewin.

 The two brothers are changed first into deer, then into boar and finally into wolves. Math says: “I will make you fare together, and be coupled, and of the same nature as the beasts whose guise you are in”.  There is an element here of having to experience sexual activity from both sides, as the brothers are alternately male and female as their animal guises change. They produce offspring at the end of each year which Math transforms into human form and takes into his care. But this seems primarily to be a banishment from human community. At the end of the three-year banishment they are restored to fully human status and able to take part in human affairs once more.  Later in this tale Lleu temporarily takes the form of an eagle when Gronw tries to kill him and Blodeuwedd is punished by being turned, apparently permanently, into an owl.

 Shape-shifting for a willed purpose is less common. We can set aside the horse nature of Rhiannon as something quite different. Similarly the shifting between human shapes of Pwyll and Arawn and the ability of Gwydion to temporarily conjure illusory horses and dogs are not shape-shifting between humans and animals. There is a brief example of this in Culhwch where Menw transforms himself into a bird in order to confirm that the treasures are between the ears of Twrch Trwyth.  But in the Third Branch of Y Mabinogi, ‘Manawydan fab Llyr’, there is a larger scale example of willed shape-shifting where a horde of attackers in the guise of mice strip the corn that Manawydan has planted and destroy the crop. This is part of the strategy of Llwyd fab Cil Coed to mount a magical attack on the land of Dyfed over which he has already cast an enchantment. We are to suppose that this attack comes from Annwn, the Other World, where willed shape-shifting might be more common. For humans it was a perilous and often unpleasant experience, certainly not to be undertaken on a whim.

Something on Manawydan’s response to the magical attack on Dyfed next time …..