Tales of Arthur

 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 Dream of Rhonabwy

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.”

How Culhwch Won Olwen

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 of 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)

Rhiannon's Birds

... and so the manuscript breaks off as we hear that Manawydan finds that he has never met a more beautiful woman than Rhiannon. In the First Branch of Y Mabinogi she arrives with a magical aura about her but acts as a real enough woman to get what she wants. In the Third Branch, the beginning of which the above illustrates, she is even more practically present, at least until she is captured in an enchanted fort. But between these, in the Second Branch, her birds sing over the sea to those that returned from Ireland, "and all the songs they had ever heard were harsh by comparison". In Culhwch and Olwen these same birds of Rhiannon are said to "wake the dead and lull the living to sleep". How can the same tradition, and in fact two tales that lead one into the other, regard the same character at once as a person in the story and an enchantress with magical birds?

One answer is to say that different elements came into the tale from an earlier mythological tradition but this suggests a tale-teller that wasn't in full control of the material. Whatever we think of Culhwch which is full of what might be regarded as scarcely integrated mythical material, the author of the Four Branches  does seem to be writing stories in which the elements are consistently integrated. But the two identities of Rhiannon do not seem consistent. The final pages of Branwen eerily evoke something more otherwordly than the rest of the apparently Otherworld characters who come and go as ordinary people. 

How can Rhiannon of the birds suddenly become Manawydan's wife? Could the author engage in a sort of double-think? We could propose that the sensibility of medieval authors was different from ours so that they could know what they were dealing with in terms of earlier mythical material while at the same time get on and present a story in the devout christian world they inhabited. Sometimes reading medieval literature I think this, but at others I think they were prone to an intense literalism and their faith was attached to material objects (like obviously fake holy relics). But perhaps they knew full well that they were fakes but nevertheless had faith in their efficacy.

We can learn to read the things they wrote, but can we ever read them as they wrote them?