The Horse and the Mother as an Archetype

Image by Thalia Took

The psychologist C G Jung links the Mother archetype with the Horse:

'Mother' is an archetype and refers to the place of origin, to nature … to substance and matter, to materiality and the womb

It also means the unconscious, our natural and instinctive life, the physiological realm, the body in which we dwell

'Horse' is an archetype that is widely current in mythology and folklore. As an animal it represents the non-human psyche, the subhuman, animal side, the unconscious. That is why horses in folklore sometimes see visions, hear voices, and speak. As a beast of burden it is related to the 'mother' archetype

It is evident, then, that 'horse' is an equivalent of 'mother' with a slight shift of meaning.

(from The Practical Use of Dream Analysis)

The identification here with the 'mother' archetype and the 'horse' as a beast of burden has a particular resonance in the context of the passage in the first of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi where Rhiannon takes the role of a beast of burden after being accused of killing her son:

This is the punishment that was put upon her - to be in that court in Arberth until the end of seven years - and there was a mounting block beside the gate - to sit beside that every day, and to tell to all who might come, whom she supposed might not know it, the whole tale; and whoever might allow her to carry him, to offer to carry the guest or stranger on her back to the court. But scarcely would anyone allow her to carry him.

Here, though no-one will take her up on her offer, she has to offer herself for this task that, in the Jungian typology, is linked to motherhood. She has to do this until Teyrnon returns her child to her:

As they approached the court, they could see Rhiannon sitting beside the mounting block. As they came to her, "Ah chieftain", she said "I will carry each of you to the court" ….

"Ah gentle lady" said Teyrnon, "I do not imagine any one of us will go on your back".
[…..]
"And behold there your son, and whoever spoke a lie against you did you wrong".

In Jungian terms, the re-uniting of the mother and child makes things whole so the 'horse' and the 'mother' become an integrated archetype once more and there is no longer a need for one of the elements to be foregrounded as separate from the other.

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.

The Enchanted Fort

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

The Rhymer, The Prophet and The Lady

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.

Rigantona : A Dedication

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.

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’

Horse Sonnets

{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.

Merlin, Fictional Characters and the Gods

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!

Gwenallt : Rhiannon as Wales

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 [], 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,

 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

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.

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)

Calan Mai / Mayday

MAYDAY and the gates of Annwn are open: Rhiannon on a pale horse riding out of the dawn, glimpsed first near, then far away, coming closer then receding, but closer on this day as sensuous scents from blossomed boughs sail on the morning air to steal my heart away.

Cymera ofal Pwyll rhag pryder:

Bydd Llawenydd Pryderi yn ffrwyth dy hyder

Rainbow Woman

Nyt oed nes hagen idi no chynt. Y uarch a gymhellaud o’r kerdet mwyaf a oed ganthaw. A guelet a wnaeth na thygyei idaw y hymlit.

He was no nearer to her than before. He drove his horse as fast as he could but he saw that he would not be able to follow her.

Pwyll Pendeuic Dyved

….. like a rainbow, when you look
from afar it seems to ground
right there, but if you move
towards the spot where the crock
of gold might be it shifts
- as colours shift – and such
elusive allure is in the nature
of real presences defined
by their unreality when you reach
out to the spot where they are.

I thought this while watching a
rainbow arc across the salt marsh
towards mountains to touch a mound
in the middle distance where the
ground begins to rise. Is it there? But
the thought thinned and evanesced
as the colours did and her light
shone elsewhere touching other
pupils of her wayward ways;
unless they turned away?

Or like Pwyll found a way
to apprehend and speak with her;
on, perhaps, that very mound
if she would stay and gather
up her light around her – like
the golden sheen of her gown,
the white gleam of her steed –
and lift her veil a little to share
some words and acknowledge
this yearning, this love, this need.

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?