The White Goddess Read online

  The following chapters will rediscover a set of sacred charms of varying antiquity in which successive versions of the Theme are summarized. Literary critics whose function it is to judge all literature by gleeman standards – its entertainment value to the masses – can be counted upon to make merry with what they can only view as my preposterous group of mares’ nests. And the scholars can be counted upon to refrain from any comment whatsoever. But, after all, what is a scholar? One who may not break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a member.

  And what is a mare’s nest? Shakespeare hints at the answer, though he substitutes St. Swithold for Odin, the original hero of the ballad:

  Swithold footed thrice the wold.

  He met the Night-Mare and her nine-fold,

  Bid her alight and her troth plight,

  And aroynt thee, witch, aroynt thee!

  A fuller account of Odin’s feat is given in the North Country Charm against the Night Mare, which probably dates from the fourteenth century:

  Tha mon o’ micht, he rade o’ nicht

  Wi’ neider swerd ne ferd ne licht.

  He socht tha Mare, he fond tha Mare,

  He bond tha Mare wi’ her ain hare,

  Ond gared her swar by midder-micht

  She wolde nae mair rid o’ nicht

  Whar aince he rade, thot mon o’ micht.

  The Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets. The prophet Job said of her: ‘She dwelleth and abideth upon the rock. Her young ones also suck up blood.’

  1 Cynghanedd may be illustrated in English thus:

  Billet spied,

  Bolt sped.

  Across field

  Crows fled,

  Aloft, wounded,

  Left one dead.

  But the correspondence of the ss in ‘across’ and the s of ‘crows’, which has a ‘z’ sound, would offend the purist.

  Chapter Two

  THE BATTLE OF THE TREES

  It seems that the Welsh minstrels, like the Irish poets, recited their traditional romances in prose, breaking into dramatic verse, with harp accompaniment, only at points of emotional stress. Some of these romances survive complete with the incidental verses; others have lost them; in some cases, such as the romance of Llywarch Hen, only the verses survive. The most famous Welsh collection is the Mabinogion, which is usually explained as ‘Juvenile Romances’, that is to say those that every apprentice to the minstrel profession was expected to know; it is contained in the thirteenth-century Red Book of Hergest. Almost all the incidental verses are lost. These romances are the stock-in-trade of a minstrel and some of them have been brought more up-to-date than others in their language and description of manners and morals.

  The Red Book of Hergest also contains a jumble of fifty-eight poems, called The Book of Taliesin, among which occur the incidental verses of a Romance of Taliesin which is not included in the Mabinogion. However, the first part of the romance is preserved in a late sixteenth-century manuscript, called the ‘Peniardd M.S.’, first printed in the early nineteenth-century Myvyrian Archaiology, complete with many of the same incidental verses, though with textual variations. Lady Charlotte Guest translated this fragment, completing it with material from two other manuscripts, and included it in her well-known edition of the Mabinogion (1848). Unfortunately, one of the two manuscripts came from the library of Iolo Morganwg, a celebrated eighteenth-century ‘improver’ of Welsh documents, so that her version cannot be read with confidence, though it has not been proved that this particular manuscript was forged.

  The gist of the romance is as follows. A nobleman of Penllyn named Tegid Voel had a wife named Caridwen, or Cerridwen, and two children, Creirwy, the most beautiful girl in the world, and Afagddu, the ugliest boy. They lived on an island in the middle of Lake Tegid. To compensate for Afagddu’s ugliness, Cerridwen decided to make him highly intelligent. So, according to a recipe contained in the books of Vergil of Toledo the magician (hero of a twelfth-century romance), she boiled up a cauldron of inspiration and knowledge, which had to be kept on the simmer for a year and a day. Season by season, she added to the brew magical herbs gathered in their correct planetary hours. While she gathered the herbs she put little Gwion, the son of Gwreang, of the parish of Llanfair in Caereinion, to stir the cauldron. Towards the end of the year three burning drops flew out and fell on little Gwion’s finger. He thrust it into his mouth and at once understood the nature and meaning of all things past, present and future, and thus saw the need of guarding against the wiles of Cerridwen who was determined on killing him as soon as his work should be completed. He fled away, and she pursued him like a black screaming hag. By use of the powers that he had drawn from the cauldron he changed himself into a hare; she changed herself into a greyhound. He plunged into a river and became a fish; she changed herself into an otter. He flew up into the air like a bird; she changed herself into a hawk. He became a grain of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn; she changed herself into a black hen, scratched the wheat over with her feet, found him and swallowed him. When she returned to her own shape she found herself pregnant of Gwion and nine months later bore him as a child. She could not find it in her heart to kill him, because he was very beautiful, so tied him in a leather bag and threw him into the sea two days before May Day. He was carried into the weir of Gwyddno Garanhair near Dovey and Aberystwyth, in Cardigan Bay, and rescued from it by Prince Elphin, the son of Gwyddno and nephew of King Maelgwyn of Gwynedd (North Wales), who had come there to net fish. Elphin, though he caught no fish, considered himself well rewarded for his labour and renamed Gwion ‘Taliesin’, meaning either ‘fine value’, or ‘beautiful brow’ – a subject for punning by the author of the romance.

  When Elphin was imprisoned by his royal uncle at Dyganwy (near Llandudno), the capital of Gwynedd, the child Taliesin went there to rescue him and by a display of wisdom, in which he confounded all the twenty-four court-bards of Maelgwyn – the eighth-century British historian Nennius mentions Maelgwyn’s sycophantic bards – and their leader the chief bard Heinin, secured the prince’s release. First he put a magic spell on the bards so that they could only play blerwm blerwm with their fingers on their lips like children, and then he recited a long riddling poem, the Hanes Taliesin, which they were unable to understand, and which will be found in Chapter V. Since the Peniardd version of the romance is not complete, it is just possible that the solution of the riddle was eventually given, as in the similar romances of Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Tit Tot, Oedipus, and Samson. But the other incidental poems suggest that Taliesin continued to ridicule the ignorance and stupidity of Heinin and the other bards to the end and never revealed his secret.

  The climax of the story in Lady Charlotte’s version comes with another riddle, proposed by the child Taliesin, beginning:

  Discover what it is:

  The strong creature from before the Flood

  Without flesh, without bone,

  Without vein, without blood,

  Without head, without feet…

  In field, in forest…

  Without hand, without foot.

  It is also as wide

  As the surface of the earth,

  And it was not born,

  Nor was it seen…

  The solution, namely ‘The Wind’, is given practically with a violent storm of wind which frightens the King into fetching Elphin from the dungeon, whereupon Taliesin unchains him with an incantation. Probably in an earlier version the wind was released from the mantle of his comrade Afagddu or Morvran, as it was by Morvran’s Irish counterpart Marvan in the early mediaeval Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy, with which The Romance of Taliesin has much in common. ‘A part of it blew into the bosom of every bard present, s
o that they all rose to their feet.’ A condensed form of this riddle appears in the Flores of Bede, an author commended in one of the Book of Taliesin poems:

  Dic mihi quae est illa res quae caelum, totamque terram replevit, silvas et sirculos confringit…omnia-que fundamenta concutit, sed nec oculis videri aut [sic] manibus tangi potest.

  [Answer] Ventus.

  There can be no mistake here. But since the Hanes Taliesin is not preceded by any formal Dychymig Dychymig (‘riddle me this riddle’) or Dechymic pwy yw (‘Discover what it is’)1 commentators excuse themselves from reading it as a riddle at all. Some consider it to be solemn-sounding nonsense, an early anticipation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, intended to raise a laugh; others consider that it has some sort of mystical sense connected with the Druidical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but do not claim to be able to elucidate this.

  Here I must apologize for my temerity in writing on a subject which is not really my own. I am not a Welshman, except an honorary one through eating the leek on St. David’s Day while serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and, though I have lived in Wales for some years, off and on, have no command even of modern Welsh; and I am not a mediaeval historian. But my profession is poetry, and I agree with the Welsh minstrels that the poet’s first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths. One day while I was puzzling out the meaning of the ancient Welsh myth of Câd Goddeu (‘The Battle of the Trees’), fought between Arawn King of Annwm (‘The Bottomless Place’), and the two sons of Dôn, Gwydion and Amathaon, I had much the same experience as Gwion of Llanfair. A drop or two of the brew of Inspiration flew out of the cauldron and I suddenly felt confident that if I turned again to Gwion’s riddle, which I had not read since I was a schoolboy, I could make sense of it.

  This Battle of the Trees was ‘occasioned by a Lapwing, a White Roebuck and a Whelp from Annwm.’ In the ancient Welsh Triads, which are a collection of sententious or historical observations arranged epigrammatically in threes, it is reckoned as one of the ‘Three Frivolous Battles of Britain’. And the Romance of Taliesin contains a long poem, or group of poems run together, called Câd Goddeu, the verses of which seem as nonsensical as the Hanes Taliesin because they have been deliberately ‘pied’. Here is the poem in D. W. Nash’s mid-Victorian translation, said to be unreliable but the best at present available. The original is written in short rhyming lines, the same rhyme often being sustained for ten or fifteen lines. Less than half of them belong to the poem which gives its name to the whole medley, and these must be laboriously sorted before their relevance to Gwion’s riddle can be explained. Patience!

  CD GODDEU

  (The Battle of the Trees)

  I have been in many shapes,

  Before I attained a congenial form.

  I have been a narrow blade of a sword.

  (I will believe it when it appears.)

  5 have been a drop in the air.

  I have been a shining star.

  I have been a word in a book.

  I have been a book originally.

  I have been a light in a lantern.

  10 A year and a half.

  I have been a bridge for passing over

  Three-score rivers.

  I have journeyed as an eagle.

  I have been a boat on the sea.

  15 have been a director in battle.

  I have been the string of a child’s swaddling clout.

  I have been a sword in the hand.

  I have been a shield in the fight.

  I have been the string of a harp,

  20 Enchanted for a year

  In the foam of water.

  I have been a poker in the fire.

  I have been a tree in a covert.

  There is nothing in which I have not been.

  25 I have fought, though small,

  In the Battle of Goddeu Brig,

  Before the Ruler of Britain,

  Abounding in fleets.

  Indifferent bards pretend,

  30 They pretend a monstrous beast,

  With a hundred heads,

  And a grievous combat

  At the root of the tongue.

  And another fight there is

  35 At the back of the head.

  A toad having on his thighs

  A hundred claws,

  A spotted crested snake,

  For punishing in their flesh

  40 A hundred souls on account of then sins.

  I was in Caer Fefynedd,

  Thither were hastening grasses and trees.

  Wayfarers perceive them,

  Warriors are astonished

  45 At a renewal of the conflicts

  Such as Gwydion made.

  There is calling on Heaven,

  And on Christ that he would effect

  Their deliverance,

  50 The all-powerful Lord.

  If the Lord had answered,

  Through charms and magic skill,

  Assume the forms of the principal trees,

  With you in array

  55 Restrain the people

  Inexperienced in battle.

  When the trees were enchanted

  There was hope for the trees,

  That they should frustrate the intention

  60 Of the surrounding fires….

  Better are three in unison,

  And enjoying themselves in a circle,

  And one of them relating

  The story of the deluge,

  65 And of the cross of Christ,

  And of the Day of Judgement near at hand,

  The alder-trees in the first line,

  They made the commencement.

  Willow and quicken tree,

  70 They were slow in their array.

  The plum is a tree

  Not beloved of men;

  The medlar of a like nature,

  Overcoming severe toil.

  75 The bean bearing in its shade

  An army of phantoms.

  The raspberry makes

  Not the best of food.

  In shelter live,

  80 The privet and the woodbine,

  And the ivy in its season.

  Great is the gorse in battle.

  The cherry-tree had been reproached.

  The birch, though very magnanimous,

  85 Was late in arraying himself;

  It was not through cowardice,

  But on account of his great size.

  The appearance of the…

  Is that of a foreigner and a savage.

  90 The pine-tree in the court,

  Strong in battle,

  By me greatly exalted

  In the presence of kings,

  The elm-trees are his subjects.

  95 He turns not aside the measure of a foot,

  But strikes right in the middle,

  And at the farthest end.

  The hazel is the judge,

  His berries are thy dowry.

  100 The privet is blessed.

  Strong chiefs in war

  Are the…and the mulberry.

  Prosperous the beech-tree.

  The holly dark green,

  105 He was very courageous:

  Defended with spikes on every side,

  Wounding the hands.

  The long-enduring poplars

  Very much broken in fight.

  110 The plundered fern;

  The brooms with their offspring:

  The furze was not well behaved

  Until he was tamed.

  The heath was giving consolation,

  115 Comforting the people.

  The black cherry-tree was pursuing.

  The oak-tree swiftly moving,

  Before him tremble heaven and earth,

  Stout doorkeeper against the foe

  120 Is his name in all lands.

  The corn-cockle bound together,

  Was given to be burnt.

  Others were rejected