The White Goddess Read online

  On account of the holes made

  125 By great violence

  In the field of battle.

  Very wrathful the…

  Cruel the gloomy ash.

  Bashful the chestnut-tree,

  130 Retreating from happiness.

  There shall be a black darkness,

  There shall be a shaking of the mountain,

  There shall be a purifying furnace,

  There shall first be a great wave,

  135 And when the shout shall be heard –

  Putting forth new leaves are the tops of the beech,

  Changing form and being renewed from a withered state;

  Entangled are the tops of the oak.

  From the Gorchan of Maelderw.

  140 Smiling at the side of the rock

  (Was) the pear-tree not of an ardent nature.

  Neither of mother or father,

  When I was made,

  Was my blood or body;

  145 Of nine kinds of faculties,

  Of fruit of fruits,

  Of fruit God made me,

  Of the blossom of the mountain primrose,

  Of the buds of trees and shrubs,

  150 Of earth of earthly kind.

  When I was made

  Of the blossoms of the nettle,

  Of the mater of the ninth wave,

  I was spell-bound by Math

  155 Before I became immortal.

  I was spell-bound by Gwydion,

  Great enchanter of the Britons,

  Of Eurys, of Eurwn,

  Of Euron, of Medron,

  160 In myriads of secrets,

  I am as learned as Math….

  I know about the Emperor

  When he was half burnt.

  I know the star-knowledge

  165 Of stars before the earth (was made),

  Whence I was born,

  How many worlds there are.

  It is the custom of accomplished bards

  To recite the praise of their country.

  170 have played in Lloughor,

  I have slept in purple.

  Was I not in the enclosure

  With Dylan Ail Mor,

  On a couch in the centre

  175 Between the two knees of the prince

  Upon two blunt spears?

  When from heaven came

  The torrents into the deep,

  Rushing with violent impulse.

  180 (I know) four-score songs,

  For administering to their pleasure.

  There is neither old nor young,

  Except me as to their poems,

  Any other singer who knows the whole of the nine hundred

  185 Which are known to me,

  Concerning the blood-spotted sword.

  Honour is my guide.

  Profitable learning is from the Lord.

  (I know) of the slaying of the boar,

  190 Its appearing, its disappearing,

  Its knowledge of languages.

  (I know) the light whose name is Splendour,

  And the number of the ruling lights

  That scatter rays of fire

  195 High above the deep.

  I have been a spotted snake upon a hill;

  I have been a viper in a lake;

  I have been an evil star formerly.

  I have been a weight in a mill. (?)

  200 My cassock is red all over.

  I prophesy no evil.

  Four score puffs of smoke

  To every one who will carry them away:

  And a million of angels,

  205 On the point of my knife.

  Handsome is the yellow horse,

  But a hundred times better

  Is my cream-coloured one,

  Swift as the sea-mew,

  210 Which cannot pass me

  Between the sea and the shore.

  Am I not pre-eminent in the field of blood?

  I have a hundred shares of the spoil.

  My wreath is of red jewels,

  215 Of gold is the border of my shield.

  There has not been born one so good as I,

  Or ever known,

  Except Goronwy,

  From the dales of Edrywy.

  220 Long and white are my fingers,

  It is long since I was a herdsman.

  I travelled over the earth

  Before I became a learned person.

  I have travelled, I have made a circuit,

  225 have slept in a hundred islands;

  I have dwelt in a hundred cities.

  Learned Druids,

  Prophesy ye of Arthur?

  Or is it me they celebrate,

  230 And the Crucifixion of Christ,

  And the Day of Judgement near at hand,

  And one relating

  The history of the Deluge?

  With a golden jewel set in gold

  235 I am enriched,

  And I am indulged in pleasure

  By the oppressive toil of the goldsmith.

  With a little patience most of the lines that belong to the poem about the Battle of the Trees can be separated from the four or five other poems with which they are mixed. Here is a tentative restoration of the easier parts, with gaps left for the more difficult. The reasons that have led me to this solution will appear in due course as I discuss the meaning of the allusions contained in the poem. I use the balled metre as the most suitable English equivalent of the original.

  THE BATTLE OF THE TREES

  (lines 41–42)

  From my seat at Fefynedd,

  A city that is strong,

  I matched the trees and green things

  Hastening along.

  (lines 43–46)

  Wayfarers wondered,

  Warriors were dismayed

  At renewal of conflicts

  Such as Gwydion made,

  (lines 32–35)

  Under the tongue-root

  A fight most dread,

  And another raging

  Behind, in the head.

  (lines 67–70

  The alders in the front line

  Began the affray,

  Willow and rowan-tree

  Were tardy in array.

  (lines 104–107)

  The holly, dark green,

  Made a resolute stand;

  He is armed with many spear-points,

  Wounding the hand.

  (lines 117–120)

  With foot–beat of the swift oak

  Heaven and earth rung;

  ‘Stout Guardian of the Door’

  His name in every tongue.

  (lines 82, 81, 98, 57)

  Great was the gorse in battle,

  And the ivy at his prime;

  The hazel was arbiter

  At this charmed time.

  (lines 88, 89, 128, 95, 96)

  Uncouth and savage was the [fir?]

  Cruel the ash-tree –

  Turns not aside a foot-breadth,

  Straight at the heart runs he.

  (lines 84–87)

  The birch, though very noble,

  Armed himself but late:

  A sign not of cowardice

  But of high estate.

  (lines 114, 115, 108, 109)

  The heath gave consolation

  To the toil-spent folk,

  The long-enduring poplars

  In battle much broke.

  (lines 123, 126)

  Some of them were cast away

  On the field of fight

  Because of holes torn in them

  By the enemy’s might.

  (lines 127, 94, 92, 93)

  Very wrathful was the [vine?]

  Whose henchmen are the elms;

  I exalt him mightily

  To rulers of realms.

  (lines 79, 80, 56, 90)

  In shelter linger

  Privet and woodbine

  Inexperienced in warfare;

  And the courtly pine.

  Little G
wion has made it clear that he does not offer this encounter as the original Câd Goddeu but as:

  A renewal of conflicts

  Such as Gwydion made.

  Commentators, confused by the pied verses, have for the most part been content to remark that in Celtic tradition the Druids were credited with the magical power of transforming trees into warriors and sending them into battle. But, as the Rev. Edward Davies, a brilliant but hopelessly erratic Welsh scholar of the early nineteenth century, first noted in his Celtic Researches (1809), the battle described by Gwion is not a frivolous battle, or a battle physically fought, but a battle fought intellectually in the heads and with the tongues of the learned. Davies also noted that in all Celtic languages trees means letters; that the Druidic colleges were founded in woods or groves; that a great part of the Druidic mysteries was concerned with twigs of different sorts; and that the most ancient Irish alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion (‘Birch-Rowan-Ash’) takes its name from the first three of a series of trees whose initials form the sequence of its letters. Davies was on the right track and though he soon went astray because, not realizing that the poems were pied, he mistranslated them into what he thought was good sense, his observations help us to restore the text of the passage referring to the hastening green things and trees:

  (lines 130 and 53)

  Retreating from happiness,

  They would fain be set

  In forms of the chief letters

  Of the alphabet.

  The following lines seem to form an introduction to his account of the battle:

  (lines 136–137)

  The tops of the beech-tree

  Have sprouted of late,

  Are changed and renewed

  From their withered state.

  (lines 103, 52, 138, 58)

  When the beech prospers,

  Though spells and litanies

  The oak–tops entangle,

  There is hope for trees.

  This means, if anything, that there had been a recent revival of letters in Wales. ‘Beech’ is a common synonym for ‘literature’. The English word ‘book’, for example, comes from a Gothic word meaning letters and, like the German buchstabe, is etymologically connected with the word ‘beech’ – the reason being that writing tablets were made of beech. As Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century bishop-poet, wrote: Barbara fraxineis pingatur runa tabellis – ‘Let the barbarian rune be marked on beechwood tablets.’ The ‘tangled oak-tops’ must refer to the ancient poetic mysteries: as has already been mentioned, the derwydd, or Druid, or poet, was an ‘oak-seer’. An early Cornish poem describes how the Druid Merddin, or Merlin, went early in the morning with his black dog to seek the glain, or magical snake’s-egg (probably a fossiled sea-urchin of the sort found in Iron Age burials), cull cresses and samolus (herbe d’or), and cut the highest twig from the top of the oak. Gwion, who in line 225 addresses his fellow-poets as Druids, is saying here: ‘The ancient poetic mysteries have been reduced to a tangle by the Church’s prolonged hostility, but they have a hopeful future, now that literature is prospering outside the monasteries.’

  He mentions other participants in the battle:

  Strong chiefs in war

  Are the [ ? ] and mulberry….

  The cherry had been slighted….

  The black cherry was pursuing….

  The pear that is not ardent….

  The raspberry that makes

  Not the best of foods….

  The plum is a tree

  Unbeloved of men….

  The medlar of like nature….

  None of these mentions makes good poetic sense. Raspberry is excellent food; the plum is a popular tree; pear-wood is so ardent that in the Balkans it is often used as a substitute for cornel to kindle the ritual need-fire; the mulberry is not used as a weapon-tree; the cherry was never slighted and in Gwion’s day was connected with the Nativity story in a popular version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; and the black cherry does not ‘pursue’. It is pretty clear that these eight names of orchard fruits, and another which occupied the place that I have filled with ‘fir’, have been mischievously robbed from the next riddling passage in the poem:

  Of nine kinds of faculties,

  Of fruit of fruits,

  Of fruit God made me….

  and have been substituted for the names of nine forest trees that did engage in the fight.

  It is hard to decide whether the story of the fruit man belongs to the Battle of the Trees poem, or whether it is a ‘Here come I’ speech like the four others muddled up in the Câd Goddeu, of whom the speakers are evidently Taliesin, the Flower-Goddess Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn the ancestor of the Cymry, and the God Apollo. On the whole, I think it does belong to the Battle of the Trees:

  (lines 145–147)

  With nine sorts of faculty

  God has gifted me:

  I am fruit of fruits gathered

  From nine sorts of tree –

  (lines 71, 73, 77, 83, 102, 116, 141)

  Plum, quince, whortle, mulberry,

  Raspberry, pear,

  Black cherry and white

  With the sorb in me share.

  By a study of the trees of the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet, with which the author of the poem was clearly familiar, it is easy to restore the original nine trees which have been replaced with the fruit names. We can be sure that it is the sloe that ‘makes not the best of foods’; the elder, a notoriously bad wood for fuel and a famous country remedy for fevers, scalds and burns, that is ‘not ardent’; the unlucky whitethorn, and the blackthorn ‘of like nature’, that are ‘unbeloved of men’ and, with the archer’s yew, are the ‘strong chiefs in war’. And on the analogy of the oak from which reverberating clubs were made, the yew from which deadly bows and dagger-handles were made, the ash from which sure-thrusting spears were made, and the poplar from which long-enduring shields were made, I suggest that the original of ‘the black cherry was pursuing’ was the restless reed from which swift-flying arrow-shafts were made. The reed was reckoned a ‘tree’ by the Irish poets.

  The ‘I’ who was slighted because he was not big is Gwion himself, whom Heinin and his fellow-bards scoffed at for his childish appearance; but he is perhaps speaking in the character of still another tree – the mistletoe, which in the Norse legend killed Balder the sun-god after having been slighted as too young to take the oath not to harm him. Although in ancient Irish religion there is no trace of a mistletoe cult, and the mistletoe does not figure in the Beth-Luis-Nion, to the Gallic Druids who relied on Britain for their doctrine it was the most important of all trees, and remains of mistletoe have been found in conjunction with oak-branches in a Bronze Age tree-coffin burial at Gristhorpe near Scarborough in Yorkshire. Gwion may therefore be relying here on a British tradition of the original Câd Goddeu rather than on his Irish learning.