The White Goddess Read online

  The remaining tree-references in the poem are these:

  The broom with its children…

  The furze not well behaved

  Until he was tamed….

  Bashful the chestnut-tree….

  The furze is tamed by the Spring-fires which make its young shoots edible for sheep.

  The bashful chestnut does not belong to the same category of letter trees as those that took part in the battle; probably the line in which it occurs is part of another of the poems included in Câd Goddeu, which describes how the lovely Blodeuwedd (‘Flower-aspect’) was conjured by the wizard Gwydion, from buds and blossoms. The poem is not difficult to separate from the rest of Câd Goddeu, though one or two lines seem to be missing. They can be supplied from the parallel lines:

  Of nine kinds of faculties.

  Of fruit of fruits,

  Of fruit God made me.

  The fruit man is created from nine kinds of fruit; the flower woman must have been created from nine kinds of flower. Five are given in Câd Goddeu; three more – broom, meadow-sweet and oak-blossom – in the account of the same event in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy; and the ninth is likely to have been the hawthorn, because Blodeuwedd is another name for Olwen, the May-queen, daughter (according to the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen) of the Hawthorn, or Whitethorn, or May Tree; but it may have been the white-flowering trefoil.

  HANES BLODEUWEDD

  line 142

  Not of father nor of mother

  144

  Was my blood, was my body.

  156

  I was spellbound by Gwydion,

  157

  Prime enchanter of the Britons,

  143

  When he formed me from nine blossoms,

  149

  Nine buds of various kind:

  148

  From primrose of the mountain,

  121

  Broom, meadow-sweet and cockle,

  Together intertwined,

  75

  From the bean in its shade bearing

  76

  A white spectral army

  150

  Of earth, of earthly kind,

  152

  From blossoms of the nettle,

  129

  Oak, thorn, and bashful chestnut –

  [146

  Nine powers of nine flowers,

  145]

  Nine powers in me combined,

  149

  Nine buds of plant and tree.

  220

  Long and white are my fingers

  153

  As the ninth wave of the sea.

  In Wales and Ireland primroses are reckoned fairy flowers and in English folk tradition represent wantonness (cf. ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ – Hamlet; the ‘primrose of her wantonness’ – Brathwait’s Golden Fleece). So Milton’s ‘yellow-skirted fayes’ wore primrose. ‘Cockles’ are the ‘tares’ of the Parable that the Devil sowed in the wheat; and the bean is traditionally associated with ghosts – the Greek and Roman homoeopathic remedy against ghosts was to spit beans at them – and Pliny in his Natural History records the belief that the souls of the dead reside in beans. According to the Scottish poet Montgomerie (1605), witches rode on bean-stalks to their sabbaths.

  To return to the Battle of the Trees. Though the fern was reckoned a ‘tree’ by the Irish poets, the ‘plundered fern’ is probably a reference to fern-seed which makes invisible and confers other magical powers. The twice-repeated ‘privet’ is suspicious. The privet figures unimportantly in Irish poetic tree-lore; it is never regarded as ‘blessed’. Probably its second occurrence in line 100 is a disguise of the wild-apple, which is the tree most likely to smile from beside the rock, emblem of security: for Olwen, the laughing Aphrodite of Welsh legend, is always connected with the wild-apple. In line 99 ‘his berries are thy dowry’ is absurdly juxtaposed to the hazel. Only two fruit-trees could be said to dower a bride in Gwion’s day: the churchyard yew whose berries fell at the church porch where marriages were always celebrated, and the churchyard rowan, often substituted for the yew in Wales. I think the yew is here intended; yew-berries were prized for their sticky sweetness. In the tenth-century Irish poem, King and Hermit, Marvan the brother of King Guare of Connaught commends them highly as food.

  The remaining stanzas of the poem may now be tentatively restored:

  (lines 110, 160, and 161)

  I have plundered the fern,

  Through all secrets I spy,

  Old Math ap Mathonwy

  Knew no more than I.

  (lines 101, 71–73, 77 and 78)

  Strong chieftains were the blackthorn

  With his ill fruit,

  The unbeloved whitethorn

  Who wears the same suit.

  (lines 116, 111–113)

  The swift-pursuing reed,

  The broom with his brood,

  And the furze but ill-behaved

  Until he is subdued.

  (lines 97, 99, 128, 141, 60)

  The dower-scattering yew

  Stood glum at the fight’s fringe,

  With the elder slow to burn

  Amid fires that singe,

  (lines 100, 139 and 140)

  And the blessed wild apple

  Laughing for pride

  From the Gorchan of Maelderw,

  By the rock side.

  (lines 83, 54, 25, 26)

  But I, although slighted

  Because I was not big,

  Fought, trees, in your array

  On the field of Goddeu Brig.

  The broom may not seem a warlike tree, but in Gratius’s Genistae Altinates the tall white broom is said to have been much used in ancient times for the staves of spears and darts: these are probably the ‘brood’. Goddeu Brig means Tree-tops, which has puzzled critics who hold that Câd Goddeu was a battle fought in Goddeu, ‘Trees’, the Welsh name for Shropshire. The Gorchan of Maelderw (‘the incantation of Maelderw’) was a long poem attributed to the sixth-century poet Taliesin, who is said to have particularly prescribed it as a classic to his bardic colleagues. The apple-tree was a symbol of poetic immortality, which is why it is here presented as growing out of this incantation of Taliesin’s.

  Here, to anticipate my argument by several chapters, is the Order of Battle in the Câd Goddeu:

  It should be added that in the original, between the lines numbered 60 and 61, occur eight lines unintelligible to D. W. Nash: beginning with ‘the chieftains are falling’ and ending with ‘blood of men up to the buttocks’. They may or may not belong to the Battle of the Trees.

  I leave the other pieces included in this medley to be sorted out by someone else. Besides the monologues of Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn and Apollo, there is a satire on monkish theologians, who sit in a circle gloomily enjoying themselves with prophecies of the imminent Day of Judgement (lines 62–66), the black darkness, the shaking of the mountain, the purifying furnace (lines 131–134), damning men’s souls by the hundred (lines 39–40) and pondering the absurd problems of the Schoolmen:

  (lines 204, 205)

  Room for a million angels

  On my knife-point, it appears.

  (lines 167 and 176)

  Then room for how many worlds

  A-top of two blunt spears?

  This introduces a boast of Gwion’s own learning:

  (lines 201,200)

  But I prophesy no evil,

  My cassock is wholly red.

  (line 184)

  ‘He knows the Nine Hundred Tales’ –

  Of whom but me is it said?

  Red was the most honourable colour for dress among the ancient Welsh, according to the twelfth-century poet Cynddelw; Gwion is contrasting it with the dismal dress of the monks. Of the Nine Hundred Tales he mentions only two, both of which are included in the Red Book of Hergest: the Hunting of the Twrch Trwyth (line 189) and the Dream of Maxen Wledig (lines 162–3).

  Lines 206 to 211 belong, it seems, to Can y Meirch, ‘The Song
of the Horses’, another of the Gwion poems, which refers to a race between the horses of Elphin and Maelgwyn which is an incident in the Romance.

  One most interesting sequence can be built up from lines 29–32, 36–37 and 234–237:

  Indifferent bards pretend,

  They pretend a monstrous beast,

  With a hundred heads,

  A spotted crested snake,

  A toad having on his thighs

  A hundred claws,

  With a golden jewel set in gold

  I am enriched;

  And indulged in pleasure

  By the oppressive toil of the goldsmith.

  Since Gwion identifies himself with these bards, they are, I think, described as ‘indifferent’ by way of irony. The hundred-headed serpent watching over the jewelled Garden of the Hesperides, and the hundred-clawed toad wearing a precious jewel in his head (mentioned by Shakespeare’s Duke Senior) both belonged to the ancient toadstool mysteries, of which Gwion seems to have been an adept. The European mysteries are less fully explored than their Mexican counterpart; but Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson and Professor Roger Heim have shown that the pre-Columbian Toadstool-god Tlalóc, represented as a toad with a serpent head-dress, has for thousands of years presided at the communal eating of the hallucigenic toadstool psilocybe: a feast that gives visions of transcendental beauty. Tlalóc’s European counterpart, Dionysus, shares too many of his mythical attributes for coincidence: they must be versions of the same deity; though at what period the cultural contact took place between the Old World and the New is debatable.

  In my foreword to a revised edition of The Greek Myths, I suggest that a secret Dionysiac mushroom cult was borrowed from the native Pelasgians by the Achaeans of Argos. Dionysus’s Centaurs, Satyrs and Maenads, it seems, ritually ate a spotted toadstool called ‘fly-cap’ (amanita muscaria), which gave them enormous muscular strength, erotic power, delirious visions, and the gift of prophecy. Partakers in the Eleusinian, Orphic and other mysteries may also have known the panaeolus papilionaceus, a small dung-mushroom still used by Portuguese witches, and similar in effect to mescalin. In lines 234–237, Gwion implies that a single gem can enlarge itself under the influence of ‘the toad’ or ‘the serpent’ into a whole treasury of jewels. His claim to be as learned as Math and to know myriads of secrets may also belong to the toad-serpent sequence; at any rate, psilocybe gives a sense of universal illumination, as I can attest from my own experience of it. ‘The light whose name is Splendour’ may refer to this brilliance of vision, rather than to the Sun.

  The Book of Taliesin contains several similar medleys or poems awaiting resurrection: a most interesting task, but one that must wait until the texts are established and properly translated. The work that I have done here is not offered as in any sense final.

  CD GODDEU

  ‘The Battle of the Trees’.

  The tops of the beech tree

  Have sprouted of late,

  Are changed and renewed

  From their withered state.

  When the beech prospers,

  Though spells and litanies

  The oak tops entangle,

  There is hope for trees.

  I have plundered the fern,

  Through all secrets I spy,

  Old Math ap Mathonwy

  Knew no more than I.

  For with nine sorts of faculty

  God has gifted me:

  I am fruit of fruits gathered

  From nine sorts of tree –

  Plum, quince, whortle, mulberry,

  Raspberry, pear,

  Black cherry and white

  With the sorb in me share.

  From my seat at Fefynedd,

  A city that is strong,

  I watched the trees and green things

  Hastening along.

  Retreating from happiness

  They would fain be set

  Informs of the chief letters

  Of the alphabet.

  Wayfarers wondered,

  Warriors were dismayed

  At renewal of conflicts

  Such as Gwydion made;

  Under the tongue root

  A fight most dread,

  And another raging

  Behind, in the head.

  The alders in the front line

  Began the affray.

  Willow and rowan-tree

  Were tardy in array.

  The holly, dark green,

  Made a resolute stand;

  He is armed with many spear-points

  Wounding the hand.

  With foot-beat of the swift oak

  Heaven and earth rung;

  ‘Stout Guardian of the Door’,

  His name in every tongue.

  Great was the gorse in battle,

  And the ivy at his prime;

  The hazel was arbiter

  At this charmed time.

  Uncouth and savage was the fir,

  Cruel the ash tree –

  Turns not aside a foot-breadth,

  Straight at the heart runs he.

  The birch, though very noble,

  Armed himself but late:

  A sign not of cowardice

  But of high estate.

  The heath gave consolation

  To the toil-spent folk,

  The long-enduring poplars

  In battle much broke.

  Some of them were cast away

  On the field of fight

  Because of holes torn in them

  By the enemy’s might.

  Very wrathful was the vine,

  Whose henchmen are the elms;

  I exalt him mightily

  To rulers of realms.

  Strong chieftains were the blackthorn

  With his ill fruit,

  The unbeloved whitethorn

  Who wears the same suit,

  The swift-pursuing reed,

  The broom with his brood,

  And the furze but ill-behaved

  Until he is subdued.

  The dower-scattering yew

  Stood glum at the fight’s fringe

  With the elder slow to burn

  Amid fires that singe,

  And the blessed wild apple

  Laughing in pride

  From the Gorchan of Maelderw,

  By the rock side.

  In shelter linger

  Privet and woodbine,

  Inexperienced in warfare,

  And the courtly pine.

  But I, although slighted

  Because I was not big,

  Fought, trees, in your array

  On the field of Goddeu Brig.

  1 Another form is dychymig dameg (‘a riddle, a riddle’), which seems to explain the mysterious ducdame ducdame in As You Like It, which Jacques describes as ‘a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle’ – perhaps a favourite joke of Shakespeare’s Welsh schoolmaster, remembered for its oddity.