from The Black Book of Carmarthen
Stand up Seithennin
Look out at the waves
Crashing over Gwyddno’s realm.
Woe to the maiden,
The aggrieved cup-bearer
Who bore in her cup the sea’s chagrin.
Woe upon her, the daughter
Of the well whose cup of plenty
Covers the contours with featureless water.
Mererid’s outcry from the fortress
Seeking divine help;
As is known: after arrogance is loss.
Mererid’s outcry from the fortress
Calling out in prayer;
As is known : pride has its redress.
Mererid’s outcry is a grief to me tonight
It brings only anguish;
As is known : presumption has its price.
Mererid’s outcry from the bay mare’s back
For divine grace to be generous ;
As is known : after plenty there is lack.
Mererid’s outcry calls me from my lodging
No bed for me tonight;
As is known : conceit has its ending.
Interpretation
The poem has been translated a number of times. The version above follows the original line by line and hopes to convey the sense of each stanza as written in the medieval Welsh. It is a ‘re-interpretation’ because I have made a few contextual shifts away from previous more or less literal translations.
The assumption of most translators has been that the blame for the flood is being directed at Mererid. But the arrogance and presumption (‘traha’) which is said to have brought it about is assigned to Seithennin in a final verse which I have omitted here. This verse also occurs in the ‘Stanzas of the Graves’ and seems not to belong to this poem. But it refers to Seithennin as ‘the presumptious’ and it could just as well be said that the poem implies that he is to blame. Indeed, in the later version of the story he does become the agent of the flood by getting drunk and forgetting to close the sluice gates.
Here I have tried to shift the focus back on Mererid, not as a blameworthy perpetrator but as one whose office as cup bearer and keeper of the well has been violated. There are other legends about well-keepers being upset or offended resulting in the well flooding a large area. These are usually stories of lake origins. But Mererid is also a cup bearer, an office which carried some status but which might set the holder apart from other court officials. In my view of her she functions as a priestess and representative of the water world. So I have interpreted the word ‘emendiceid’ (accursed) referring to her in stanzas 2 & 3 not so much as directed at her but as a reflection on her condition. This, admittedly, does involve a creative change of emphasis from the imperative mood (‘boed’) in these two lines.
The poet’s expression is concise, especially in the lines where I have used the repeated phrase “As is known …’ . The poem has a single repeated word ‘gnaud’, literally ‘usual’ or ‘natural’ but also ‘what is’ or ‘known’. The latter seems to me to be a better construction in the translation.
Who speaks the poem? Rachel Bromwich considers the possibility that it is Mererid’s voice heard on the wind long after the event. The poem might, after all, be part of a lost prose saga. But I find it conceivable that it is Seithennin himself who speaks, possibly reflecting on his own part in bringing about the inundation. In the opening line, where he is addressed directly, the pronoun ‘you’ in the familiar form is attached to the verb ‘stand’ [up or out] and this happens again in the next line with ‘look’ where the deponent form of the verb could suggest a reflexive sense. The final verse’s reference to the speaker being driven from his lodging links to the opening and reinforces the possibility that it is he who speaks.
So with Mererid , well-maiden and cup-bearer, in a medieval poem attached to a legend of a drowned land on the coast. She had long been an evocative presence who seemed to have a significance I had not quite fathomed. But as I thought about the legend and discovered the lore associated with it, her identity began to take shape. Floods from springs or wells when their guardians are offended are the legendary origins of many lakes. These guardians are invariably female and it is sometimes stressed, as with the case of Mererid, that she is a maiden. Two words are used to convey this in the poem. In one line she is referred to as ‘morvin’ (simply maiden), but in another line as ‘machteith’ which is also a term indicating a court office. Rachel Bromwich comments that “both interpretations should be borne in mind”.
A later tale tells of Seithennin as a drunkard who forgot to close the sluice gates protecting the low-lying land. This may be based on an early mistranslation where a word was mistakenly read as ‘wines’, but is just as likely to stem from the mischievious imagination of Iolo Morganwg. It has become the version most repeated in popular folklore in English, but also become entwined with the earlier version in various strands of local folklore in the Welsh language. For instance, the tale of ‘Nodon’ and ‘Merid’, relates that a giant called Nodon — who must be a version of the Brythonic god Nodens — lived on a flat expanse of land which is now under the sea in Cardigan Bay. [1] He had a well looked after by a well maiden called Merid. One day a stranger came past on his way back from a feast with a drinking horn full of wine. He asked Merid for some water from the well for his horse, and while the horse was drinking he gave Merid the drinking horn and got her drunk on the wine. He then goes on his way leaving her in a drunken state and she forgets to close the well. Water flows out of the well while she is sleeping and she is drowned as the land all around is engulfed by a flood, and remains flooded to this day. A variation in English [2] says that man in a drunken state gave her wine then violated her with the same outcome. The tale ends by saying that she was transformed into a seabird and her descendants still inhabit the well-known seabird nesting colony on Craig yr Adar (Birds Rock) near to the village of Newquay on Cardigan Bay.
Clearly Merid must surely be the same character as Mererid. Interestingly, the collection of local folklore in Welsh from the Cardigan Bay area where the story is reproduced also contains another story about a mermaid called Morwen who lives in the already drowned land of Cantre’r Gwaelod, and who causes further permanent flooding in order to capture a young man she wishes to carry off into the depths and marry him. A drowned land called Maes Maichgen is mentioned elsewhere in the medieval Triads in Latin [3] which describes it as the land of Helig son of Glannog and locates it in the central part of Cardigan Bay, apparently encompassing but stretching further than the lands of Maes Gwyddno (Cantre’r Gwaelod). The triad appears to refer to different kingdoms being flooded over a large area in the distant past. References elsewhere also refer to such inundations: “there were but two rivers …. but the deep water grew wider and overflowed the kingdoms” as the Mabinogi story of Branwen has it. That is, there are both legends of specific inundations as in the Cantre’r Gwaelod story, but also references to a general rise in sea level over a long period of time.
Wells were often seen as gateways to the Otherworld and if these gateways were not properly protected the steady flow of blessed water might become a deluge, particularly if the guardian of the well ceases to become a virgin either by her own volition or by her violation. But Mererid is also a ‘cup-bearer’. Reading Enright’s elucidations [4] about the role of cup-bearers in Celtic and Germanic cultures and the proposed origins of their functions and identity in the Goddess Rosmerta (the ‘Great Provider’); the ambiguous status of Wealtheow, Hrodgar’s queen and cup-bearer, in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf; the story of the virgin prophetess Veleda in Tacitus’ Germania; all began to bring the picture into focus.
Rosmerta’s emblems are the cup, ladle and bucket. Her cup an emblem of plenty, proffered at the feast; in Gaul she is associated in at least once place with a sacred spring. In her continuing identity in the persons of cup bearers her role becomes differentiated and therefore ambiguous, particularly in later contexts when the religious significance may have been lost but the magical status still remained resonant. A cup bearer might be a maiden and hold an office as such at court but equally there might be an implied sexual element involved in what she represents associated with fertility. Enright says as part of his discussion of these elements, “We may therefore reiterate an argument made constantly in this study – that prophecy, sexuality and the offering of liquor were all part of the same mental construct for Celts and, perhaps, somewhat later, for Germans.” Where her maiden status is associated with protection, the loss of it also implies loss of protection. But it might in other contexts be associated with fertility and so becoming sexually active brings plenty. Her survival into later legends, folklore and story may emphasise only one or the other of these functions exclusively and so appear to be only about a single event such as an inundation or a symbolic offering of plenty by a cup bearer, though often the portrayal of these events retains an aura of something deeper.
Mererid is a well maiden whose function is to protect the well. She also bears the cup of plenty. So could her seduction or violation have removed the protection and so caused the flood? And could there be an underlying sense of fertility here too, the release of life-giving waters, but disguised in the story of a catastrophic inundation? Perhaps. It was with such as sense of these possibilities that I moved from undertaking a translation of the poem from The Black Book of Carmarthen, where I felt constrained to preserve the narrative and thematic integrity of the original, to writing my own, freer version of the same poem in an act of imaginative re-casting. Here it is:
Cantre’r Gwaelod
(A free adaptation of the poem in The Black Book of Carmarthen)
Wake up Seithennin
Can’t you see what’s happening
The wild sea is rushing in.
The well’s cup-bearer,
That girl you had beside you –
You thought it nothing just to take her.
Now she’s gone, the well
She keeps is overflowing
And running to the sea’s swell.
Can you hear her call
Ringing out across the water?
Your fault has brought you to a fall.
Can you hear her berate
The fate that’s brought her
To this end – early or late
She sings her lament
Over Gwyddno’s flooded meadows
The cup of plenty now is spent.
She rides through the flow –
Mererid – on the bay mare’s back
Her song lulling the pull and tow
Of the plaintive waves:
A pearl plucked from its oyster;
Like your bed, empty of its treasure.
There is a single word in the original poem ‘cwyn’ that has been alternatively translated ‘complaint’ and ‘feast’. Did she complain about what had happened to her (as I imply in my translations) or might we suppose that the offering of her cup as a feast has other implications? A mythological reading might include both possibilities simultaneously. Is she here the victim of a violation or an active participant in releasing the flood? You would think as I have translated the poem twice with the same implication, that I was certain about this. But I’m not.
References:
1. Myra Evans Casgliad o Chwedlau Newydd (Aberystwyth, 1926)
2. Peter Stevenson Ceredigion Folk Tales (Stroud, 2014)
3. Rachel Bromwich : introduction to Trioedd Ynys Prydain p. lxxv (third edition, Cardiff, 2006)
4. M J Enright Lady With a Mead Cup (Dublin, 1995)
The poem is No. 39 in The Black Book of Carmarthen.
The original text with a translation, discussion and notes by Rachel Bromwich appears in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1950). The discussion compares the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod with the Breton legend of Ker-Is.
There is also a translation by Jenny Rowlands in Early Welsh Saga Poetry (Cambridge, 1990).
greghill.cymru 