Ronald Hutton has challenged the interpretation of medieval Welsh stories as representations of earlier mythology, and their characters as Brythonic deities. I’ve considered his argument and developed a response. It’s too long for a blog post so I’m making it available as a pdf download:
A major influence on John Rhŷs, the author of Celtic Folklore (1901), according to Rhŷs himself, was the the Welsh-language writer and folklorist Glasynys (Owen Wyn Jones) who, in the middle of the nineteenth century , wrote a series of accounts of the way festivals such as Calan Gaeaf were celebrated in rural areas in the mountains of North Wales, as well as tales about the Tylwyth Teg which were then still actively resonant in the imaginative life of these communities. His accounts were, in the words of one later commentator, shaped “in his own mould”[vii], seeking to recreate their essential core of the origins of the traditions he related. Here is the opening of his account of a Nos Galan Gaeaf Celebration:
“Whoever wishes to see and hear the traditional customs practised through the ages should come with me to Cwm Blaen y Glyn where they have been observed since time immemorial. There, in the quiet of the mountains, the young, adults and old folk gather together to celebrate Nos Galangaeaf.”
He describes how the evening begins with a large bonfire being lit on the hill above the valley. When the fire lighters have returned, the evening’s proceeding begin featuring the final fruits of the year’s harvest: apples and nuts. The apples are put in a tub of water and have to be removed by the younger attenders using only their teeth to pick them up, a custom known more generally as ‘apple bobbing’. A more adventurous version of this game for young adults was to stick a lit rush candle into the apple and players had to attempt to eat it without holding it in their hands, and without burning their cheeks! While this is going on oatcakes are cooked on a griddle on the fire and homemade mead is dispensed to the company.
The festival is also a time for divination. This is where the nuts come in. Those wishing to know if they will have good luck for the coming year put one of the nuts into the fire. Each one that cracks with a ‘clec’ means good luck. But if the nut burns without cracking it means bad luck.
At this point an awaited guest arrives: Rhydderch y Grythor who will provide music with his crwth or traditional fiddle. Traditional songs are sung, one such with a verse that may be translated something like this:
In the house there’s nuts to crack
For tonight is Calan Gaeaf;
In by the fire mead to drink,
Outside the Hwch Ddu Gwta.
The ‘Hwch Ddu Gwta’ or ‘Tailess Black Sow’ will chase anyone out after dark on this night, and woe betide anyone who is caught. Those within by the fire are safe for now. But for those whose nuts did not ‘clec’ in the fire, what may be their fate on their way home under the stars at the dark of the Moon beneath the far glitter of Orion’s belt where the Grey King haunts the skies?
As well as writing descriptive accounts such as this, he also incorporated traditional lore into short stories such as Y Fôr Forwyn (The Mermaid) where the traditional tale of a fisherman who meets and marries a mermaid is shaped into a more complex narrative where the Mermaid (Nefyn) is said to be the daughter of Nefydd Naf Neifion and the niece of both Gwydion ab Don and Gwyn ap Nudd, and in which the children of the marriage have to deal with its various consequences in both the human and the otherworld. Rhŷs recounts part of this tale in Celtic Folklore alongside others concerning the descendants of such mixed marriages including one where he states that “Glasynys maintains that [the descendants] were known to him at the time he wrote in 1863”.
Another appreciative account of his contribution to Welsh life records that he “…gave tongues to our old castles and our ruined forts, told the legends of our brave forbears and threw a magical aura over daily life through an expressive use of the Welsh language that was music to the souls of its speakers.” [xxiii]. Glasynys himself held this as a mission in a world where such things, he felt, were slowly being eroded from consciousness, saying in a essay of 1860 :
“The world has turned. Children are no longer raised to value such things. No care is taken to nurture an awareness of them so the result is that the world has shrunk, is weakened, is shrivelled and withered. The soul is not contained within the land and the life of the land, nor transformed in a view of the world which is its pattern or archetype.” [xxv]
This sense of the value of folklore as an expression of the spiritual health of society is an early identification of what, in our own time, has been described as ‘the disenchantment of the world’. But Glasynys, though he saw things were changing, still looked at rural life in Wales as an Arcadia, not only in the past, but still existing for him in the present.
Translated / paraphrased from the selection Straeon Glasynys ed. Saunders Lewis (1943) All quotations followed by roman numerals are references to the Introduction to this edition.
A major influence on John Rhŷs, the author of Celtic Folklore (1901), according to Rhŷs himself, was the the Welsh-language writer and folklorist Glasynys (Owen Wyn Jones) who, in the middle of the nineteenth century , wrote a series of accounts of the way festivals such as Calan Gaeaf were celebrated in rural areas in the mountains of North Wales, as well as tales about the Tylwyth Teg which were then still actively resonant in the imaginative life of these communities. His accounts were, in the words of one later commentator, shaped “in his own mould”[vii], seeking to recreate their essential core of the origins of the traditions he related. Here is the opening of his account of a Nos Galan Gaeaf Celebration:
“Whoever wishes to see and hear the traditional customs practised through the ages should come with me to Cwm Blaen y Glyn where they have been observed since time immemorial. There, in the quiet of the mountains, the young, adults and old folk gather together to celebrate Nos Galangaeaf.”
He describes how the evening begins with a large bonfire being lit on the hill above the valley. When the fire lighters have returned, the evening’s proceeding begin featuring the final fruits of the year’s harvest: apples and nuts. The apples are put in a tub of water and have to be removed by the younger attenders using only their teeth to pick them up, a custom known more generally as ‘apple bobbing’. A more adventurous version of this game for young adults was to stick a lit rush candle into the apple and players had to attempt to eat it without holding it in their hands, and without burning their cheeks! While this is going on oatcakes are cooked on a griddle on the fire and homemade mead is dispensed to the company.
The festival is also a time for divination. This is where the nuts come in. Those wishing to know if they will have good luck for the coming year put one of the nuts into the fire. Each one that cracks with a ‘clec’ means good luck. But if the nut burns without cracking it means bad luck.
At this point an awaited guest arrives: Rhydderch y Grythor who will provide music with his crwth or traditional fiddle. Traditional songs are sung, one such with a verse that may be translated something like this:
In the house there’s nuts to crack
For tonight is Calan Gaeaf;
In by the fire mead to drink,
Outside the Hwch Ddu Gwta.
The ‘Hwch Ddu Gwta’ or ‘Tailess Black Sow’ will chase anyone out after dark on this night, and woe betide anyone who is caught. Those within by the fire are safe for now. But for those whose nuts did not ‘clec’ in the fire, what may be their fate on their way home under the stars at the dark of the Moon beneath the far glitter of Orion’s belt where the Grey King haunts the skies?
As well as writing descriptive accounts such as this, he also incorporated traditional lore into short stories such as Y Fôr Forwyn (The Mermaid) where the traditional tale of a fisherman who meets and marries a mermaid is shaped into a more complex narrative where the Mermaid (Nefyn) is said to be the daughter of Nefydd Naf Neifion and the niece of both Gwydion ab Don and Gwyn ap Nudd, and in which the children of the marriage have to deal with its various consequences in both the human and the otherworld. Rhŷs recounts part of this tale in Celtic Folklore alongside others concerning the descendants of such mixed marriages including one where he states that “Glasynys maintains that [the descendants] were known to him at the time he wrote in 1863”.
Another appreciative account of his contribution to Welsh life records that he “…gave tongues to our old castles and our ruined forts, told the legends of our brave forbears and threw a magical aura over daily life through an expressive use of the Welsh language that was music to the souls of its speakers.” [xxiii]. Glasynys himself held this as a mission in a world where such things, he felt, were slowly being eroded from consciousness, saying in a essay of 1860 :
“The world has turned. Children are no longer raised to value such things. No care is taken to nurture an awareness of them so the result is that the world has shrunk, is weakened, is shrivelled and withered. The soul is not contained within the land and the life of the land, nor transformed in a view of the world which is its pattern or archetype.” [xxv]
This sense of the value of folklore as an expression of the spiritual health of society is an early identification of what, in our own time, has been described as ‘the disenchantment of the world’. But Glasynys, though he saw things were changing, still looked at rural life in Wales as an Arcadia, not only in the past, but still existing for him in the present.
Translated / paraphrased from the selection Straeon Glasynys ed. Saunders Lewis (1943) All quotations followed by roman numerals are references to the Introduction to this edition.
There is a folk tradition that blackberries should not be picked after Michaelmas Day, as they then belong to the Devil. The idea behind this is that Michael cast him out of Heaven on this day and he landed in a tangle of brambles so afterwards the berries were tainted with his blood and not fit to eat. Whether the cut-off date is to be taken as the current 29th September or Old Michaelmas Day on 10th October is presumably dependent on how much of a risk the pickers wish to take!
Blackberries have not been plentiful this year where I live. But we went out on 29th September to pick sloes, which hung in inviting blue-black profusion on the blackthorn trees along the edge of the sunken lane where we usually find them. Sloes can be picked later than blackberries but we gathered them today for Gwyn ap Nudd because we were celebrating the restoration of his feast day (for which see THIS POST on the Brython Blog by Lorna Smithers). It has always been our custom to take the dregs of previous batches of sloe gin we make from them to return to the earth something of what we have taken. We did so again this year, but also took some very drinkable sloe gin from a good vintage to toast our labours and to pour a libation for Gwyn ap Nudd.
These sloes were picked on his feast day and the sloe gin we will make from them will be made for him, so he will be welcome at our winter festivities and in quiet moments or special occasions when it will be savoured.
These dark berries are astringent. The drink they make is powerfully pungent. As such it contains something of his nature. But there is no repugnance or reluctance – such as that associated with the Devil’s Blackberries – felt at the gathering of Gwyn’s sloes to infuse our gin. They can be gathered until Calan Gaeaf, even until Old Calan Gaeaf, after which they will no longer be at their best and the Cailleach’s withered fingers may claim them. But their spirit will be contained because we gathered them for Gwyn ap Nudd.
Inundations, not temporary floods but the permanent flowing of waters across the land; there are many stories of such flowings from springs or wells to make lakes, or rushing to meet the sea to re-shape the coastline. There are recurrent stories behind these legends, superficially of pride, arrogance, presumption, though this might mask a quest for knowledge and therefore power. Often the consequences are delayed and the flood comes after many generations (time for the otherworld deities is not our time). The legend of the drowning of Tyno Helig near the estuary of the River Conwy in North wales is typical of the theme where a wicked ruler is told that his descendants will be punished for his deeds and so he thinks he has nothing to worry about, but seven generations later his lands are flooded during a feast and only the harper escapes drowning. This latter detail of the harper is also a common element in the stories. John Rhŷs thought that the theme of delayed punishment for evil deeds was a later development in these stories which originally involved something happening at a sacred well which causes it to overflow. Consider for instance, the story of Boann who looks into Nechtan’s Well of Wisdom which should only be visited by Nechtan and his cup-bearers. The well overflows and chases her all the way to the sea, thereby forming the River Boyne. In the story of the drowning of Cantre’r Gwaelod, or the lands of Gwyddno Garanhir, Mererid is herself a cup-bearer and a well-maiden, though the oblique nature of the verses which record this (probably originally contained in a prose saga which supplied more detail) means that the context is unclear.
But no matter. For there is more to say. Both the setting for Tyno Helig and that for Cantre’r Gwaelod are also settings for different surviving versions of the story of Taliesin. Think now of that harper who survives (or is re-born from) the flood. The story of Taliesin begins at Llyn Tegid, the location of another inundation legend which explains the formation of the lake near the town of Bala. This is where Gwion stirred Ceridwen’s cauldron. The River Dee (Dyfrdwy) which runs through the lake, has its own mythos naming its waters as sacred (~>). Gwion looked into, and tasted, the waters of this cauldron and there was an inundation. He gained wisdom just as Finn gained wisdom either by tasting the salmon from the Well of Wisdom or, in another story, tasting drops of water from an otherworld well.
In Gaul a god that the Romans called Mercurius – though he may not have had a name before the Romans gave him one – was partnered with Rosmerta, whose name could simply mean ‘The Great Provider’. Rosmerta had a site of devotion at a sacred spring in Gaul and is also commemorated in Bath, the site of the sacred springs of Sulis in Britain. One of her emblems is a bucket (cauldron?) and she is represented with Fortuna on one relief where the bucket could symbolise re-birth. A spring, a cauldron, a brew of otherworld wisdom, welling into our world. A cup-bearer, a well-maiden ~/~ the keeper of the cauldron, a hag. Are these two sides of the same coin, the turning of Fortuna’s wheel? When there is a flow from otherworld streams out of the well or the cauldron, who can catch the essential drops on the tongue, taste the salmon or gather the hazel nuts that have fallen into the the waters of the well?
Think of that harper, the survivor of the flood. Think of Taliesin, re-born from the waters into a weir in which salmon are caught. Think of others whose quest for knowledge transforms them into divine or inspired figures.Then consider that Mercurius, Rosmerta’s partner, may have been known in the lands that overlapped Gaul as Woden, and how a god, taking a different name for a different people, might do things differently, and yet still discover sources of wisdom, of inspiration, and how the mead of poetry from the Cup or Cauldron of Inspiration might be dispensed to the poets, the awenyddion, the drui, from whom the waters of the Cauldron flow as rivers of song.
Consider the stories from Greece about Hades and Persephone, which operate at the purely mythic level and Orpheus and Eurydice which enacts the same mythic pattern but sets it as a story about humans rather than gods. In the first Hades snatches Persephone away to his dark realm and her mother Demeter eventually manages to rescue her but only on the basis that she spends half the year in Hades and half in the world we know. This is a story about the gods and the turning of the seasons. Now consider the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As with many Greek stories about interactions between the worlds, the human characters concerned have some divine ancestry but live as humans in our world. Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies so her husband Orpheus, a musician with divine gifts, one might say inspired by the Awen and so godlike in his nature, goes to the Land of the Dead and plays his music charming Hades into releasing her, though the condition that he must not look back until they are both in the open air introduces a tragic dimension that is often a feature of the Greek stories. This feature often translates to an ironically comic view of human frailty as in the Roman Ovid’s re-telling of the tale.
So what we have here is a basic myth of a goddess being snatched away by a god into his realm and her return being allowed for part of the year and a parallel story of a woman being taken into this realm and her release negotiated, though not successfully achieved. The story is different but the mythic pattern is the same. In Ireland this pattern occurs in the story of Midhir and Etain. There are two versions of this story which echo the differences between the two Greek stories. In one they are both inhabitants of Tir na Nog (i.e. both gods) but in another version Etain is human and is carried off by Midhir, a king of the Tuatha de Danaan, after he tricks her husband and wins her in a game of chess. The cultural context here is very different and firmly embedded in the mythical history of Ireland. But, again, the mythic pattern is the same.
Celtic otherworlds may be in caves or under hills, beneath lakes or seas, or on far-away islands. The variety of location and context reveals a multi-layered inheritance in how these worlds are perceived and how they tend to fuse, in later literature, in a more generalised experience of Faery or, more trivially, Fairyland. In both these latter cases most often this is an inaccessible place that may be glimpsed but rarely visited though its inhabitants may well also inhabit our world. In an article about the Welsh name for the Otherworld, Bernard Mees and Nick Nicholas remark that ” the Welsh name Annwfn … suggests an etymological notion of an otherworld” [see below*]. Suggested Brythonic origins of the name are *an-dubnos (‘not-world’ or ‘not-deep'[deep-notness?]) or *ande-dubnos (‘underworld’ or ‘under-deep’). Also discussed is a Gaulish word antumnos, used in calling upon Dis or Prosperpine and therefore suggesting a nether world of darkness rather than a paradisal parallel realm.
The probable Greek origin of antumnos also suggests a dark, underworld location. The authors of the article find it unlikely that the supposed Brythonic term *an-dubnos was used without knowledge of its associations with the Greek Underworld. This may imply that its later associations with the ‘Hell’ of Christian tradition is not entirely a later overlay. Rather, as Mees and Nicholas suggest “… the entrance of the term to early Brythonic might even be plausibly connected with the development of the dual nature of the Insular Otherworld and Graeco-Roman influence: paradisaical and ageless on the one hand, sinister and Stygian on the other.”
In this view, it seems that the Brythonic Celts wanted it both ways, not wishing to abandon the idea of a blissful parallel dimension to their own world but also paradoxically seeing it as a dark Underworld where the souls of the dead reside. If the fabric of these alternatives appear to have little in common with each other this may be because, for us, ancestors and other-beings seem to require differently imagined locations. But do they?
In Britain the story exists in various folklore and literary versions including the Shetland ballad ‘King Orfeo’ and the Breton lay ‘Sir Orfeo’. Both conceive of the place into which Orfeo’s wife Heroudis is snatched as a domain of Faery. The confusion between this and the Land of the Dead is expressed ambiguously in these tales. ‘King Orfeo’ has the lines “The King of Faery with his dart/Has pierced your lady through the heart” possibly suggesting death but also, potentially, enchantment. ‘Sir Orfeo’ portrays the land that Orfeo enters as one where the folk who had been captured were “thoughte dede and nere nought” (seemed dead but were not) but a few lines further on “some dede and some awedde” (some dead and some mad). I wrote my own concise distillation of these British versions some time ago HERE. Lorna Smithers also discusses ‘Sir Orfeo’ and the nature of the Otherworld in her own inspired exploration linking with some different contextual matter HERE where the overlay between Annwn and the Land of the Dead is also discussed. The mythic pattern of capture and release from the Otherworld may also be seen in the story of Rhiannon in the Third Branch of the Mabinogi tales where it is Manawydan who rescues her. Again the cultural context changes but the pattern remains. The medieval Welsh poem of ‘The Girl in Ogyrfen’s Hall’, discussed recently on this blog, I think gains much of its power from its concentration on just one aspect of this mythic pattern. The gods live in an Otherworld which is parallel to and connected to our world. The seasons come and go as the gods move between the worlds, life leaving the land and returning in due season. So that land is also the Land of the Dead, where the ancestors dwell, just as they also dwell in the landscape that we know, their embedded actions in shaping and naming the landscape and the memories of their lives, their spirits, their being here with us which is also there in the Otherworld where the cauldron of re-birth gives them new identity.
So the mythic world of the gods is also our world, the legendary world of those semi-divine or heroic figures who have visited that world also inhabit our own world, and so it is there for us too if we would see it. Or it is ‘other’ if we choose it to be so.
There is the story of a well in Ireland
that was abused so then could not be found
by any but the true seeker who would be led
to where it was by one who kept its secrets.
There is the story of a well in Wales
whose guardian was dishonoured so it flooded
and made a great lake, but she would come
from the waters to greet any with the right token.
There are stories of The Well at the World’s End
that many seek for far away, but find
near to home where the Otherworld spring pulses
through in some hidden place in the world we know.
Seek out the source of the crystal waters,
the rising spring that runs into the gathering stream.
Speak out the spells that the well maid waits for
as a salve for her sorrows to wash away her pain.
Photo and Caption:© Keith Morris 2013 / http://www.artswebwales.com (used with permission)
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The custom of carrying a horse’s head around at New Year is a well established folk tradition in Wales. But how old is it? The example in the picture above from the village where I live is certainly a recent revival, seeking to maintain old customs and cultural survivals, and none the worse for that. Elsewhere in Wales, particularly in Glamorgan, the custom has a longer continuity. The name Mari Lwyd (Grey Mary) has been linked to ceremonies connected with the Virgin Mary, though the folklorist Iorwerth Peate, writing in the 1930s, thought that it should be construed as ‘Grey Mare’ and that it had its origins in pre-christian practices, possibly transferred to Mary in the Middle Ages. More recent folklorists have been reticent to make this connection and its continuity is doubted by Ronald Hutton. Nevertheless the custom has a deep resonance about it that connects with ancestral memories in a way that does not require proof of unbroken continuity.
The poet Vernon Watkins wrote of the custom in his ‘The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’ in 1941. The whole poem covers more than twenty pages and alternates different voices, together with an ‘announcer’ to convey the New Year custom in Wales of carrying a horse’s head from house to house.
Here is an extract:
Mari Lwyd , Horse of the Frost, Star-horse and White Horse of the Sea, is carried to us.
[…..]
Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.
A knock of the sands on the glass of the grave,
A knock on the sands of the shore,
A knock of the horse’s head of the wave,
A beggar’s knock on the door.
A knock of a moth and the pane of light,
In the beat of the blood a knock.
Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.The sands in the glass, the shrinking sands,
And the picklock, picklock, picklock, hands.Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight.
Hark at the hands of the clock.
In the poet’s own note to the poem following its first publication he asserts that it was a well-established custom remembered from his childhood:
“Mari Lwyd – the Grey Mari, the Grey Mare – was a white or grey horse’s head modelled in wood, painted, and hung with ribbons, carried from house to house on the last night of the year.
The carriers were usually a party of singers, wits, and impromptu poets, who, on the pretext of blessing, boasting of the sanctity of what they carried, tried to gain entrance to a house for the sake of obtaining food and drink. The method they used was to challenge those within to a rhyming contest. The inmates would keep them out so long as they were not in want of a rhyme, but when they failed to reply to the challenger the right of entry was gained. The singers would then bring their horse’s head in, lay it on the table, and eat and drink with the losers of the contest.
The singers came every year to my father’s house; and listening to them at midnight, I found myself imagining a skull, a horse’s skull decked with ribbons, followed and surrounded by all kinds of drunken claims and holy deceptions. I have attempted to bring together those who are separated. The last breath of the year is their threshold, the moment of supreme forgiveness, confusion and understanding, the profane and sacred moment impossible to realize while the clock-hands divide the Living from the Dead.”
* *
*
Details of more recent practice of the custom can be found Here and there is You Tube footage with commentary Here. All of these recent enactments take place around New Year, but is this the right time for the practice? Iorwerth Peate thought that is properly belonged to Samhain and I have always thought of it in this way and many years ago wrote my own fictional setting for it in this context : Grey Mare of the Night. Its transference to New Year, however, may be significant of the movement from darkness to returning light. Vernon Watkins’ poem is seen from the perspective of those within the houses which are visited by the Mari. Many years later in the 1960s he wrote a sequel to the earlier ballad entitled Ballad of the Outer Dark. The later ballad in one sense picks up where the earlier one left off, the inmates of the house going out into the night bearing the horse’s head, taking the interpretation of the custom a stage further as if the Dark itself needed to be embraced as the voices move beyond the circle of Light.
Here the experience is not of being within the house but outside as one voice says:
The fire we loved, the hours we lived
Are snatched away by thieves.
and another voice responds:
We are ourselves the shafts of white
Those men of firelight mock.
And we must drift like flakes of snow
That know not where to rest,
So soft upon the night they go
Whom none will take for guest.
But the horse’s head is, in fact, brought in. The ancestors are met with on their own terms and go back to the land of the dead and the light returns for the living. So the later ballad in some ways completes the earlier one in transcending the rejection of the ‘Outer Dark’. This seems a plausible explanation of the custom of carrying the head of the Mari Lwyd from house to house at New Year though the custom itself seems to be resonant of the whole period from the coming of Winter at Samhain through to New Year Calends and the prospect of returning light at Imbolc.
{Arthur Rackham}
Of all the lore concerning the coming of Winter and the transitions (both personal and mythological) which shape the deeper significances of the dark months at the the year’s end, the image of the Washer at the Ford, the Cailleach, the Shadow Woman – call her what you will – is most deeply embedded in my responses to Winterfall. I have written of her elsewhere but I recently came across this interleaving of deep mythos, local folklore and Brythonic legend in a folklore record from North Wales:
“… there is a parish called Llanferrys and Rhyd y Gyfarthfa, ‘Ford of the Barking’, is there, and in olden times the dogs of the country would come there to bark, and no-one would venture to go to see what was there until Urien of Rheged came. He saw nought but a woman washing. And then the dogs stopped barking, and Urien took hold of the woman and had possession of her.”
from T. Gwynn Jones Welsh Folkore and Custom (1930)
The story continues that she is the daughter of the King of Annwn but is destined to have a child fathered by a christian man. She tells him to return at the end of the year and when he returns she presents him with a son and a daughter: Owain and Morfudd.
This is interesting in itself because of the conflation of historical and legendary material from the ‘Old North’ of Welsh tradition with a local tale which itself contains elements of both mythological and folkloric provenance. The coupling of Urien, the sixth century king of the Brythonic territory of Rheged in what is now southern Scotland and north-western England, with the daughter of the King of of the Otherworld (Gwyn ap Nudd) suggests a union between Thisworld and the Otherworld intricate with a sovereignty theme in that a king in Thisworld has to marry and Otherworld woman to validate his power (consider the marriage of Pwyll to Rhiannon in the first of the four Mabinogi tales). At its worse, the tale as related here however portrays the union as little more than a casual rape by a powerful lord of a woman washing her clothes in the river. But identifying the woman as an Otherworld princess shifts the tale to another level. Would such a woman be washing her clothes in the river and would she permit herself to be raped? It seems unlikely on both counts, but Otherworld women are rarely what they seem. The story appears to rationalise her compliance with Urien in that it is her ‘destiny’ to bear his children. But the image of the Washer at the Ford is far too profoundly embedded in the mythos for its appearance here to be taken, as the wording above has it, as “nought but a woman washing”.
In some occurrences of the sovereignty theme in folklore and myth, the king has to be prepared to couple with the goddess of the land both in her winter and her summer aspects, or he has to take her as an old hag so that she may become a young woman again. This is often also a variant in stories about dalliances with Otherworld women who are able to change their form from beautiful to hideous and there is sometimes a suggestion of initiatory processes in this being accepted by the would-be lover. Such an initiatory journey may itself be portrayed in disguised form in story and so find its way into the folklore record. A man may have to be prepared to marry an old crone who becomes a beautiful young woman after he has slept with her, as in stories that made their way into mainstream literature such as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tale. A young woman might equally have to become subject to an ogre or, in the classic fairy story, to kiss a frog. It is the confrontation with otherness that is enacted here, being prepared to be tested or to step out of the comfort zone of everyday life. When such stories are embedded in the folk or faërie lore record they tend to reflect in a generalised way personal journeys of quest, change or psychological discovery. At the religious level they are reflective of initiation into the mysteries. Mythologically they embody the personas of the gods through the changing seasons, the changes of history, geology, cosmology. The Washer at the Ford is not to be ‘possessed’ at a whim and it is significant that it has to wait for a great figure like the legendary Urien to approach her.
We have here, then, an impacted record of change. A change of season from Autumn to Winter where the Washer sits at the threshold of the two seasons wailing for the fate of the God of Summer as the leaves fall from the trees all about her. A change of status for one who dares to cross the ford and confront her. A change that also reflects here shifting historical, cultural and religious patterns across the Island of Britain as a momentous leader of an old kingdom in the North turns up in Wales in a story about a place people fear to go to and the barking of the dogs ceases as he appeases the spirit of the place. In such ways are different traditions and older mythologies overlaid, one on the other, interwoven and re-synthesised into stories the significance of which may not always be clear, or even fully discernible, but through which the gods still speak to us as they always have.
greghill.cymru 