In my study of the four branches of the Mabinogi one of the things that fascinates me is the repeated measuring of time by years in the story of Pywll and Rhiannon in the first branch.

This story begins with Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and his courtiers going to the mysterious hill, or gorsedd, of Arberth, where legend has it that they are likely to see a wonder. The wonder they see is a woman riding sedately past, but who proves impossible to overtake. They try on three successive days to catch up with her, and even the great Pwyll, himself, is unable to do so. He finally manages to persuade her to stop and talk to him by shouting after her, and in the conversation which ensues, she proposes marriage to him, and invites him to come to her father’s kingdom “one year from now” for their marriage feast.

At the feast, things go terribly wrong when a previous suitor of Rhiannon’s turns up during the feast and manages to claim her. However, Rhiannon manages to put him off until “one year from now”. She and Pwyll then hatch a plan to trick the unwanted suitor, and at the second wedding feast their plan succeeds, and they are finally wed.

The couple then return to Pwyll’s kingdom of Dyfed, where they reign “that year and the next” but “in the third year” Pwyll’s advisors begin to complain that Rhiannon has not produced an heir. They want Pwyll to choose another wife, but he persuades them to meet him again “a year from now”, and if Rhiannon has not produced a child, then he will consider it. However, before the end of that year Rhiannon bears a son, who then mysteriously disappears on the night of his birth.

The action of the story then shifts from Dyfed to Gwent, where a landholder called Teyrnon has a fine mare who foals every May eve, but the next day the foal has always mysteriously disappeared. This time, Teyrnon vows to keep watch, so he takes the mare into his house for the night, arms himself, and sits up with her. The mare gives birth and soon a great clawed arm reaches through the window and grabs the foal, but Teyrnon manages to draw his sword and sever it, saving the foal. He runs outside to see what monster the arm belongs to but can find nothing. However, when he returns to the house, he finds that an infant has been left in the doorway.

Teyrnon and his wife decide to raise this child as their own, and in a familiar formula for young heroes the child grows at a prodigious rate. At a year old he is like a child of three, at two he is like a child of six, and so on. At four years of age, he is given the colt to ride, and it is at this time that Teyrnon hears of all that has happened in Dyfed, and realises that the boy is Pwyll’s son, and returns him to his parents.
While May-eve is only mentioned once in the story, at the foaling of Teyrnon’s mare, I feel that there is a strong implication that other major events in the story also take place at Calan Mai. This time of the thinning veil would make sense for Pwyll to go out with the hope of “seeing a wonder”. It is at the beginning of the tale that the language is most explicit that the timings of the wedding feasts are at intervals of exactly one year from the meeting of Pwyll and Rhiannon. This establishes a rhythm of exact years for the subsequent parts of the tale, even though the timing of events might be a little less definite. Perhaps we are expected to get the idea after the first few times.
It seems likely that the birth of Rhiannon’s child happens on May eve, the same night that he is delivered to Teyrnon. If we work back, then we have Rhiannon’s first appearance on the May eve five years earlier, and the return of the child four years later, possibly also at Calan Mai. This motif of years isn’t pronounced in the rest of the Mabinogi, suggesting that it is being emphasised intentionally.
The character of the youthful goddess Rhiannon arriving on her magical white horse is certainly one which feels like spring or early summer, and I don’t think it is hard to envision Her as a May Queen, come to bring good things to the land. It feels very appropriate to me to honour Rhiannon, and Teyrnon as well, at this time of year.

Maybe, (or maybe not) connected, are three May horse mumming traditions from southwest England, which once had a language and culture strongly connected to the Welsh-speaking home of the Mabinogi. You may be aware of the famous celebrations at Padstow, where the town has a long history of an all-day festival of stylised singing and dancing, involving their unique ‘obby ‘oss, pictured above. The tradition is at least two hundred years old, but like so many folk customs is likely much older, although we lack proof. At Minehead, in Somerset, there is also a hobby horse tradition, with some similarities and some notable differences to the one in Padstow. In Combe Martin, North Devon, a little later in May comes a festival called “Hunting the Earl of Rone”, which involves another hobby horse of the Padstow type, as well as a live donkey (which seems to be treated very well).

All three of these events are community festivals involving hundreds of local people as active participants, supporters, and spectators. Like the winter horse mumming customs, I wrote about here, here, and here, these customs went through a period of being considered survivals from pre-Christian times, but this certainly can’t be proven, however much it feels like it. One thing I find beautiful and wonderful about these traditions is their tenacity. The people within these small towns seem driven to keep the customs alive and to participate in them. They allow things to morph and grow to suit the times, yet still manage to treat them with a certain reverence. Alongside that respect, however, exists a certain wildness of spirit which can’t be denied when the horses take to the streets, accompanied by ranks of drummers and musicians.  Could this be the wild ebullience of a horse goddess?

So who was it that created the world of the Celts? Donn and Danu? Eiocha? The Cailleach?

Did we lose our creation myth?
The lack of a “Celtic creation myth” is something that has vexed scholars, and bothers many modern Pagans, as well. Some people feel that our body of myths is incomplete without one, and some neoPagans feel that their attempt at reconstructing a religion requires a creation myth. But what can you do? It’s not there.

There are various theories as to why. The Druids kept it as secret lore, and the Christian monks erased it because it differed from the biblical one being the two most popular. Neither of these feel entirely plausible to me. Creation stories are usually widely shared in a culture. I can imagine that there was knowledge that the Druids didn’t share widely, but that would probably have amounted to “trade secrets”, for the most part. In most cultures, creation stories are used to entertain, or to reinforce the truth of a particular religious paradigm. They’re really not much use if you keep them secret.

The Christian thing is a little more likely, I suppose. I don’t much care for Christianity, but I still think that Irish churchmen (and a little later Welsh churchmen) recorded myths and stories primarily because they thought they were worth preserving. After all, these will have been the stories they grew up with – their own indigenous material. I’m not saying that they never made editorial decisions for religious reasons, but often what we see in old manuscripts looks like an effort to preserve things with a degree of accuracy.

Still, if anything might have been problematic in the cultural mythos, a creation story which directly contradicted the well known creation and flood stories in the Book of Genesis might have been it. Certainly, when we get to the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions) there is a conscious effort to create a story of Ireland which can be slotted into that system. However, because creation stories tend to be popular and widely known in a culture, you would expect to see some signs of it in the myths. Like a piece of clothing that has been altered, the shape of the original garment is usually evident, especially when examined by an expert. Goodness knows, Celticists have given the medieval manuscripts of Wales and Ireland a thorough going over, but there is no sign of a creation myth.

Sometimes, folklore preserves things that don’t get written down, and it has been suggested that the folklore surrounding An Cailleach, especially the folklore about Her in Scotland, might be what we’re looking for. It’s tempting to see this. There are many stories of The Cailleach creating aspects of the local landscape in local stories. She is sometimes represented as a giantess who moves large stones or creates mountains and lochs through her various activities – sometimes she even has sisters who help her. Legends like these are common all over the world. Only a few of them attempt to explain the creation of everything, though. They are usually limited to familiar topography. I’ll accept The Cailleach as both a creator and a destroyer on that scale, but She doesn’t look like the creator, to me.

Personally, I’m perfectly happy without a creation story. If Celtic-speaking people didn’t have one, that is really worth thinking about. It takes us outside of the Abrahamic worldview, and I think that’s a hard place for many of us to find, no matter how much we believe we’ve rejected it, because it’s so all-pervasive. What does it say, when people believe not that their gods put them into a world that had been created for them, but that their gods/ancestors travelled to a kind of paradise and took up residence there? Or even more simply, that the world has more-or-less always existed. I find it kind of refreshing.

But I read a Celtic creation myth one time.
There are a number of things floating around that try to be this. Most of them are just exercises in creative writing that got widely disseminated, often detached from their original intent, and the names of their original authors. They are all modern. Writers as diverse as Ella Young in her 1910 collection, Celtic Wonder Tales, and Peter Beresford Ellis in his Celtic Myths and Legends, have written them. There are several which appear on the internet frequently, so let's go through those.

A Tale of Great Love (a reconstructed Gaelic creation myth) by Iain MacAnTsaoir, is a serious attempt at reconstruction, but takes wild liberties with pretty much everything. This is the one about “Donn and Danu”. It turns up a lot in blogs and on YouTube, and MacAnTsaoir is rarely credited.

Then there is one written by Frank Mills, in 1998, called Oran Mór: The Primordial Celtic Myth. It’s just a bit of spiritual fluff with no real plot, which surfaces from time to time.

Finally, there's the one about how a horse called Eiocha is born from sea foam. She gives birth to Cernunnos, then mates with him. Before you know it, deities from Gaul, Ireland and Wales are running about interacting with one another. Then they create animals and humans, and finally fight some giants. In case you’re not sure, this is not an ancient Celtic myth. I finally tracked the origins of this one down at this link. I was created in New York, by “a team” in 2002.

Of course, I know the real answer. A hare laid an egg, and the world hatched out of it.

Have a lovely Vernal Equinox!

Mystery: Any truth that is divinely revealed but otherwise unknowable.
                                                                                      - Collins Dictionary

Over the past couple of years I’ve been thinking about this question of “hard polytheism” and “soft polytheism”, and I see a few problems. Now, those problems may have to do with how people define their terms, so let’s try to get that out of the way first.

I looked at a few random articles and discussions by modern Pagan devotional polytheists about this. As I understand the popular definitions of hard polytheism, the important factors are a belief that deities are real, and are distinct entities. Some went so far as to say that from this position deities must be perceived not only as individuals, but as ‘persons’. That all seems very simple to understand. The definitions of soft polytheism (mostly by self-declared hard polytheists) are a little more varied, but tend to dwell on the belief that deities are actually archetypes, and on various flavours of universalism. It strikes me that there is a lot of open water between those two positions.

There’s a tendency to paint a black and white picture. In most cases, that read as “Unless you believe exactly this,” it isn’t hard polytheism, and therefore it is soft polytheism – often followed by, “and therefore, you are not a polytheist.” Oh, dear.

There is noticeable peer pressure, in polytheist and reconstructionist circles, to insist on hard polytheism. (I think a bit of fundamentalism is creeping in, but that’s a different conversation.) Since I’m writing this, you may be assuming that I’m about to announce that I’m not a hard polytheist. Not really. However, I am frustrated by entrenched dichotomies. Generally, Pagans aren’t too keen on these, either. Good and evil – for example.

What’s in a name?
I can only speak for my own experiences with deities, and that lies almost entirely with Celtic deities (in the wider sense of “Celtic”). In Patrick Sims-Williams book Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (p. 9-11), he talks about the question of deities with similar names, and divides these into three categories: cognates, borrowings, and translations. Hopefully, I can summarise his ideas here.

overlapping” deities always falls into these same three divisions, but I do think that a lot of it is down to issues of names.

The problem is, that while we can define these three categories, it is much harder to distinguish which category we’re looking at when we compare the names of two deities, and even when we can, does it tell us whether we’re looking at one deity or two? If I had a twin sister called Krista Hughes, I would argue that we are two different people. If I’m called Ms Hughes at work and Kris at home, I am still the same person, and would prefer to be viewed as an integrated whole. But someone encountering my name from just a few historical references, might not be able to see all this.

Can mythology clear this up?
No. But let me muddy the water for you a little. Most people consider that the Irish Lugh and the Welsh Lleu relate, somehow, to the continental Lugus. However, most of the details of their myths are different – at least on the surface. I would argue that if you dig a little deeper there are quite a few similarities, but I see that they are still quite divergent. On the other hand, the story of Rhiannon in The Mabinogi, and the story of Macha, in The Tain, while not the same, have ten or twelve points of similarity – yet their names are unrelated. Art the two goddesses related? If so, what does that relationship imply? I don’t have the answer, but both from an analytical, academic viewpoint, and from a spiritual one, I’m convinced that the relationship is worth investigating. I’m not going to cover my ears, and say, “la-la-la-la I don’t want to hear about this,” for fear of compromising my purity as a hard polytheist.  

Are Lleu and Lugh the same deity? I don’t know. They don’t feel quite the same to me. Maybe more like overlapping pieces of the same deity? Like there is something going on – if you reach back past the stories, to what’s behind the stories, there’s an underlying something. I don’t feel the need to arrive at an answer to this. I think I understand each of them better as a result of understanding the other. I am not talking about archetypes here, and I am definitely not talking about universalism. I’m just saying I recognise the complexity of their history.

I get a lot of inspiration from working with myths. I get more than inspiration, actually. Working with myths is a devotional practice for me, and a big part (certainly not the only part, though) of how I draw close to deities and interact with them. The more I do this, however, the more I find a lot of connections between deities and maybe a few blurry edges. Rather than find this worrying, or a problem to be solved, I celebrate it. I see it as a deepening of my understanding sometimes, and at others it’s more like my attention has been drawn to a great mystery. And I mean mystery in the spiritual sense, not in the “what’s the answer?” sense. I mean “A truth that is divinely revealed but otherwise unknowable.”

I had an interesting question/comment from one of the students on my current Celtic Horse Goddesses course, where we have been talking a great deal about sovereignty and sovereignty goddesses.

The question was: “I sometimes wonder if sovereignty is the correct word, though it is certainly the word used in the literature. It may be that the word sovereignty is being tainted by its use in England by isolationists and the far right. The ‘ownership’ denoted by the word sovereignty seems wrong.”

I understand their concern, and would add that it’s not just England. In 2018, the US president was banging on about US sovereignty in a speech at the United Nations, and that wasn’t the only time.

There is a danger in treating words as “tainted” too readily, though. It forces us to look for new vocabulary, often less precise vocabulary, and this will, in turn, create confusion later about every use of the original word in older pieces of writing. I think it’s always worth trying to hang onto useful words by keeping their true, clear meaning in the public conversation. If we can’t do that with sovereignty, then perhaps we can at least keep it as a specialist word within the sphere of Celtic studies and Celtic Paganism.

As for the original question, I think sovereignty is exactly the right word, in spite of the recent taint. Sovereignty is the opposite of ownership, in a way. Ownership of land is actually a relatively modern idea, in the long sweep of history. To this day, we talk about "landholders" a lot, in British English. I think landholder is a more accurate word for what should be going on, and how things were viewed in Celtic societies.

Holding land implies responsibilities to the people who live on the land, and to the land itself. Sovereignty, in the sense of kingship, requires the virtues of strength, good judgement, fairness, and respect for the goddess who has conferred it. That goddess is inextricably linked with the land and if she/the land/the people are not respected by the holder of the sovereignty, things will get out of balance, and this will become increasingly obvious. In a well-working system of appointing leaders, the holder of sovereignty will then have to be replaced. I suspect that this was easier to maintain in smaller units of government, such as a kin-group, tribe, or a smaller geographical region.

The kind of sovereignty implied by the question, above, is actually something other than sovereignty as I would use the word in Celtic studies or Celtic Paganism. What’s often being implied by modern politicians is a kind of exceptionalist “It’s a free country and you can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do,” attitude. Or, perhaps, “It’s a free market.” It’s forgetting that everything is inextricably linked. It’s refusing to acknowledge that what you do has repercussions for others and for nature, and forgetting that therefore your actions will rebound on your land and your people.

We are feeling the consequences of choosing leaders who have ignored this for decades. For centuries. Now we have a climate crisis and a pandemic. I don’t think the sovereignty goddesses went away when we stopped calling ourselves farmers and got rid of our kings. I believe that they are still here, and that one reason some of us are called to honour them again is precisely because they are tied to the health of the land, to the sacredness of the natural world.

I do love the Cath Maige Tuired, which is sometimes called The Second Battle of Mag Tuired (or Moytura, etc.) in English. I’ve used it as a way to teach about Irish deities, ideas about kingship, the power of satire, and so many other things. My ears pricked up when I heard that Morgan Daimler was planning to do a new translation, including the poetic passages that Elizabeth A. Gray chose not to include.

English translations of The Cath Maige Tuired have been published twice before: first by Whitley Stokes in 1891, and by Elizabeth A. Gray in 1982. Gray’s version is considered the standard, and better of the two translations. Both are available online, although Gray’s extensive notes make it worth getting the print version.

I’ve heard Morgan say that she decided to learn Sengoidelc (Old Irish) because she was unhappy with Stokes’ translation due to its omissions, so this translation is a nice thing, and an understandable thing, for her to be doing.

As well as being a translator, Morgan writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her stated reason for doing translations, however, has always been “accuracy”, and sometimes very literal translations fail to achieve what they set out to do, which is to make the original meaning of a text clear. Idioms, for example, require careful handling. They rarely translate well, so either a similar idiom has to be substituted, or there will have to be a footnote. (I love footnotes, but I also love text that flows.) Also, many things other than meaning get lost in translations. Various aspects of style might be captured, poetic devices rarely can be. A sense of the nuance behind why the original says “steed”, instead of “horse” or “mount” is necessary, and the ability to convey that sense of the word to the target audience requires a particular kind of skill that isn’t always covered by “literal”. 

Of course, not being a scholar of Sengoidelc, I can’t judge any translator’s work on how well it represents the style of the original, or its accuracy. But translations of Irish texts aren’t really for scholars of the language – they are for those of us who aren’t! We have to trust our translators, and for that reason I hope that this translation will be read and commented on by a few professional Celticists, so that readers who want to can get a sense of the quality of this work, which I suspect is high.

After so much preamble, you’re probably wondering what I think of this book. There are many things I like about it. The fact that it is slim and inexpensive should make it accessible to a wider audience, although this was achieved by keeping the extra material to a minimum. The author’s note is two short pages, there’s no index, introduction, or other interpretive material, which I suspect many of Morgan’s readers would find helpful. However, the footnotes are very good, and I love the fact that they’re placed at the bottom of the page, not in some mysterious location at the back of the book. I don’t mind reading footnotes, but I detest leafing back and forth and losing my place. For me this is a huge bonus.

Let’s talk a bit more about the footnotes. One thing I like is that Morgan has given the meaning of characters’ names. This is something that translators of myths and bardic poetry don’t do often enough, in my opinion. It instantly adds a layer of insight that is otherwise lacking. The footnotes are also very “honest”. Inevitably, there are many problematic words in texts this old, so where there is doubt, or where she has disagreed with other translators, Morgan has simply explained her choice, and often given Gray and/or Stokes’ alternatives. I spoke earlier of “trusting” a translator, and such an open approach to things helps the reader to do just that.

Cath Maige Tuired is a good story. So an edition like this will be really valuable if that aspect is to the fore, which I think it is here. Since I already know the story, and love it, it’s a little hard for me to put myself in the shoes of a first-time reader, but I think they would enjoy it, and feel very supported by the footnotes.

As for the language in the prose sections, Morgan’s focus on accuracy might impede the flow a little, but I respect her clear priorities, and didn’t find it awkward or “clunky”, which is a danger with literal translations. In fact, many passages were a joy to read.

The real surprise, though, was the poetry. Literal translations of poetry often fall flat, but these do not. It’s obvious that translators are wary of these passages with good reason. Medieval poetry in Celtic languages is notoriously obscure, sometimes intentionally so. There is a love of puns and double-meanings which sets traps for translators at every step, and a tendency by either poets, or scribes, to “antique” the language further for effect.

The only other translation of these passages that I’ve seen were done by Isolde Carmody as part of an MA thesis. (Lugh’s poem here, the Morrigan’s poems here.) Since they will have had the oversight of a tutor, I assume that they are reasonably plausible. They are significantly different than Morgan’s, which definitely flow better and make at least as much sense. My big frustration, here, is that Morgan chose not to divide the poetry into lines, in all but one case. Maybe this was done to keep the cost of the book down, as it would have added some pages, but I think it loses a sense of rhythm and space for the reader when it’s dumped into paragraphs this way.

In her presentation of this book, Morgan places quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that she is an amateur translator, which is understandable and very honest. However, it think her efforts deserve a bit of attention from those who are on the academic side, as they are the only ones able to comment on the quality of the translation.

As some of my readers will know, I’m not fond of turning deities into symbols or interpreting them as mere archetypes, but I have nothing against symbols.

“But it’s made up!” “This isn’t traditional!” Well, no, it certainly isn’t. At least it isn’t a tradition of long standing, although it’s become something of a tradition among many modern Pagans. There is nothing wrong with new traditions, and as new traditions go, I think the Oak and Holly Kings idea is both benign and useful. Not all Pagans are religious. Some have no interest in deities but most of us are interested in the seasonal cycles of nature, and these chaps give us something which personifies that in a non-deific way. Most people don’t worship the Oak and Holly Kings, they are just symbols.

As symbols, these figures have come to riff pretty obviously on the foliate head iconography found on (mostly) English Norman churches. It’s generally thought that their original meaning is far from the ideas of the veneration of nature that are now applied to them, but I don’t think that’s important. It’s a modern, post-Christian interpretation of a common artistic expression, as is the modern understanding of The Green Man. On the cultural appropriation scale, I would rank it 1 (very low) to 0 (you must be joking). It doesn’t ask us to apply any archetypal mumbo-jumbo to some unsuspecting deity who will find it a poor fit.

Of course you may feel that your own culture or mythology offers all you need to understand and celebrate the endless journey between midsummer and midwinter, and if so, that’s fine. Christians don’t really need Santa Claus, but he’s fairly harmless and popular, and largely what you make of him. A symbol of the season, a Christian saint, or something for kids. I don’t feel that my own tradition has deities which strongly personify summer or winter, in spite of some associations. Nor do I feel that there are myths in any Celtic tradition which really describe the seasonal changes as a strong theme. There are hints. The Cailleach is a big one – but I still feel a bit wobbly about whether or not she is even a deity, and I think she has acquired a lot of new folklore, especially concerning her imprisonment of Bride as a spring maiden. The seasonal battle between  Gwythyr ap Greidol and Gwyn ap Nudd, alluded to in Culhwch and Olwen, suggests that there may have once been a seasonal battle myth, as does Arawn and Hafgan’s annual battle in the First Branch of the Mabinogi.

The fact that many modern Pagans try hard to find or recreate myths from cultural traditions may indicate that there is a need for such a myth. It’s possible that this is largely a modern need, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. It’s also possible that it’s just another neoPagan hangover from the glory days of Frazier and Graves. Well, modern Paganism owes them a lot, whether we like it or not.

Old isn’t always better. Culture-specific isn’t always better, either. I’m a devotional polytheist. I do my specific thing within that. However, I’m extremely glad of the wider neoPagan community. I like many of its traditions and loathe others. I like the Oak and Holly Kings. I occasionally get a little frustrated when people start making claims for their antiquity or spouting nonsense about the meanings of foliate heads on churches. But I’m nerdy like that. I love to get at the truth of things.

Still, what a great new set of symbols. People like writing stories about them, and creating beautiful new art depicting them. So now you know. I’m completely and utterly out of the closet as a fan on the Oak and Holly Kings.

So many Celtic warriors, like Vercingetorix or Boudicca, have their public memorials, as do many legendary kings like Alfred the Great or Brian Boru. Where is Urien’s memorial? Why are his stories no longer told? It’s a sad state of affairs.

He would come to be known as one of the blessed womb-burdens of Britain. Urien and his sister Efrddyl, children of the great Cynfarch, were twins. Efrddyl went on to bear triplets.

Urien’s own eldest children, Owein and Morfydd were also twins, begotten, if was said, on Modron, the daughter of Afallach, King of Annwfn (the otherworld) when he found her washing at a ford. It's a scene uncannily reminiscent of encounters with The Morrigan in Irish myth. Ever after, Owein was associated in some mystical way with Modron’s divine son, Mabon, a deity worshipped in North Britain as Maponnos.

These were three blessed womb-burdens of Britain, according to the triads.

Where was Urien born? We don’t know. This is a phrase you hear a great deal when discussing Urien, or Rheged, or Hen Ogledd (The Old Brythonic North). We don’t know.

Urien might mean “privileged” or “exalted” birth. There are no surviving legends about him as a youth. No prodigious feats. It would be surprising it such tales hadn’t existed at some point, but even if they had, that wouldn’t make them true.

Taliesin is the closest we can find to an eyewitness. The Book of Taliesin contains many poems which are unlikely to be the work of the historical Taliesin, but it contains twelve which might be. Of those, eight concern Urien, and one is an elegy for Owein, his son.

It’s unclear whether Taliesin was of a similar age to Urien, or whether he served as Urien’s court poet for many years or just a few. My money is on him being younger. There is something in the tone of those poems. Of course it was the job of a bard to praise his patron, but Taliesin sounds as if Urien made a deep impression on him. They feel almost worshipful. A little like love poems, at times. In amongst the sabre rattling there is often tenderness, adoration, and gratitude.

Taliesin describes a few battles – one at a place called Gwen Ystrad (the white strath) that could be anywhere, another at Catraeth, almost certainly Catterick, which Urien seems to have held for a time. In The Battle of Argoed Llwyfain, Taliesin tells how Urien and Owain refuse the demand for hostages, from the Angle leader, Fflamddwyn, giving battle and defeating him, instead. Flamddwyn, meaning “flame bearer” – probably known for burning the settlements of the Britons. “The hounds of Coel’s litter would be hard-pressed indeed before they’d hand over one man as a hostage,” asserts Owein, invoking his ancestor, Coel Hen. “I shall plan a whole year for my victory song,” boasts Taliesin, at the end of the story.

All this is something of a preamble. The final chapters of Urien’s life are not told by Taliesin. Nennius takes up the tale, briefly, to give us a more Saxon viewpoint –

According to tradition, Urien was an old man by the time he finally created enough unity among the warlords of the north to drive the Angles back. The story of what that required of him as far as battle or diplomacy in unclear. Was it the work of many years? We only know that Urien seems to have grown from a powerful northwestern warlord into an irresistible unifying force in the north, only to be cut down by a jealous rival at the last moment. As is so often the case, it becomes another story of how the Celts almost won.

 Ironically, Arthur, who we hear so much of today, was probably operating in the same sphere, at around the same time, or maybe a generation before. Yet Arthur gets barely a mention from the poets and historians closest to hand, leaving me to wonder about many of the stories of a great, tragic king who nearly united the Britons. Were tales which have Arthur’s name attached to them originally inspired by the deeds of Urien of Rheged?

Half a year ago, I made a little video about Taliesin – talking both about the story of Cerridwen and the shape-shifting episode, and also about the historical Taliesin and his relationship to Urien. Something got inside me when I was working on that. I needed to know more about Urien of Rheged. There were no books about him, but a great deal of tangled conjecture on the internet.

I started reading the scholarly material, most of which referred me back to the few written resources available. Nennius, Taliesin, the Welsh Triads, genealogies, and the Llywarch Hen poems. I was amused by the honest, self-deprecating remarks of different Celticists as they introduced their topics. The consensus: we don't know.

Amusing, and very human, but a bit disheartening, too.

Increasingly, though, I knew I wanted to tell Urien’s story. Laugh, if you must, but sometimes I felt Urien looking over my shoulder, asking me to write it. But how? I’m not a fan of the historical/fantasy novel, with lots of romance, adventure, and material made-up for effect. On the other hand, I’m no historian, and by this time I had established that there wasn’t enough historical material to make a story.

Then, I remembered who I am. Someone who loves myth and poetry and legend, as well as history. I began to wonder whether there was enough material in the poets, and other sources I mentioned above, to piece together Urien’s story. Not a story of historical fact, not a fanciful story fleshing out the few facts we have, but a simple stitching together of the early texts. It worked. The old texts created a rich picture of Urien’s life, and I swear I glimpsed a nod of thanks out of the corner of my eye.

I feel like writing this changed something. Changed me. It felt like a privilege to reweave the tradition of Urien, rather than try to answer historical questions. And it was a joy to discover that far from making stuff up out of whole cloth, as the saying goes, I found a cloth that was already surprisingly whole.

Self-publishing can mean uploading files to Amazon, or it can look like this. The only thing I don’t do is my own printing, because my volume of sales doesn’t currently justify me buying a good laser printer. (Some of you have heard my moans about dealing with printers, but we won’t talk about that…)

I write the content and unfortunately do the editing, too, which isn’t ideal, but the rates I charge myself are rock-bottom! I do the layouts and prepare the files. I wrangle with the printers more often than not, and bring the pages home and do my own folding and stapling. And I might listen to something nice like Candlelit Tales Irish mythology YouTube channel while I’m doing it.

I hope my customers think my efforts are worth it, and enjoy knowing that I get to keep a bigger chunk of what they pay for my books, because I do it this way. That means that after postage, packing, printing - I get a little something for my writing time.

If you like my writing, you might want to consider my books as a possibility if you’re doing a little holiday shopping, or just like to read. They're all listed on this page.

If you want to get each new book as it comes out, and give this venture a bit of extra support, you can get each new book automatically by joining my Patreon community at the Sturdy Pony tier ($7 monthly), or higher. Then, you can think of yourself as a bigwig publisher, giving me an advance on the next book!

In this recent post I looked at some common pitfalls when reading The Four Branches of the Mabinogi (and other Celtic myth). This is the other side of the coin. Some tips about what’s worth noticing and thinking about as you read The Four Branches.

About the Four Branches
Although the Mabinogi manuscripts that have survived date to the 14th century, dating the stories themselves is a lot harder. In the form that we find them, they may go back a couple of centuries earlier, but it’s much harder to date the material they came from. There are enough common themes and cognate names that are shared with Irish material several centuries older to suggest some common ancestry. There is enough in common with other with Indo-European myth, generally, to suggest that these stories have very long roots.

The “Mab” in Mabinogi means son, or boy and there are a couple of Celtic deities with related names: Maponos, and Mabon ap Modron. (Here’s a link to an in depth look at these deities.) Mabon ap Modron (divine son of the divine mother) has associations in Welsh-language lore with being a divine prisoner, and he is an important character in Culhwch and Olwen, which is in the wider collection of The Mabinogion.

The stories have a theme of mothers and sons and one theory is that many of these stories were originally stories about Mabon/Maponos. It has also been suggested that “Mabinogi” might imply that these are stories for the instruction of boys – specifically for young noblemen who would have been taught by bards, and who would have been expected to learn about the responsibilities and dangers of leadership. I believe that both these ideas have a lot of merit, and there is no reason that they can’t both be true. Probably, the more deeply mythic themes of motherhood, male youth, and kingship represent an older layer.  This may have been developed, over time, into stories which would require young men to think deeply about honour, marriage, and leadership. I think it is important to keep these ideas in mind, when reading the Four Branches.

Women’s themes
Women’s themes play a big part in The Four Branches. There is quite a bit of mistreatment of women, and there is also some extremely assertive behaviour by some of the females characters. For the most part, the females don’t sit in towers waiting to be rescued, nor do their lives revolve entirely around producing heirs for their mates. A theory which has not been widely accepted is that the “author” of The Mabinogi was a woman. The reasons for discarding that theory have less to do with disbelief that a medieval woman could be the author, and more to do with the lack of evidence. It's possible that The Mabinogi doesn’t exactly have an author. It almost certainly came down through the oral tradition, and how much responsibility any one individual had for the form in which we know it, is difficult to discern, although its likely that one individual was responsible for pulling The Four Branches together into the version we know. Still, referring to that person as “editor” or “redactor” is probably more accurate than “author”.

The way women are portrayed has caused some students to feel that the “true” stories of some of the female characters must have been altered by medieval patriarchal forces. That’s difficult to prove or disprove. While it’s true that the female characters are not always “good”, neither are the male characters. The motivations for the actions of Arianrhod and Blodeuedd, in particular, are left to the reader to ponder for themselves. Characters in The Four Branches are surprisingly three dimensional, and it’s a mistake to assume that only good (or bad) behaviour is being modelled. A more useful approach is to look for cause and effect, or to consider that the choices open to some characters are limited. What we can be certain of is that as Celtic myths or medieval stories go, The Four Branches seems unusually concerned with the treatment of women and the issues they face.

Overarching themes
Although The Four Branches forms a loosely chronological narrative, it is worthwhile to compare the branches to one another, and perhaps track a progression of ideas as the cycle progresses, rather than just look at them as some kind of saga. There are a number of themes which recur, including: weddings; motherhood; mothers losing their sons; large, futile battles; honour; magic; and deception. It’s worth noting how each of these themes is approached.

To take one example, there is a wedding in every branch, but they are each very different.

In The First Branch, Rhiannon appears in Pwyll’s kingdom and proposes marriage to him. They encounter some difficulties on the way to becoming man and wife, but work together to achieve it. Their relationship encounters more problems, but Pwyll remains essentially loyal, if sometimes a bit ineffective.

Just this one theme of weddings and marriages offers quite a bit of insight into The Four Branches. The degree of agency shown by Rhiannon at the beginning of her relationship to Pwyll, is dramatically different that Branwen’s situation, or Blodeuedd’s. A similar trend can also be seen when looking at other themes, like honour. Generally, the trajectory from First Branch to Fourth is not a positive one. So, as well as there being lessons within each story, perhaps we can begin to see bigger philosophical questions being tackled, if we make the effort. To some extent, this may be a commentary on the state of society in which The Four Branches found its form, but I believe that there are also much earlier religious and cultural forces underlying these themes.

I’m always encouraging people to read The Mabinogi – and Celtic myths in general. But I’m aware that not everyone gets a lot out of them. I put these thoughts together for a talk I gave recently, so before I forget it all, I thought I’d write it down. It’s safe to say that this advice works pretty well for reading most Celtic myth, not just The Mabinogi.

Thinking it’s damaged goods
This takes two forms:
1. The Christians wrecked it!
Yes, most medieval texts were copied out in monasteries. As modern people, we tend to assume that if someone entered a monastery, then they must have been almost fanatical in their religious views, but there’s no evidence for this. Sure, if you were a religious fanatic a monastery might be where you ended up, but people were there for all sorts of other reasons. Some were given to the church by their parents as children, some were attracted by the access to books and learning, and it’s quite possible that for others it was seen as a path not that different from becoming a Druid. There is even a line of thinking that some Druids were sort of “underground” in monasteries, although I’m not sure we should take it all that seriously.

Many of the monks were local, or had at least grown up in the culture that preserved the stories which became what we think of as The Mabinogi. It's possible that their main motivation for putting these tales on paper was to preserve them. They believed that the stories had value. I think they were prompted by the same urge to preserve lore that sustained the bards and other lore keepers who had existed for millennia.

There is little, if any, Christianisation of the stories in The Mabinogi. There is some Christianised language salted through the dialogue. This may have just been a reflection of how people spoke at the time, or an effort to put a few “key words” into the text, so that it couldn’t be called completely ungodly. You certainly see this with a lot of early bardic poetry, where most of the Christian references are in the opening few lines, or sometimes the last few lines. As if a nod to Him Upstairs would keep any disapproving bishops off the scent. The stories themselves do not feel like Christian stories – they feel closer to pre-Christian myth.

I can’t deny that many Celtic myths feel a little fragmented. Sometimes you sense that the story you’re getting must have been part of a bigger story. Other times, a text will refer to a story that we just don’t have anymore. I think it’s important not to get too hung up on this. Often, studying lesser known sources like The Triads and The Book of Taliesin will help fill in some gaps, but not always. Sometimes I do feel very angry at the Romans, the Saxons, and the Anglicised aristocracy, for destroying so much Celtic lore. Equally, I feel extremely proud and awestruck at how much was saved in spite of the cultural trauma being inflicted. I choose to celebrate that.
 
Reading it as fiction
We live in a society that consumes a lot of fiction in the form of books and films. We tend to plough through large books or multi-episode films with an enormous appetite. There’s an analogy there with a glutton stuffing themselves, but not really tasting their food very much.

Medieval texts are usually very economical with words. Some of that came from the need to be economical with ink and vellum, not to mention the human effort required to hand write things. So, The Mabinogi moves very fast. Almost every sentence is meaningful. Major action happens on every page. You can easily read The Four Branches in a day. But can you digest it?

Another habit we have from consuming fiction is reading mostly for identification. Notice how you read books and watch films. Most of us identify primarily with one character. Successful fiction is often constructed to encourage that. We feel we have a lot in common with the anti-hero or the oppressed female character. Or we long to be beautiful and engaged in romantic intrigue, or to be on a great quest or adventure.

Of course, myth can draw you into all of that, too, but keep your wits about you and you will get more out of it. Rather than wanting to be like one of the characters, or sort of falling in love with a character because you think you have a lot in common, pay attention to what’s going on in the story as a whole and you will find a much more interesting set of layers.

And finally
I believe this is good advice:
Take your time. Read a paragraph, think about it, repeat if necessary. Or read a story, sleep on it, or go for a nice walk and think about it. Then read it again.

Get above the trees and look down a the forest. What is going on in the story as a whole? Can you see causes and effects? What’s the cause behind the cause (behind the cause….).

Prepare for ambiguity and deep thinking. There are messages in myths. I believe that there are layers of messages that reveal themselves as we need them. But they are not black and white morality tales. Deep thinking will reveal surprising insights about justice, cosmology, and honourable behaviour. Those insights won’t be simple, or cut and dried. They will be nuanced. Don’t try to reduce them to some kind of Ten Commandments.

A greatly expanded version of this post appears in Four Essays on Celtic Mythology.