Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Ever since Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation first came to print in 1849, The Mabinogion has been regarded as one of the ‘great flowerings’ of medieval European literature. It’s stories, in particular those of the 'Four Branches', are regarded as the national epic of the Welsh and are to be compared with the great Irish cycles, the Norwegian Sagas, the Icelandic Eddas and even to Homer’s Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. This collection of magical tales are to be found in two surviving manuscripts, The White Book of Rhydderch and The Red Book of Hergest, which date from the 13^th and 14^th centuries respectively, though fragments of some of the Four Branches, (the Mabinogi proper) occur in other manuscripts dated to at least 100 years earlier than this. Linguistic evidence suggests that they were written down, in the form that we have them, sometime in the late 11^th century, though this is not universally accepted. There are also numerous allusions to certain characters and episodes in the Mabinogion to be found in the 'Triads of the Island of Britain' and also in the poems of the cynfeirdd and gogynfeirdd, the early and not so early Welsh poets. There are further references in the work of later poets, lexicographers, encyclopaedists, copyists, critics, forgers and translators which show that several of the characters to be found in these tales, particularly those in Math vab Mathonwy (the Fourth Branch), were traditionally associated with the constellations and with the stars of the Milky Way

It used to be widely supposed that these stories had grown and developed over time from a body of largely unrelated, traditional oral material, consisting of such international themes as 'The Calumniated Wife' and 'The King and His Prophesied Death', along with a raft of onomastic or aetiological tales. The theory goes that a gradual process of amalgamation inevitably caused internal episodic inconsistencies which in turn required that certain personages and narratives be dropped in favour of the invention of new characters and story-lines, or further borrowing from elsewhere, in order to make the stories 'work'. This diachronic approach – the exhaustive search for sources, cognates and variants - to the Four Branches found full expression in the work of W.J. Gruffydd's 'Math vab Mathonwy' and 'Rhiannon' and in Pronsias McCana’s ‘Branwen‘.

According to this school of thought, each tale changed with every telling, even if subtly, for that is the nature of the ‘oral tradition’, which it was held was the sole vehicle for the early transmission of the tales. Indeed, this is an opinion still held by one of the most recent translators into English of the Mabinogion - Sioned Davies, as she states in her introduction:

'Their roots lie in oral tradition, and they evolved over centuries before reaching their final written form'.

There is undoubtedly some truth to this view, but herein lies a problem, taken at face value it leads to the paradoxical position whereby these intricate and interwoven stories, the crown jewels of the medieval Welsh imagination, were arrived at by a process resembling a game of age long ‘Chinese whispers’, one is reminded of the absurdity that chimpanzees will eventually write Shakespeare given enough time. I believe that this chain of reasoning, still current in Mabinogion scholarship, has acted as a veil behind which the real Mabinogion can hardly be glimpsed.

In recent decades some commentators on the Four Branches have emphasized certain internal structural evidence which points to a single author and which has challenged this notion of multiple and anonymous authorship. Current scholarship is increasingly leaning in this direction and it is not uncommon now for commentators to describe the Four Branches as a unified, single work of art. J.K. Bollard for example has memorably likened the recurrent interweaving of the themes of friendship, marriage and feud in the Four Branches to the elaborate patterns found in Celtic knot-work. This is an attractive analogy, it offers a visual structure, a physical organising principle based upon a motif which is in itself deeply evocative of the Celtic cultural mindset, or at least our modern perception it.

I began to think about these matters when in my teens, in the mid 1970's, after I'd bought my first Mabinogion, when I became intrigued by a note to Lady Guest's translation of Math the son of Mathonwy regarding the character of Gwydion. She wrote as follows:

Gwydion ... He was...a great astronomer, and as such was classed with Gwynn ab Nudd, and Idris. The Milky Way is after him termed Caer Gwydion: similar honours indeed appear to have been paid to the whole family of Don. Himself (sic), gave his name to the constellation of Cassiopeia, in Welsh, Llys Don, the Court of Don; and Caer Arianrod, Corona Borealis, is so called after his daughter Arianrod, one of the heroines of the present Tale.ⁱ

Upon reading these words I was immediately reminded of another famous family, who were involved in an episode not from Welsh tradition but from the Greek story of Perseus; Cassiopeia and her husband Cepheus, their daughter Andromeda, Perseus himself had all been accorded the same honours as Guest was suggesting for the family of Don. Here were two legendary families from two, apparently widely separated cultures, both temporally and geographically, who were being associated directly with the constellations. Soon afterwards I discovered that Don ought not be considered as the father of Aranrhod, as Lady Guest had erroneously stated, but was more usually regarded as the mother of Aranrhod. I remember thinking that it seemed very curious that Don the mother of Aranrhod and Cassiopeia the mother of Andromeda were both being identified with the same constellation. Lady Guest's note then was the starting point to this inquiry and the purpose of this blog is to set out certain conclusions which I have arrived at in the course of investigating the origins of these stellar associations with major characters in The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, and in the other tales, Culhwch in particular, of the Mabinogion

It is has been suggested that these celestial allusions were a late development, born solely out of the interest in Greco-Roman mythology, astrology and astronomy which had become popular during the Welsh renaissance period around the turn of the sixteenth century. In support of this notion, for example, it is supposed that some over-enthusiastic Welsh antiquarian, in wanting to elevate 'Welsh Mythology' to the plane of Greek mythology, noticed the similarity between the names Arianrhod and Ariadne, (the usual owner of the Northern Crown), and so Corona Borealis became Caer Arianrodⁱⁱ. Alternatively, it is often baldly stated, with little or no attempt at producing evidence, particularly in Wiccan, Neo-Druidic and Archaeo-astronomical literature and websitesⁱⁱⁱ, that this material has an older, more mysterious provenance. Here, it is generally seen as part of a body of indigenous 'starlore' belonging, as it were, to an ancient Celtic heritage and reflected in the astronomical knowledge implied in the Coligny Calendar and in the alignments of megalithic monuments. There may well be some truth in both of these positions. However, this inquiry will take a synchronic view and focuses on the possible influence of a corpus of classical literature which had been preserved in the so-called 'Celtic Church' in Ireland and in Wales since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, and also on the Greco-Arabic astronomical learning which was becoming available to western European scholars through new Latin translations from around the turn of the first millennium.

Before discussing just what form this 'Astronomy' took it would be useful to establish the when, where and who in regard to the composition of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, as we have them, namely, the version(s) recorded in the White Book of Rhydderch and The Red Book of Hergest^iv. Although these are later redactions, from the mid-fourteenth and late-fourteenth centuries respectively, I have generally worked on the assumption that the date of composition was 'between about 1050 and about 1120', as reasoned by T.M. Charles-Edwards.^v As to who or what kind of person wrote the Mabinogi and where, there exists a loose consensus that the work was composed by a learned ecclesiastic at one of the clasau or else a monk at a monastery somewhere in Wales. There is much disagreement when it comes to the details of this broad picture. Sir Ifor Williams thought he was a monk from Dyfed,^vi building on this Pronsias Mac Cana tentatively argued that the work may have been a collaboration between Sulien and his son Rhygyfarch at Llanbadarn Fawr,^vii Sioned Davies suggests 'a cleric, or perhaps a court lawyer'.^viii Iestyn Daniel, of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, in response to Andrew Breeze's theory that the author of The Mabinogi was the Welsh warrior princess Gwenllian, has said, “I don’t think he is correct in deducing it is the work of a woman. Personally I think it is by a Dominican [monk]”.^ix For the purposes of this work then, in following the broad sweep of current wisdom, I will proceed on the reasonable assumption that if the Mabinogi and the Fourth Branch in particular contains any reference to Astronomy it would reflect the state of knowledge based on the teaching resources current in what remained of the clasau and in the monastic institutions of Wales, leading up to and during the broad period from about 1050 to about 1120.

Notes

i The Mabinogion, (From The Red Book of Hergest). Translated, with notes, by Lady Charlotte

Guest. London. 1877. Facsimile edition John Jones Cardiff Ltd. 1977. p.436

ii The likely veracity of this particular instance will be discussed in the following chapter, where it will also be argued that the author of the Fourth Branch intended Andromeda for Aranrhod.

iii Some contributors to websites who have taken the trouble to do some research and to provide sources include ‘Astrocelt’ on Gwydion at www.druidicdawn.org

iv Peniarth MS 6 (13th C.) predates these by about a century. It contains fragments of Branwen and

Manawyddan but unfortunately lacks Branches One and Four.

v The Mabinogi. A Book of Essays. Edited by C.W. Sullivan. 1996. 'The Date of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi'. Appendix: Branwen. T.M. Charles-Edwards. p53.

vi Pedeir Keinc Y Mabinogi. Ifor Williams. Cardiff. 1930

vii Branwen Daughter of Llyr. Pronsias Mac Cana. Cardiff 1958. pp 183-187

viii The Mabinogion. Sioned Davies. Oxford. 2007.

ix 'Experts clash over theory of female author of Mabinogion'. James McCarthy, Western Mail. Jul 6

2009