Caer Gwydion

Caer Gwydion 

"His residence was among the stars and called Caer Gwydion".ⁱ

Introduction

There is an intriguing note to Lady Charlotte Guest's 1846 translation of Math the son of Mathonwy regarding the character of Gwydion, arguably the lead character in the Fourth Branch. This note was the starting point to this inquiry. 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.ⁱⁱ

What were Lady Guest's sources, where does this material originate, most importantly, did the author of Math have these celestial associations in mind, did he equate the Milky Way with Gwydion, Cassiopeia with Don, Corona Borealis with Aranrhod? Is it legitimate to ask whether he may have associated other characters in the Fourth Branch with other constellations? Math and Geowin, Pryderi, Llew and Gronw Pebr; did these characters belong to an astronomical scheme too? 

Without doubt, Lady Guest's initial reference is to the infamous 'third series' of Triads penned by Iolo Morgannwg and published in Y Myvyrian Archaiology in 1807:

89. The Three Renowned Astronomers of the Isle of Britain:

Idris the Giant;

Gwydion son of Dôn;

And Gwyn son of Nudd.

Such was their knowledge of the stars, their natures and qualities, that they could prognosticate whatever was wished to be known until the day of doom.ⁱⁱⁱ

Through her friendship with Taliesin Williams, Iolo's son, she also would have had access to the list of 37 constellations which gives, according to Iolo, the original Welsh names for the constellations, later to be contained within Volume I of Y Barddas also by Iolo Morgannwg, edited by J. Williams Ab Ithel and published in 1862:

Caer Gwydion, The Circle of Gwydion; 

The son of Don; one of "the three sublime astronomers of the Isle of Britain." 

Tr. 89, third Series. The Galaxy.^iv

However spurious the context of Triad 89 it is certain that these celestial associations had been handed down from an earlier period. Fifty years before the publication of the Iolo Manuscripts Lewis Morris (1701–1765) recorded in his Celtic Remains (completed in 1757, though it remained unpublished until 1878) the following:

Gwydion or Gwdion, Son of Don, Lord or Prince of Arvon. This Gwdion was a great philosopher and astronomer, and from the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, or Galaxy, in the heavens is called Caer Gwdion. His great learning made the vulgar call him a conjuror and necromancer; and there was a story feigned that when he travelled through the heavens in search of ...'s [sic] wife that eloped, he left this tract of stars behind him.^v

One hundred and fifty years before Morris's entry, John Jones of Gelli Lyvdy, 'noted in a MS. written by him before 1619':

Gwraig Huan ap Gwydion, a vu un o ladd ei gwr, ag a ddyfod ei fyned

ef i hely oddi gartref, ai dad ef Gwdion brenhin Gwynedd y gerddis bob tir yw amofyn, ac or diwedd y gwnaeth ef Gaergwdion (sef: via lactua) sy yn yr awyr yw geissio: ag yn y nef y cafas ei chwedyl , lle yr oedd ei enaid: am hynny y troes y wraig iefanc yn ederyn, a ffo rhag ei thad yn y gyfraith, ag a elwir er hynny hyd heddiw Twyll huan.^vi

       The wife of Huan^vii ap Gwydion was one in a plot to kill her husband, and said that he had gone away hunting, and his father Gwydion, King of Gwynedd, travelled every country to seek him and at last he made Caergwydion, (that is, via lactua [sic]), which is in the sky, to find him: and in heaven, he had news of him, where his soul was. Therefore he changed the young woman into a bird, and she fled from her father-in-law, and she is called from that day to this Huan's Deceiving (Twyll Huan).^viii

Of these two related episodes that John Jones is alluding to here the first is, very obviously, where Blodeuedd and Gronw Pebyr had previously colluded in the attempted murder of Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Huan), but on receiving the wound from Gronw's magically prepared spear, Lleu had flown away in the form of an eagle and Gwydion had set out in search for him. It is important to emphasise at this point that W.J. Gruffydd, in his seminal study of the Fourth Branch, uses this John Jones 'variant' on two occasions to 'prove' his point that in an earlier version of Math, (i.e. than the White Book redaction) Gwydion was the father, (and not merely the uncle) by incest with Arianrhod, of Lleu.^ix Gryffudd however makes no comment at all on the astronomical nature of the rest of the passage though presumably he accepted this aspect as an integral part of this ‘earlier version‘. This is how Jones and Jones translated the relevant passage from The White Book of Rhydderch:

         Then the tidings reached Math son of Mathonwy. Heaviness and grief Math felt within him, and Gwydion more than he by far. 'Lord,' said Gwydion, 'I shall never rest till I have tidings of my nephew.' 'Aye,' said Math, may God be thy strength.' And then he set out and began to go his way, and Gwynedd he traversed, and the length and breadth of Powys. When he had traversed every part, he came to Arfon, and came to the House of a villein in Maenawr Bennardd. He alighted at the house and stayed there that night.^x

        

Has John Jones's apparently extraneous material been omitted or even 'censored' from the extant tale, or contrary to Gryffudd's opinion, is it a later embellishment unrelated to the intentions of the author of Math? There are several points of interest here. First, the tradition, which John Jones recorded in the early seventeenth century, supplies an alibi or 'cover story' for Blodeuedd and Gronw's treacherous act. In order to explain Lleu's disappearance Blodeuedd must have told Gwydion that Lleu 'had gone away hunting' with the implication that he had not returned. This detail, which might be thought of as necessary to the flow of the narrative, is strangely lacking in Math, we are only told that, 'Then the tidings reached Math son of Mathonwy'. We are not told what tidings, neither is there any suggestion that either Math or Gwydion knew of the true fate of Lleu. Furthermore, the actions of Gwydion were not, at this juncture in the tale, directed in the least against Blodeuedd and Gronw. Even when Gwydion does finally find Lleu in the topmost branches of the 'world tree', it only occurs to him that the eagle is Lleu, but he doesn't know that it is. It may be inferred from this therefore, because we cannot otherwise explain the actions of Gwydion, that the 'cover story' given by Blodeuedd, (according to Jones) i.e. Lleu 'had gone away hunting', was at one time included in 'Math' and was, for whatever reason, omitted from the extant redactions contained in the Red and White Books.

It is possible to detect further striking evidence that this seemingly late and isolated story fragment once formed an integral part of the Mabinogi of Math. Consider the uncanny similarity of language of the Fourth Branch compared with the 'Jones fragment', Math has it that Gwydion 'traversed every part', and Jones relates that he 'travelled every country'. In addition, the Mabinogi has Gwydion say: 'I shall never rest till I have tidings of my nephew.' And the Jones' tradition supplies: 'and in heaven, he had news of him, where his soul was'. Is this where and how Gwydion learnt that a sow would lead him to Lleu? In the extant Mabinogi, Gwydion's arrival at the pig farm reads like an amazing stroke of luck. Once more the ‘Jones fragment’ supplies a rational narrative explanation for Gwydion's, otherwise unexplained, good fortune.

It would seem from this that what we have here is not an excerpt from a variant tradition, or a later imaginative re-rendering of Math but a fragment of an earlier literary version from which the extant text must have been derived. Did John Jones have access to this, now lost, version? Perhaps. With this tentative conclusion in mind, it is now worth placing side by side the following passage containing the astronomical allusions, from the tradition preserved by John Jones with the relevant passage from Math, as translated by Jones and Jones:

[Gwydion] travelled every country to seek him and at last he made Caergwydion, (that is, via lactea), which is in the sky, to find him: and in heaven, he had news of him, where his soul was. (Jones)

When he [Gwydion] had traversed every part, he came to Arfon, and came to the House of a villein in Maenawr Bennardd. He alighted at the house and stayed there that night. (Jones & Jones)

I want to focus now on the word 'alighted'. In the White Book of Rhydderch, the Welsh word used is diskynnu. Ford gives the following meaning: diskynnu - 'come upon; alight'.^xi The Red Book of Hergest has dysgynnu the same as modern Welsh - dysgynnu - which is defined in Y Geiriadur Mawr,^xii as 'to descend'. The Oxford Paperback Dictionary^xiii defines 'alight' thus: 'to descend and settle' and gives the following example of usage: the bird alighted on a branch. It would be amiss not to acknowledge that this word diskynnu/dysgynnu also carries the meaning 'to dismount', as from a horse, as does the English word 'alight' and this is how it has been interpreted by several translators including Gruffydd, Gantz, Bollard and Davies. Even those translators who have elected to use the word 'alighted', who include Lady Guest, Ford and Parker, most likely understood this word in the context of 'dismounting a horse'. But why should this be so? Jones and Jones certainly understood 'alighted' in the context of a bird coming to rest, for they use it in this sense, shortly after the instance under consideration, to describe Lleu's descent in eagle form:

And he let himself down till he was on the lowest branch of the tree...And he alighted on Gwydion's knee.^xiv

Nowhere, in the relevant part of the text of Math, is there any mention of a horse from which Gwydion could dismount. The fact is that the only other version of this episode that we possess is the one preserved by John Jones which insists that Gwydion searched for Lleu in the Milky Way, 'which is in the sky'. The presence in Math of the word 'alighted', (diskynnu/dysgynnu)^xv with it’s connotation of a bird coming to land, is therefore a matter of great interest because it too argues for the inclusion of the John Jones version of events in an earlier redaction. Leaving aside the question of Lleu's parentage, a more complete and harmonious version may now be reconstructed as follows:

Blodeuedd, the wife of Llew Llaw Gyffes, said that he had gone away hunting, and had not returned. Then these tidings reached Math son of Mathonwy. Heaviness and grief Math felt within him, and Gwydion more than he by far. 'Lord,' said Gwydion, 'I shall never rest till I have tidings of my nephew.' 'Aye,' said Math, may God be thy strength.' And then he set out and began to go his way, and Gwynedd he traversed, and the length and breadth of Powys. When he had traversed every part, and travelled every country to seek him he made Caergwydion, which is in the sky, to find him: and in heaven, he had news of him, where his soul was. At last he came to Arfon, and came to the House of a villein in Maenawr Bennardd. He alighted at the house and stayed there that night.

A further episode is mentioned, almost in the same breath, by John Jones, which we can recognise from the extant version of Math. This time the reference is to Gwydion's search for and transformation of Blodeuedd. Significantly, as has been mentioned, Lewis Morris, in the eighteenth century, related a version that has this action taking place in, or more specifically, resulting in the formation of, the Milky Way. Unfortunately, he appears not to have remembered the names of the characters^xvi and there is more than a suggestion here that he has heard, rather than read the story, although he attributes it to David Johns (fl. 1573-87)^xvii:

...and there was a story feigned that when he (Gwydion) travelled through the heavens in search of ...'s [sic] wife that eloped, he left this tract of stars behind him.

Lady Charlotte Guest‘s translation of this episode, (from the Red Book of Hergest) is as follows :

Then they called together the whole of Gwynedd, and set forth to Ardudwy. And Gwydion went on before and proceeded to Mur y Castell. And when Blodeuwedd heard that he was coming, she took her maidens with her, and fled to the mountain. And they passed through the river Cynvael, and went towards a court that there was upon the mountain, and through fear they could not proceed except with their faces looking backwards, so that unawares they fell into the lake. And they were all drowned except Blodeuwedd herself, and her Gwydion overtook. And he said unto her, “I will not slay thee, but I will do unto thee worse than that. For I will turn thee into a bird; and because of the shame thou hast done unto Llew Llaw Gyffes, thou shalt never show thy face in the light of day henceforth; and that through fear of all the other birds. For it shall be their nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee... and that thou shalt not lose thy name, but that thou be forever called Blodeuwedd... And the owl (tylluan)^xviii is still called Blodeuwedd^xix.

Unlike Morris's version, John Jones's account omits to tell whether these events should be seen as taking place in the Milky Way, but they do follow on immediately after Gwydion's celestial adventure in search of Huan (Lleu) and like this episode, despite the obvious name changes and the back to front structure, the language of Gwydion’s transformation of Twyll Huan again has strong echoes of the White Book redaction:

The wife of Huan ap Gwydion was one in a plot to kill her husband.

Therefore he (Gwydion) changed the young woman into a bird...

and she fled from her father-in-law...

and she is called from that day to this Twyll Huan.

When the corresponding text from Math is combined with the narrative structure of the Jones fragment, a very close relationship is revealed:

...because of the shame thou hast done unto Llew Llaw Gyffes...

he (Gwydion) said unto her I will turn thee into a bird...

she... fled to the mountain and her Gwydion overtook...

And the owl is still called Blodeuwedd.

Note the change of name from Blodeuedd (Flowers) to Blodeuwedd, (Flowerface). A similar onomastic twist is also implied in Jones's version: 'she is called from that day to this Twyll Huan' (Huan's Deceiving), the Welsh word for owl is Tylluan. There is a curious persistence here, in both cases a change in the spelling of the name of the wife results in a homonym signifying 'owl' and one is given the strong impression, once again, that Jones's source is a literary one. Moreover, one that is demonstrably closely related to the extant tale of Math in the White and Red Books.

'Thus, after the manner of the Greeks, the Britons formerly treated their stories and tales in order to keep them in memory'. In this way does John Jones conclude his account of Gwydion's search for Huan (Lleu) in the Milky Way and of the punishment of Twyll Huan (Blodeuwedd), though it is not made clear just where this mnemonic quality lies, or how it relates to the tales of the Greeks. How curious an echo this is of Jones’ contemporary and friend Dr John Davies's scrawled Latin note at the end of the Mabinogi of Math in the manuscript White Book of Rhydderch, 'This author strives, with his creations, to outdo the Chimera, or whatever monstrous creature all of Greece has to offer'.^xx

Daniel Huws has described John Jones of Gellilyfdy as 'the most heroic of all transcribers of Welsh literature'^xxi. He was certainly no Iolo Morgannwg and has never been accused of 'invention'. However, the fact that Jones may have had access to the White Book at about the time (1619) that he made this note^xxii, might lead one to suspect that his source was in fact the White Book itself and that the extra, astronomical details were added in by him from some other, perhaps more recent, source. I do not believe this for a moment, John Jones was an honest man. J. Gwenogvryn Evans described his character thus:

In services to Wales and its literature John Jones takes precedence of all his namesakes... The Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen...informs us "that he was an attorney in the court of the Marches of Wales, and that he early withdrew himself because he had too much honesty to pursue it." ...his interest in the Welsh language, and its literature dominated his whole life. For over forty-years we find him steadily at work making really beautiful copies of every old manuscript he could borrow and were it not for this supreme, though indiscriminate devotion of his pen to things Welsh, we should have lost altogether certain texts, which no longer exist except in his transcripts.^xxiii

In any case, we can trace Gwydion's specific association with the Milky Way to an even earlier period, because at least seventy years before John Jones made his careful copy of a now lost manuscript, another great renaissance Welshman called William Salesbury, recorded in his groundbreaking Dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe in 1547 that 'Caer Gwydion' was the Welsh name for the Milky Way. Salesbury's stated aim, in his preamble address to Henry VIIIth, was to educate the Welsh as to the pronunciation of the English language and this was in line with Henry's policy, (despite his own Welsh ancestry) of uniting England and Wales under the aegis of English cultural hegemony. There can be no conceivable reason, therefore, why Salesbury might have invented this equivalence and though no history or etymology is given in his dictionary, it might be guessed, given the conservatism of the Welsh language, that this usage of 'Caer Gwydion' for the Milky Way was not a recent innovation. We have now travelled backwards in time exactly three hundred years since the publication of Lady Guest's Mabinogion, where this enquiry began, and it transpires that, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Caer Gwydion was part of the common parlance of the ordinary Welsh speaking men and women of Wales. That this was also the case in the two previous centuries is proved by the presence, as Mark Williams has noted, of 'Caer Gwydion' in relation to the Milky Way in the poetry of Lewis Glyn Cothi, writing in the late fifteenth century, and of Gruffudd Grug writing in the late fourteenth century. Both referred to the Milky Way using the term 'Caer Gwydion', and both poets were contemporaries of the scribes of the extant redactions of Math vab Mathonwy. Why did these poets choose to refer to this celestial version of Math whilst the scribes of the Red and White books apparently chose to edit out all overt reference it? Before attempting to answer this question it is worth examining the extant version(s) of The Fourth Branch to see if there are any further traces of evidence of this astronomical 'variant'.

I propose that we can point to three further instances within The Fourth Branch, which allude to, if only just below the narrative surface, an astronomical explanation for Gwydion, These instances also focus on certain avian attributes and, if this is accepted, a constellational identity for Gwydion, within the Milky Way, appears to present itself, the constellation in question is Cygnus the Swan.

The first instance is when Gwydion is disguised as the Pencerdd or 'the chief poet' at the court of Pryderi. In order to be convincing in the part he would be required to wear a tugen, as was the legal privilege of the pencerdd, this was a mantle made from the feathered pelts of various water birds but very often described as being simply a mantle of swan feathers.^xxiv To complete the disguise he must carry a harp, not the modern Welsh harp but the 'crwth' of medieval Wales, the older Welsh version of the lyre, in other words he is disguised as a swan with a lyre. Second, in the conversation between Pryderi and Gwydion (wearing his swan feather mantle, idly plucking his lyre) following the evenings entertainment at Rhuddlan Teifi, Gwydion enquires of Pryderi, 'can anyone deliver my request to you better than I myself?' Pryderi's apparently throwaway reply is illuminating and may well have elicited knowing laughter from a learned audience, 'No indeed,' said Pryderi. 'Yours is a very good tongue.'^xxv Is this an aside to an audience, a pun? Whether swans tongues were a delicacy served at the tables of British noblemen I could not say, certainly entire swans were served at medieval banquets. But perhaps the more apt pun is directed towards the ancient and widespread notion that, only the tongue of a swan was able to separate milk from water. This idea was based on the swans' reputation as the purest of birds, only the tongue of a swan was good enough to separate fact from fiction. Third, the final visit that Gwydion and Lleu make to Caer Aranrhod again emphasises their changing appearance in order to be disguised as poets, with the implicit invitation to the audience/readership to visualise this transformation once more, which in all likely-hood involved Gwydion carrying a lyre and donning a swan feathered pelt. 

Another reason for suspecting a connection between Gwydion and Cygnus and Lyra concerns Gwydion's portrayal in the Cad Goddeu as a sort of avatar of Orpheus, who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, on his return from the Underworld animates the trees by plucking the strings of his lyre, exactly as Gwydion does in The Battle of the Trees. Orpheus, according to Plato was transformed upon his death into the constellation Cygnus and placed next to Lyra.

Finally, following his adventure in the Milky Way, (according to the John Jones frament) Gwydion sings three englynion to Lleu/Eagle, who is located at the top of what most commentators agree represents the World Tree or the Axis Mundi. The second englyn contains an interesting number:

... With that the eagle let himself down till he was in the middle of the tree. Then Gwydion sang another englyn:

Grows an oak between two lakes.

Nor rain wets it, nor heat melts;

Nine score hardships hath he suffered

In its top, Lleu Llaw Gyffes.

It is curious that the eagle 'was in the middle of the tree'. but that Lleu Llaw Gyffes was 'in its top', this apparent discrepancy disappears if it is accepted that Llew and the eagle were intended, in the mind of the author, to represent the constellations of Perseus and Aquila respectively. To appreciate how neat an explanation this is, a very useful tool is the Philips Planisphere for 51.5 degrees North, this allows you to track the movements of the constellations over time as they appear to an observer in Wales. This enables you to watch Perseus/Llew set in the North while Aquila/Eagle rises in the East and then travels 180 degrees (nine score hardships) across the sky to set in the West, with Perseus/Llew now in the topmost branches of the (world) tree, i.e. at Zenith. I will discuss this particular episode in more detail later, for now it is sufficient to illustrate how the numbers in Math lend convincing support to the idea that there is an embedded level in the tale which can only be understood in terms of Astronomy.

Aquila the Eagle has traversed 180 degrees or 'nine score hardships' to set in the west, Cygnus or Gwydion has also traversed 'every part' to find Lleu Llaw Gyffes or Perseus, who is is at the very top of the sky. (The chart is Schaubach's northern hemisphere).

In all of this, it is difficult not to see the constellations of Cygnus the Swan, which dominates the Milky Way of the northern celestial hemisphere, and of the adjacent Lyra the Harp. To the medieval Celtic mindset the image presented by Cygnus and Lyra would have been immediately recognisable as a 'pencerdd', particularly so, if the narrator/performer of this tale happened to be a similarly accoutred chief poet. Note also that Lyra was often depicted as The Desert Falcon which like the owl is a nocturnal predator, and in the case of Lleu Llaw Gyffes note that Aquila the Eagle is also a constellation of the Milky Way. When this is combined with what can be gleaned from the evidence of Lewis Morris and John Jones, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the author of Math fab Mathonwy, in telling the story of Gwydion, Blodeuwedd and Lleu, had in mind the group of constellations anciently known as the Stymphalian Birds, Cygnus, Lyra and Aquila. In modern times, many people are familiar with this group from their brightest or alpha stars, respectively Deneb, Vega and Altair for which we must thank another legendary Astronomer Patrick Moore for coining the phrase 'The Summer Triangle'.

Notes

i (The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. 1911. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, 152-3.)

ii 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

iii From the compilation of Iolo Morganwg, published in 1807, cited according to Y. Leitch “Gwyn”,

The Temple Publications, Wells 2007. Y Myvyrian Archaiology in 1807.

iv Y Barddas. Volume I. Iolo Morgannwg, edited by J. Williams Ab Ithel .published in 1862. Here is the whole list:
1. Caer Arianrod,  1.The Circle of Arianrod; 

2. Yr Orsedd Wenn, 2. The White Throne;

3. Telyn Arthur, 3. Arthur's Harp; 

4. Caer Gwydion, 4. The Circle of Gwydion; 

5. Yr Haeddel fawr, 5. The Great Plough-tail; 

6. Yr Haeddel fach, 6. The Small Plough-tail;

7. Y Llong fawr, 7. The Great Ship;

8. Y Llong foel, 8. The Bald Ship;

9  Y Llatheidan, 9. The Yard;

10. Y Twr Tewdws, 10. Theodosius's Group; 

11. Y Tryfelan, 11. The Triangle;

12. Llys Don, 12. The Palace of Don; 

13. Llwyn Blodeuwedd, 13. The Grove of Blodeuwedd;

14. The Chair of Teyrnon; 14. Cadair Teyrnon,

15. The Circle of Eiddionydd; 15. Caer Eiddionydd,

16. The Circle of Sidi; 16. Caer Sidi,

17. The Conjunction of a Hundred Circles; 17. Cwlwm Cancaer,

18. The Camp of Elmur; 18. Lluest Elmur,

19. The Soldier's Bow; 19. Bwa ’r Milwr,

20. The Hill of Dinan; 20. Brynn Dinan,

21. The Hen Eagle's Nest; 21. Nyth yr Eryres,

22. Bleiddyd's Lever;         22. Trosol Bleiddyd,

23. The Wind's Wing; 23. Asgell y Gwynt,

24. The Trefoil; 24. Y Feillionen,

25. The Cauldron of Ceridwen; 25. Pair Caridwen,

26. Teivi's Bend; 26. Dolen Teifi,

27. The Great Limb; 27. Yr Esgair fawr,

28. The Small Limb; 28. Yr Esgair fechan,

29. The Large-horned Oxen; 29. Yr Ychen Bannog,

30. The Great Plain; 30. Y Macs mawr,

31. The White Fork; 31. Y fforch wenn,

32. The Woodland Boar; 32. Y Baedd Coed,

33. The Muscle; 33. Llywethan,

34. The Hawk; 34. Yr Hebog,

35. The Horse of Llyr; 35. March Llyr,

36. Elffin's Chair;         36. Cadair Elffin,

37. Olwen's Hall. 37. Neuadd Olwen,

v Celtic Remains. Lewis Morris.1701-1765). Quoting Gruffydd.

vi Peniarth MS 112 880-881. John Jones of Gelli Lyvdy, noted in a MS. written by him before 1619.

Quoting Gruffydd.

vii See Gruffydd, (Math vab Mathonwy) for an explanation of 'Huan' for 'Lleu', in which he also notes:

'It is not impossible that just as Mathien means "bear born," Lougen here is meant to mean "Lion-

born."

viii Gruffydd's translation. Compare with this translation from www.maryjones.:

'The wife of Huan ap Dôn was a party to the killing of her husband, and she said that he had gone to hunt away from home. And his father, Gwydion, the King of Gwynedd, traversed all countries in search of him, and at last made Caer Gwydion, that is the via lactea, which is in the sky, to seek him. And he found him in heaven, where was his soul. And for that he turned the young wife into a bird and she fled form her father-in-law, and is called to this day Twyll Huan. Thus, after the manner of the Greeks, the Britons formerly treated their stories and tales in order to keep them in memory'.

ix Gruffydd, Math vab Mathonwy pp. 138 & 198

x The Mabinogion. Translated, edited and introduced by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones and a preface

by John Updike. Everyman's Library. London. 2000. pp 64-65

xi Math uab Mathonwy. Text from the Diplomatic Edition of the White Book of Rhydderch, by J. Gwenogvryn Evans. Edited, with Notes and Glossary by Patrick K. Ford. Ford & Baillie, Belmont. 1999.

xii M.A. W.O. Thomas, Y Geiriadur Mawr The Complete Welsh-English, English-Welsh Dictionary. H. Meurig Evans, B.A. Stephen J. Williams, M.A., D. Litt. Gomer. Lllandysul. 2007

xiii The Oxford Paperback Dictionary Joyce M Hawkins Third Edition. Oxford University Press 1989.

xiv Jones & Jones p 66. However, the word here translated is dygwydawd. Ford gives dygwyd: vn. 'fall'

xv There are at least two other instances in the Mabinogi where 'alight' has been used to describe a

bird descending and settling - for example, Lady Guest and W.J.Gruffydd translate the crucial

incident in the naming of Llew Llaw Gyffes in almost identical fashion "And thereupon, lo, a wren

alighting/alighted on board the ship". Ac ar hynny llyma y dryw yn seuyll ar vwrd y llog. (but Ford

gives: seuyll - 'stand'. modern Welsh = sefyll - 'to stand'.) And in 'Branwen Uerch Llyr' in the

episode in which Branwen sends a starling with the message tied around its leg, to Bran the

Blessed, the identical sense is given... "It alighted on his shoulders and ruffled its feathers until the

letter could be seen, and it was realised that the bird was reared among dwellings", 'A diskynnu ar e

yscwyd, a garwhau y phluf, yny arganuuwyt y llythyr, ac adnabot meithryn yr ederyn yg kyuanned'.

(Branwen Uerch Llyr. Derick S. Thomson. The Dublin Institute For Advanced Studies).

There are two instances in Cilhwch and Olwen; Both Menw son of Teirgwaedd and Gwyrhyr

Interpreter of Tongues changed themselves into bird form and both alighted above the lair of

Twrch Trwyth. In all of these cases the author was thinking of Corvus the Crow - Welsh Bran.

xvi Gruffydd considers the omission down to Silvan Evans, the editor of Celtic Remains, who 'has

failed to read the husband's name.'

xvii Bodleian Add, MS 14,886, f. 129r. See P.C. Bartrum, A Welsh Classical Dictionary. Aberystwyth,

1993. p. 369. Source: Mark Williams. Fiery Shapes. Oxford 2010. p. 91

xviii My italics and my parenthesis.

xix Guest. pp 431-432

xx ‘Hic auctor certat fictis superare Chimaerum / Vel quicquid monstri Graecia tota refert.

xxi Daniel Huws. Medieval Welsh Manuscripts. University of Wales Press and The National Library of

Wales. 2000. p 261

xxii According to Robert Vaughan, The White Book after 1614 was in the possession of one John

Wynn of Twr, a close neighbour of John Jones. It is not known for certain when it came in to

his care but by c. 1634 The White Book was definitely ‘with John Jones’. See Huws

pp 260-261

xxiii The Second Portion of the Welsh Manuscripts at Peniarth, Tywyn, Merioneth. J. Gwenogvryn

Evans. Historical Manuscripts Commission. 1905.

xxiv Cormac's Glossary. TUGEN: 'covering (tuige) of birds (én), for it is of skins of birds white and

many-coloured that the poets' toga is made from their girdle downwards, and of mallards' necks

and of their crests from the girdle upwards to their neck'.

The following quote from 'The Siege of Druim Damhghaire' concerning the druid Mogruith is

explicit in it's description of the ability of druids to fly to 'the heavens', which here must mean the

starry firmament “Mogruith’s skin of the bull was brought to him and also his enchennach (bird-

dress) with it’s flying-wings. Then he rose up, in company with the fire of the earth and flew into

the air and the heavens.”

Admittedly, I have not been able to find the provenance for the many claims such as: 'Gwydion's

stars are the constellation known as The Northern Cross or Cygnus' Christine O’Keeffe.

Copyright 1997 And: 'Like shamans in other countries, Irish poets wore feathered cloaks called

tugen. Some say that these were of swan feathers; others describe them as multi-coloured or

containing mallard feathers.' Anna Franklin. And: 'Swans are also sacred to Bards, and their skin

and feathers were used to make the tugen, the ceremonial Bardic Cloak'. Susa Morgan Black, FSA

Scot. Etc.

xxv It is possible that this whole vignette was intended to be amusing and self referential; potentially, we

may picture an actual scene, where during a performance of Math, a swan feathered, lyre carrying

chief poet may have told this story, about a swan feathered, lyre carrying chief poet who is telling

stories to a Welsh chieftain, to a Welsh chieftain! 

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