Chapter Two
THE BATTLE OF THE TREES |
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It seems that the Welsh minstrels, like the Irish poets,
recited their traditional romances in prose, breaking into
dramatic verse, with harp accompaniment, only at points of
emotional stress. Some of these romances survive complete with the
incidental verses; others have lost them; in some cases, such as
the romance of Llywarch Hen, only the verses survive. The most
famous Welsh collection is the Mabinogion, which is usually
explained as 'Juvenile Romances', that is to say those that
every apprentice to the minstrel profession was expected to
know; it is contained in the thirteenth-century Red Book of
Hergest. Almost all the incidental verses are lost. These
romances are the stock-in-trade of a minstrel and some of
them have been brought more up-to-date than others in their
language and description of manners and morals.
The Red Book of Hergest also contains a jumble of fifty-eight
poems, called The Book of Taliesin, among which occur the
incidental verses of a Romance of Taliesin which is not
included in the Mabinogion. However, the first part of the
romance is preserved in a late sixteenth-century manuscript,
called the 'Peniardd M.S.', first printed in the early nineteenth-century
Myvyrian Archaiology, complete with many of the same incidental verses,
though with textual variations. Lady Charlotte Guest translated this
fragment, completing it with material from two other manuscripts, and
included it in her well-known edition of the Mabinogion (1848).
Unfortunately, one of the two manuscripts came from the library of
Iolo Morganwg, a celebrated eighteenth-century 'improver' of Welsh documents,
so that her version cannot be read with confidence, though it has not
been proved that this particular manuscript was forged.
The gist of the romance is as follows. A nobleman of
Penllyn named Tegid Voel had a wife named Caridwen, or Cerridwen, and
two children, Creirwy, the most beautiful girl in the world, and Afagddu,
the ugliest boy. They lived on an island in the middle of Lake Tegid.
To compensate for Afagddu's ugliness, Cerridwen decided to make him highly
intelligent. So, according to a recipe contained in the books of Vergil
of Toledo the magician (hero of a twelfth-century romance), she boiled up
a cauldron of inspiration and knowledge, which had to be kept on the
simmer for a year and a day.
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pg.28
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Season by season, she added to the brew magical herbs
gathered in their correct planetary hours. While she gathered the herbs
she put little Gwion, the son of Gwreang, of the parish of Llanfair in
Caereinion, to stir the cauldron.
up down
Towards the end of the year three burning drops flew out and fell on little
Gwion's finger. He thrust it into his
mouth and at once understood the nature and meaning of all things past,
present and future, and thus saw the need of guarding against the wiles of
Cerridwen who was determined on killing him as soon as he had completed
his work. He fled away, and she pursued him like a black screaming hag.
By use of the powers that he had drawn from the cauldron he changed
himself into a hare; she changed herself into a greyhound. He plunged into
a river and became a fish; she changed herself into an otter. He flew up
into the air like a bird; she changed herself into a hawk. He became a
grain of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn; she changed herself into
a black hen, scratched the wheat over with her feet, found him and
swallowed him. When she returned to her own shape she found herself
pregnant of Gwion and nine months later bore him as a child. She could
not find it in her heart to kill him, because he was very beautiful, so tied
him in a leather bag and threw him into the sea two days before May Day.
He was carried into the weir of Gwyddno Garanhair near Dovey and
Aberystwyth, in Cardigan Bay, and rescued from it by Prince Elphin, the
son of Gwyddno and nephew of King Maelgwyn of Gwynedd (North
Wales), who had come there to net fish. Elphin, though he caught no fish,
considered himself well rewarded for his labour and renamed Gwion
'Taliesin', meaning either 'fine value', or 'beautiful brow'--a subject for
punning by the author of the romance.
When Elphin was imprisoned by his royal uncle at Dyganwy (near
Llandudno), the capital of Gwynedd, the child Taliesin went there to
rescue him and by a display of wisdom, in which he confounded all the
twenty-four court-bards of Maelgwyn -- the eighth-century British historian
Nennius mentions Maelgwyn's sycophantic bards -- and their leader
the chief bard Heinin, secured the prince's release. First he put a magic
spell on the bards so that they could only play blerwm blerwm with their
fingers on their lips like children, and then he recited a long riddling poem,
the Hanes Taliesin,, which they were unable to understand, and which will
be found in Chapter V. Since the Peniardd version of the romance is
not complete, it is just possible that the solution of the riddle was
eventually given, as in the similar romances of Rumpelstiltskin, Tom
Tit Tot, Oedipus, and Samson. But the other incidental poems suggest
that Taliesin continued to ridicule the ignorance and stupidity of Heinin
and the other bards to the end and never revealed his secret.
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pg.29
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The climax of the story in Lady Charlotte's version comes with another
riddle, proposed by the child Taliesin, beginning:
Discover what it is:
The strong creature from before the Flood
Without flesh, without bone,
Without vein, without blood,
Without head, without feet...
in field, in forest...
Without hand, without foot.
It is also as wide
As the surface of the earth,
And it was not born,
Nor was it seen...
up down
The solution, namely 'The Wind', is given practically with a violent storm
of wind which frightens the King into fetching Elphin from the dungeon,
whereupon Taliesin unchains him with an incantation. Probably in an earlier version
[?] the wind was released from the mantle of his comrade Afagddu or Morvran,
as it was by Morvan's Irish counterpart Marvan in the early mediaeval
proceedings of the grand Bardic Academy,
with which The Romance of Taliesin has much in common.
'A part of it blew into the bosom of every bard present, so that they all rose to their
feet.'
...since the Hanes Taliesin is not preceded by any formal
Dychymig Dychymig ('riddle me this riddle') or
Dechymic pwy yw ('Discover what it is')
[1]
commentators excuse themselves from reading it as a riddle at all. Some
consider it to be solemn-sounding nonsense, an early anticipation of Edward Lear and
Lewis Carroll, intended to raise a laugh; others consider that it has
some sort of mystical sense connected with the Druidical doctrin of the
transmigration of souls, but I do not claim to be able to elucidate this.
Here I must apologize for my temerity in writing on a subject which is not really my own. I
am not a Welshman, except an honorary one through eating the leek on St. David's Day while
serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and, though I have lived in Wales for some years, off
and on, have no command even of modern Welsh; and I am not a mediaeval
historian.
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pg.30
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But my profession is poetry, and I agree with the Welsh minstrals
that the poet's first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths. One day while I was
puzzling out the meaning of the ancient Welsh myth of Câd Goddeu ('The Battle
of the Trees'), fought between
Arawn King of Annwm
('The Bottomless Place'), and the two sons of Dôn, Gwydion and Amathaon, I had much the
same experience as Gwion of Llanfair. A drop or two of the brew of Inspiration
flew out of the cauldron and I suddenly felt confident that if I turned again to
Gwion's riddle, which I had not read since I was a schoolboy, I could make sense of it.
...The Romance of Taliesin contains a long poem, or group of poems
run together, called Câd Goddeu, the verses of which seem as nonsensical
as the Hanes Taliesin because they have been deliberately 'pied'...
[Here Graves goes on to claim that he has made sense of Câd Goddeu
('the Battle of the Trees") and to explain his position...]
more links about Robert Graves
{[1] (footnote): Another form is dychymig dameg
('a riddle, a riddle'), which seems to explain the mysterious ducdame ducame
in As You Like It, which jaques describes as 'a Greek invocation to
call fools into a circle' -- perhaps a favourite joke of Shakespeare's
Welsh schoolmaster, remembered for its oddity.}
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