GWION’S RIDDLE

When with this complicated mythological argument slowly forming in my mind, I turned again to the Hanes Taliesin (‘The Tale of Taliesin’), the riddling poem with which Taliesin first addresses King Maelgwyn in the Romance, I already suspected that Gwion was using the Dog, the Lapwing and the Roebuck to help him conceal in his riddle the new Gwydionian secret of the Trees, which he had somehow contrived to learn, and which had invested him with poetic power. Reading the poem with care, I soon realized that here again, as in the Câd Goddeu, Gwion was no irresponsible rhapsodist, but a true poet; and that whereas Heinin and his fellow-bards, as stated in the Romance, knew only ‘Latin, French, Welsh and English’, he was well read also in the Irish classics – and in Greek and Hebrew literature too, as he himself claims:

I realized too, that he was hiding an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery, but had not made this secret altogether impossible for a well-educated fellow-poet to guess.

I here use the name ‘Gwion’ for ‘Taliesin’, to make it quite clear that I am not confusing the miraculous child Taliesin of the Romance of Taliesin with the historic Taliesin of the late sixth century, a group of whose authentic poems is contained in the Red Book of Hergest, and who is noticed by Nennius, in a quotation from a seventh-century genealogy of the Saxon Kings, as ‘renowned in British poetry’. The first Taliesin spent much of his time during the last third of the sixth century as a guest of various chiefs and princes to whom he wrote complimentary poems (Urien ap Cynvarch, Owein ap Urien Gwallag ap Laenaug, Cynan Garwyn ap Brochfael Ysgythrog, King of Powys, and the High King Rhun ap Maelgwn until he was killed by the Coeling in a drunken quarrel). He went with Rhun in the first campaign against the men of the North, the occasion of which was the killing of Elidir (Heliodorus) Mwynfawr, and the avenging raid of Clydno Eiddin, Rhydderch Hael (or Hen) and others, to which Rhun retaliated with a full-scale invasion. This Taliesin calls the English ‘Eingl’ or ‘Deifyr’ (Deirans) as often as he calls them ‘Saxons’, and the Welsh ‘Brython’ not ‘Cymry’. ‘Gwion’ wrote about six centuries later, at the close of the Period of the Princes.

In his Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, Dr. Ifor Williams, the greatest recent authority on the text of the Taliesin poems, postulates from internal literary evidence that parts of the Romance existed in a ninth-century original. I do not dispute this, or his conclusion that the author was a paganistic cleric with Irish connexions; but must dispute his denial that there is ‘any mysticism, semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism’ in the poems and that the whole rigmarole can be easily explained as follows:

As a scholar, Dr. Williams naturally feels more at home with the earlier Taliesin, who was a straight-forward court bard of the skaldic sort. But the point of the Romance to me is not that a pseudo-Taliesin humorously boasted himself omniscient, but that someone who styled himself Little Gwion, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion, a person of no importance, accidentally lighted on certain ancient mysteries and, becoming an adept, began to despise the professional bards of his time because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic lore. Proclaiming himself a master-poet, Gwion took the name of Taliesin, as an ambitious Hellenistic Greek poet might have taken the name of Homer. ‘Gwion son of Gwreang’ is itself probably a pseudonym, not the baptismal name of the author of the Romance. Gwion is the equivalent (gw for f) of Fionn, or Finn, the Irish hero of a similar tale. Fionn son of Mairne, a Chief Druid’s daughter, was instructed by a Druid of the same name as himself to cook for him a salmon fished from a deep pool of the River Boyne, and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art. The equivalent of Gwreang is Freann, an established variant of Fearn, the alder. Gwion is thus claiming oracular powers as a spiritual son of the Alder-god Bran. His adoption of a pseudonym was justified by tradition. The hero Cuchulain (‘hound of Culain’) was first named Setanta and was a reincarnation of the god Lugh; and Fionn (‘fair’) himself was first named Deimne. Bran was a most suitable father for Gwion, for by this time he was known as the Giant Ogyr Vran, Guinevere’s father – his name, which means ‘Bran the Malign’ (ocur vran),1 has apparently given English the word ‘ogre’ through Perrault’s Fairy Tales – and was credited by the bards with the invention of their art and with the ownership of the Cauldron of Cerridwen from which they said that the Triple Muse had been born. And Gwion’s mother was Cerridwen herself.

It is a pity that one cannot be sure whether the ascription of the romance in an Iolo manuscript printed by the Welsh MSS. Society, to one ‘Thomas ap Einion Offeiriad, a descendant of Gruffydd Gwyr’, is to be trusted. This manuscript, called ‘Anthony Powel of Llwydarth’s MS.’, reads authentically enough – unlike the other notices of Taliesin printed by Lady Guest, on Iolo Morganwg’s authority, in her notes to the Romance of Taliesin:

If this is a genuine mediaeval document, not an eighteenth-century forgery, it refers to a muddled tradition about the sixth-century poet Taliesin and accounts for the finding of the Divine Child in the weir near Aberdovey rather than anywhere else. But probably ‘Gwion’ was more than one person, for the poem Yr Awdyl Vraith, which is given in full in Chapter Nine, is ascribed in the Peniardd MS. to Jonas Athraw, the ‘Doctor’ of Menevia (St. David’s), who lived in the thirteenth century. A complimentary reference to the See of St. David’s concealed in the Hanes Taliesin supports this ascription. (Menevia is the Latin form of the original name of the place, Hen Meneu, ‘the old bush’; which suggests the cult of a Hawthorn-goddess.)

Dr. Williams explains the confused state of the texts of the poems contained in the Romance by suggesting that they are the surviving work of the Awenyddion of the twelfth century, described by Giraldus Cambrensis:

The Awenyddion, the popular minstrels, may indeed have disguised their secrets by a pretence of being possessed by spirits, as the Irish poets are recorded to have done by buffoonery, and they may have induced their ecstasies by toadstool eating; but Câd Goddeu, Angar Cyvyndawd and all the other strange poems of the Book of Taliesin medley read like nonsense only because the texts have been deliberately confused, doubtless as a precaution against their being denounced as heretical by some Church officer. This explanation would also account for the presence of simple, dull religious pieces in the medley – plausible guarantees of orthodoxy. Unfortunately a large part of the original material seems to be lost, which makes a confident restoration of the remainder difficult. When an authoritative version of the text and an authoritative English translation has been published – none is so far available, else I should have used it – the problem will be simpler. But that the Awenyddion were descended from the Trojans is an important statement of Gerald’s; he means that they inherited their traditions not from the Cymry but from the earlier inhabitants of Wales whom the Cymry dispossessed.

The context of the thirteenth-century version of the Romance can be reconstructed from what Gwynn Jones has written of Phylip Brydydd of Llanbadarn Fawr and the poem in which he mentions his contention with the beirdd yspyddeid, vulgar rhymesters, as to who should first present a song to Prince Rhys Ieuanc on Christmas Day.

Phylip’s complaint that his opponent Bleiddri had no ‘honour’ means that he did not belong to the privileged class of Cymric freemen from which the court-bards were chosen. In the Romance of Taliesin we have the story from the side of the minstrel, but an extraordinarily gifted minstrel, who had studied abroad among men of greater learning than were to be found anywhere in Wales and who insisted that the court-bards had forgotten the meaning of the poetry that they practised. Throughout the poems the same scornful theme is pressed:

This unprivileged minstrel boasts that the Chair is rightly his: he, not any poet of Phylip Brydydd’s merely academic attainment, is the true heir of Taliesin. However, for courtesy’s sake, the tale of Gwion and Cerridwen is told in terms of sixth-century, not thirteenth-century, history. ‘The speech of strangers’ which, Phylip complains, has corrupted Gwynedd is likely to have been Irish: for Prince Gruffudd ap Kynan, a gifted and progressive prince educated in Ireland, had introduced Irish bards and minstrels into his principality in the early twelfth century. It may have been from this Irish literary colony, not from Ireland itself, that Gwion first derived his superior knowledge. Gruffudd also had Norsemen in his entourage. His careful regulations for the government of bards and musicians were revived at the Caerwys Eisteddfod in 1523.

Here, finally, is the Hanes Taliesin riddle in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation. In it, Little Gwion answers King Maelgwyn’s questions as to who he was and whence he came:

The deceitful cry of the Lapwing! Gwion was not so ignorant of sacred history as he pretended: he must have known perfectly well that Moses never crossed the Jordan, that Mary Magdalene was never in the Firmament, that Lucifer’s fall had been recorded by the prophet Isaiah centuries before the time of Alexander the Great. Refusing to be lured away from the secret by his apparently nonsensical utterances, I began my unravelling of the puzzle by answering the following questions:

I felt confident that I would presently catch a gleam of white through the tangled thicket where the Roebuck was harboured.

Now, according to the Pentateuch, Moses died on Pisgah on the other side of Jordan and ‘no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day’; and of all the Children of Israel who had come with him into the wilderness out of the house of bondage, only two, Caleb and Joshua, crossed into the Promised Land. As spies they had already been bold enough to cross and recross the river. It was Caleb who seized Hebron from the Anakim on behalf of the God of Israel and was granted it by Joshua as his inheritance. So I realized that the Dog had torn the whole poem into shreds with his teeth and that the witty Lapwing had mixed them up misleadingly, as she did with the torn shreds of the fruit passage in the Câd Goddeu. The original statement was: ‘I conveyed the Divine Spirit through the water of Jordan to the level of the vale of Hebron.’ And the ‘I’ must be Caleb.

If the same trick had been played with every line of the Hanes Taliesin, I could advance a little farther into the thicket. I could regard the poem as a sort of acrostic composed of twenty or thirty riddles, each of them requiring separate solution; what the combined answers spelt out promised to be a secret worth discovering. But first I had to sort out and reassemble the individual riddles.

After the misleading ‘through the water of Jordan’ had been removed from line 25, ‘I strengthened Moses’ remained. Well, who did strengthen Moses? And where was this strengthening done? I remembered that Moses was strengthened at the close of his battle with the Amalekites, by having his hands held up by two companions. Where did this battle take place and who were the strengtheners? It took place at Jehovah-Nissi, close to the Mount of God, and the strengtheners were Aaron and Hur. So I could recompose the riddle as: ‘I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity’. And the answer was: ‘Aaron and Hur’. If only one name was needed, it would probably be Hur because this is the only action recorded of him in the Pentateuch.

Similarly, in line 25, ‘I have been with Mary Magdalene’ had to be separated from the misleading ‘in the firmament’ and the other part of the riddle looked for in another verse. I had already found it by studying the list of people present at the Crucifixion: St. Simon of Cyrene, St. John the Apostle, St. Veronica, Dysmas the good thief, Gestas the bad thief, the Centurion, the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleopas, Mary Magdalene….But I had not overlooked the woman who (according to the Proto-evangelium of St. James) was the first person ever to adore the child Jesus, the prime witness of his parthenogenesis, and his most faithful follower. She is mentioned in Mark XV, as standing beside Mary Magdalene. So: ‘I was with Mary Magdalene at the place of the Crucifixion of the merciful Son of God.’ The answer was: ‘Salome’.

Who instructed Enoch? (Eli does not, apparently, belong to this riddle.) I agree with Charles, Burkitt, Oesterley, Box and other Biblical scholars that nobody can hope to understand the Sayings of Jesus who has not read the Book of Enoch, omitted from the canon of the Apocrypha but closely studied by the primitive Christians. I happened to have been reading the book and knew that the answer was ‘Uriel’, and that Uriel instructed Enoch ‘on the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell’. A curious historical point is that the verse about Uriel’s instruction of Enoch is not included in the fragments of the Greek Book of Enoch quoted by the ninth-century Byzantine historian Syncellus, nor in the Vatican MS. (1809), nor in the quotations from the Book of Enoch in the Epistle of St. Jude. It occurs only in the text dug up at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886, and in the Ethiopian translation of an earlier Greek text, which is the only version which we know to have been extant in the thirteenth century. Where did Gwion find the story? Was a knowledge of Ethiopian among his attainments? Or did he find a complete Greek manuscript in the library of some Irish abbey that had escaped the fury of the Vikings’ war against books? The passage in the First Book of Enoch, XVIII, 11, and XIX, 1, 2, 3, runs:

This discovery took me a stage further, to line 7: ‘I have borne a banner before Alexander.’ Among the poems attributed to Taliesin in the Red Book of Hergest is a fragment called Y Gofeisws Byd (‘A Sketch of the World’) which contains a short panegyric of the historical Alexander, and another Anrhyfeddonau Alexander, ‘The Not-wonders of Alexander’ – a joke at the expense of a thirteenth-century Spanish romance ascribing to Alexander adventures properly belonging to the myth of Merlin – which tells mockingly how he went beneath the sea and met ‘creatures of distinguished lineage among the fish….’ But neither of these poems gave me a clue to the riddle. If it must be taken literally I should perhaps have guessed the answer to be ‘Neoptolemus’, who was one of Alexander’s bodyguard and the first man to scale the walls of Gaza at the assault. But more probably the reference was to Alexander as a re-incarnation of Moses. According to Josephus, when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the outset of his Eastern conquests, he refrained from sacking the Temple but bowed down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the High Priest’s golden frontlet. His astonished companion Parmenio asked why in the world he had behaved in this unkingly way. Alexander answered: ‘I did not adore the High Priest himself but the God who has honoured him with office. The case is this: that I saw this very person in a dream, dressed exactly as now, while I was at Dios in Macedonia. In my dream I was debating with myself how I might conquer Asia, and this man exhorted me not to delay. I was to pass boldly with my army across the narrow sea, for his God would march before me and help me to defeat the Persians. So I am now convinced that Jehovah is with me and will lead my armies to victory.’ The High Priest then further encouraged Alexander by showing him the prophecy in the Book of Daniel which promised him the dominion of the East; and he went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah and made a generous peace-treaty with the Jewish nation. The prophecy referred to Alexander as the ‘two-horned King’ and he subsequently pictured himself on his coins with two horns. He appears in the Koran as Dhul Karnain, ‘the two-horned’. Moses was also ‘two-horned’, and in Arabian legend ‘El Hidr, the ever-young prophet’, a former Sun-hero of Sinai, befriended both Moses and Alexander ‘at the meeting place of two seas’. To the learned Gwion, therefore, a banner borne before Alexander was equally a banner borne before Moses; and St. Jerome, or his Jewish mentors, had already made a poetic identification of Alexander’s horns with those of Moses.

The banner of Moses was ‘Nehushtan’, the Brazen Serpent, which he raised up to avert the plague in the wilderness. When he did so he became an ‘Alexander’, i.e. a ‘warder-off-of-evil-from-man’. So the answer of this riddle is ‘Nehushtan’ or, in the Greek Septuagint spelling, in which I imagine Gwion had read the story, ‘Ne-Esthan’. It should be remembered that this Brazen Serpent in the Gospel According to John, III, 14 and the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas, XII, 7 is a type of Jesus Christ. Barnabas emphasizes that the Serpent ‘hung on a wooden thing’, i.e. the Cross, and had the power of making alive. In Numbers, XXI, 9 it is described as a ‘seraph’, a name given by Isaiah to the flying serpents that appeared in his vision as the attendants of the Living God and flew to him with a live coal from the altar.

The next riddle I had to solve, a combination of lines 9 and 26, was: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy.’ The Galaxy, or Milky Way, is said to have been formed when the milk of the Great Goddess Rhea of Crete spouted abundantly into the sky after the birth of the infant Zeus. But since the Great Goddess’s name varies from mythographer to mythographer – Hyginus, for example, debates whether to call her Juno or Ops (Wealth) – Gwion has considerately given us another clue: ‘When Roma was built’. He is correctly identifying a Cretan with a Roman goddess, and what is more surprising, recognizes Romulus as a Latin deity of the same religious system as Cretan Zeus. Romulus’s mother was also named Rhea, and if she had trouble with her milk when she was forced to wean her twins in order to conceal their birth, so had Cretan Rhea in the same circumstances. The main difference was that Romulus and Remus had a she-wolf for their foster-mother, whereas Zeus (and some say his foster-brother Goat Pan, too), was suckled by the she-goat Amalthea, whose hide he afterwards wore as a coat; or, as still others say, by a white sow. Both Romulus and Zeus were brought up by shepherds. So: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy, when Roma was built.’ The answer is Rhea, though it was not Rhea herself but the spurt of her milk, rhea in Greek, that was on the Galaxy. Gwion had been anticipated by Nennius in giving more importance to Rhea, mother of Romulus, than the Classical mythologists had done: Nennius called her ‘the most holy queen’.

This riddle is purposely misleading. The only legend about the Galaxy that Heinin and the other bards at Maelgwyn’s court would have known concerns Blodeuwedd, conjured by Gwydion to be the bride of Llew Llaw Gyffes. Llew’s other name was Huan and Blodeuwedd was transformed into an owl and called Twyll Huan (‘the deceiving of Huan’) for having caused Llew’s death: the Welsh for owl being tylluan. The legend of Blodeuwedd and the Galaxy occurs in the Peniardd MSS.:

It should be added that the form ‘Caer Gwydion’, instead of ‘Caer Wydion’, proves the myth to be a late one. Blodeuwedd (as shown in Chapter Two) was Olwen, ‘She of the White Track’, so Gwydion was right to search for her in the Galaxy: Rhea with her white track of stars was the celestial counterpart of Olwen-Blodeuwedd with her white track of trefoil.

Who, in line 21, witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Lot, or perhaps the unnamed ‘wife of Lot’.

Who, in line 18, was ‘the chief director of the work of the tower of Nimrod’? I saw that the Lapwing was at her tricks again. The question really ran: ‘Of the work on what tower was Nimrod the chief director?’ The answer was ‘Babel’. Gower’s lines on the inconvenience caused to Nimrod and his masons when the confusion of tongues began, had run in my head for years:

Who, in line 24, was ‘with my Lord in the manger of the Ass’? Was the answer ‘swaddling clothes’? Then someone called my attention to the text of Luke II, 16: ‘And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.’ Gwion was being mischievous: literally, the sentence reads as though Joseph, Mary and the child were all together in the manger. The answer was evidently ‘Joseph’, since that was St. Joseph’s most glorious moment.

Who was it that said, in line 23: ‘I am now come here to the remnant of Troia.’ According to Nennius, Sigebertus Gemblasensis, Geoffrey of Monmouth and others, Brutus the grandson of Aeneas landed with the remnants of the Trojans at Totnes in Devon in the year 1074 BC–109 years after the accepted date of the Fall of Troy. A people who came over the Mor Tawch (the North Sea) some seven centuries later to join them were the Cymry. They cherished the notion that they were descended from Gomer, son of Japhet, and had wandered all the way from Taprobane (Ceylon – see Triad 54) by way of Asia Minor before finally settling at Llydaw in North Britain. So: ‘I have been in India and Asia (line 20) and am now come here to the remnant of Troia.’ The answer was ‘Gomer’.

‘I know the names of the stars from north to south’ in line 8, suggested one of the Three Happy Astronomers of Britain mentioned in the Triads, and I judged from the sentence ‘my original country is the region of the summer stars’ (i.e. the West) which seemed to belong to this riddle, that no Greek, Egyptian, Arabic, or Babylonian astronomer was intended. Idris being the first named of the three astronomers, the answer was probably ‘Idris’.

‘I have been on the White Hill, in the Court of Cynvelyn (Cymbeline)’ in line 29, evidently belonged with ‘I was in the Court of Don before the birth of Gwydion’, in line 12. The answer was ‘Vron’ or ‘Bran’, whose head, after his death, was according to the Romance of Branwen buried on the White Hill (Tower Hill) at London as a protection against invasion – as the head of King Eurystheus of Mycenae was buried in a pass that commanded the approach to Athens, and the alleged head of Adam was buried at the northern approach to Jerusalem – until King Arthur exhumed it. For Bran was a son of Dôn (Danu) long before the coming of the Belgic Gwydion.1

The answer to ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain’ (line 10), was clearly ‘David’. King David had crossed over Jordan to the Canaanite refuge-city of Mahanaim, while Joab fought the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim. There in the gateway he heard the news of Absalom’s death. In compliment to the See of St. David’s, Gwion has combined this statement with ‘I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crozier.’ (‘And St. David!’ as we Royal Welch Fusiliers loyally add to all our toasts on March 1st.) One of the chief aims of Prince Llewelyn and the other Welsh patriots of Gwion’s day was to free their Church from English domination. Giraldus Cambrensis had spent the best part of his quarrelsome ecclesiastical life (1145–1213) in campaigns to make the See of St. David’s independent of Canterbury and to fill it with a Welsh Archbishop. But King Henry II and his two sons saw to it that only politically reliable Norman-French churchmen were appointed to the Welsh sees, and appeals by the Welsh to the Pope were disregarded because the power of the Angevin kings weighed more at the Vatican than the possible gratification of a poor, divided and distant principality.

Who, in line 20, when the misleading ‘in Asia’ has been removed, was ‘with Noah in the Ark’? I guessed ‘Hu Gadarn’, who according to the Triads led the Cymry from the East. With his plough-oxen he also drew up from the magic lake the monster avanc which caused it to overflow in a universal flood. He had been ‘fostered between the knees of Dylan in the Deluge’. But the Lapwing, I found later, was deliberately confusing Dylan with Noah; Noah really belongs to the Enoch riddle in line 13. The present riddle must run: ‘I have been fostered in the Ark.’ But it could be enlarged with the statement in line 33: ‘I have been teacher to all intelligences’, for Hu Gadarn, ‘Hu the Mighty’, who has been identified with the ancient Channel Island god Hou, was the Menes, or Palamedes, of the Cymry and taught them ploughing – ‘in the region where Constantinople now stands’ – music and song.

Who, in line 27, ‘obtained the Muse from the cauldron of Caridwen’? Gwion himself. However, the cauldron of Caridwen was no mere witch’s cauldron. It would not be unreasonable to identify it with the cauldron depicted on Greek vases, the name written above Caridwen being ‘Medea’, the Corinthian Goddess who killed her children, as the Goddess Thetis also did. In this cauldron she boiled up old Aeson and restored him to youth; it was the cauldron of rebirth and re-illumination. Yet when the other Medea, Jason’s wife, played her famous trick (recorded by Diodorus Siculus) on old Pelias of Iolcos, persuading his daughters to cut him up and stew him back to youth and then calmly denouncing them as parricides, she disguised her Corinthian nationality and pretended to be a Hyperborean Goddess. Evidently Pelias had heard of the Hyperborean cauldron and had greater faith in it than in the Corinthian one.

‘It is not known whether my body is flesh or fish.’ This riddle, in line 36, was not hard to answer. I remembered the long-standing dispute in the mediaeval Church whether or not it was right to eat barnacle goose on Fridays and other fast-days. The barnacle goose does not nest in the British Isles. (I handled the first clutch of its eggs ever brought there; they were found at Spitzbergen in the Arctic.) It was universally believed to be hatched out of the goose barnacle – to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a white sea-shell of the pedunculate genus of Cirripedes.’ The long feathery cirri protruding from the valves suggested plumage. Giraldus Cambrensis once saw more than a thousand embryo barnacle geese hanging from one piece of drift wood on the shore. Campion wrote in his Elizabethan History of Ireland: ‘Barnacles, thousands at once, are noted along the shoares to hang by the beakes about the edges of putrified timber…which in processe taking lively heate of the Sunne, become water-foules.’ Barnacle geese were therefore held by some to be fish, not fowl, and legitimate Friday eating for monks. The word ‘barnacle’, the same dictionary suggests, is formed from the Welsh brenig, or Irish bairneach, meaning a limpet or barnacle-shell. Moreover, the other name for the barnacle goose, the ‘brent’ or the ‘brant’, is apparently formed from the same word. Caius, the Elizabethan naturalist, called it Anser Brendinus and wrote of it: “‘Bernded” seu “Brended” id animal dicitur.’ This suggests a connexion between bren, bairn, brent, brant, bern and Bran who, as the original Câd Goddeu makes plain, was an Underworld-god. For the northward migration of wild geese is connected in British legend with the conducting to the icy Northern Hell of the souls of the damned, or of unbaptized infants. In Wales the sound of the geese passing unseen overhead at night is supposed to be made by the Cwm Annwm (‘Hounds of Hell’ with white bodies and red ears), in England by Yell Hounds, Yeth Hounds, Wish Hounds, Gabriel Hounds, or Gabriel Ratchets. The Hunter is called variously Gwyn (‘the white one’) – there was a Gwyn cult in pre-Christian Glastonbury – Herne the Hunter, and Gabriel. In Scotland he is Arthur. ‘Arthur’ here may stand for Arddu (‘the dark one’) – Satan’s name in the Welsh Bible. But his original name in Britain seems to have been Bran, which in Welsh is Vron. The fish-or-flesh riddle must therefore belong with the other two Vron riddles already answered.

The alternative text of the Hanes Taliesin published in the Myvyrian Archaiology is translated by D. W. Nash as follows:

The sequence is different and the Lapwing has been as busy as ever. But I learned a good deal from the variants. In place of ‘the land of the Summer Stars’, ‘the land of the Cherubim’ is mentioned. Both mean the same thing. The Eighteenth Psalm (verse 10) makes it clear that the Cherubim are storm-cloud angels; and therefore, for Welshmen, they are resident in the West, from which quarter nine storms out of every ten blow. The Summer Stars are those which lie in the western part of the firmament.

The first two lines in stanza 18, ‘I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin’, helped me. There is a stone seat at the top of Cader Idris, ‘the Chair of Idris’ where, according to the local legend, whoever spends the night is found in the morning either dead, mad, or a poet. The first part of this sentence evidently belongs to the Idris riddle, though Gwion, in his Kerdd am Veib Llyr mentions a ‘perfect chair’ in Caer Sidi (‘Revolving Castle’), the Elysian fortress where the Cauldron of Caridwen was housed.

The text of stanza 2, ‘Johannes the Diviner I was called by Merddin’, seems to be purposely corrupt, since in the Mabinogion version the sense is: ‘Idno and Heinin called me Merddin.’ I thought at first that the original line ran: ‘Johannes I was called, and Merddin the Diviner’, and I was right so far as I went. Merddin, who in mediaeval romances is styled Merlin, was the most famous ancient prophet in British tradition. The manifest sense of the stanza is that Gwion had been called Merddin, ‘dweller in the sea’, by Heinin, Maelgwyn’s chief bard, because like the original Merddin he was of mysterious birth and, though a child, had confounded the bardic college at Dyganwy exactly as Merddin (according to Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth) had confounded Vortigern’s sages; that he had also been called ‘John the Baptist’ (‘But thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Most Highest’); but that eventually everyone would call him Taliesin (‘radiant brow’) the chief of poets. Dr. MacCulloch suggests that there was an earlier Taliesin than the sixth-century bard, and that he was a Celtic Apollo; which would account for the ‘radiant brow’ and for his appearance among other faded Gods and heroes at King Arthur’s Court in the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen. (Apollo himself had once been a dweller in the sea – the dolphin was sacred to him – and oddly enough John the Baptist seems to have been identified by early Christian syncretists in Egypt with the Chaldean god Oannes who according to Berossus used to appear at long intervals in the Persian Gulf, disguised as the merman Odacon, and renew his original revelation to the faithful. The case is further complicated by the myth of Huan, the Flower-goddess Blodeuwedd’s victim, who was really the god Llew Llaw, another ‘sea-dweller’.)

It took me a long time to realize that the concealed sense of stanza 2, which made the textual corruption necessary, was a heretical paraphrase of the passage in the three synoptic Gospels (Matt. XVI, 14, Mark VI, 15, Luke IX, 7, 8):

The completing phrase ‘and Elias’ occurs in stanza 8. The Divine Child is speaking as Jesus Christ, as I believe he also is in stanza 14: ‘I have suffered hunger with the Son of the Virgin.’ Jesus was alone then except for the Devil and the ‘wild beasts’. But the Devil did not go hungry; and the ‘wild beasts’ in the Temptation context, according to the acutest scriptural critics – e.g. Professor A. A. Bevan and Dr. T. K. Cheyne – were also of the Devil’s party. The Mabinogion version, line 31, is: ‘I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin,’ which comes to the same thing: Jesus suffered hunger on his own account. The answer to this riddle was simply ‘Jesus’, as ‘Taliesin’ was the answer to ‘Joannes, and Merddin the Diviner, and Elias I was called’.

‘I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha’, in stanza 10, and ‘I was in Caer Bedion, Tetragrammaton’, stanza 6, must together refer to the ‘Holy Unspeakable Name of God’. ‘Alpha and Omega’ was a divine periphrasis which it was permitted to utter publicly; and the ‘tetragrammaton’ was the cryptogrammic Hebrew way of spelling the secret Name in four letters as JHWH. I thought at first that ‘I was in Caer Bedion’ belonged to the Lot riddle: because ‘Lot’ is the Norman-French name for Lludd, the king who built London, and Caer Bedion is Caer Badus, or Bath, which according to Geoffrey of Monmouth was built by Lludd’s father Bladud. But to Gwion the Welshman Lludd was not ‘Lot’, nor is there any record of Lludd’s having lived at Bath.

I let the ‘Caer Bedion’ riddle stand over for a while, and also the riddle ‘I was Alpha Tetragrammaton’ – if this conjunction composed the riddle – the answer to which was evidently a four-lettered Divine Name beginning with A. Meanwhile, who was ‘bard of the harp to Deon, or Lleon, of Lochlin, or Llychlyn’ (line 28; and stanza 14)? ‘Deon King of Lochlin and Dublin’, is an oddly composite character. Deon is a variant spelling of Don, who, as already pointed out, was really Danu the Goddess of the Tuatha dé Danaan, the invaders of Ireland, patriarchized into a King of Lochlin, or Lochlann, and Dublin. Lochlann was the mythical undersea home of the later Fomorian invaders of Ireland, against whom the Tuatha dé Danaan fought a bloody war. The god Tethra ruled it. It seems that legends of the war between these two nations were worked by later poets into ballad cycles celebrating the ninth-century wars between the Irish and the Danish and Norse pirates. Thus the Scandinavians came to be called ‘the Lochlannach’ and the Danish King of Dublin was also styled ‘King of Lochlin’. When the cult of the Scandinavian god Odin, the rune-maker and magician, was brought to Ireland he was identified with his counterpart Gwydion who in the fourth century BC had brought a new system of letters with him to Britain, and had been enrolled as a son of Danu or Dôn. Moreover, according to the legend, the Danaans had come to Britain from Greece by way of Denmark to which they had given the name of their goddess, and in mediaeval Ireland Danaan and Dane became confused, the Danes of the ninth century AD getting credit for Bronze Age monuments. So ‘Deon of Lochlin’ must stand for ‘the Danes of Dublin’. These pirates with their sea-raven flag were the terror of the Welsh, and the minstrel to the Danes of Dublin was probably the sea-raven, sacred to Odin, who croaked over their victims. If so, the answer to the riddle was ‘Morvran’ (sea-raven), who was the son of Caridwen and, according to the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen, the ugliest man in the world. In the Triads he is said to have escaped alive from the Battle of Camlan – another of the ‘Three Frivolous Battles of Britain’ – because everyone shrank from him. He must be identified with Afagddu, son of Caridwen, for whom the same supreme ugliness is claimed in the Romance of Taliesin, and whom she determined to make as intelligent as he was ugly.

I wondered whether ‘Lleon of Lochlin’, in the Myvyrian version, was a possible reading. Arthur had his Court at Caerlleon-upon-Usk and the word Caerlleon is generally taken to mean ‘The Camp of the Legion’; and certainly the two Caerlleons mentioned in the seventh-century Welsh Catalogue of Cities, Caerlleon-upon-Usk and Caerlleon-upon-Dee, are both there explained as Castra Legionis. If Gwion accepted this derivation of the word the riddle would read: ‘I was bard of the harp to the legions of Lochlin’, and the answer would be the same. The name Leon occurs in Gwion’s Kadeir Teyrnon (‘The Royal Chair’): ‘the lacerated form of the corsleted Leon’. But the context is corrupt and ‘Leon’ may be a descriptive title of some lion-hearted prince, not a proper name.

Then there was the riddle in stanza 8 to consider: ‘I was on the horse’s crupper of Eli and Enoch’ – an alternative to the misleading Book of Enoch riddle in the Mabinogion version:

of which the answer is ‘Uriel’. In both texts Elias is really a part of the heretical John the Baptist riddle, from which the Lapwing has done her best to distract attention; her false connexion of Elias and Enoch has been most subtly made. For these two prophets are paired in various Apocryphal Gospels – the History of Joseph the Carpenter, the Acts of Pilate, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul. In the Acts of Pilate, for instance, which was current in Wales in Latin translation, occurs the verse:

But the real riddle in the Mabinogion version proves to be: ‘I was instructor to Enoch and Noah’. In this other version, ‘I was on the horse’s crupper of Eli and Enoch’, the mention of Elias is otiose: for Enoch, like Elias, was caught up alive into Heaven on a chariot drawn by fiery horses. So the answer again is Uriel, since ‘Uriel’ means ‘Flame of God’. Now perhaps I could also answer ‘Uriel’ to the riddle ‘I was in Caer Bedion’. For, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a sacred fire was kept continually burning in a temple at Caer Bedion, or Bath, like that which burned in the House of God at Jerusalem.

There is a variation between the texts: ‘a day and a year in stocks and fetters’ (line 30) and ‘a year and a half in stocks and fetters’ (stanza 15). ‘A year and a half makes no obvious sense, but ‘a day and a year’ can be equated with the Thirteen Prison Locks that guarded Elphin, if each lock was a 28-day month and he was released on the extra day of the 365. The ancient common-law month in Britain, according to Blackstone’s Commentaries (2, IX, 142) is 28 days long, unless otherwise stated, and a lunar month is still popularly so reckoned, although a true lunar month, or lunation, from new moon to new moon, is roughly 29½ days long, and though thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number. The pre-Christian calendar of thirteen four-week months, with one day over, was superseded by the Julian calendar (which had no weeks) based eventually on the year of twelve thirty-day Egyptian months with five days over. The author of the Book of Enoch in his treatise on astronomy and the calendar also reckoned a year to be 364 days, though he pronounced a curse on all who did not reckon a month to be 30 days long. Ancient calendar-makers seem to have interposed the day which had no month, and was not therefore counted as part of the year, between the first and last of their artificial 28–day months: so that the farmer’s year lasted, from the calendar-maker’s point of view, literally a year and a day.

In the Welsh Romances the number thirteen is of constant occurrence: ‘Thirteen Precious Things’, ‘Thirteen Wonders of Britain’, ‘Thirteen Kingly Jewels’. The Thirteen Prison Locks, then, were thirteen months and on the extra day, the Day of Liberation, the Day of the Divine Child, Elphin was set free. This day will naturally have fallen just after the winter solstice – two days before Christmas, when the Romans had their mid-winter festival. I saw that if the true reading is ‘in stocks and fetters a year and a day’, then this clause should be attached to ‘Primary chief bard am I to Elphin’, in line 1: for it was Elphin who was fettered.

Now, Gwynn Jones dissents from the usual view that the word Mabinogion means ‘juvenile romances’; he suggests, by analogy with the Irish title Mac-ind-oic, applied to Angus of the Brugh, that it means ‘tales of the son of a virgin mother’ and shows that it was originally applied only to the four romances in which Pryderi son of Rhiannon appears. This ‘son of a virgin mother’ is always born at the winter solstice; which gives point to the story of Phylip Brydydd’s contention with the minstrels for the privilege of first presenting Prince Rhys Ieuanc with a song on Christmas Day, and also his mention of Maelgwyn and Elphin in that context.

The riddle in stanza 16, ‘I have been in the buttery’, must refer to Kai, who was in charge of King Arthur’s Buttery. The line, cleverly muddled up with the Barnacle riddle, should probably be attached to ‘I was with my Lord in the highest sphere’ (line 5 and stanza 5), Kai appearing in the Triads as ‘one of the three diademed chiefs of battle’, possessed of magical powers. In the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen there is this description of him:

This is close to the account given of the Sun-hero Cuchulain in his battle rage. But in the later Arthurian legends Kai had degenerated into a buffoon and Chief of the Cooks.

The memory of the thirteen-month year was kept alive in the pagan English countryside until at least the fourteenth century. The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar begins:

This has been altered in a manifestly later ballad: