Magic Bags

The following was part of the first O'Donnell lecture given at Oxford; the author was J. R. R. Tolkien, and the title is 'English and Welsh.' (The O'Donnell is a yearly lecture in Celtic Studies at Oxford in which a big scholar from another university - usually - is invited to address us. They're fun because we get to go and sit in the English Faculty in a proper lecture theatre, and everyone who has anything even tangentially to do with Celtic turns up - usually around 60 people. Then there is free booze. This year's happened last week.)

It is a very interesting - if rambling, personal and eccentric - piece of work, and the extract below remains absolutely, and depressingly, true.

* * *

'To many, perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great scholars, past and present, 'Celtic' of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. Thus I read recently a review of a book by Sir Gavin de Beer, and, in what appeared to be a citation from the original, I noted the following opinion on the river-name Arar (Livy) and Araros (Polybius): 'Now Arar derives from the Celtic root meaning running water which occurs also in many English river-names like Avon.'

It is a strange world in which Avon and Araros can have the same 'root' (a vegetable analogy still much loved by the non-philological when being wise about words). Catching the lunatic infection, one's mind runs on to the River Arrow, and even to arrowroot, to Ararat, and the descent into Avernus. Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.'

Fifth Branch

(A rather striking image of Blodeuwedd)

Over the last few months, I've been engaged in an enjoyably batty garden-shed kind of hobby which has consumed my spare time for much of the last week. Some time ago, the idea came to me to create a fake Middle Welsh text as a present for my Supervisor here in Oxford, as I am leaving for Cambridge in September. He's taught me medieval Welsh and Irish language and literature for the last six years, and some of my happiest moments have been spent working through texts with him.

The idea that came to me was to create a fifth branch of the Mabinogi. (For readers who aren't familiar with these four wonderful medieval Welsh prose tales, I wrote an introduction to them here. Apologies for the simplifications - bear in mind the piece was for a website that posts material by some blockhead suggesting, in all seriousness, that the 'Iron House' in Branwen (a metal chamber designed to burn inconvenient people to death, horribly) is actually a remnant of the sweat-lodge 'transitional rites' of the ancient druids. (Lordy! Who'd have thunk it?!) So I had to write as simply as I could.

Then the idea, as they say, topsied. I've ended up attempting to produce a text which could pass, at the macro- and mircotextual level, for the work of the redactor of the Four Branches. Now, as he (or as Andrew Breeze insists, she) was a genius, I knew I was bound to fail. But even so, it is - I think - reasonably convincing as a narrative, and the language is a good pastiche. It has an introduction, text, pseudoscholarly notes, and glossary of all the words used, and is nearly 25,000 words long.

Here's a summary of the story (one has to be familiar with the plots of the 'other' branches for this to make sense):

Amaethon, son of Dôn

After the deaths of Math son of Mathonwy and his wife Goewin, the kingdom of Gwynedd has passed to Gwydion son of Dôn. He in turn has bestowed the seven cantrefs of Dyfed upon his brother, the husbandman Amaethon; they were his to bestow because of his killing of Pryderi. One day, the men of Gwynedd come to Gwydion and lament that their orchards and fields have been despoiled by an unearthly plague, taking the form of a great wind and the sound of baying dogs. Gwydion promises to do what he can to rectify the situation, and sends messengers to the south to ask Amaethon for help and advice. In the meantime, he disguises himself as an old swineherd, and ventures out alone that night into the woods. In due course, he hears the baying of hounds and witnesses a great wind that tears all the leaves off the trees, and following this, he sees a pack of white dogs with red ears coming towards him, and a huntsman on a great bay horse. In the ensuing exchange, the huntsman identifies himself as Arawn king of the Otherworld, or Annwn, and instructs the terrified swineherd (so he thinks) to carry a message to Gwydion, informing him that the plague is caused by Arawn’s hunting over Gwynedd. This, Arawn says, is intended as punishment for Gwydion’s having contrived the death of Pryderi son of Pwyll Pen Annwn, as there was great friendship between Arawn and Pwyll.
Gwydion returns to his court, and takes thought. The messengers return in due course from Amaethon, saying his brother cannot travel to Gwynedd, as he cannot leave his fields and flocks, but that he invites Gwydion to visit him in Dyfed. This Gwydion does, and there is great rejoicing at his arrival. Gwydion and Amaethon take counsel, and Amaethon advises his brother to steal into Annwn and to take three magical animals which are highly prized by Arawn. These are a roebuck, a hound, and a plover or lapwing, and Arawn keeps them in a wattle-pen in front of his court in Annwn. Amaethon reminds Gwydion that the door to the pen is magically sealed with a certain name, and unless that name is spoken over the door, it will not open. Gwydion laughs, and asserts that he is confident he can guess the name.
The two brothers set off that night for Annwn, following Glyn Dulas. After walking for some time, Amaethon realises that they have travelled in a circle. Gwydion does not believe him, and they continue. Some time later, they find themselves once more back in the same place, and Gwydion is forced to admit that his brother was correct. He realises that they are near to the entrance to Arawn’s kingdom, and that a spell has been placed on the location to keep it hidden. He divines that the spell affects only the eyes, so the brothers tear strips of cloth from Amaethon’s cloak and make blindfolds. Picking their way ahead using their sticks, they soon find that the sound of the waters in the valley has changed sides relative to them, though they have not crossed the stream. This appears to be the sign that they have entered Annwn. They disguise themselves, and find the wattle-pen before Arawn’s court. From brambles and ivy, Gwydion creates two silver leashes and a golden cage by magic, and sings an englyn over the door of the pen, identifying the secret name upon it as ‘Achren’. The door breaks open with a loud commotion, and the two brothers make their escape as quickly as possible with the three animals, as they can already hear the court mustering behind them.
They journey over three days back up to the north, Amaethon accompanying his brother. Gwydion relies on the fact that the men of Annwn will not enter Dyfed without Arawn, who will not have returned from plaguing Gwynedd until the morning. Thus they have a head-start. They arrive at Mur Castell, a court of Gwydion and Amaethon’s nephew Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Lleu is pleased to see them, but immediately suspicious as the sight of the three strange animals, and is displeased to hear of the army of Annwn on their tail. In a council, they determine to make for the fortress of Caer Nefenhir, there to await Arawn’s troops from a better defensive position. They also decide to muster Gwynedd. They journey to Caer Nefenhir, and Gwydion’s nobles Cadwll Haearnddwrn and Cernyll Wiwfaneg arrive with such troops as they have been able to raise. Taliesin Chief of Bards and his son Afaon accompany them.
That night, the armies of Annwn begin to mass before the fort. Very early in the morning, Lleu stands on the ramparts of the stronghold, and Taliesin comes to stand with him. Taliesin reveals that he has sung before Arawn in Annwn, and thus knows the chief nobles of his court. At Lleu’s request, Taliesin points out and names various individual warriors amongst Arawn’s men, including Arawn himself. There is one very large warrior whose face is hidden from them, whom Taliesin is not able to identify.
Battle is joined, and the men of Gwynedd are pushed back to Caer Nefenhir. Arawn sends messengers, demanding the return of the animals and Gwydion as well. Arawn’s messengers reveal that there is a warrior among the hosts of Annwn who cannot be defeated unless his name is known, and accordingly the sons of Dôn should surrender before more blood is shed. Gwydion refuses, and sends word defiantly that there is a man on his side also who may not be defeated unless his name is known.
Battle continues with heavy loss of life, and Lleu Llaw Gyffes himself is injured. Gwydion realises that his men are falling in large numbers and that reinforcements are needed. Amaethon advises him to enchant the trees of the nearby wood, and despite his misgivings, Gwydion assents to this plan. He instructs twenty of his nobles to venture out into the wood, and cut down a branch of every type of tree growing there. These they are to hold up, like flags. Gwydion then goes down to the wood alone, and by means of his magic, turns the trees into armed, silent warriors. Bolstered by these eerie reinforcements, Gwydion is able to push deep into the enemy’s ranks, and gets close to the huge warrior with the hidden face. He sings a trio of englynion, which identify the unknown warrior’s name as ‘Bran’. With their advantage thus at an end, Arawn’s troops are swiftly routed.
Arawn himself comes forward to sue for peace. He asks who the unnamed warrior on Gwydion’s side was, and Gwydion, conscious that it no longers matters, informs Arawn that it was not a man, but a woman; and that her name is Achren. Achren is revealed to be the name of Arawn’s own wife, and hence the name that he placed on the wattle-pen in his own kingdom. Achren herself comes forward, and in a bitter exchange of words, she tells he husband that she has fought against him because of the disgrace which he did to her by putting a strange man to sleep with her disguised as himself – events which were narrated in the first branch. Arawn tells her that she is a wicked woman, and they separate, and Arawn in grief and anger returns to Annwn.
Amaethon, Achren and Gwydion journey to Caer Dathyl, where a great feast is prepared. Amaethon and Achren fall to talking, and find themselves delighted with the other’s company. Amaethon asks her if she would be willing to marry him, and she assents gladly. In due course, they journey together back to Dyfed, and Gwydion remains alone in Gwynedd. (End of Summary.)

This narrative draws on a genuine body of poetic references to 'The Battle of the Trees', from which we know that a traditional story once existed in which Gwydion and Amaethon pinched a roebuck, a whelp, and a plover from Arawn, had a battle with him, and won because Gwydion turned the trees into warriors. The business about the woman called Achren and the man called Bran - the two talisimanic warriors on either side - is also genuinely part of this storytelling tradition. What I've done is simply to write out this narrative as though it was the 'fifth branch' of the Mabinogi.

Unfortunately, when I started writing it, I never expected it to be anything other than an exercise for fun, as a unique present for my supervisor. But the New Age/Celtic spirituality author John Matthews has already handled the same material in his short story 'The Battle of the Trees' in his The Song of Taliesin, and I have read his version: indeed I seem to have reviewed the book favourably on Amazon. When I wrote, I adopted two ideas that he came up with for his story: - that Arawn should be hunting over Gwynedd to punish Gwydion for killing Pryderi, and that the three animals should be in a pen with the name 'Achren' on it as a magical seal. And also the idea that Amaethon should have become lord of Dyfed, now I come to think about it. The rest of the ideas are original to me, or designed to be consistent with the extant references to the lost tale.

Subsequently, my friend Jane of Raw Light has offered to publish the text and translation in her new online magazine, HORIZON, which gives us copyright issues. I have accordingly written to John Matthews, enclosing my Middle Welsh text and asking very politely for permission to publish, with due acknowledgement of the three ideas of his which I have used. I hope permission will be forthcoming; as usual I've opened my big mouth and am on record sounding off about the erratic scholarly standards of the Matthewses, so may turn out to be hoist with my own petard. Never mind. Even if John Matthews doesn't give me permission, one copy will be bound to look exactly like a scholarly edition (complete with a page reproduced from the fictional manuscript) and left as a present for Thomas, my supervisor, like a book that had mysteriously dropped in from some Borgesian parallel universe.


* * *
UPDATE: John Matthews graciously extended permission today (24/5/08).

Eleni Karaindrou

I'm a big fan of the Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose sumptuously sorrowful, folk-inflected music often uses traditonal, indeed ancient, mediterranean musical instruments. Here is a piece of hers from the soundtrack to Theo Angelopoulos' haunting film Ulysses' Gaze. The first couple of minutes are stunning, and begin with a fragement of Byzantine Chant.

Hills

I genuinely feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Matt (who read American Politics at University) and I have been supporting her campaign, as much as two non-Americans can, and, yes, I know she can't stop herself lying, I know her claims of experience are exaggerated, I know that she unscrupulously uses nasty Rovian tactics, and I know that Barack Obama is a deeply inspiring candidate, and possibly, just what the US needs at this point in history. But I still feel sad for her. She's given it everything she's got and has shown, if nothing else, that she has a rugged tenacity and grit. I also feel unnerved that feminism has sagged to the point where the prospect of the most powerful leader in the world being a freely-elected, highly intelligent, clearly competent woman for the first time ever doesn't inspire. I think there has been a staggering level of barely-hidden misogyny expressed. Perhaps because the UK doesn't have a divisively bitter history of racial conflict in the same way as the States, it's hard for me at least to feel inspired by Obama to anything like the same extent. (His speeches are fantastic - but not as fantastic as the glamazonian Michelle Obama.) The prospect of Hills taking the Oath of Office in a powder-blue pantsuit, blonde 'do, and pair of stillies had Matt and I cheering. (This is why you should never trust gays with anything - shallow, you see.)

So, very soon, we expect to be sadly taking down the HILLARY poster, consigning the mugs emblazoned with her face to the back of the cupboard, and generally losing interest in the whole damn thing.

* * *

That said, here are Camille Paglia's comments on the infamous '3am' ad that the Clinton campaign ran a few months ago. I roared with laughter:

Would I want Hillary answering the red phone in the middle of the night? No, bloody not. The White House first responder should be a person of steady, consistent character and mood -- which describes Obama more than Hillary. And that scare ad was produced with amazing ineptitude. If it's 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe's baleful raven. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.

The Art of Translation

As the great American polymath, artist, translator and short-story writer Guy Davenport once observed, English is a Romance language in the way that a porpoise is a fish or a bat a bird. One of my main intellectual pre-occupations is the realm of the interlingual, or, to put it in less exalted terms, worrying neurotically about the membranes between languages through which a text must pass in order to be translated. My original degree was Classics and English, which in part involved looking at the processes of translation, interpretation, appropriation, re-imagining, re-creation and distortion to which the Latin and Greek classics have been subjected over the centuries since the end of Antiquity. This field is generally known as ‘reception studies’, and I loved it because it encouraged intellectual breadth. I’ve felt the downside of it since, when I look on with envy at the linguistic skills of my friends who did straight Classics. My Greek and Latin are perfectly serviceable, especially for reading medieval Latin and koine Greek, but someone like dear Melanie can read difficult classical Latin as easily as English and can undoubtedly think in perfect Attic Greek. If I ever attained that kind of mental fluency it’s long gone, edged out by the Celtic languages. Similarly, I never did the whole spread of English lit, concentrating on 1100-1780, roughly. A student in straight English does everything from Beowulf to Rushdie.

Oxford had – and has – a fantastic set of faculty for teaching the reception of the Classical literatures. My college tutor was Richard Jenkyns, whose The Victorians and Ancient Greece kick-started much of the vogue for studying reception, and he was (and is) a delightfully urbane and civilised presence. While teaching, he somehow always managed to give the impression that a string-quartet was playing somewhere in the middle distance. Stephen Harrison at Corpus Christi College taught me close-reading, so that an examination of Virgil’s Dido (the Latin text with various translations for comparison) would segue into Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and then he’d produce a stereo so we could listen to the ‘Remember me!’ aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, all of them subject to rigorous analysis. The late Tony Nuttall at New College also taught close-reading classes, and as he was an expert on philosophy as well as a superlative literary critic, we often found ourselves listening raptly as he talked about Plato, Aquinas and Anselm - the kind of stuff that made my 19-year-old head spin.

I’ve maintained a strong intellectual interest in the field since, transferring my affections to looking at the way that texts in Welsh and Irish negotiate the process of translation. (I’ve just marked an excellent undergraduate thesis on W. B. Yeats' uses of translated Old and Middle Irish material.) My (hopefully) second book will be an examination, in part, of the reception of the Irish gods in the modern period, in English. My thinking on this issue was brought to a head by the on-going project over at Caer Feddwyd to teach a small number of people to read the second branch of the Mabinogi, Branwen Daughter of Llyr, in the original Middle Welsh. It's fascinating to look at the original text with linguistic understanding, and then to compare two or more translations. It becomes immediately apparent that translation is a subtle and delicate art, not a mechanical process of transferral. Any translation can only be as good as the cultural, lexical and historical resources which the translator can bring to bear upon the original text. For example, we have just done the following lines, describing the good and evil brothers, Nisien and Efnisien. Of Nisien, the text tells us:

A'r neill o'r gueisson hynny, gwas da oed: ef a barei tangneued y rwg y deu lu, ban uydynt lidyawcaf...

'And the one of those lads, a good lad was he: he used to bring about a truce between the two hosts, when they were angriest...'

My translation is over-literal. In particular, I have translated gwas (plural gueiss(i)on) as 'lad, lads', which is the word's strict primary meaning. It can also mean 'servant' - in Middle Welsh, 'Lad of the Chamber' is the idiom for 'Chamberlain' as an officer of the Court, and this sense lies behind the word gwasanaeth, 'service'. (Anyone who's ever driven through Wales will recall signs for the Gwasanaethau, 'Services'.) But here, I don't think the word means either 'lad' or 'servant', as there's no suggestion that these two characters are especially young, and they are explicitly of royal blood. I would translate with a rarer, third meaning of gwas, as 'fellow' - it's sometimes equivalent in Middle Welsh to English 'chap', which is itself too colloquial. However, the sentence requires that we use the plural and then the singular in quick succession. They sound pleasingly different in Welsh (GWAYSHon vs. GWASS), but thuddingly repetitive in English (fellows, vs. fellow). So we're rather stuck. The more carefully you attempt to capture the sense and semantics of a word, the more you destroy the intricate sound-structure through which the sense moves. And this is quite apart from situations where the words themselves on the page are ambiguous or contain double-meanings, which usually cannot be translated, or where the actual meaning of the words is obscure or corrupt.

The Mabinogi is, fortunately, not a text in which insoluble cruxes are common, being written on the whole in a smooth, sober and gracious style. As a result, it is well-served with fine, accurate translations: those of Gwyn and Thomas Jones (1947), Patrick Ford (1977), and most recently that of Sioned Davies (2007). Jones and Jones, when placed side-by-side with Davies, is instructive. The two brothers, distinguished professors both, chose to replicate a lot of the sentence structure and idiom of the medieval text. As a result, their translation is an excellent crib for the beginning student of the language. However, it has an inevitable sepia tint: we do not use 'thee' and 'thou', 'lest', 'whence' or 'thence' in modern English, and as a result, the translation of the brothers Jones strikes an archaic note which the original Welsh text would not have done for its early 12th century audience. The intended effect may be to replicate the tone that the Mabinogi has for the modern Welsh reader (somewhere between Chaucer and Malory), but the result is to muffle some of the text's native freshness and vigour under a layer of faux-medieval brocade. Nevertheless, it is a fine translation, and scrupulously accurate.

I have blathered long, and beg my readers’ indulgence. Below I've posted a translation by Milton of a poem by Horace (Odes, 1.5 -Latin text below), as this was the kind of thing Tony Nuttall used to get us to look at. It's widely thought not to work, as a translation, being too literal and full of expressions that aren't really English, such as 'Plain in thy neatness' and 'stern God of Sea', or the use of the verb 'hope' with a direct object. I think this is a misguided reading, and that Milton is attempting to capture something of the qualitative otherness of reading a different language, tracing its alien semantic contours. Strict literalism functions as a kind of deliberate defamilarisation, English reworked to evoke the subjective experience of reading Latin. I'd be interested to know what readers think of it. Personally, I think it is partially successful; I especially like 'all Gold', at the end of line 1 of the penultimate stanza, which, again, is hardly English, but is as nothing compared to the strangeness of the syntax of the final sentence. Incidentally, the imagery of these lines alludes to the ancient custom that survivors of shipwreck would nail up the clothes in which they had nearly drowned in a temple of Neptune/Poseidon, accompanied by a votive tablet recording their gratitude to the sea-god for sparing their lives. The Roman poet is implying that his escape from the romantic clutches of 'Pyrrha' is akin to escape from death by drowning. Absolutely literally, the last sentence means: 'The holy wall shows, by means of a votive tablet, that I have hung up my sodden clothes to the powerful god of the sea.'

What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,
Pyrrha, for whom bindst thou
In wreaths thy golden Hair,

Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he
On Faith and changèd Gods complain: and Seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire:

Who now enjoyes thee credulous, all Gold,
Who alwayes vacant alwayes amiable
Hopes thee; of flattering gales
Unmindfull. Hapless they

To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd
Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern God of Sea.

* * *

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flavam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
nigris aequora ventis
emirabitur insolens,

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
sperat, nescius aurae
fallacis! miseri, quibus

intemptata nites! me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo.

An Mhorrigan Nua?

Matt and I spent the drive to Wales discussing Madonna's new album, Hard Candy. Our consensus was that the first single, '4 Minutes' was decent enough (though I don't think a woman of fifty can get away with referring to herself as a 'girl', really) but the rest of it was bobbins. But I cast my mind back to her Ray of Light days, and in particular the magnificent single 'Frozen', and went off to watch the video on YouTube. Bam! I realised at once - she's playing the triple Badb, the Irish trio of war and death goddesses, who appear on the battlefield in the form of crows. Look for the stunning shots of Madonna in gothic triplicate, wound round with black, sepulchral draperies and shattering into a thousand ravens against a bleached, twilit landscape. With a kind of faintly-Victorian morbid glamour, she twines billowing black cloth around herself, making a sequence of eerie, liquid shapes like living ink. Finally she appears trebled once again, in oppressive, muffled close-up, like the Morrigan impassively perfoming solemn Hindu mudras.

Taliesin

Academia and neo-paganism have been at dismal cross-purposes over the figure of Taliesin for decades, and the problem shows no signs of getting any better. Pagans (especially modern druids) are often fascinated by the figure of the shape-shifting quasi-divine poet, and tend to be convinced that the material relating to him extant from medieval Wales gives us a longed-for insight into the philosophy of the ancient Druids. They often resent the efforts of academics to examine this material critically, seeing the results of this research as reductive and devoid of imagination when it produces answers which are found uncongenial. Academics, in turn, are baffled by this ‘pagan’ Taliesin, which they see as a figure resulting from a wilful New-Age wallowing in a soup of preposterous misinformation. Both ‘sides’ could accuse the other of doctrinaire self-satisfaction.

This purpose of this post is set the information we have about Taliesin down as clearly as possible, and the first thing to grasp is what our sources are.

In historical order, they are:

c. 830 AD
A mention of Taliesin in the 9th century Historia Brittonum, as one of the men who ‘flourished in British poetry’ during the reign of Ida, King of Northumbria, at the end of the 6th century AD. It is no more than a mention, and Taliesin is not the first on the list. He is given no title, whereas other poets in the list get fancy names like ‘Wheat of Song’ and ‘Father of the Muse’. Together, these facts suggest that the author of the Hisoria Brittonum did not think of Taliesin as having been the preeminent poet of the late 6th century.

c. 1050 AD
Culhwch and Olwen
This narrative tale mentions Taliesin briefly as ‘Chief of Poets’ and a member of Arthur’s court. The perception of Taliesin's status had clearly altered since the 9th century.

c. 1100 AD
Branwen Daughter of Llŷr
Taliesin is mentioned as one of the seven survivors of Bran the Blessed’s expedition to Ireland.

c. 1325 AD
‘The Book of Taliesin’
A collection of medieval Welsh poetry, prophecy and religious verse, probably intended as a compendium of material associated with Taliesin. Altogether, it contains some 62 poems. The scribe was extremely good, and throughout it is written in a good, clear hand. (We must throw out fantasies of crumbling volumes full of hard-to-make-out arcana.) The manuscript was written c. 1325 AD, but the relative dates of the various poems inside are hard to ascertain, as I discuss below. The ‘youngest’ material in the compendium may be as little as a hundred years younger than the manuscript itself.

c. 1550 AD
The Tale of Taliesin
This is the earliest surviving version of the late folk-tale, with which we are all familiar. Very briefly, the story opens with the witch Ceridwen brewing a cauldron of knowledge for her son Afagddu. By mischance, a little boy called Gwion, who is stirring the cauldron, tastes the brew and becomes all-knowing. Ceridwen chases him through a series of shape-changes until eventually she swallows him, and nine months later, gives birth to him as a little baby. She casts the child adrift on the ocean, and he is found caught up on a fishing weir by a chap called Elphin, who names him Taliesin, 'Shining Brow', and adopts him.


* * *

Now – how do we makes sense of all this? The great Celtic scholar Sir Ifor Williams (1881-1965) argued that what we need to do first is bifurcate Taliesin.

He proposed that the original nucleus of the Taliesin material was a genuine historical personage, namely the late 6th-century poet Taliesin referred to in the 9th-century Historia Brittonum. Williams believed that a number of the poems in the early 14th century Book of Taliesin were the in fact the original Old Welsh compositions of this early medieval bard, whom he understood to have been the praise-poet of king Urien of Rheged. Rheged was the Brythonic kingdom around present-day Leeds. Williams, who was a linguist of genius, thought he could identify twelve genuine 6th century poems amongst the 60-odd pieces in the Book of Taliesin. He published these with scholarly notes in his Canu Taliesin/The Poems of Taliesin, available from the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.

Such a wide gap between date of composition and the date of our only surviving manuscript (seven centuries!) gives scholars the willies, and modern Celtic scholarship has whittled Williams’ twelve poems down to ten or so. Further, linguistic scholarship now shows that the language of the Britons finally transformed itself from late-British into proto-Welsh only around 550 AD, so if Taliesin was a historical person creating verse at the end of that century, he must have been one of the very first wave of poets to compose in the ‘new’ incarnation of the language. However, Williams’ thesis is still pretty much generally accepted in the field. These poems are, therefore, taken to be the very earliest surviving literary works in the Welsh language.

The other Taliesin Williams termed the ‘mythological’ or ‘mystical’ Taliesin, and he is to be identified with the character who appears in the late folk-tale. Many of the poems in the Book of Taliesin are full of bombastic descriptions of shape-changing, claims of identity with many substances and of encounters with many different historical, mythological and scriptural beings, staccato volleys of questions, and boasts of omnipresence and omnicognisance. Though only some of these are explicitly put in the mouth of Taliesin, it is pretty clear that they are all in the same persona. Williams argued that this ‘persona’ is obviously to be identified with the Taliesin of the late folk-tale, the shape-shifter, the infinitely-knowledgeable super-poet. It is clear that the basic outline of this tale, broadly, was well-known in Wales long before our earliest surviving version was written.

So what we have now is, as I said, two Taliesins. The first is a late 6th century praise-poet, continuing the tradition of the praise-singers whom classical writers describe attending on Gaulish chiefs, and of the bards of Maelgwn Gwynedd, who were famously vituperated by Gildas in the early 6th century.* Thus this Taliesin is heir to a very ancient tradition of panegyric, which flows from the ancient Celts all the way down into the late Irish and Welsh Middle Ages and beyond. Our second Taliesin is the ‘mystical’ shape-changer.

Williams used the poems which he considered genuinely 6th-century to construct a plausible narrative of the historical poet’s career, and as Williams was a very great scholar, his interpretation still makes much sense. (But I don’t rule out the possibility that some enterprising researcher may radically revise Williams’ theory in the future. The recent demonstration that at least one of the supposedly ‘historical’ poems is a 10th century ‘forgery’ is worrying for the authenticity of the rest of Williams’ cache of poems. But until then, his theory still holds good.)

Now a word on the character of this poetry: it is highly formulaic, full of mentions of Urien’s lavish generosity and skill in battle, and with remarkable emphasis on the poet’s own feelings. One of the poems is a moving elegy for his lord’s son, Owain son of Urien, again praising his generosity and military valour as the highest virtues. The poems tend to be of loose 8- or 9-syllable lines, ornamented with rhyme and lots of alliteration. They are paeans of praise, elegies, requests for reconciliation, not narrative poems. The language is fearsomely difficult – we normally teach people this poetry only when they have been reading Middle Welsh intensely for at least a year. Many lines are obscure and have to be emended, as one would expect for very old poetry which had passed through centuries of textual transmission.

What they are not, in any way at all, is ‘mystical’ or ‘druidic’. I’ll say that again – the earliest poems associated with Taliesin, which were written only a couple of centuries after the general conversion of the Britons to Christianity – have nothing pagan, druidic, or magical in them. The ‘Elegy for Owain’, one of the best poems, explicitly refers to the Christian God, asking that he consider the soul of the fallen hero.

The rest of the material in the Book of Taliesin, in the mouth of the ‘mystical’ Taliesin, is later. It must date to a 300-year period between about 900 AD and 1220 AD. Some individual poems in the manuscript can be dated precisely – the ‘Prophecy of Britain’ can be exactly dated to 930 AD. You may ask, quite reasonably, why the hell we can’t tie these other poems down any more precisely. The reasons are several. The first is that we often use references to contemporary political and social events to help date medieval poems. (This is, for example, how we know the date of the ‘Prophecy of Britain’ so accurately.) ‘Mythological’ poetry tends to be an inward-looking genre, which makes little reference to outer, worldly events and so in this case this approach tends to avail us nothing. Secondly, this kind of poetry, with its short lines and deliberate opacities, is rather unlike the rest of the verse which was being composed in the period – the religious verse and exalted praise-poetry of the poets known as the Gogynfeirdd, the 'Fairly early poets'. Thus it is difficult to compare it directly with other works surviving from the period, which might have helped us date individual poems. Finally, the skills required are highly specialised, and you need an expert in Welsh literature, linguistics, history and poetic forms to sit down and devote a decade or so of research-time to the material. Such people are few on the ground, but we are fortunate that Marged Haycock of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, has recently published a magisterial edition, commentary and introduction to the poems that are most of interest to pagans. She is undoubtedly the world expert on this poetry. (She also examined my PhD thesis - I was very honoured.) Her book is Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2007), with a companion volume, Prophetic Poems from the Book of Taliesin, forthcoming. Anyone who has a serious interest in Taliesin and the traditions associated with him cannot do without this book.

It’s safe to say that there is a spread of dates represented in the ‘mystical’ Taliesin poems in the Book of Taliesin. Some, like the famous ‘Spoils of Annwn’ are probably from 900-950 AD. Certainly it is one of the older poems in the voice of the ‘mystical’ Taliesin. Many others may be 12th century or later. Haycock suggests that some of them may – may – be the work of Llywarch ap Llywelyn, a poet who bore the sobriquet ‘Prydydd y Moch’, ‘the Poet of the Pigs’. He was active between 1174 AD and 1220 AD, in the Gwynedd court of Llywelyn ap Iorweth. There are certain persistent resemblances in diction to poems which we can ascribe to him with confidence, and Haycock makes a good case that many of the ‘mythological’ poems may in fact be his compositions. Just to add a bit of termporal focus – this means that many of the poems that druids and John Matthews look to for deeply archaic, ‘shamanic’ material date in fact to a century after the Norman Conquest of England, fifty odd years after Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Life of Merlin, and only a century or so before Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym were writing. They look like creations of the Welsh high Middle Ages, not the obscure Pagan/Christian borderland of the early Dark Ages.

So. What we have so far is a kernel of non-mystical, historical praise-poems by a flesh-and-blood Taliesin, from the end of the 6th century AD, and a slew of weird and wonderful poems in the voice of a shape-changing, time-travelling, all-knowing, rather insufferable ‘Taliesin’, dating from the period 900 AD to perhaps 1220 AD, probably clustering towards the end of that period, with a significant proportion perhaps the work of the great gogynfardd Prydydd y Moch.

Here’s the problem for pagans. If you want the later, ‘mystical’ poems to be the relics of druidic doctrine, why are they later, and not earlier?! One would expect the most apparently archaic and pagan poems to be the closest to the actual pagan period. If they in fact dated from the 6th century, when there presumably were still some non-Christians about in the wilds of Britain, and there were certainly still real druids in Ireland, there might be a case to answer. But they don’t. They’re centuries too late. A poem written in 1200 AD is intrinsically rather unlikely to convey accurate information about the beliefs of a class of people who were destroyed or driven underground eleven centuries before. Neither can one get away with the argument that these poems might have been handed down orally for centuries, and only written down for the first time between 900 and 1200 AD. This won’t wash, because the poems usually rhyme, and as languages change over centuries, word-endings change and this tends to abrade rhyme. (Rhyme is one of our most useful tools when it comes to dating medieval Celtic verse.) An oral poem that rhymed in 575 AD would no longer rhyme in 1200 AD, because the nuts and bolts of the words had shifted and altered. (To Chaucer, ‘breath’ and ‘heath’ rhymed. To us, they no longer do. Something similar happened in Welsh.)

Instead, what we need to ask is: ‘What the hell happened to the name of Taliesin between the historical poet’s death around 600 AD, and around 1050 AD, when we suddenly see the ‘mystical’ figure taking shape? Why would Welsh poets from 1050 AD – 1200 AD be so interested in creating such a figure?’ As actors say, ‘what’s my motivation in this scene?’ It must have happened in the latter half of the 9th century, since to the author of the Historia Brittonum around 830 AD Taliesin was simply a historical poet of the 6th century (not the most important of the period, either), and not a magical, shape-shifting psychonaut. So this vogue for fashioning the ‘mystical’ Taliesin is probably something that got underway in the late 9th and early 10th century.

It seems to me that at this period Taliesin, as a name, was like the string dipped in a glass of sugar solution, about which crystals form. It is very likely that Taliesin was developing a legend by the year 1050 AD at the very latest – we can see that the authors of Culhwch and Olwen and ‘The Spoils of Annwn’ were happily associating him with Arthur, and that the redactor of the Four Branches places him among the retinue of Bran the Blessed. (The historical Taliesin must have lived 150-odd years after Arthur, if the latter ever existed.) There is some evidence that at this stage, in the 10th and 11th centuries, there was a kind of ‘antiquarian’ vogue amongst Welsh literati – an interest in the Old North, its kings, dynasties and poets. This may have kick-started a process of mythologizing around the core of poems which had been transmitted under the name of Taliesin, and speculation about the power of the ancient poet.

A little later, Welsh court poetry during the 11-13th centuries was reaching one kind of climax of complexity and sophistication, and the professional court poets were often, it seems, rather full of themselves. Self-dramatisation was a career requirement. They had a high opinion of their own learning, considering themselves masters of not only native lore, poetic forms, topography, history, genealogy and story (the complex of lore which the Irish called senchus), but also of the mainstream ecclesiastical intellectual curriculum. They were inordinately proud of the fact that they were experts in ‘book-learning’ - the Bible, the apocrypha, hagiography, the Latin language, school-texts like Orosius and Isidore, and to a certain extent medieval science - as well as the native lore which was the natural inheritance of their order. We can detect a certain boastful jockeying with clerics and lesser, rival poets for social position, patronage, and prestige. (If you want to sample this kind of poetry in translation, I recommend Rhian Andrews’ Welsh Court Poetry.)

Marged Haycock argues, and I agree, that the ‘mythical’ or ‘mystical’ Taliesin isn’t a ‘worn-out old druid making a last stand for paganism’, but should be seen as a kind of self-congratulatory totem of the top-class professional court poets of 11-13th century Wales. With his challenges and harangues, he is a kind of boastful symbol of their self-confidence and power, endlessly rattling off their range of knowledge, vaunting the ability of poetry to penetrate the past and future with immediacy and power. Professional poets were, after all, expensive for a prince to maintain: they required board and upkeep, and due acknowledgement. As a result of shelling out liberally, every so often you’d get a praise-poem or an elegy, in very difficult, high-faluting language. There must have been an urge on the part of some aristocrats to patronise less exalted, less expensive, less difficult forms of poet, who were not proper professional bards. ‘Taliesin’ may, on one level, be the professional poets’ way of saying: look what we can do - our power, our closeness to the past and the future, our huge, all-encompassing repertoire of knowledge. In essence, ‘Taliesin’ is a symbol of the 11-12th century poets’ sense of their own professional mystique.

Haycock has carefully analysed the poems in the Book of Taliesin for their sources and analogues. She has turned an expert eye on all those poems which drove old boys like poor J. Gwenogvryn Evans off their heads with druidical fancies a hundred years ago. Her basic assertion – brilliantly, meticulously sustained – is that the kind of lore we find in these ‘mystical’ poems is perfectly ordinary medieval legend, science, school-learning and folklore dressed up: exactly the kinds of material you’d expert the learned literati of high medieval Wales to be conversant with. It’s things like the tides, the planets, the divisions of the earth, the elements, the Venerable Bede’s On the Nature of the Universe, classical stories of Hercules and Alexander the Great, biblical Apocrypha, apocalyptic prophecies, characters from Irish literature, the kinds of legends we see referred to in the Triads, stories about the family of Dôn, materia medica, and tales about Arthur. Incidentally, shape-shifting, one must remember, is one of the most ubiquitous story-motifs the world over (think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and occurs frequently in medieval Welsh and Irish literature. Linking it to druidic beliefs in reincarnation or to ‘Celtic shamanism’ simply isn’t necessary or probable. ‘Urbane, international and learned’ (as Haycock describes this poetry), ancient druidic wisdom it ain’t.

For example, in the poem ‘The Great Song of the World’, Taliesin describes how he is fashioned by God, who formed his ‘seven consistencies’:

Of fire and earth,
Of water and air,
Of mist and flowers,
And the fruitful wind.

Druids have inevitably seen these as ‘the ancient druid elements’, and no doubt some OBODite somewhere has duly incorporated mist, flowers and wind into their circle-casting. This list begins, of course, with the orthodox four elements of the ancient and medieval worlds. However, in a number of medieval texts from the 8th century onwards man is often visualised as a microcosm, fashioned from flowers, cloud, and so on, as well as earth, air, fire and water. (Often salt as well, for tears and sweat.) There is no doubt that the author of this poem was drawing on this kind of material. In essence, almost everything that looks weird and wonderful in the poems in the persona of the ‘mystical Taliesin’ turns out to be from the mainstream of medieval European lore and knowledge. This has led to some delightful ironies: the ‘seven senses’ described in the same poem have been incorporated into chants for use by John Matthews-style ‘Celtic Shamans’, but Haycock shows that they derive in fact from the Biblical Apocrypha and classical sources. The very question-and-answer format of many of the poems can be shown to derive from popular medieval dialogue texts, which often discuss much the same material. (‘What supports the world? What are human beings made of? What is the wind? Into how many regions is the earth divided? What man never died and what man was never born?’) This all sounds terribly mysterious and druidical, but in fact these are the sort of questions that apprentice monks used to tease each other with for entertainment.

So. Celtic scholars look at neo-pagan descriptions of Taliesin with a mixture of pleasure and polite bafflement: pleasure that this medieval figure is still of interest and importance to many modern people, but bafflement because they have no truck for the ‘druidic’ or ‘pagan’ Taliesin, because it just isn’t borne out by the actual texts on which our understanding of the figure and his context must be based. The neo-pagan habit of reading the Book of Taliesin poems in the expectation that they will tell us something about the pagan 1st century, instead of the Christian 12th century, is a chronic disaster. What’s worse, scholars have know that this was a wrong tree up which to bark for 150 years. (In 1858, the scholar D. W. Nash referred in his book Taliesin to the forgeries and fantasies of Iolo Morgannwg as a ‘monstrous imposture’.) The problem is that high-level Celtic scholarship and popular writing decoupled around 1900, and so a slew of writers such as Lewis Spence produced highly imaginative and wholly wrong accounts of druidic beliefs and so on, drawing on poor translations of this poetry. These books (Spence’s The Mysteries of Britain is a classic of the genre) were wildly popular with English readers, and in turn heavily influenced people like Ross Nicholls, and thus, eventually, filtered through into the flowering of neo-pagan druidry. In the 90s a lot of these books were cheaply reprinted and many neo-pagans must have had the same reaction I did – I remember reading Spence aged about sixteen, in Cornwall, utterly and completely entranced, and believing every word. To re-emphasise: no one who works professionally on the history, language or literature of medieval Wales has believed any of this old tripe for well over a century, so it is a melancholy thing to find it still (still) being regurgitated by enthusiastic, well-meaning neo-druids.

One of the saddest episodes in this protracted ‘Does the Taliesin poetry tell us about the doctrine of the druids or not?’ battle involved a scholar called J. Gwenogvryn Evans, whom I mentioned above. In 1910, he produced a simply magnificent facsimile of the Book of Taliesin, and a transcription notable for its scrupulous textual accuracy. It is so good that it was only superseded by the digital facsimile now provided by the National Library of Wales. But he fell in with the druidical-mysteries school badly and inexplicably, and in 1915 published his colossally-misguided Poems from the Book of Taliesin, which was his ‘reconstruction’ of the material according to his theories. This second volume had the misfortune to be reviewed by Sir John Morris-Jones, the greatest Welsh scholar of his time, in a book-length article in the journal Y Cymmrodor. Morris-Jones savaged Evans, demonstrating at great length and in cruelly eloquent detail precisely why Evans’ volume was completely and utterly worthless. ‘That all this trash’, purred Morris-Jones, ‘should be printed in the best ink on the finest paper, is sad indeed.’ Much the same might be said (and is) about the modern heirs to Evans’ Poems, such as John Matthews’ abysmal Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman. (An jolly half-hour can be spent comparing Matthews’ ‘translations’ at the end of this latter volume with those of Haycock, which represent perhaps the finest Welsh scholarship of our day.)

So far so good. There is another aspect to this material, however, which complicates matters. The fact is that some aspects of the late folktale about the ‘mystical’ Taliesin look like rather archaic ideas. Transformations, the acquisition of poetic inspiration, the association of poetry and prophecy, this weird stuff about an ugly boy and a beautiful one – much of it can be paralleled from Irish medieval literature. Ideas which are shared over Ireland and Wales tend to be old, and both the Irish and Welsh words for ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ show an etymological link to prophecy and seership. (There’s nothing especially ‘Celtic’ about this – many of the same ideas are found in Norse texts.)

So the mystical Taliesin material, both in the Book of Taliesin and in the late folk-tale, does seem to preserve some pretty ancient concepts. One can instantly see why the court poets of the 11-13th centuries might well have been interested in this kind of stuff, concerned as they were to bolster the prestige and mystique of their profession. (Patrick Ford's Ystoria Taliesin, an edition of the folktale, has examined this material in most detail.) Though the ideas are ancient, their hitching to the name of Taliesin, the 6th century historical poet, was not.

It’s not immediately clear why Taliesin – and not any of the other poets mentioned in the Historia Brittonum – became the ‘hook’ for this material, to which, as we saw above, much fairly commonplace lore has been added, along with a penchant for the riddling questions which formed part of several well-known and understood medieval genres. I personally think the poets of the 11-13th centuries chose Taliesin as their symbolic figurehead for the following reason. It’s possible that they simply didn't have much early poetry apart from what we now call the ‘historical’ Taliesin poems, and the Gododdin of Aneirin; in other words, that they were in much the same situation as us, being sadly short on poetry from the 6th and 7th centuries. Now the historical Taliesin’s poetry is intensely ego-focused: he’s always talking about himself, pushing his own persona to the fore, and occasionally says things like:

I saw Easter
With its myriad candles
And myriad plants.
I saw leaves as they are wont to sprout;
I saw branches equally laden with flowers.
I saw the attributes of a most generous king…

This tendency to emphasise the poet's subjectivity is akin to the boasting 'I have beens' which fill the 'mystical' poems, and may well have inspired them. The Gododdin is quite different: Aneirin makes almost no authorial impression. He leaves no feeling of character. So, if the court poets were looking for a bombastic figurehead dating from the dawn of their tradition, Taliesin the bard of Urien of Rheged was the obvious choice. To his name was hitched some ancient traditions about the nature of poetry and its acquisition, and gradually he was elaborated into the symbolic, multifunctional persona whom we find in the ‘mystical’ poetry.

He appears to have been a popular character. Much medieval poetry was all about performance. The Taliesin persona afforded great scope for entertainment – boastful and inflated, he was a poet, a warrior, a sage, a shape-shifter, a traveller in time and space who consorted with biblical figures and the characters we know from the Mabinogi. (A faint parallel with Doctor Who suggests itself...) His questions, which may seem weird and resonantly esoteric to us, would have been less confusing for a medieval audience familiar with the texts on which the authors of these poems were drawing. Many of these poems have long been understood by pagans as arcane and hallowed semi-scripture, behind which one may catch an echo of druidical incantations. But the figure of ‘Taliesin’, so loved by neopagans for his shamanic air, may in fact have been designed to provoke a sophisticated, high-medieval courtly audience to laughter and cheerful head-scratching. Instead of imagining these poems as the eerie chaunting of a bearded sage hidden away in some Welsh cave, preserving the rites and legends of the ‘Old Gods’, we should imagine a finely-dressed reciter or court-poet declaiming them to a merry audience of aristocrats, nobles and diplomats around the year 1200 AD. As a bravura, prestige-bolstering exercise by court poets taking a rest from their usual stock-in-trade of praise and lament, poems in the voice of this uber-poet would have provided splendid entertainment, testifying to the professional poets’ breadth, vitality and inventiveness.


* * *



* One of Gildas' best purple-passages. Rhetorically addressing Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd, he splutters: 'When the attention of thy ears has been caught, it is not the praises of God, in the tuneful voice of Christ's followers, with its sweet rhythm, and the song of church melody, that are heard, but thine own praises (which are nothing); the voice of the rascally crew yelling forth, like Bacchanalian revellers, full of lies and foaming phlegm, so as to besmear everyone near them.' This is our earliest description of vernacular praise-poetry in Britain.

Wales

On our trip to north-east/mid-Wales over the weekend, Matt and I visited Pistyll Rhaeadr, the hightest waterfall in Britain. At the end of a long valley near Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant ('Waterfallchurch-in-Hogvale') the cataract pours over the rock and plummets for 240 feet, passing through an astonishing natural bridge on the way. At the bottom is a plunge pool, with a deep foaming centre surrounded by a wide area of very shallow water over stones golden with silt. It was absolutely magical, and - though I rarely say things like this - I am quite sure it was sacred to the ancient druids. As I approached though the mist, early in the morning, a slim, blonde woman was sitting just by the pool with her feet in the water, wearing a strange, long grey garment, and watching me with calm, ageless eyes. Was this the otherworldly Lady of the Pool, I wondered, and felt very David Jones-ey. (No. She turned out to be Marie, on holiday from Dudley.)

We also visited the rich, melancholy ruins of Valle Crucis, on of the greatest Cisterician abbeys in Wales. Set in a wild valley near Llangollen, the Abbey is eloquent in decay, with some medieval appartments still visitable. At its height, the monks were very successful sheep-farmers, as well as patrons of native Welsh culture, and the place was obviously filthy rich. There was a remarkable selection of gravestones, one commemorating a woman called Dyddgu, 'Dear Day', which was the name of one of Dafydd ap Gwilym's mistresses. (G R Grove - thanks for the correction!)

The monastery is called 'Valle Crucis', 'Crossvale', because of the cross that once stood upon the so-called 'Pillar of Eliseg', about 400 yards up the valley. Today, this is a squat column on a little tump or hillock, which was erected in the mid-9th century by Cyngen ap Cadell, the then king of Powys, to honour his great-grandfather Eliseg or Elisedd ap Gwylog. It's in an extremely weathered state - we're missing the bottom half of it, and we only know there was an inscription on it because the great antiquarian Edward Lhuyd copied down what he could make out in 1696. This is vitally useful, because the inscription mentions several people we know about from the Historia Brittonum, written c. 829/30, and tells us a lot about who the kings of Powys at that time thought their ancestors were. (It mentions Magnus Maximus - the Macsen Wledig of Breuddwyt Macsen - and Vortigern, for example.) Looking at it, I would never have guessed it had ever been inscribed.

Dr

This whole process of writing a Ph.D goes on a bit. I submitted the softbound text at the start of October, and had the (perfectly enjoyable) viva at the start of December, when it was made clear to me that I'd passed. Then I made the required minor corrections, and sent my external examiner a copy for him to check in the first week of February. Yesterday, at the end of April, I got a letter saying that I had permission to supplicate, with a very positive yet appropriately searching report from the examiners. I printed off a full copy of the thesis (260+ pages), filled in three more forms, and trotted to the binders. It will take a week and cost £28 to have the thesis bound in the dark, drilled and sewn buckram that the Bodleian requires. It won't be ready till next Tuesday. And at the moment that the bound thesis is handed over in the Bodleian office, with yet another form duly filled in and pasted into the inside cover, then - ping! - I magically change from 'Mr' to 'Dr'. (Which hasn't stopped me using 'Dr' on job applications ever since I got through the viva last year.) What a magical transformation. As the Mabinogion doesn't, in fact, say of my two supervisors: '...and they took a mass of scrap paper, a load of smudged ink, and a heap of old books, and conjured up the most ill-tempered and drunken new Celtic Ph.D that anyone had ever seen.'

Beltane

Beltane - with a nod to Sappho.

It began to get dark as Justine and I pushed on into the wood, a soft dusk-mist greying the wash of bluebells. Hazel and sweet-chestnut trunks were very black under a roof of green. A great tit swung his unchanging two notes out over the twilight, as though skimming stones on the surface of a lake. In the distance, we could hear the snarl and scrape of motorbikes being raced through the woodshave down by the estate.

We came into a small, bowl-sided dell, with a path of beaten black mud leading through it. Oaks antlered the slopes, standing two abreast. We stood very still, sensing which way we should go, into the blue. The grey gauzes of the woodland thickened, and night seeped in between the trees.

We climbed the side of the dell and sheltered on its lip. It was nearly dark, and the two of us, old friends, went like blind people in a familiar house, navigating by touch and instinct. I took out the provisions, the honeycomb, the spiced wine and bread. Justine gathered a creel of sticks and laid them down.

With blowings and fannings, I lit a fire, humming to the anvil-breasted mother of flame, with her snakes and her spring-waters, riding her red mare, the old darling of the poets. Justine sat gravely, looking out over the dingle, as the twigs snapped and charred and the smoke sought us out, each in turn. We washed our faces in the smoke of the wood, floating soft and grey as clouds of moths.

I tipped some grains of frankincense into my hand, and sprinkled them onto the charcoal block snug in its socket of flint. Sweet-sharp incense rose, mingled with woodsmoke. The hot, holy spice blended with smoke and sap and wild garlic: fragrance of earth ingrained with light.

A long silence, as we sat side by side, in perfect and precious companionship. I let my mind drift through the forest, touching and smelling and tasting...slim, swan-necked birches, smooth sweet-chestnuts, hornbeam all atangle, the furrowed wizard oak. All grow here, their feet washed in bluebells and the curling waves of fern. Together, we breathed ourselves into the note of the wood, its unheard music. I raised my voice in a line of melody, sinuous and Persian, unspooling my song out between the trees.

I began.

- Our subject, tonight, is Love.
- For I can think of no better thing to speak of this night, and every night, until we die, replied Justine.
- For what is the dark earth beneath our feet than the flesh of the heart in which Love roots? And what is the incense but the perfume of the Beloved, whose sweetness points beyond itself to the sweeter scent of nothingness?
- And what is the fire but the blaze of the heart, that consumes itself in Love?

A longer silence, broken by the chirr of the night-birds. Justine took the bread and lifted the turned beechwood bowl filled with honeycomb. The wind through the coppice swayed the slender trunks like shaken sedge.

I took the wine, spiced with honey and crushed herbs, rosemary for the sun, cool mint for the sting of contrast, to offer up and to dip the warm breadcrusts in.

Justine blessed the bread, asking that our coming and our going alike be made sacred. We took turns to dip the bread in the honey, and placed it in the fire as an offering. The honey sizzled and charred with a sweet smell.

- Old Adam in the greenwood, I said. Atavistic and ancient, his mouth spews leaves and tendrils, green-smeared, his flesh is of grass. Do you catch the uncured tang of his bullhide and the acrid crush of the woundwort, of the sanicle and strawberry bruised beneath him?
- Are the gods metaphors that are realer than reality? I think that they haunt this place, they savour it, and in their savouring it comes to be.

I blessed the wine, pouring it into the chipped green bowl. I lifted it and poured a good cupful into the dark soil as an offering to the mother of the place, the Lady of the Wood, beech-shanked, leaf-skinned in her dazzle of shadow. Justine took the cup, and I watched her shut her eyes and drink the spiced wine in the yellow firelight beneath the oak.


Wild garlic and the wood anemone
under the rain. In the green dusk
the wet, white-starred earth rebukes
the heavens for starlessness.
The toad-faced nightjar
lies hid in the thicket,
sharpening the wood with his note.

Some say cities and gallery walls
shelter the most beautiful sights
upon dark earth: but I say
it is the fall of your hair
against a frieze of birches.

Hope

This is a fine poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-95), the extraordinary Mexican nun, poet, playwright and polymath. Condemned for her learning and outspoken views in defence of women's right to education, she was eventually forced by the Church to sell her 4,000 volume library, and her treasured collection of scientific and musical instruments. She died of plague, whilst nursing her sick sisters. Cambridge University has an excellent website about her here.

I found myself wondering if the vivid metaphor of the last lines inspired the hideous Pale Man of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.

A la Esperanza

Verde embeleso de la vida humana,
loca Esperanza, frenesí dorado,
sueño de los despiertos intrincado,
como de sueños, de tesoro vana;

alma del mundo, senectud lozana,
decrépito verdor imaginado;
el hoy de los dichosos esperado,
y de los desdichados el mañana:

sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día
los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos,
todo lo ven pintado a su deseo;

que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía,
tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos
y solamente lo que toco veo.


* * *

Hope

Green ravisher of human life,
mad Hope, gilded frenzy,
the waking man's sleep,
confused and proud of its treasures as of its dreams;

soul of the world, flourishing senility,
decrepit and imaginary prime,
the today desired by the lucky,
and the unlucky man's tomorrow;

let them follow your name in search of your light,
those who wear green-tinted glasses
and see all as they would desire it;

But I, wiser in my fortune,
keep both my eyes in my two hands,
and see only what I touch.

Lawrence o Arabia

Further to the subject of Welsh documentaries, my friend Rhiannon can be heard talking learnedly about Lawrence of Arabia in this S4C program. She wanders around Jesus College Oxford chatting with the main presenter. Woohoo! She's lovely, and that's where I work!

Dead laptop

Today - my bloody birthday - my trusty word-steed juddered to a halt and expired in the dust, taking with it (apparently irrecoverably) several thousand words of occasional writings, a lecture, and some poem fragments. So any readers who were looking forward to 'Pagan Poetry III' will have to bear with me, as I now can't remember what I was in the process of saying. DAMN. Of course the D.Phil and M.Phil theses are safely backed up, as were most of my lectures. But sadly not quite all. Double damn.

Manx

I am currently teaching Manx, the language which the Irish scholar T. F. O'Rahilly once called 'the Cinderella of the Gaelic tongues.' And of the Celtic languages in general, he might have added.

Though Manx (extinct since 1974, but undergoing a bit of a revival) is closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, its orthography was basically cooked up by John Phillips, the Welsh-speaking Bishop of Sodor and Man in the early 17th century. As a result, it's kind of Englishy and kind of Welshy, and hilariously misleading if you come at it from the perspective of knowing Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Ocassionally, just by coincidence, it can superficially look unnervingly like Middle Welsh, e.g. the biblical phrase va enmyssit Ean, 'who was named John'. All told, it has a kind of wierd organic appearance, an up-the-airy-mountain, down-the-rushy-glen goblin energy: N'egooish cha row nhee erbee jeant va er ny yannoo. ('Without him nothing was made that was made', or more literally, 'In-his-not-presence not was anything on-earth made that-was after its making.')

Here's a sample for any enterprising Irish-speakers out there. I've put the words into their precise Irish equivalents below, but they will look very odd to
Modern Irish speakers, especially the use of guth, 'voice' to mean 'word', though in fact this use is attested all the way back to Old Irish.

Ayns y toshiaght va'n Goo, as va'n Goo marish Jee, as va'n Goo Jee.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

(Anns a' tosach bha'n Guth, is bha'n Guth mairis Dé, is bha'n Guth .)

2 Va'n Goo cheddin ayns y toshiaght marish Jee.
The same was in the beginning with God.

(Bha'n Guth céanna anns a' tosach mairis Dé.)


It gets worse! But it's quite a lot of fun.