The White Goddess (23 page)

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:
“
‘Bernde
d”
seu
“Br
ende
d”
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: