The White Goddess (24 page)

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
Talie
sin
,
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.