Pagan Phoenix - Damh the Bard

Penstowe Manor asked people who wanted lunch to order it earlier in the morning, but even so the queue was slow-moving. We eventually shared a table with some of the group of Gloucestershire Pagans that my friend belongs to, which was very pleasant. Behind the table was a stall of stunningly good artwork - but I had already spent to my limit on CDs and songbooks of Damh the Bard's music.

He was the next speaker, on Y Mabinogi - the Four Branches: their History and the Bardic Mysteries.
I'd been looking forward to this, being reasonably familiar with the Mabinogion since I first read the Evangeline Walton series The Islands of the Mighty. They were published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy range in the early 1970s and I came across them a little while after that.

The talk began with a quotation from Rowland Williams:
"For thee of English birth
But British heart
Our bardic harp neglected and unstrung
Moved to the soul
And at thy touch there start
Old harmonies to life
Our ancient tongue opens
Its buried treasure to impart"

Damh the Bard has been working on his version of the myths of the Four Branches, and two CDs were available on his stall. He starts with the tales of Pwll and Annwn, Rhiannon, and Bran.
The theme of the day, harking back to Andy Letcher that morning, seemed to be the tension between Mythos and Logos - the experience and the writing down. The tales of the Mabinogion were written down by Christian monks, but they are older and stranger, and very much part of an oral tradition.
They were almost forgotten in Wales, until Lady Charlotte Guest translated them into English, starting with the King Arthur stories. She married John Guest, of Dowlais ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil, in the early 19th century and, being an accomplished linguist, taught herself Welsh. It is thanks to her that the stories became known again.

Damh said that the stories could be divided into two parts - the stories of the family of Llyr, and the stories of the family of Don. The stories of Llyr are all associated with the sea, and tend to be emotional, while the stories of Don are associated with the land, and are earthy and practical - and both sets of stories show what happens when the characters make terrible mistakes!

The story of Blodeuedd, for instance, the Woman of Flowers, has Gwydion creating a bride for Llew Llaw Gyffes (who has been cursed by his mother Arianrhod to never have a human wife), without thinking of the consequences. She falls in love with another man, and plots to kill her husband - and is eventually turned into an owl as punishment. There is a standing stone in North Wales, Llech Ronw, near Blaenau Ffestiniog, which is associated with the legend - the hole in it supposedly shows the passage of the spear which kills Gronw, as revenge for trying to kill Llew. Another, modern stone stands on the bank of the River Dovey. This one was carved for the 1969 TV series The Owl Service, Alan Garner's re-telling of the myth.

Another important part of the stories is how closely they are tied into real places in Wales. You can go to the place where Llew and Blodeuedd lived, and visit valleys and hills that are mentioned in the tales.

There's a lot, too, about transformation - Blodeuedd is made from flowers; Gwydion himself is transformed into a series of animals, along with his brother Gilfaethwy, as punishment for the rape of King Math's foot-holder Goewin. They spend a year each as a breeding pair of deer, then pigs, then wolves, producing a fawn, a piglet and a cub, before they are restored to human form by Math. Llew Llaw Gyffes, after the attempt on his life, is transformed into an eagle, until Gwydion tracks him down and restores him to human form.

Lady Charlotte Guest and the Mabinogion

Nearly two weeks ago, I went to Hay Castle to see the first fifteen minutes of a film called The Dancing Floor, inspired by the Welsh mythology which was preserved in the collection of stories called the Mabinogion. There was music, on crwth, pipes, guitar and cello, and a storyteller who told one of the tales - of Llew Llaw Gyffes, and the Woman of Flowers, of magic and betrayal and a hero who is reborn. They have a crowd funder going at Indigogo, and it really is a beautiful film, well worth supporting.

Also there that evening was a great great grand daughter of Lady Charlotte Guest (I think I've got the right number of greats). She spoke about her illustrious ancestor - because Lady Charlotte Guest translated the Mabinogion from Medieval Welsh into English and popularised it for the first time.
She would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the task - she was born in Lincolnshire, the daughter of wealthy and aristocratic parents, but she shocked polite society when she married an ironmaster from South Wales, who was twice her age! Josiah Guest was also the first MP for Merthyr Tydfil, and later was made a baronet.
When she arrived at Dowlais, near Merthyr Tydfil, at the big house next to the ironworks, at the age of 21, she began to learn Medieval Welsh. She was already a linguist, having learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian with her brother (she fell for the tutor) and then went on to teach herself Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. When her work was published, Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself commented on the beauty of her language.
She and her husband were interested in education, and built several schools for the working people locally. She also started a library, at first for a fee of 1/6, but in 1853, shortly after her husband died, it was made free of charge.
On her husband Josiah's death in 1852, she also took charge of the running of the ironworks, at the time the largest in the world, until she handed it over to her oldest son Ivor. By this time, she had ten children. Ivor later married Lady Cornelia Spencer-Churchill, an aunt of Winston Churchill.