Gwydion son of Don and reading Math, son of Mathonwy, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion.

Gwydion in the Fabled Third.

Gwydion son of Don is the main character in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. At one stage in the story he goes to the court of a prince, disguised as the best of all story tellers. I borrowed him, and put him into Laȝamon's narrative because I wanted to compare different types of storytelling. My version of Gwydion will tell four stories, three of them taken from The Mabinogion. (Or five and four if you count the story he’s telling himself near the end of the book which is taken from ‘Culhwch and Olwen’.)

Whether the character in my story is actually that Gwydion is deliberately vague. At one point he claims to be. He’d be four or five hundred years old at least, if not much older at the time of the story, and then he'd have to live for another five or six centuries to meet Laȝamon at the end of the book. Given his abilities as a magician, longevity or immortality of sorts doesn’t seem a problem.

In a book littered with anachronisms, the one I had the most trouble with was Gwydion’s regret and guilt over his actions before the book starts. There is nothing in his story in the Fourth Branch to suggest either sentiment is something he might have experienced.

How did the original audience ‘read’ the Fourth Branch?

Sophisticated modern readings of the tale explore the possible mythic and folkloric sub strata; painstaking scholarly excavations seek to reveal the origins of the story in ‘Celtic’ religion; similarities with Irish stories are carefully established; the relationship to stories about bird men and beast men, to the prophesied death of the king; to folk lore about women as owls, dating back to ancient Greece, to Celtic Love Triangles and the possible folk -memory of proto-Celtic bronze age culture, all in an ongoing attempt to reconstruct what the story might have been long before this version was ever written down.

I admit it’s addictive.

But I’m interested in storytelling and I think whoever put the four branches together was a genius. So take this as a story, complete in itself and then ask: how did the original audience read the central character? It’s impossible to give a definitive answer, but that shouldn’t stop us.

Although it is usually called ‘Math Son of Mathonwy’, Math’s nephew, Gwydion is the main character He’s a powerful magician. In the story he puts the proof of his competence before any consideration of consequence. So while Gwydion is successful in all he attempts, his actions are catastrophic for many of those around him.

The story can be split into the usual triple movement, and at the heart of each movement is a woman and Gwydion’s treatment of her. I’m going to take each one in turn. In the first, I think it’s obvious that Gwydion’s actions are unacceptable, legally, morally, and any other way you can think of. The story makes that very plain, but I don’t think it’s clear from this how the audience would have ‘read’ him’. In the second and third parts, it’s not so straightforward. The overall effect is (what may be) a deliberate, characteristic, refusal to dictate interpretation. Which is one of the things I admire about the story.

(If you’re interested in the more usual approaches to the stories, which I’ve briefly summarised above, Will Parker’s magnificent The Four branches of the Mabinogi (Bardic Press, 2005) will keep you enthralled for a very long time. He has a shorter online version here: http://www.mabinogion.info/about.htm) 

1)    Goewin

The story

For reasons that are never explained, Math, who is the king, must rest with his feet in the lap of a virgin unless he’s called to war. The current foot holder is Goewin, who is the most beautiful maiden in those parts at that time. Gwydion’s younger brother is pining for her. When he confesses this to him, Gwydion doesn’t say, ‘In your dreams child. She doesn’t love you, not a bit, pick someone else.’ He says ‘Minheu a baraf’…I will arrange it. 

So that the brother can rape the girl, Gwydion has to start a war to get Math out of the palace. He does. Men die. Pryderi, the prince he tricks into starting the war, dies in single combat, beaten by Gwydion’s ‘strength and magic’.  

In case anyone listening to the story doesn’t realise the evil of their actions, Math’s reaction should point them towards the appropriate response. When he finds out what the brothers have done he is furious. The first thing he does is try to do the right thing by the girl. He marries her and gives her ‘authority over my kingdom.’

His punishment of the brothers is savage, humiliating, and appropriate. The boys have acted like beasts. He changes them into beasts, condemning them to a year as a mating pair. When they return, he takes their offspring, and then changes them again into different animals. The male to female and vice versa. For three years they live like this, forced to mate with each other three times.

But while Gwydion survives the punishment, he doesn’t seem to learn from it.

2) Aranhrod

The story.

Because of what happened in the first part, Math now needs a new foot holder. Gwydion proposes his sister and sets in motion the rest of the story.

They send for her, and presumably in public, ask if she’s a virgin which is the major qualification for this weird role. Her answer is evasive, so Gwydion tests her, magically. He does this in public, and when he proves she isn’t, she is publicly shamed. She flees having given birth to two children (this bit is strange even by Mabinogion standards.) a sturdy yellow haired boy, and a small something. Gwydion brings up the small something. When the lad is four, he takes him to his sister.

Again, he presents the boy with no tact or thought of the shame he might be causing. She curses her son.

Gwydion tricks her into lifting the first curse. She curses him again. Gwydion tricks her again, though as she points out this time he has put other people’s lives in danger. Her third curse cannot be circumvented. He will not have a wife from the race of women living in the world at this time.

In the audience’s world a girl’s virginity was a public fact. Her value in the marriage market depended on it. If in doubt, her kin could be called on to vouch for her. So Gwydion’s question may not have been as intrusive or offensive as it might seem to a modern reader. On the other hand, if he didn’t know the answer, then he could have asked her in private?

When he takes the boy to Aranrhod, she asks who is the boy? Gwydion says, your son.

‘O man,’ she says, ‘why did you shame me, and now continue to shame me?’

Whose side would the audience be on here? Do they see the way he has consistently shamed his sister? Or do they side with him?

It’s possible to argue that Gwydion’s actions are motivated by his concern for his nephew, Lleu. But it’s worth remembering that his actions in the first part were motivated by concern for his brother. Competence seems more important to him than consequence . What we might euphemistically call ‘collateral damage’ doesn’t seem to concern him. Trickery and confrontation seem to be his only solutions to a problem. When he cannot use these, he Is stuck. Which leads seamlessly into the third part.

3) Blodeuedd.

The Story.

Gwydion complains to Math. The wording of Aranrhod’s third curse means there’s no way of getting round it. So together they make a woman out of flowers, called Blodeuedd. She is the most beautiful woman ever seen. They give her to Lleu. There is nothing unusual  about that for a contemporary audience, fathers gave away their daughters. According to the Welsh laws of women he said Mi a’th roddais i wr….I give you to the man….Rich men bought wardships and auctioned off their wards.

 In a story where what characters say is so important, Great Uncle, Uncle and Nephew say nothing to her or she to them at this stage of the story. All we are told is ‘at the feast they slept together’. (Simms Williams glosses Kysgu yn gyt as ‘consummated the marriage’).

The Eve associations are stronger than the Pygmalion ones.

But they don’t ask her, they don’t stop to consider the couple may not be matched. And whether the made woman has free will or any right to a say in her life are questions no one in the text asks.

Lleu’s first recorded independent action, apart from sleeping with his wife, is to leave her and visit his Great Uncle. Blodeuedd encounters Gronw. They fall instantly ‘in love’ or into bed. Unlike the blank ‘at the feast they slept together’ the storyteller makes an effort to describe their reactions to each other.

When he finally leaves, Gronw instructs her in how to wheedle out the secret of Lleu’s death. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘remember what I told you, and keep on talking to him as if you really loved him. And find out from him how his death might come about.’

Lleu is tricked into showing her the bizarre way in which he can be killed. And Gronw throws a spear at him. Instead of dying Lleu becomes a damaged bird. There is no explanation as to why Lleu is not killed. But Gwydion seeks his nephew, and nurses him back to health and a hearty, human hatred. They go seek the lovers. Blodeuedd is not offered the opportunity to redeem her husband’s shame. Possibly because she has no family to pay the price. She is turned into an owl, and Gwydion gleefully tells her she will be hated by all the other birds. Gronw offers reparation, but Lleu insists the only reparation he will accept is for Gronw to stand where he stood while Lleu stands were he did and throws a spear at him.

In section one, Gwydion helps his brother commit a crime. The audience would know that rape was a crime against the King’s peace; it occurs in the Court, and it occurs in the King’s own bed. Math’s reaction emphasises the enormity of what they have done.

In section two Gwydion shames his sister, and then escalates the problem by smugly pointing out how he’s cheated his way past each curse.

In section three, Gwydion and Math make the perfect woman, but don’t stop to consider what she wants, and are surprised when she responds to another man.

At no point does Gwydion considers what the woman might want.

But at no stage in this story does anyone stop and consider the consequences of their actions, unless you count Gronw’s ,‘…since you do not advise it, I will not go,’ he said. ‘However, I would say there is a danger that the chieftain who owns this court will return.’

The brothers don’t stop and think what will happen when the news of their actions in part one reaches Math.

Gwydion never pauses to think that by shaming Aranrhod, and then gleefully telling her he’s broken the first curse, she might escalate the curses.

Math and Gwydion don’t stop to wonder if the flower woman, being human, has free will. The lovers don’t seem to consider that killing the nephew of one powerful magician, who is also the grandnephew of another, might not go unnoticed or unpunished.

So how did the original audience respond to all this? Was Gwydion simply a powerful magician in a vaguely perceived past who did stuff? Or was he as ambiguous to the original audience as he is now? 

Not forgetting that the audience was probably mixed. We should get rid of the idea of all medieval woman as downtrodden and submissive. There is a roll call of strong women, and you might object that these women are aristocratic and therefore not representative, but the truth is very little is known about non-aristocratic people, and how any of them organised their private lives. In the stories, the ability to hold an intelligent conversation is a much admired skill.  Unlike the Brut, where women rarely speak, The Mabinogion as a collection is bejewelled with strong women, who often represent common sense and have the best lines of dialogue.

In the First Branch, in Pwyll’s version of heaven, Arawn’s wife is described conventionally as the most beautiful woman anyone had seen. But also ‘As he conversed with her, he found her to be the most noble woman and the most gracious of disposition and discourse he had ever seen.‘

I wonder how the women in the audience reacted to the Fourth Branch. 

Writing is one way of pursuing the what if to where scholarship can’t go.

My bet is that the reaction was not one of exclusively passive consumption. While some medieval stories were deliberately constructed to preach a moral, not all stories were long winded versions of an Aesop’s fable. Before reading became a solitary pleasure, stories could not only be ways of organising the world, but subject matter for thought and conversation in a public setting.

In the Fabled Third, when Gwydion ends his second story, a version of the third part of the Fourth Branch, the audience buzzes. 

Uther interrupts. ‘Your story fades.’

Gwydion bows, ‘My Lord is very kind.
I am flattered that you say so.’

 Uther, surprised, speechless, but amused.

‘My task is not to tell my listeners what to think,
but to give them things to think about.
Stories with neat endings shut down conversations. 

If storytelling is a way of playing what if, then what if the habitual dying fall of so many fine medieval stories is the storyteller’s invitation to the audience to exercise their own judgement?

Translations from the Mabinogion on this page are by Sioned Davies.  Taken from The Mabinogion, translated with an Introduction and notes by Sioned Davies. Oxford University Press, 2008