The Mabinogion: The First Branch

Write-up won by coraa for helphaiti. The translation is by Sioned Davies.

I had never before read these medieval Welsh tales, though I was vaguely aware that they were influential on Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” series, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and a number of other fantasy novels that I have read. (I know about Evangeline Walton’s books but I haven’t read them.)

coraa intrigued me by describing one branch as “gay incestuous genderswitching bestiality MPREG” – a completely accurate description, by the way. She also mentioned the king who needed to keep his feet in the lap of a virgin at all times. Also completely accurate!

I almost always enjoy reading myths and ancient tales, and this was no exception. The stories are dreamlike, complete with sudden shifts in perspective and dissolves into new lands and new scenes. The logic by which events occur is also dreamlike, intuitive, based on emotion and fairytale motifs rather than psychological realism. They are surreal but not random, tapping into the raw materials of the human psyche: rational and irrational fears, the metaphors by which we shade our eyes from thoughts otherwise too bright or dark to directly perceive.

As I read the stories and compared them to the modern works which took at least a little inspiration from them, I thought how little modern fantasy even attempts to recreate the atmosphere of myth as opposed to borrowing characters and events, and how rational and predictable are most systems of magic in modern fantasy. I like a lot of modern fantasy. But sometimes I wish more of it would dip into the substance as well as the set dressing of its roots. Not everything has to be realistic, nor does everything have to be explained. If we can’t find mystery and stories in which the events are driven by the characters’ emotions and inner landscapes in fantasy, where can we find it? (That’s rhetorical. Modern stories of that nature are usually published as magic realism, though there are some exceptions.)

I began my reading by looking up pronunciation notes, which were rather terrifying. If I applied them correctly, “Nghymru” (Wales) is pronounced “Ingimri,” and “Pwyll” is pronounced "Poo-i-[voiceless breathy sound]". Then I found, in those notes, a few ready-made phonetic pronunciations for important names. However, since they were all along the lines of “Gooyd-eeon” and “Gill-vaye-thooee,” I didn’t find them as helpful as I had initially hoped. Most intimidating language since Mandarin!

In the First Branch, Prince Pwyll goes out hunting, scares a pack of white hounds with red ears from a stag, and feeds it to his own pack. Even one as ignorant of Welsh myth as I could have told him it is always a bad idea to interfere with obviously supernatural creatures. Sure enough, the hounds belong to Arawn, king of Annwfn. The notes helpfully explain that the latter is an “Otherworld,” not any sort of Hell.

Unlike Lloyd Alexander’s Evil Overlord, this Arawn is reasonable about the insult and only asks to switch places with Pwyll for a year so Pwyll can kill one of his enemies for him. The extremely honorable Pwyll does so, sleeping with Arawn’s beautiful wife for an entire year but refusing to have sex with her. When he returns, his wife is extremely grateful that he’s suddenly willing to have sex with her again, for Arawn disguised as Pwyll did the exact same thing. Granted that sex under those circumstances would not be consensual in the normal sense… those poor ignored wives! ("Those poor women" was a thought I often had while reading this.)

Since I earlier mentioned fairy-tale elements being literalizations of the inner landscape, what I take from that, at least, is the terrifying sense of not knowing the man you're bound yourself to - the feeling that he's changed so much, or that you never really knew him in the first place - that he's a different person wearing your man's skin.

Anyway, Pwyll and Arawn are best friends forever after. No further mention of their wives.

But then Pwyll encounters the beautiful Rhiannon, who has somehow fallen in love with Pwyll and asks him to rescue her from her engagement to a man she doesn’t love. But a mysterious suppliant comes up to Pwyll and begs for an unspecified favor.

“Ask what it is first,” I thought.

“Anything!” says Pwyll.

“Why did you say that?” exclaims Rhiannon, reading my mind.

“I want to sleep with and marry the woman you love,” says the not-so-mysterious suppliant.

“Pwyll, you idiot,” I thought.

“Never has a man been more stupid than you have been,” says Rhiannon, not needing to read my mind.

She goes on to explain that the suppliant is Gwawl son of Clud, her unwanted fiancé. (Pronounced Goo-a-ool son of Clid. I think.) She proceeds to outline an elaborate plot for trapping Gwawl in a bag and beating the hell out of him. Not only does this work like a charm, Rhiannon then gets Gwawl to agree not to seek vengeance. I don’t know why Rhiannon isn’t ruling the world at this point, but instead she settles down with Pwyll and gets pregnant.

But alas! Her baby disappears, and Rhiannon’s serving women, to avoid getting blamed for sleeping on the job, kill some puppies and smear her mouth with blood so everyone will think she’s eaten the baby. Bizarre as it is, this is not an uncommon fairytale motif: I can think of a couple other stories where this happens, including one from India. I think it taps into various anxieties, from seeing animals eat their young, to the nightmare-terror of being accused of something horrible and untrue – perhaps even the phenomenon of psychotic post-partum depression, in which women very occasionally do kill their babies.

Pwyll sort of believes Rhiannon’s story, but neither of them can prove anything. Rhiannon has to sit outside on a mounting block, tell any strangers the story, and offer to carry them to court. Meanwhile, to my total lack of surprise, a baby mysteriously shows up on the doorstep of a neighboring lord, via an “enormous claw” (Grendel, on a road trip?) He and his wife adopt the baby, who grows supernaturally fast, luckily for Rhiannon, who is still stuck outside giving strangers piggyback rides.

Then, in a twist I was not expecting due to the usual prevalence of coincidences and birthmarks in similar stories, the lord hears about Rhiannon and logically deduces who the child really is. Also to my surprise, he and his wife talk it over and decide to return the boy rather than trying to keep the whole thing a secret. Rhiannon is vindicated, the boy is renamed Pryderi, and everyone lives happily ever after, at least until the next branch. Hopefully not including the lying, puppy-killing serving women. I expect Rhiannon had some ideas about what to do about them.