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This branch completely lived up to expectations. If I thought the first branch was full of magical metaphors for sexual anxiety, it has nothing on the fourth branch.
At that time Math son of Mathonwy could not live unless his feet were in the lap of a virgin, unless the turmoil of war prevented him.
I’m aware of the many beliefs about the magical efficacy of virginity, but this sentence begs for elaboration more than almost any sentence I’ve ever read. Since none is given… why? I assume a curse, but for any particular reason? I read “feet in lap” as a form of sex-substitute, with non-sexual parts standing in for sexual parts to effect a sort of virginal anti-sex sex magic. Anyway, imagining the logistics of this cracks me up.
Math’s virgin footrest is Goewin. Unfortunately for her, Math’s creepy nephew Gilfaethwy becomes obsessed with her, and plots with his brother Gwydion son of Don to rape her. Gwydion comes up with this completely bonkers, though effective plot:
He tells Math that Pryderi (hi, Pryderi!) has these hitherto-unknown animals called pigs which taste delicious. He and Gilfaethwy visit Pryderi disguised as poets* (!) and scam Pryderi out of some pigs by trading formagic beans conjured horses which will vanish with the first light. When Pryderi’s horses evaporate at dawn, he goes to war. Math rides out to meet Pryderi’s army, leaving Goewin behind because he doesn’t need his feet in a virgin’s lap if he’s at war, and Gwydion helps Gilfaethwy rape her.
*Bards? I’m imagining what a “poet disguise” would look like nowadays. A dreamy air and a laptop?
This is all even more surreal for me than it would be anyway (Virgin footrest! Bacon wars!) because there is an extremely noble, Aragorn-like character in the Lloyd Alexander series named… Gwydion son of Don. As if starting a war to facilitate a rape wasn’t bad enough, Original!Gwydion kills Pryderi in single combat. Poor Pryderi. He’d been around so long, I had subconsciously been expecting him to survive till the end.
When Math returns, Goewin straightforwardly tells him he’ll need to find another virgin because his nephew raped her. Considering how other women had been wronged, then blamed for it, one might expect Goewin to be as well. But no! Math says he’ll marry her (hopefully she liked that idea – hey, they spent lots of time together in an intimate fashion already, maybe they were already in love but could never consummate it because she’d break her pledge and he’d lose his footrest) and give her authority over the kingdom, and take revenge! Goewin and Math are my official favorite Mabinogion couple.
There follows a remarkable sequence of events. Math transforms the brothers into a stag and a hind, and sends them out into the forest to breed with each other. A year later, they return with a fawn, whom Math turns back into a boy and takes in. Switching their genders, he turns them into a boar and a sow, they return with a piglet-boy, and Math switches their genders again and makes them wolves. With the cub-boy, Math decides they’ve had enough forced incestuous bestial sex to teach them not to rape people. Or, as he phrases it, “You have been greatly shamed that each of you has offspring by the other.”
There is not enough boggle in the world. Do their fawn, piglet, and cub sons have adventures in other stories? Can they shape-shift at will?
Then Math needs another virgin (I guess he had an interim virgin for the last three years) and Gwydion nominates Math’s niece Aranrhod. I would not take Gwydion’s advice if I were Math. In fact, Math doesn’t take Aranrhod’s word either, and makes her step over his magic wand to prove that she’s a virgin. (I don’t even need to comment on symbolism here, do I?) When she does, she instantly gives birth: an infallible proof of lack of virginity. She flees, dropping a lump of something which Gwydion takes. It turns out to be a boy who, like Pryderi, grows supernaturally fast.
I wonder about Aranrhod. Was Gwydion trying to screw her over? Was he trying to kill Math by getting him to put his feet in a non-virgin’s lap? Was she already pregnant (in which case, who was the father?), or did the babies spontaneously manifest as magical proof that she’d had sex?
Gwydion raises the boy and rubs his existence into Aranrhod’s face. (Are Gwydion and Aranrhod siblings? There’s clearly some serious history between them.) She displaces her anger at Gwydion and maybe Math too onto the boy, and lays various curses on him: that he will never get a name until she gives him, never bear arms until she gives them to him, and never marry a woman from any human race. Through various tricks and magics of Gwydion, the boy gets a name (Lleu) and weapons from Aranrhod, and, in a gorgeous passage, Gwydion and Math join their magic to make him a wife of flowers.
No one asks the flower woman, Blodeuedd, how she feels about this. You’d think both Math and Gwydion would know better by now. But after they are married, Blodeuedd falls for another man, Gronw, has an affair with him, and plots Lleu’s death.
There are some character types that occur over and over in these stories: put-upon women and very stupid men. Lleu obligingly tells his wife his secret – that he can only be killed when standing with one foot on a specially constructed outdoor bath and one on a billy goat! And then he even more stupidly agrees to demonstrate this bizarre balancing act.
(I am reminded of an Indian legend of a demon who could not be killed inside or outside, by day or night, by man or beast. He was slain by Vishnu incarnated as a man-lion, on a threshold at twilight.)
Gronw throws a spear at Lleu, who flies up in the form of an eagle and vanishes. Gronw and Blodeuedd then move in together, taking over Lleu’s lands. Gwydion goes to look for Lleu, and finds that he’s become a rotting zombie eagle being eaten by pigs. Everything has come full circle, all the way back to the pigs that started it all, except now the pigs are eating the people instead of the other way around.
Gwydion turns him back into a man, and he recovers after some recuperation time. Gwydion turns Blodeuedd into an owl (and suddenly Alan Garner’s The Owl Service makes so much more sense to me) and Lleu kills Gronw by throwing a spear through a boulder he was hiding behind.
You will all unsurprised to hear that this was my favorite branch. I particularly feel for the women in it, who all got a raw deal, even if Goewin did end up becoming a queen and married to probably the most decent and least stupid man available. Are there any other stories about the same characters, either additional myths or later retellings?
At that time Math son of Mathonwy could not live unless his feet were in the lap of a virgin, unless the turmoil of war prevented him.
I’m aware of the many beliefs about the magical efficacy of virginity, but this sentence begs for elaboration more than almost any sentence I’ve ever read. Since none is given… why? I assume a curse, but for any particular reason? I read “feet in lap” as a form of sex-substitute, with non-sexual parts standing in for sexual parts to effect a sort of virginal anti-sex sex magic. Anyway, imagining the logistics of this cracks me up.
Math’s virgin footrest is Goewin. Unfortunately for her, Math’s creepy nephew Gilfaethwy becomes obsessed with her, and plots with his brother Gwydion son of Don to rape her. Gwydion comes up with this completely bonkers, though effective plot:
He tells Math that Pryderi (hi, Pryderi!) has these hitherto-unknown animals called pigs which taste delicious. He and Gilfaethwy visit Pryderi disguised as poets* (!) and scam Pryderi out of some pigs by trading for
*Bards? I’m imagining what a “poet disguise” would look like nowadays. A dreamy air and a laptop?
This is all even more surreal for me than it would be anyway (Virgin footrest! Bacon wars!) because there is an extremely noble, Aragorn-like character in the Lloyd Alexander series named… Gwydion son of Don. As if starting a war to facilitate a rape wasn’t bad enough, Original!Gwydion kills Pryderi in single combat. Poor Pryderi. He’d been around so long, I had subconsciously been expecting him to survive till the end.
When Math returns, Goewin straightforwardly tells him he’ll need to find another virgin because his nephew raped her. Considering how other women had been wronged, then blamed for it, one might expect Goewin to be as well. But no! Math says he’ll marry her (hopefully she liked that idea – hey, they spent lots of time together in an intimate fashion already, maybe they were already in love but could never consummate it because she’d break her pledge and he’d lose his footrest) and give her authority over the kingdom, and take revenge! Goewin and Math are my official favorite Mabinogion couple.
There follows a remarkable sequence of events. Math transforms the brothers into a stag and a hind, and sends them out into the forest to breed with each other. A year later, they return with a fawn, whom Math turns back into a boy and takes in. Switching their genders, he turns them into a boar and a sow, they return with a piglet-boy, and Math switches their genders again and makes them wolves. With the cub-boy, Math decides they’ve had enough forced incestuous bestial sex to teach them not to rape people. Or, as he phrases it, “You have been greatly shamed that each of you has offspring by the other.”
There is not enough boggle in the world. Do their fawn, piglet, and cub sons have adventures in other stories? Can they shape-shift at will?
Then Math needs another virgin (I guess he had an interim virgin for the last three years) and Gwydion nominates Math’s niece Aranrhod. I would not take Gwydion’s advice if I were Math. In fact, Math doesn’t take Aranrhod’s word either, and makes her step over his magic wand to prove that she’s a virgin. (I don’t even need to comment on symbolism here, do I?) When she does, she instantly gives birth: an infallible proof of lack of virginity. She flees, dropping a lump of something which Gwydion takes. It turns out to be a boy who, like Pryderi, grows supernaturally fast.
I wonder about Aranrhod. Was Gwydion trying to screw her over? Was he trying to kill Math by getting him to put his feet in a non-virgin’s lap? Was she already pregnant (in which case, who was the father?), or did the babies spontaneously manifest as magical proof that she’d had sex?
Gwydion raises the boy and rubs his existence into Aranrhod’s face. (Are Gwydion and Aranrhod siblings? There’s clearly some serious history between them.) She displaces her anger at Gwydion and maybe Math too onto the boy, and lays various curses on him: that he will never get a name until she gives him, never bear arms until she gives them to him, and never marry a woman from any human race. Through various tricks and magics of Gwydion, the boy gets a name (Lleu) and weapons from Aranrhod, and, in a gorgeous passage, Gwydion and Math join their magic to make him a wife of flowers.
No one asks the flower woman, Blodeuedd, how she feels about this. You’d think both Math and Gwydion would know better by now. But after they are married, Blodeuedd falls for another man, Gronw, has an affair with him, and plots Lleu’s death.
There are some character types that occur over and over in these stories: put-upon women and very stupid men. Lleu obligingly tells his wife his secret – that he can only be killed when standing with one foot on a specially constructed outdoor bath and one on a billy goat! And then he even more stupidly agrees to demonstrate this bizarre balancing act.
(I am reminded of an Indian legend of a demon who could not be killed inside or outside, by day or night, by man or beast. He was slain by Vishnu incarnated as a man-lion, on a threshold at twilight.)
Gronw throws a spear at Lleu, who flies up in the form of an eagle and vanishes. Gronw and Blodeuedd then move in together, taking over Lleu’s lands. Gwydion goes to look for Lleu, and finds that he’s become a rotting zombie eagle being eaten by pigs. Everything has come full circle, all the way back to the pigs that started it all, except now the pigs are eating the people instead of the other way around.
Gwydion turns him back into a man, and he recovers after some recuperation time. Gwydion turns Blodeuedd into an owl (and suddenly Alan Garner’s The Owl Service makes so much more sense to me) and Lleu kills Gronw by throwing a spear through a boulder he was hiding behind.
You will all unsurprised to hear that this was my favorite branch. I particularly feel for the women in it, who all got a raw deal, even if Goewin did end up becoming a queen and married to probably the most decent and least stupid man available. Are there any other stories about the same characters, either additional myths or later retellings?
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