Landscapes of The Mabinogi

John K. Bollard

Abstract

The medieval Welsh prose classic known as The Mabinogi survives complete in two

important fourteenth-century manuscripts and in a thirteenth-century fragment. This

paper looks at ways in which the four interlaced tales, incorporating elements of much

earlier myth and legend, are also recorded and reflected in the Welsh landscape,

especially in place names and place name clusters that reference the tales. Using the

analogy of Western Apache place tales, it suggests that the place names and the

landscape of the tales served (and perhaps still serve) as reminders both of the cultural

significance of the tales and of the importance of the themes that they explore. It also

looks at the ways in which Anglo-Norman and English regimes overlaid that significance

with tangible demonstrations of their own power and authority. Finally, it explores how

the geographic reach of The Mabinogi served to reinforce a growing sense of Welsh

cultural unity during a period when political unification may have seemed within reach.

Introduction

The Mabinogi, known also as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, is the preeminent

work of medieval Welsh literature, comprising four ‗branches‘ (ceinciau) or short

interrelated prose tales. It was written in the late eleventh or early twelfth century in a

highly polished, yet straightforward prose style derived from a well-developed Welsh

literary tradition that draws in its turn on the native Welsh oral narratives of the

cyfarwydd, the professional storyteller and repository of history and lore. The Four

Branches contain considerable quantities of lore derived ultimately from a Welsh or

Celtic mythology that would otherwise be known only from scattered references and

names. But though these tales have a mythological background and are replete with

magic and wonder, they are not primary myth of the sort that records beliefs about the

origins of gods and people. Rather, they incorporate inherited lore, tales, episodes, and

references in order to explore themes that were of importance to the medieval reading and

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listening audience, an importance evidenced by their very survival in manuscripts of the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Despite the mythic quality of the tales, however, the places that the events and

characters of The Mabinogi inhabit are largely real and could be identified by

contemporary medieval audiences; most are in Wales, some in Ireland and England, and

a few in metaphysical spaces contiguous with, and reached from, the ‗real‘ world of the

audience (Fig. 1). This coincidence of place and myth contributes greatly to the enduring

mysterious charm of The Mabinogi and provides as well a marked immediacy of

identification for the modern reader.

Figure 1. Map of place names in The Mabinogi

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The First Branch tells how Pwyll, the ruler of Dyfed in south-west Wales, changes

places for a year with the king of the Otherworld; how he gets a wife, Rhiannon, who has

several magical, even divine, attributes; and how their son, later named Pryderi,

mysteriously disappears at birth and is eventually restored to his parents, thereby

absolving his mother from a charge of infanticide. The Second Branch, set in North

Wales and Ireland, tells of the marriage between the Irish king and Branwen, the sister of

Bendigeidfran, the king of Britain, and of the resulting disastrous war. In the Third

Branch, all the people, domestic animals, and other signs of habitation in Dyfed disappear

in a mysterious mist, except for Pryderi, his wife Cigfa, his mother Rhiannon, and her

new husband Manawydan (Branwen‘s brother). The four are left to make a living at

leather trades in Lloegr (England) or as hunters and farmers in Dyfed until the cause of

the enchantment is revealed and life is restored to Dyfed. The Fourth Branch, again set

primarily in North Wales, is a complex tale of rape, thievery, war, wrongful death, shape-

shifting, adultery, and retribution.

Needless to say, no summary does justice to any of these tales. Running throughout

are themes of friendship, marriage, feuds, and other concerns which bind the whole

together in an exploration of the forces that stabilize society or tear it apart (Bollard

1996a & 1996b, Davies 1993, Mac Cana 1977). This paper will explore, through the

context of the Welsh landscape, further aspects of these tales, in the hope that they can

bring us to a deeper appreciation of just what The Mabinogi is – and, with luck, to a

closer understanding of what it might have been to the audiences who encountered it

between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

In a study with which the present article has several points of contact, Alfred Siewers,

drawing on the work of W. J. Gruffydd, Patrick Ford, and others, sees the very landscape

itself as ‗the central character‘ of The Mabinogi (Siewers 2005, 193; revised as Siewers

2009, Chapter 2). In broad terms, Siewers sees The Mabinogi as a response to and a

defence against the Norman military and ecclesiastical conquest of Wales, or as, in his

words, ‗a fully loaded iconographic act of cultural resistance (albeit with a some-what

obscured trip wire)‘ (Siewers 2005, 228). However, he reads the text in largely

mythological and symbolic terms as ‗the relation between a female fertility figure and the

hero-ruler of the realm,‘ applying the sovereignty goddess myth which is more clearly

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articulated in earlier Irish tales (Siewers 2005, 193, 200; Siewers 2009, chapter 2). The

concerns of the present article are more with the ways in which a literary work such as

The Mabinogi is likely to have been perceived (and perhaps conceived) by its eleventh-

or twelfth-century author or final redactor, its medieval audiences, and to a lesser extent,

its modern readers. While ancient mythological elements clearly survive in The

Mabinogi, there is little, if any, evidence that these components of the tales figured as

such in any medieval understanding of the tales.

The multiple ‘landscapes’ of The Mabinogi

To provide a focus I would like to consider the landscapes in which the narratives of

The Mabinogi reside. Most concretely, there is the geographical landscape of Wales,

within which it is so precisely located, and this will be the primary matter of this paper.

But there is also the literary landscape, the array of tales, texts, and manuscripts amongst

which The Mabinogi is situated and which inevitably colours and informs our perception

of its meaning and function. We must also consider the tumultuous historical, political,

and social landscape of eleventh- to fourteenth-century Wales, and conditions that

undoubtedly had much to do with why The Mabinogi was composed and ultimately

preserved in manuscript. And perhaps most importantly, we have what we might call the

moral landscape of The Mabinogi itself, those features which imbue the rest with

meaning and relevance, today as well as nine centuries ago (though perhaps not in the

same ways).

In our assessment of these multivalent landscapes, we must be careful to distinguish

between the terms location, place, and landscape. A location is simply an area that can

be objectively defined by its position on earth, irrespective of any human relationship to

it; it can be adequately designated by little more than a grid reference or numbers in a

database or GPS. For the purposes of this paper, a place is a location that has been given

a name; the historical and etymological underpinnings of that name (whether literally true

or not) may help to determine the significance and the meaning of the place in

specifically human terms and how these may be renegotiated and adjusted with changes

in context. For example, the name of the Welsh town of Caerfyrddin/Carmarthen derives

from caer ‗fort‘ plus early Brythonic Moridunon ‗sea fort‘, which would develop

5

phonetically into the later form Caerfyrddin. It was a short leap, for Geoffrey of

Monmouth and for others before and after him, to construe that the name Caerfyrddin

meant ‗Myrddin‘s Fort‘, giving rise (even birth) to the enigmatic prophet-poet Myrddin,

known widely today as Merlin, thus retroactively connecting the town to deep legendary

history and later to the growing popularity of the Arthurian Matter of Britain (see Jarman

1991, 137-40). Places acquire meaning and resonance as history and narrative accrue

around them, and they begin to assume relevance and significance within a landscape, a

larger area that evokes response especially through the common cultural experience and

understanding of its inhabitants. Like other poets, writers, and storytellers before him,

particularly within the context of early Irish and Welsh place name lore, the author of The

Mabinogi was explicitly interested in the origins of place names, citing or alluding to

several in his tales, and we shall explore below how these places are situated in the

broader geographical, narrative, and moral landscapes of Wales.

A few years ago I began thinking about translating The Mabinogi, not because other

available translations are inadequate, but to present to a general audience a rendering that

would reflect a bit of my own understanding of the work, and I asked Anthony Griffiths

to photograph all of the places mentioned in The

Mabinogi. Soon we had a really beautiful book

(Bollard 2006) the cover of which is shown in Fig. 2

and this has been followed by a volume of

Companion Tales to the Mabinogi (Bollard 2007).

What surprised me most, however, was how the

process of tracking down places and looking through

literally hundreds of photos, and finally the published

result, changed my perception of The Mabinogi

itself. Place suddenly took on a more immediate or

prominent role in understanding the tales. And the

effect was not simply visual. I began to consider

that the landscape which the tales inhabit may be

Figure 2. Front cover of The Mabinogi,

showing Llyn y Morynion (foreground)

and Nant y Moch reservoir

(background)

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more than simply a storyteller‘s conceit, but I didn‘t have a conceptual framework in

which to couch this notion until, as so often happens, I fortuitously entered another realm

altogether.

Narrative and the meaning of place

At the time my translation of The Mabinogi was published in 2006, with Anthony‘s

accompanying images, I happened to be reading Colin Calloway‘s magisterial history,

One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Much of

this book is about the importance of place to the American Indians who lived (and who

still live) in the Central Plains. One statement initially caught my attention:

Place is often more important than time in recalling history. (Calloway 2003, 6)

Calloway then expands on this to say,

Mythic tales linked to specific places contained morals and teachings that enabled

people to live as true human beings…. The landscape reinforced the continuity

and accuracy of the narratives. (Calloway 2003, 7).

I began to think, ‗It sounds a lot like The Mabinogi to me,‘ and then I read:

Storied landscapes are surely not unique to the Native American West.

They are common, for instance, in the Celtic regions of the British Isles.

(Calloway 2003, 8)

So I began to wonder what this might mean more specifically in terms of The

Mabinogi. It is obvious that place plays a role, but what is it and how does it work? As

the anthropologist Margaret Rodman puts it, ‗The problem of place arises, paradoxically,

because the meaning of place too often seems to go without saying….There is little

recognition that place is more than locale, the setting for action, the stage on which things

happen‘ (Rodman 1992, 640, 643). The meaning and complexity of place is perhaps

more easily perceived in the phrase ‗sense of place,‘ which implies some communal

experience and interpretation of the location, and which embodies within it ‗the relation

of sensation to emplacement; the experiential and expressive ways places are known,

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imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested, and struggled over;

and the multiple ways places are metonymically and metaphorically tied to identities‘

(Feld and Basso 1996, 11). Place thus becomes a multi-layered social construct, a

location that is named by people, that accrues meaning through social interaction, that

evokes an emotional response, that serves as a repository of history (large or small;

personal, familial, or societal), and that may be imbued with aspects of the moral code of

those who experience the place communally in some form. This moral component is of

particular interest when we turn to narratives of place.

In recent years, the study of place has come into its own, not least among

ethnohistorians and anthropologists. This trend was encouraged, if not sparked, by the

discoveries of Keith Basso in the 1970s and 1980s regarding the central function of place

in the wisdom tales of the Western Apache (Basso 1996). And the Apache sense of place

resonates with The Mabinogi. I say this not because The Mabinogi can be directly

mapped onto the Apache mode of place-tale telling, but because the Apache articulate

explicitly ways in which places can take on, preserve and convey a complex and subtle

range of meaning and function, and these ways of thinking about narrative and place

might prove fruitful when applied to The Mabinogi.

Basso discovered that the body of Western Apache wisdom is preserved in tales with

a strong element of place in them, particularly a type known as ’ágodzaahí or ‗historical

tale‘. These short tales always begin with the statement ‗It happened at...‘ and a place is

named. The tales also end with a repetition of the same formula. The content usually

tells of some instance of misbehaviour and thus carries with it some moral import. As the

Apache explain it, these tales are not merely about the events they recount, they are also

about the person they are told to (or as they say, ‗shot at‘ like an arrow) (Basso 1996, 60).

They are instructive tales. So significant and so familiar are they that a speaker need only

say the opening formula naming the place to get the moral point across, ‗It happened at

____, at this very place.‘ This is called ‗Speaking with Names.‘ The target of such a

remark, a wayward grandchild perhaps, or a disappointed lover, will get a picture of the

place in mind, will recall the story, and will apply it to himself or herself. And whenever

they think of or see that place – for these are real, specific places – they will remember

the tale and the lesson again (Basso 1996, 77-104).

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Places, then, in real landscapes serve as an Apache reference library of wisdom and

moral precepts. The place names themselves are important to the Apache because they

convey such multivalent resonance. When Basso asked an Apache wise man, Dudley

Patterson, ‗What is wisdom?‘, Patterson replied, ‗It is in these places. Wisdom sits in

places‘ (Basso 1996, 121-22). After telling some tales to exemplify what he meant,

Patterson quoted from his grandmother‘s teaching, concluding with her words,

‗Wisdom sits in places. It‘s like water that never dries up. You need

to drink water to stay alive, don‘t you? Well, you also need to drink from

places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their

names. You must remember what happened there a long time ago. You

must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will

become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it

happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be

wise. People will respect you.‘ (Basso 1996, 127)

Taking a step closer to Wales brings us, first, to early Irish tradition, which has a

body of literature dealing explicitly and directly with place names and the myths and

legends attached to them. The collections of prose and poetry, roughly contemporary

with The Mabinogi, known as dindshenchas (from dind ‗hill, notable place‘ + senchas

‗ancient lore‘) catalogue Irish place names and the mythological or legendary narratives

attached to them. Constructed originally in the preliterate oral tradition as mnemonic

devices to aid poets and storytellers and also as entertaining repositories of lore in and of

themselves, they also employ narrative as etymology to ‗explain‘ why names were given

in the form they have (see Stokes 1894; Gwynn 1903-06 [1991]). In an exploration of

place and myth in Irish tradition, Proinsias Mac Cana notes that ‗As a compositional

element in narrative [place names] are often loaded with the kind of multiple reference

and resonance that is characteristic of myth,‘ and that ‗placenames and their lore were

more than an attribute or a simple constituent of cultural consciousness, they were in a

sense its living index, its semiotic system‘ (Mac Cana 1988, 338, 341).

That there was a similar conjunction of tradition and place in Wales is clear not

simply from the onomastic references in The Mabinogi and other sources, but from an

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intriguing collection of over ninety englynion (short verses) surviving in several

manuscripts and known as Englynion y Beddau ‗The Stanzas of the Graves.‘ Thomas

Jones postulates a date of composition ‗probably as early as the ninth or tenth century‘

(Jones 1967, 100). Each stanza locates the graves of one or more legendary or

mythological heroes, four of whom appear in The Mabinogi:

…where the wave makes a noise,

the grave of Dylan is at Llanfeuno.

At the confluence of the Gwenoli

is the grave of Pryderi….

The grave of Lleu Llawgyffes under cover of the sea,

where his disgrace was,

a man who spared no one.

The grave of Gwydion son of Dôn on Morfa Dinlleu

under the stones of Defeillon….

(Jones 1967, 119, 125, 135)

I have lingered over these notions of place in order to provide a range of perspectives

from which to view the landscape of The Mabinogi and to learn to understand that

landscape as an intersection of location, tale or event, meaning, and personal experience.

It has long been recognized that place names are important in The Mabinogi, but most

commentary seems content with the notion that an onomastic episode simply accounts for

the name of a place, or with the necessary attempts to identify one place or another,

without considering any further relationship of that episode to the place or without

considering what the place has become for us when the tale is situated within it. One of

the questions this paper will attempt to address is ‗Why do (or should) mythic elements,

explanations, or narratives be connected to place and then persist?‘

Reading places

Perhaps all literature, but medieval literature in particular, and especially traditional

narrative, contains a strong element of instruction – we learn from it how to be human,

how to behave within our particular cultural context, or what happens if we don‘t behave.

With this in mind, the references to many places in The Mabinogi can be read in ways

that are similar to the Apache place tales. That is, the place represents the tale, in a sense

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it is the tale, and the tale has

something to teach us. Thus Tomen

y Mur in north Wales, in the

modern sensibility, consists of the

ruins of a Roman camp, with a

medieval mound or ‗tomen‘ in its

middle (Fig. 3). However, for the

Welsh audience in the Middle Ages

Tomen y Mur was then the place called Mur Castell

(Castle Wall), and in The Mabinogi it figures as the

home of Lleu Llaw Gyffes and his beautiful wife, Blodeuedd. It is there that in Lleu‘s

absence she takes a lover with disastrous consequences. Thus, I am suggesting here that,

if a Welsh man or woman heard this name, not only would the place and the story be

called to mind, but also the social consequences of adultery, especially to anyone with

adultery on their mind.

There is indeed, I believe, general agreement today among students of The Mabinogi

that the author was, as Brynley Roberts puts it, ‗using story to convey a view of society

and social values,‘ and that he is, quoting Sioned Davies, ‗an author to whom a moral

code of conduct was important, a man who placed great emphasis on friendship and

peace‘ (Roberts 2001, 64; Davies 1993, 81; see also Bollard 1996a, 1996b). I would like

to propose that the use of place in The Mabinogi is an important aspect of the author‘s

method of conveying that moral code to his audience in the kinds of ways I have

suggested for Tomen y Mur.

Awareness of the meaning and effect of places, with their multiple layers of history

and narrative, runs deep in Wales. History is visible throughout the country, and many

places retain a significance even if their original meaning might be lost. For example, in

1985 my brother-in-law, Richard Lloyd, and Agnes Stokes, a photographer, traveled

through Wales to photograph standing stones for a multi-media piece that Richard was

composing. One evening they were at the Bronze Age stone circle known as Four Stones

in Radnorshire, when two women approached. I recently asked Richard about one of the

photographs (Fig. 4) taken there and he replied:

Figure 3. Tomen y Mur / Mur Castell

11

I do remember that picture. It was at the end of the trip when we were

coming down on the east side of Wales. These rocks were in a field, but

fairly close to the road. As Agnes and I were looking at the trees in the

distance and had moved away from the rocks a bit, these two women came

up the road, chatting amiably. I actually was walking around doing other

things, but Agnes caught them putting their hands on the rocks for a period

of time. That's when she took the picture. I remember Agnes remarking

afterwards on having seen them concentrating on what they were doing,

and she certainly caught it in the picture…. obviously something was

happening for them. (Personal communication, 2008)

Now, these women may have been participating in

the practice of touching stones for their presumed

efficacious properties, or merely following a minor personal or local ritual marking the

turning point in their evening walk, but it is hard to believe that they would have nothing

to say about that act or about the stones if Richard and Agnes had interrupted them to ask.

And it is equally hard to believe that the human participation in erecting those stones in

Figure 4. Four Stones, Radnorshire

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the first place (for whatever reason) isn‘t being recognized even today in such simple,

almost offhand behaviors. At the very least, this event shows that such markers of deep

history continue to resonate among those who live around them.

For the medieval audiences of The Mabinogi I am confident that place and meaning

were similarly entwined. Just who comprised those audiences can never be known

precisely, but we can make some broad generalisations. At one end of a continuum we

have the readers of The Mabinogi as we know it in written form, members of the

aristocratic, educated, and clerical estates who commissioned, read, and copied the

surviving manuscripts and their exemplars. Certainly earlier, but in all likelihood

contemporaneously and later as well, are the somewhat wider audiences of the

cyfarwyddiaid, the traditional storytellers who related and relayed the tales in their oral

forms. And at the opposite end are the residents especially of those areas that abound in

places figuring prominently in the tales. The latter, in particular, are those whom we can

imagine most clearly ‗reading‘ the tales from the landscape around them and passing

down the stories of their homes to subsequent generations. Of course, anyone reading,

hearing, or knowing The Mabinogi may fit into more than one of these categories.

As he was photographing, Anthony Griffiths noted several times that just about

everywhere he went to take a picture of a place named in the Mabinogi he found some

antiquity in the landscape. Many of those ancient remains and monuments whose

significance and purpose had been forgotten accrued new meanings as new tales were

planted there, or as old tales were relocated from other parts. A simple example is Bedd

Taliesin (Taliesin‘s Grave), a Bronze Age cairn in Ceredigion

which came to be known as the grave of the legendary and

historical fifth-century poet-prophet Taliesin. A similar

example connected explicitly to The Mabinogi is Bedd

Branwen (Fig. 5), a Bronze Age cairn in Anglesey that is

referenced in the Second Branch when Branwen dies of grief:

‗And she gave a great sigh, and upon that her heart broke. And

a four-sided grave was made for her, and she was buried there

in Glan Alaw‘ (Bollard 2006, 57).

Figure 5. Bedd Branwen, Anglesey

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From Place to Landscape

The identification of specific places named in The Mabinogi is not always certain.

Some cannot be precisely located (e.g. Pen Llwyn Diarwya, Caer Dathyl, Cefn Cludno).

Other names might appear, either now or formerly, in more than one location (e.g.

Arberth). In these cases, there is liable to be, of course, ongoing academic debate over

identification, where the literary, historical, and geographical contexts must all be

brought to bear on the problem. But of more interest at present is the evidence provided

by clusters of names that undoubtedly have a direct relationship to the tales, and these

may be construed as being part of the fabric of landscapes.

There is, for example, a concentration of names around Arfon in north-west Wales

which are associated with events recounted in the Fourth Branch of The Mabinogi.

Whether the tales were created as explanations of the names or the names were planted in

the landscape to preserve the tales, the medieval audience could read the landscape in

relation to the tales. In effect this creates links between the place, the residents, and the

tales, links which play an important role in the preservation of the thematic core of the

tales, the lessons they present to be understood and remembered.

Many of these places retain some of their resonance even today, at least insofar as

they preserve a memory of the tales in the names of their locations and characters. For

example, in the Fourth Branch the lord of Gwynedd, Math son of Mathonwy, had a virgin

foot-holder (a personal but high-born retainer) who is raped by his nephew. She is

identified in the tale as ‗Goewin daughter of Pebin of Dôl Bebin in Arfon‘ (Bollard 2006,

79). In his edition of The Mabinogi, Ifor Williams has a brief note on Dôl Bebin: [E]rys

yr enw ar ffarm yn Nyffryn Nantlle, ‗The name survives on a farm in the Nantlle Valley‘

(Williams 1951, 251, my translation). We should note here also that this rape leads

indirectly to the birth of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, whose name is imbedded in Nantlle ‗Lleu‘s

Stream‘. When Anthony was scouting out this farm, he inquired of several older area

residents. One directed him to a house near the village of Nantlle, but another told him

that there had been an older house that went by that name, now buried under one of the

overgrown slate tips in the valley (grid reference SH493526, see Fig 9, no.4). This farm

appears as Dol Beaby or Dolbebi on Ordnance Survey maps from 1889 to 1953. The loss

14

of the final –n suggests knowledge of its significance was lost at some point. Whether

the name was transplanted to a new house in the village by a family member when the

farm ceased to be or was resurrected by someone else because it was available once

again, the current house known as Dôl Bebin has restored the final –n, recognising anew

and clarifying the local reference to The Mabinogi.

One cluster of evocative place names from the Fourth Branch has yielded interesting

results in recent years within an upland landscape on a mountain tributary of the Vale of

Ffestiniog (Fig. 6). The tale is at a key point of retribution: Gronw Bebr, Blodeuedd‘s

lover, treacherously throws a spear at her husband Lleu Llaw Gyffes:

Gronw rose up from the hill which is called Bryn Cyfergyr, and he rose on

one knee, and with the poisoned spear he cast at him and struck him in his

side, so that the shaft broke off from it, but the point remained in him.

And then he flew up in the guise of an eagle and gave a horrible scream.

And no sight of him was had from thenceforth.‘

(Bollard 2006, 103-4)

Bryn Cyfergyr means ‗the Hill of the

Exchange of Blows‘, and, as Ifor Williams

notes, it still goes by that name, in the modern

form Bryn Cyfergyd (Williams 1951, 289).

As punishment for his murderous act Gronw

must receive a blow in exchange, standing ‗in

the place where Lleu Llaw Gyffes was when

he cast at him, and Lleu in the place where he

was‘ (Bollard 2006, 103, 107). Less than a

kilometre south of this hill – as the crow (or

spear) flies – is an old farmhouse called Llech

yr Onw or Llech-Goronwy ‗Gronw‘s Stone

Slab‘. This is undoubtedly a reference to the

stone with which Gronw tries in vain to

protect himself when he stands to receive the

Figure 6. Sites from the Fourth Branch of The

Mabinogi associated with Bryn Cyfergyd and

Llech Goronwy farms, 2.5 inch OS Map

15

avenging blow:

And then Gronw took the stone slab and placed it between him and the

blow. And then Lleu cast at him with the spear, and he pierced through

the stone slab and through him, too, so that his back was broken.

(Bollard 2006, 108)

The narrator of The Mabinogi then tells us explicitly that the stone is there ar lan Auon

Gynuael yn Ardudwy, a’r twll drwydi ‗there on the bank of the River Cynfael in

Ardudwy, with the hole through it‘ (Williams 1951, 92;

Bollard 2006, 108). In the early 1990s a stone slab with

the requisite hole in it was indeed found hidden in the

grass and leaves in the corner of a field on the banks of

Afon Bryn-Saeth ‗Arrow-Hill River‘, a small stream

that runs into the Cynfael past Bryn Saeth Farm in the

shadow of Bryn Cyfergyd (Fig. 7) (Hughes 2000, 75-

76). According to Mrs. Sali Williams, who lives on

Bryn Saeth farm, her father, who lived at Llech

Goronwy, never ploughed or cut the grass in that corner

and referred to the spot as Bedd Gronw (Pers. comm.

2005). And this was prior to the (re)discovery of the

stone, which has since been raised and rather

inelegantly set in concrete.

A related site nearby is mentioned in Richard Fenton‘s Tours in Wales 1804-1813:

‗Pass [sic] by a place called Bryn y Saeth, and another called Bryn y Cyfergyd, and

another called Bryn yr Eryr Gronwy,‘ though he seems not to know of the Mabinogi

connection (Fenton 1917, 124). The last, ‗the Hill of Gronwy‘s Eagle‘, adds to our list

another undoubted topographical reference to the final episodes of the Fourth Branch.

(Could this be either or both ‗Bron-yr-erw‘ or ‗Bron-Goronwy‘ on the 1891 OS map, side

by side immediately west of ‗Bryn-cyfergyd‘?) Such a collection of places, located

between Lleu‘s home at Mur Castell (Tomen y Mur) to the south and Llyn y Morynion

(Lake of the Maidens) just northeast over the hill, makes up a specific landscape of moral

Figure 7. Llech Gronw

16

lesson, of retribution and consequence for socially unacceptable behaviour. It was also a

short stretch on the Roman Road from Tomen y Mur northwards to the Conwy Valley

and Caernarfon, an element of the larger landscape of Arfon and Eryri (Snowdon)

through which the tales of the Mabinogi played.

Tomen y Mur itself, ‗The Mound of the Wall‘, called Mur Castell in the Mabinogi

and which I have already discussed, was named for the imposing motte built in the midst

of the earthworks of a Roman camp (Williams 1951, 285-86). It is part of a complex

archaeological landscape still largely unexplored. The medieval sources, however, leave

us in no doubt that this place held deep importance in the struggles for power in the

period of the Middle Ages when the tales of the Mabinogi were being written down for

the first time. The Brut y Tywysogion (‗The Chronicle of the Princes‘) notes that Henry I

brought his hosts to Mur Castell in 1114 to implement what the chronicler saw as the

king‘s attempt at a Final Solution – ‗to seek to exterminate all the Britons completely, so

that the Britannic name should nevermore be remembered‘ (Jones 1955, 79). The

thirteenth-century Historia Gruffud vab Kenan says, Ag y felly y doeth y gywoeth

Gruffudd, a phebyllyaw y Mur Kastell ‗and thus he [the English king] came to Gruffydd‘s

realm, and pitched camp at Mur Castell‘ (Evans 1977, 29.5-6; my translation). The

description of the site by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical

Monuments of Wales suggests that ‗the fort enclosure appears to have been refortified,

possibly when Norman armies encamped here in the late eleventh—early twelfth

century.‘ More relevant for our present purposes, however, they go on to say, ‗The

―Tomen‖, the great castle mound (NPRN95478), was probably raised in the twelfth or

thirteenth century and would have been associated with a llys or princely court‘ (Coflein).

So here not only do we have a location deemed important enough to be a specific target

of English appropriation, but we also have the tempting possibility of a Welsh court right

on the site of one of the most evocative places in The Mabinogi. If this turns out to be

true, can there be any doubt that The Mabinogi, or at least some of the tales incorporated

into it, would have echoed in its hall or chambers, or even that its residents may have

wandered over the hill on the old Roman road towards Llyn y Morynion, into which, we

are told in the Fourth Branch, Blodeuedd‘s fleeing handmaidens, their faces turned back

in fear, fell and were drowned. The very name of that lake, Llyn y Morynion (The Lake

17

of the Maidens), is a reminder of the significance of the tale – another consequence of

adultery and deceit (see Fig. 2).

As in the case of Tomen y Mur, other important sites in The Mabinogi saw the Anglo-

Normans and English quite deliberately impose their own symbols of authority upon the

memory and location of Welsh tradition. Perhaps the best known of these is Caernarfon

Castle, which effectively overshadowed the tradition of Caernarfon as a Welsh royal

centre in The Mabinogi and other tales as it overshadows the town still today. The

reference to Bendigeidfran holding court at Caer Saint yn Arfon in the Second Branch

clearly identifies it as a place of note in Welsh tradition (Bollard 2006, 79, 51). So too

does the elaborate description of a fortress (caer) at Aber Saint (i.e., the present castle

site), whose hall had a roof and floors of gold and walls of precious stone in The Dream

of Maxen Wledig, a tale also found in the White Book of Rhydderch, the manuscript of the

earliest version of The Mabinogi (Bollard 2007, 76). As Taylor (1963, 369-70) has

pointed out, in addition to its militarily and politically strategic location, Caernarfon‘s

place in the native narrative and historical tradition provided an additional reason for

Edward I‘s selection of the location for his most impressive castle. Its banded walls

deliberately echo the walls of Constantinople, thus reviving the Welsh imperial dream of

Maxen Wledig (Magnus Maximus, the Roman military leader of Britain, named emperor

in 383) with Edward I cast in the role of ‗Rome returned‘ and legitimate successor to all

the authority of the lineages of Gwynedd.

Another of Bendigeidfran‘s assembly places in the Second Branch is Harlech. With

the exception of The Mabinogi there is no written record of Harlech prior to Edward I‘s

conquests in 1282 and building his renowned castle there between 1283 and 1289. Why

did he choose Harlech? There were, of course, sound strategic reasons to fortify this

‗beautiful rock‘ (from Welsh hardd ‗beautiful‘ + llech ‗flat stone, slate‘). It provided

Edward with access, through Cwm Bychan, to the interior, south of the wilds of Eryri

(Snowdonia), and with a vantage point overlooking the coast and across Tremadog Bay

towards Llywelyn the Great‘s castle at Criccieth, which Edward took and refurbished at

the same time. As R. R. Davies notes, ‗Edward took a particular delight in appropriating

the residences of the Gwynedd dynasty, thereby making clear to all the definitiveness and

finality of his conquest‘ (Davies 1987, 355). At Harlech, Edward doubly symbolized his

18

presumption of power by completely dismantling Llywelyn ap Gruffudd‘s hall at

Ystumgwern and reconstructing it in the inner ward of the new castle (Davies 1987, 355).

But this still does not fully answer the question of why Harlech. I suggest that there is

another likely element to this choice.

The Second Branch of The Mabinogi identifies carreg Harddlech ‗the rock of

Harlech‘ as a royal llys (Fig. 8):

Bendigeidfran son of Llŷr was crowned king over this island and

adorned with the crown of London. And one afternoon he was in

Harddlech, in Ardudwy, in a court of his. And they were sitting on the

rock of Harddlech, above the sea…. And as they were sitting thus,

they could see thirteen ships coming from the south of Ireland and

making way toward them. (Bollard 2006, 43-4)

Whatever fortifications, residences, or other structures might have been there before

Edward appropriated the site for his own display of power, our tale strongly suggests that

this was not only a place associated with the rule of Ardudwy or North Wales, but one

that harbored traditions which could evoke memories of an independent Wales, and even

an independent, Welsh-ruled Britain, Ynys y Kedeirn, the Island of the Mighty, as it is

called throughout the Second

Branch. As at Caernarfon,

Edward was clearly aware of the

symbolic meanings of Harlech as

a place and his choice of location

must have been deliberate as an

act of cultural and political

appropriation, building towards a

project of re-making Ynys

Prydein, Bendigeidfran‘s (and

Arthur‘s) island Kingdom of

Britain.

Figure 8. Carreg Harddlech and Harlech Castle

19

The concentration of places in northwest Wales, especially in Arfon, have led

Brynley Roberts and others to speculate that the author may have been from that region

(Roberts 2001). Whether that is so or not, with the exception of the three surviving

manuscripts the Arfon landscape is the most manifest early record of The Mabinogi that

we have. It records onomastically more information about the tales than any other

source, except perhaps the Triads of the Island of Britain, ten of which reference names

from The Mabinogi (see Bromwich 2006, triads 8, 13, 20W, 26, 28, 30, 37, 53, 67, 95).

Anthony Griffiths commented, as he was working in Arfon, that he would reach a site,

photograph it, and then he could just look around and see the next place in one direction

or another.

One such landscape comprising another cluster of names in Arfon contains Dinas

Dinlle, Caer Arianrhod, and Maen Dylan, along a stretch of the coastline from which one

can look east towards Dyffryn Nantlle.

Lying south of Caernarfon on the

fertile coastal morfa between the Irish

Sea approach to the Menai Strait and

the Snowdon massif (Fig. 9), all of

these places bear the names of

characters in the Fourth Branch.

Aranrhod (to use the form in the

manuscripts), hoping to replace

Goewin as Math‘s virgin footholder,

declares her virginity but immediately

gives birth, first to a boy who is named

Dylan because of his great swimming

ability and then to another boy. Dylan

quickly disappears from the tale,

though we are told that he died at the

hand of his uncle Gofannon. Aranrhod

refuses to acknowledge her second son,

swearing he will never get a name, arms, or a wife unless from her. Through the

Figure 9. Sites from the Fourth Branch of The

Mabinogi associated with Dinas Dinlle

20

cleverness of his uncle, the magician Gwydion, she is tricked into naming him Lleu Llaw

Gyffes (‗The Fair One with a Skilful Hand‘), and arming him, and Gwydion and Math

then conjure up a beautiful but flawed wife out of flowers: Blodeuedd (‗Flowerface‘),

whom we have already met.

From atop Dinas Dinlle (‗The

Settlement of Lleu‘s Fortress‘, Fig.

10) one can look south and see

Trwyn Maen Dylan (‗The

Promontory of Dylan‘s Stone‘) with

the great glacial boulder that has

taken on the name of a standing stone

now lost to the sea (Fig. 11). The

original stone is recorded in a letter

dated December 6, 1852, and printed in

Archaeologia Cambrensis IV (New Series),

which mentions, ‗the sepulchral pillar…of

Dylan, on the seashore, near the mouth of the

Llyfni, still maintaining its upright position,

after the lapse of ages, not withstanding the

encroachment of the sea which washes its base

on each successive tide.‘ Offshore and about

halfway between Dinas Dinlle and

Maen Dylan, and now visible only at

the lowest spring tides, is a line of

rock known as Caer Arianrhod

(Arianrhod‘s Fortress) (Fig. 12), to

which Gwydion and Lleu would

sometimes walk and sometimes sail.

And we can conclude with Nantlle

Figure 10. Dinas Dinlle, looking south towards Maen

Dylan and the mountains of the Lleyn Peninsula

Figure 11. Maen Dylan

Figure 12. Caer Arianrhod

21

(‗Lleu‘s Stream‘), inland to the east (on these places, see Williams 1951, 272-73, 278-

79), a place I have already noted above.

Such natural, prehistoric, Roman, and even Dark Age sites as we have been looking

at are precisely the type of places that give rise to story, that serve as anchors by which

tales become part of where we live, or as bollards to which culturally significant

narratives are moored. What I am suggesting is that as long as it or the relevant parts of it

were known, The Mabinogi was inescapable in this part of Wales. The place names

memorialise episodes of The Mabinogi; the tales in turn imbue the encompassing

landscape with moral meaning. And The Mabinogi would be remembered, told, and

passed on within that landscape because its moral messages have relevance to those who

live there. The landscape brings those lessons home, visually as well as metaphorically,

and it helps keep the narrative tradition alive. When the tales fade from memory and

texts are lost, however, those evocative places become once again merely locations, and

the names may become corrupt or opaque. Thus, Caer Aranrhod became locally

Trecanandrag or Tregaranthrag (see Williams 1951, 272-3). In the early nineteenth

century Fenton records it as Tregaeramrhawd, with no indication of its Mabinogi

connection. (The Tre- in these forms is from tref ‗town, settlement, dwelling.‘). The

corruption of a name, if it occurs at all, can be a long gradual process even after any

attached origin tale is lost, but it is far less likely if the tale is remembered. In this

connection it is striking that Fenton‘s account records a folk tradition among the women

of the region, when the memory of the feminine origin of the place name may have been

lost:

DINAS DINLLE

Perhaps a fort of the Town now covered with Sea below it, which

Tradition says was called Tregaeramrhawd.* It has been asserted that at

very low ebb some of its ruins have been seen; and tradition says that

many females, particularly at low water, used to ride on horses on Sundays

and holidays over to Llanddwynwen, in Anglesea, on the opposite shore.

* The literary Caer Arianrhod.—Ed.

(Fenton 1917, 324)

22

Fenton‘s editor in 1917, familiar no doubt with Lady Guest‘s nineteenth-century

translations of The Mabinogion, included the footnote identifying the name. A similar

literary awareness almost certainly accounts for the label Caer Arianrod on the 1891 O.S.

map.

The retention of etymologically transparent (or translucent) names, especially those in

readily identifiable ‗narrative‘ clusters, helps us to understand why such myth-based tales

survived and even flourished in a culture that had adopted a new religion and a new

worldview centuries before the written forms of these tales were composed. It is not the

pre-Christian mythology per se that is being preserved, but rather the moral and social

meaning imbedded in the tales, coupled with a connection to deep history and cultural

identity.

As noted earlier, Brynley Roberts and others see the concentration, specificity, and

meaningfulness of northern place names as indications that the author was himself from

North Wales (Roberts 2001, 68). One the other hand, some, including Ifor Williams and

Proinsias MacCana, see a southern bias (Williams 1951, xli; Mac Cana 1977, 14-17).

Glenys Goetinck goes so far as to say, ‗Mae‘n amlwg nad yw‘r awdur yn edrych ar dde a

gogledd Cymru yn yr un modd. Mae‘n well ganddo‘r de.‘ (Goetinck 1987-88, 253; ‗It is

clear that the author does not view south and north Wales in the same way. He prefers the

south.‘ [my translation]) The very incompatibility of these opinions points to an

important feature of The Mabinogi, one that Roberts touches on: ‗The Four Branches is

one of the few, even rare, texts which encompass both north and south Wales… [O]verall

here is a narrative which is firmly set in both Gwynedd and Dyfed‘ (Roberts 2001, 62).

There is no doubt that the north-south range of The Mabinogi is intentional.

Accepting 1060 to 1200 as the period during which it was probably composed, we must

recognize that The Mabinogi is the product of an exceptionally tumultuous age, when the

survival of Welshness was being seriously threatened from without. I have already

quoted the chronicler regarding the Anglo-Norman plan ‗to exterminate all the Britons

completely‘ (Jones 1955, 79). The compiler of Brenhinedd y Saesson adds the

unequivocal sentence, a chyttyngkv nat edewit dyn bew yn Kymre ‗and they swore

together that no living person would be left in Wales‘ (Jones 1971, 121). Yet the author

23

of The Mabinogi writes about friendship, openness and honesty, and the bonds of

marriage and alliance, and some of his characters (e.g. Pwyll in the First Branch, Pryderi

in the Third and Fourth) are presented as perhaps too trusting and naïve, but are

nonetheless admirable on that account.

It is quite likely, as Catherine McKenna suggests that the Four Branches, as we know

them today, were written ‗when the emergence of certain powerful princes in both South

and North created a vision of a unified Wales,‘ and she concludes that in these tales ‗[t]he

resources of the native tradition are harnessed to the purpose of urging rulers to move

carefully, prudently, and with dignity through the dangerous shoals of Cambro-Anglo-

Norman politics‘ (McKenna 2003, 116, 117). And I concur. But it is also true that these

tales, perhaps in some other (now unknowable) form, are older than the times of those

princes, as testified in part by their place in the landscape. And if that is so, then the

themes and moral underpinnings of The Mabinogi would have had a wider relevance to

audiences outside as well as within the immediate court circle.

Attempts to date The Mabinogi by matching episodes or details to specific historical

events is, as Brynley Roberts says, ‗dangerous‘ (Roberts 2001, 63). To which I might

add, this is not the way story works. The Mabinogi is not fictionalized history, nor is it

an allegory of eleventh- or twelfth-century Wales. But it is indeed a moral work

delivering deep human truths to a people and in a period very much in need of a new

vision. Nor is it surprising that The Mabinogi should be considered worth preserving in

the later troubled centuries between 1200 and 1400, when it was copied into the surviving

manuscripts and their lost exemplars.

Conclusion

In closing, I return briefly to another Native American assessment of the value of

narrative, one that again is applicable to The Mabinogi, especially insofar as it is a written

work descended from an ancient oral storytelling tradition. Some 2500 miles northeast of

Apache country, the Abenaki scholar and storyteller Joseph Bruchac writes, ‗Listen close

when a Native elder tells you a story. The lesson within it may be a subtle way of

suggesting to you that you need to rethink your behavior‘ (Bruchac 2004, 113). I believe

it is no accident that The Mabinogi has become the defining work of medieval Welsh

24

literature, for as it sweeps across the Welsh landscape, it raises questions of who we are

and how we should behave – whether we are Welsh or not.

But the lessons and moral constructs of The Mabinogi are not simple ones. Indeed, at

times they run counter to our expectations. There is no simple code here; rather life is

messy and frailty common: the tacit expectations of proper behaviour it propounds are

neither a version of the early medieval heroic code, as we might expect from a land in a

nearly constant state of war, nor the aristocratic code of courtly love that became widely

popular in the literature of the later Middle Ages. The fact that these tales are situated so

precisely, mapped onto the world of daily life, helps to reify the events narrated, not in a

literal or historical sense, but at a deeper level, where our standards of behaviour are

informed by the cultural mythologies we create (see Bollard 1996b). To live within that

landscape makes it harder to forget or ignore its lessons. The question for the audience of

The Mabinogi is not ‗Did these things really happen here?‘ The more important question

is ‗How carefully do we attend to the tales set in these places?‘ There is another world

contiguous with, and informing, the one we experience – the world of myth, of narrative

and story. Its landscape is our landscape, and though its rules may be somewhat

different, the characters who inhabit those tales face the same sort of very human choices

and decisions that we must also learn to make.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were read at the UCLA Celtic Conference, March 2008,

and to the Welsh Department at Aberystwyth University, May 2008. Thanks are due to

Joseph Nagy (UCLA), Gruffydd Aled Williams (Aberystwyth), and Marged Haycock

(Aberystwyth) for their support, and especially to David Austin (UW Lampeter) for

encouraging me to publish it and for his rigorous editing. Special recognition, of course,

is due to Anthony Griffiths, whose photographs of The Mabinogi landscape help to reveal

not only where the tales take place, but how to understand them better in their physical

and literary contexts. All of the photographs accompanying this article were taken by

him except for that of Four Stones taken by Agnes Stokes.

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