The example of John Matthews’ story ‘The Battle of the Trees', in his ‘The Song of Taliesin: Tales from King Arthur's Bard’, and the kind advice of John Matthews himself, who read this text in draft, is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Amaethon Uab Dôn: The Fifth of the Five Branches of the Mabinogi

edited from the extant version in Judas College MS 152c by Mark Williams (Junior Research Fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge)

 

Introduction

I. The Manuscript

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi – Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math - are the greatest works of medieval Welsh prose. They are based on a rich vein of orally-transmitted folklore and mythological material, but were synthesised in the early 12th century by a redactor of genius. They take the form of four roughly chronological and interlinked short-stories, termed ‘branches’, which are set in a pre-Christian, pre-Roman Britain which resembles an idealised version of the redactor’s own high medieval era. His humane, sober style contrasts fascinatingly with the violence and shape-shifting which loom so large in the four tales. Translations into English are numerous; the most recent is that of Sioned Davies (Davies, The Mabinogion (Oxford, 2007)), which is particularly good at drawing attention to the techniques of the oral storyteller discernable in the text.

But the existence of the ‘fifth branch of the Mabinogi’, Amaethon uab Don, was unsuspected until very recently, when a hitherto-unknown medieval Welsh manuscript was discovered in the library of Judas College, Oxford. The MS itself is of a decidedly heterogenous character. It contains a series of verse prayers, a version of the ladymass, and a partial collection of legal triads. Unusually, a significant amount of agricultural material is also found in the MS, in the form of a list of activities to be performed by the farmer according to the months, and a tract on the diseases of livestock. Amaethon uab Don is the only narrative text contained within the MS. It is tempting to connect the agricultural bias of the MS with elements of the story, which, as noted below, shows an overriding concern with fertility and the natural world, as its presiding character Amaethon suggests. (Amaethon from British *Ambactonos, ‘Divine Ploughman’.)

II. Date

It seems very likely that the tale is the work of the same redactor or author who penned the familiar Four Branches of the Mabinogi, or at least of a close associate. The language does not seem to be any earlier or later than the PKM, and the existence of numerous verbal echoes and parallels of incident suggests that Amaethon uab Don is the final part of the Mabinogi as a consciously-composed and unitary work dating to the end of the 11th or early 12th century.

Before the rediscovery of the MS, the sketchy lineaments of our tale were known from three other sources. These, when placed together, point to the existence of a tale recounting a battle between Arawn, lord of Annwn, the Welsh otherworld, and the sons of Dôn, Gwydion the enchanter and Amaethon the Ploughman. Arawn plays an important part in the first branch, and Gwydion is the central character in the fourth. This skirmish, termed ‘One of the Three Futile Battles of the Island of Britain’ in one of our three sources, was brought about because Amaethon stole a hound, a roebuck and a plover from Arawn’s kingdom. When Arawn and his armies clash with those of Gwydion and Amaethon, neither side may achieve victory because each contains a kind of palladium, a warrior who may not be defeated as long as their name remains unknown. Gwydion discovers the name of the magical warrior on Arawn’s side by means of three extempore verses, which are preserved in a version rather different to that in our text. He also enchants the nearby trees, so that they acquire human form and become warriors attacking the forces of Annwn. The totemistic warrior on the side of the sons of Dôn is revealed at the last to be a woman, named Achren.

Such were the bare bones of the traditional narrative as we knew it from the scraps of evidence that were extant. It was presumed that a prose narrative of the story had either never been put in written form, or had not survived. The delight of scholars on finding that not only did such a narrative text exist, but that it completed the most important cycle of Welsh medieval literature, can therefore be easily imagined.

III. Literary Qualities

There does indeed seem to be a concern detectable in the text to complete or round off the cycle of tales, as the colophon indicates: A uelly yd gwnaethpwyt teruyn ar gangeu hynn o’r Mabinogi, ‘And thus an end is made upon these branches of the Mabinogi’. Most strikingly, the story comes back to some of the concerns and characters of Pwyll, the first branch. Arawn reappears, and we return in part to the seven cantrefs of Dyfed, which Gwydion has bestowed on his brother Amaethon after the defeat of Pryderi by magic in the fourth branch. Further, the unnamed wife of Arawn at the start of the first branch becomes a major player at the end of the fifth, and the reason why her name was not then given becomes clear. Marital disharmony is transposed from the bedroom to the battlefield. A kind of ironic symmetry is detectable, as well as a number of scenes which reprise or echo previous events in the cycle, each time with significant differences, in a different key, as it were. The first-branch scene where Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, encounters Arawn without knowing who he is is echoed in the scene in which Gwydion fab Dôn, disguised as an old man, meets Arawn, again while the latter is out hunting. But this time, the character greeting Arawn knows exactly who he is. Even Gwydion’s disguise, as an old man driving a (male) pig, inverts his role at the end of the fourth branch, where he follows a sow to find his nephew, Lleu. In each case, he is seeking an explanation for something of great importance to him; in the fourth branch, the whereabouts of his nephew, and in Amaethon the reason for the unearthly gormes, or plague, upon his kingdom of Gwynedd.

As with the other Four Branches, dialogue makes up almost half the narrative, and the narrator prefers to delineate character through dialogue rather than explication. For example, we see a side of Gwydion that we have not seen before, in that on two occasions his nerve appears to falter. The first is his refusal to contemplate being transformed into a stag for the purposes of stealing into Annwn: Yr rof i a Duw…o’r holl wyduilot yssyd yn y byt, nyt af inheu a’r rith hynny arnaf, ‘Between me and God … of all the wild animals which are in the world, I for one will not go with the shape of those ones upon me.’ (We recall, of course, that Gwydion has previously been punished for abetting rape by being turned into animal form for three years, as the fourth branch relates.) Instead, he opts for the riskier strategy of assuming the guise of Arawn himself. Secondly, he seems to have a crisis of conscience when he sees the carnage which the forces of Annwn wreak upon the men of Gwynedd and Arwystli at Caer Nefenhir, and is momentarily at a loss:

‘Oy a uab Duw Hollgyuoethawc … madws oed ynni caffael pedyt newyd o’r lle, canys Arawn yssyd y cadarnaf, ac y Duw y dygaf ug gyffes, na uynnaf i y wyr Gwyned cael adoet drostom ni bellach.’

‘O Almighty Son of God…it were high time for us to get new footsoldiers at once, since Arawn is the stronger, and to God I bear my confession, I do not wish the men of Gwynedd to receive further deadly harm on our account.’

It is fitting that it is Amaethon, the farmer and man of animals and fields, who suggests the transformation of the trees into warriors to relieve the pressure. Amaethon himself is also characterised in dialogue: when Gwydion urges them to continue with the stolen animals overnight towards Gwynedd, Amaethon insists they camp, canys kerdet bellach ny allont y kyuryw aniueileit, ‘Since such animals cannot go any further.’ The isolationism which lies behind his rivalry with his brother is suggested in the first dialogue between them, in which Amaethon reminds his brother yssit a wnelhwyf inheu nys gwnelych, ‘there is that which I myself may do that you cannot.’ The difference in character between the brothers is also underlined by their treatment of the plover, the smallest of the three animals stolen from the otherworld. Gwydion grabs it roughly gyr e uynwgyl, ‘by its neck’, which contrasts sharply with the strange scene in which Amaethon comforts the agitated bird by wrapping it in his garment and singing to it. Finally, the stinging, bitter dialogue between Arawn and Achren at the end of the branch suggests the redactor had some experience of marital recrimination, perhaps as a lawyer.

Very importantly, Amaethon alters the way in which we read the other Four Branches, though the implications of this readjustment will take time to be fully analysed. The whole cycle is now framed within the context of the relationship of Arawn and his wife. Also, the north-south dichotomy of the other branches is overcome; whilst the first and third branches were set in Dyfed, and the second and fourth in Gwynedd, the fifth is set in both. Further, the discovery of the fifth branch means that the third branch, Manawydan, is revealed as the central branch of the five, and this has some effect on our sense of the redactor’s overall purpose and vision. It has been remarked that Manawydan himself can be seen as a post-heroic figure, whose wisdom, circumspection and self-control save the day; I feel we are right to continue to regard these values as close to the redactor’s heart. But the moral chaos of the fourth branch only worsens in the fifth, with its violence, theft, divorce and bitter feuding. If Manawydan was an image of the responsible, sober post-heroic man, Gwydion emerges, perhaps, as the author’s portrait of the emotional sterility that arises from an inner moral vacuum. At the end of the tale, Gwydion returns to Gwynedd alone when Amaethon and Achren marry, and Lleu, his nephew and only heir, is either killed or injured as a direct result of his actions. That intimations of mortality may be pressing heavily on Gwydion is suggested by the detail at the start of our text that he fails to visit the grave of Math, his uncle, because it disturbs him to see gwr hut a lledrith, ‘a man of magic and enchantment’ - like himself - dead and under the earth.

As with the other branches, fragments of lore and onomastic tales are woven into the texture of the narrative. Indeed Amaethon furnishes us with two hitherto-unknown triads – the ‘Three Unfrequented Graves’ and the ‘Three Chief Warrior-Women of the Island of Britain’. The last of these is a remarkable piece of evidence that Buddug/Byddug (Boudica) was the subject of a body of Welsh narrative tradition, in which she sacked Rome (!) in revenge for Julius Caesar’s abduction of Fflur from Caswallawn fab Beli. Similarly unexpected is the occurrence of a teichoscopia, a topos of heroic narratives throughout the Indo-European world, in which the heroes of an opposing army are pointed out one by one from the walls or ramparts of a besieged city. Examples occur in the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Iliad, and the Ramayana, and with our text a further Celtic instance of the topos can be added to this distinguished list of epic comparanda.

Aetiology clearly remains an important part of the redactor’s inheritance from his oral predecessors. An origin is also given for the proverb Gwae i’r lleidr a fo gweledig, ‘Woe to the thief who may be seen’, as a chance remark by Gwydion upon stealing the three animals from Annwn. Further, a satirical aetiology (perhaps) is provided for the broken speech of the northern Welsh border, in the story that some of the transformed trees, not endowed with the power of speech, failed to return to their woods and travelled as far as England, where they fathered children on local women by force. According to the storyteller, the children of such silent fathers and human mothers possessed only lledieith, ‘half-speech’, or ‘stammering’. As with the story of Blodeuwedd in Math, the creation of human beings from plant-matter has unexpected and unpleasant consequences.

As with the other branches, the tale is patterned with structural devices drawn from oral tradition. For example, the events are rhythmically punctuated by scene-setting adverbs such as treigylgueith, ‘once upon a time’ and trannoeth, ‘the next day’, by formulaic descriptions of feasting and of seating arrangements. As Sioned Davies has suggested, the overwhelming frequency of the conjuction ‘and’ may suggest the fragmented nature of spoken language. Repetition is a common narrative feature linked to memorability; we may note the formulaic question-and-answer nature of the teichoscopia between Taliesin and Lleu, with its refrain mi a’e gwnn, ‘I know him’, for example. Tripartite repletion is also particularly apparent; three attempts are required on the part of Gwydion and Amaethon to enter Annwn, and they succeed only on the third attempt. Similarly, Gwydion sings three verses, each termed an englyn, in order to identify the unnamed warrior in Arawn’s forces, and the journey from Dyfed up to Gwynedd is made in three sections.

The literary implications of the fifth branch will take time and the spilling of much scholarly ink in order to be fully understood and seen in context. In particular, the recurring themes of the branch – naming and namelessness, speech and silence, sight and the lack thereof, and agricultural fertility – need to be teased apart and related to the symphonic play of themes of the preceding Four Branches, which recent scholarship has done so much to identify.

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