The White Goddess (13 page)

In Wales and Ireland primroses are reckoned fairy flowers and in English folk tradition represent wantonness (cf. ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ –
Hamlet
;
the ‘primrose of her wantonness’ – Brathwait’s
Golden
Fleece
)
.
So Milton’s ‘yellow-skirted fayes’ wore primrose. ‘Cockles’ are the ‘tares’ of the Parable that the Devil sowed in the wheat; and the bean is traditionally associated with ghosts – the Greek and Roman homoeopathic remedy against ghosts was to spit beans at them – and Pliny in his
Natural
History
records the belief that the souls of the dead reside in beans. According to the Scottish poet Montgomerie (1605), witches rode on bean-stalks to their sabbaths.

To return to the Battle of the Trees. Though the fern was reckoned a ‘tree’ by the Irish poets, the ‘plundered fern’ is probably a reference to fern-seed which makes invisible and confers other magical powers. The twice-repeated ‘privet’ is suspicious. The privet figures unimportantly in Irish poetic tree-lore; it is never regarded as ‘blessed’. Probably its second occurrence in line 100 is a disguise of the wild-apple, which is the tree most likely to smile from beside the rock, emblem of security: for Olwen, the laughing Aphrodite of Welsh legend, is always connected with the
wild-apple. In line 99 ‘his berries are thy dowry’ is absurdly juxtaposed to the hazel. Only two fruit-trees could be said to dower a bride in Gwion’s day: the churchyard yew whose berries fell at the church porch where marriages were always celebrated, and the churchyard rowan, often substituted for the yew in Wales. I think the yew is here intended; yew-berries were prized for their sticky sweetness. In the tenth-century Irish poem,
King
and
Hermit
,
Marvan the brother of King Guare of Connaught commends them highly as food.

The remaining stanzas of the poem may now be tentatively restored:

The broom may not seem a warlike tree, but in Gratius’s
Genistae
Altinates
the tall white broom is said to have been much used in ancient times for the staves of spears and darts: these are probably the ‘brood’.
Goddeu
Brig
means Tree-tops, which has puzzled critics who hold that
Câd
Goddeu
was a battle fought in Goddeu, ‘Trees’, the Welsh name for Shropshire. The
Gorchan
of Maelderw (‘the incantation of Maelderw’) was a long poem attributed to the sixth-century poet Taliesin, who is said to have particularly prescribed it as a classic to his bardic colleagues. The
apple-tree was a symbol of poetic immortality, which is why it is here presented as growing out of this incantation of Taliesin’s.

Here, to anticipate my argument by several chapters, is the Order of Battle in the
Câd
Goddeu
:

 

It should be added that in the original, between the lines numbered 60 and 61, occur eight lines unintelligible to D. W. Nash: beginning with ‘the chieftains are falling’ and ending with ‘blood of men up to the buttocks’. They may or may not belong to the
Battle
of
the
Trees.

I leave the other pieces included in this medley to be sorted out by someone else. Besides the monologues of Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn and Apollo, there is a satire on monkish theologians, who sit in a circle gloomily enjoying themselves with prophecies of the imminent Day of Judgement (lines 62–66), the black darkness, the shaking of the mountain, the purifying furnace (lines 131–134), damning men’s souls by the hundred (lines 39–40) and pondering the absurd problems of the Schoolmen:

This introduces a boast of Gwion’s own learning: