The White Goddess (9 page)

The solution, namely ‘The Wind’, is given practically with a violent storm of wind which frightens the King into fetching Elphin from the dungeon, whereupon Taliesin unchains him with an incantation. Probably in an earlier version the wind was released from the mantle of his comrade Afagddu or Morvran, as it was by Morvran’s Irish counterpart Marvan in the early mediaeval
Proceedings
of
the
Grand
Bardic
Academy
,
with which
The
Romance
of
Taliesin
has much in common. ‘A part of it blew into the bosom of every bard present, so that they all rose to their feet.’ A condensed form of this riddle appears in the
Flores
of Bede, an author commended in one of the
Book
of
Taliesin
poems:

There can be no mistake here. But since the
Hanes
Taliesin
is not preceded by any formal
Dychymig
Dychy
mig
(‘riddle me this riddle’) or
Dechymic
pwy
yw
(‘Discover what it is’)
1
commentators excuse themselves from reading it as a riddle at all. Some consider it to be solemn-sounding nonsense, an early anticipation of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, intended to raise a laugh; others consider that it has some sort of mystical sense connected with the Druidical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but do not claim to be able to elucidate this.

Here I must apologize for my temerity in writing on a subject which is not really my own. I am not a Welshman, except an honorary one through eating the leek on St. David’s Day while serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and, though I have lived in Wales for some years, off and on,
have no command even of modern Welsh; and I am not a mediaeval historian. But my profession is poetry, and I agree with the Welsh minstrels that the poet’s first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths. One day while I was puzzling out the meaning of the ancient Welsh myth of
Câd
Goddeu
(‘The Battle of the Trees’), fought between Arawn King of Annwm (‘The Bottomless Place’), and the two sons of Dôn, Gwydion and Amathaon, I had much the same experience as Gwion of Llanfair. A drop or two of the brew of Inspiration flew out of the cauldron and I suddenly felt confident that if I turned again to Gwion’s riddle, which I had not read since I was a schoolboy, I could make sense of it.

This Battle of the Trees was ‘occasioned by a Lapwing, a White Roebuck and a Whelp from Annwm.’ In the ancient Welsh
Triads,
which are a collection of sententious or historical observations arranged epigrammatically in threes, it is reckoned as one of the ‘Three Frivolous Battles of Britain’. And the
Romance
of Taliesin
contains a long poem, or group of poems run together, called
Câd
Goddeu,
the verses of which seem as nonsensical as the Hanes Taliesin because they have been deliberately ‘pied’. Here is the poem in D. W. Nash’s mid-Victorian translation, said to be unreliable but the best at present available. The original is written in short rhyming lines, the same rhyme often being sustained for ten or fifteen lines. Less than half of them belong to the poem which gives its name to the whole medley, and these must be laboriously sorted before their relevance to Gwion’s riddle can be explained. Patience!