The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  No sooner had she held this discourse than she sent to Gronw Pebyr. Gronw toiled at making the spear, and that day twelvemonth it was ready. And that very day he caused her to be informed thereof.

  ‘Lord,’ said Blodeuwedd unto Llew, ‘I have been thinking how it is possible that what thou didst tell me formerly can be true; wilt thou show me in what manner thou couldst stand at once upon the edge of a cauldron and upon a buck, if I prepare the bath for thee?’ ‘I will show thee,’ said he.

  Then she sent unto Gronw, and bade him be in ambush on the hill which is now called Bryn Kyvergyr, on the bank of the river Cynvael. She caused also to be collected all the goats that were in the Cantrev, and had them brought to the other side of the river, opposite Bryn Kyvergyr.

  And the next day she spoke thus. ‘Lord,’ said she, ‘I have caused the roof and the bath to be prepared, and lo! they are ready.’ ‘Well,’ said Llew, ‘we will go gladly to look at them.’

  The day after they came and looked at the bath. ‘Wilt thou go into the bath, lord?’ said she. ‘Willingly will I go in,’ he answered. So into the bath he went, and he anointed himself. ‘Lord, ‘said she, ‘behold the animals which thou didst speak of as being called bucks.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘cause one of them to be caught and brought here.’ And the buck was brought. Then Llew rose out of the bath, and put on his trowsers, and he placed one foot on the edge of the bath and the other on the buck’s back.

  Thereupon Gronw rose up from the hill which is called Bryn Kyvergyr, and he rested on one knee, and flung the poisoned dart and struck him on the side, so that the shaft started out, but the head of the dart remained in. Then he flew up in the form of an eagle and gave a fearful scream. And thenceforth was he no more seen.

  And soon as he departed Gronw and Blodeuwedd went together unto the palace that night. And the next day Gronw arose and took possession of Ardudwy. And after he had overcome the land, he ruled over it, so that Ardudwy and Penllyn were both under his sway.

  Then these tidings reached Math the son of Mathonwy. And heaviness and grief came upon Math, and much more upon Gwydion than upon him. ‘Lord,’ said Gwydion, ‘I shall never rest until I have tidings of my nephew.’ ‘Verily,’ said Math, ‘may Heaven be thy strength.’ Then Gwydion set forth and began to go forward. And he went through Gwynedd and Powys to the confines. And when he had done so, he went into Arvon, and came to the house of a vassal, in Maenawr Penardd. And he alighted at the house, and stayed there that night. The man of the house and his household came in, and last of all came there the swineherd. Said the man of the house to the swineherd, ‘Well, youth, hath thy sow come in to-night?’ ‘She hath,’ said he, ‘and is this instant returned to the pigs.’ ‘Where doth this sow go to?’ said Gwydion. ‘Every day, when the sty is opened, she goeth forth and none can catch sight of her, neither is it known whither she goeth more than if she sank into the earth.’ ‘Wilt thou grant unto me,’ said Gwydion, ‘not to open the sty until I am beside the sty with thee?’ ‘This will I do, right gladly,’ he answered.

  That night they went to rest; and as soon as the swineherd saw the light of day, he awoke Gwydion. And Gwydion arose and dressed himself, and went with the swineherd, and stood beside the sty. Then the swineherd opened the sty. And as soon as he opened it, behold she leaped forth, and set off with great speed. And Gwydion followed her, and she went against the course of a river, and made for a brook, which is now called Nant y Llew. And there she halted and began feeding. And Gwydion came under the tree, and looked what it might be that the sow was feeding on. And he saw that she was eating putrid flesh and vermin. Then looked he up to the top of the tree, and as he looked he beheld on the top of the tree an eagle, and when the eagle shook itself, there fell vermin and putrid flesh from it, and these the sow devoured. And it seemed to him that the eagle was Llew. And he sang an Englyn:

  Oak that grows between the two banks;

  Darkened is the sky and hill!

  Shall I not tell him by his wounds,

  That this is Llew?

  Upon this the eagle came down until he reached the centre of the tree. And Gwydion sang another Englyn:

  Oak that grows in upland ground,

  Is it not wetted by the rain? Has it not been drenched

  By nine score tempests?

  It bears in its branches Llew Llaw Gyffes!

  Then the eagle came down until he was on the lowest branch of the tree, and thereupon this Englyn did Gwydion sing:

  Oak that grows beneath the steep;

  Stately and majestic is its aspect!

  Shall I not speak of it

  That Llew will come to my lap?

  And the eagle came down upon Gwydion’s knee. And Gwydion struck him with his magic wand, so that he returned to his own form. No one ever saw a more piteous sight, for he was nothing but skin and bone.

  Then he went unto Caer Dathyl, and there were brought unto him good physicians that were in Gwynedd, and before the end of the year he was quite healed.

  ‘Lord,’ said he unto Math the son of Mathonwy, ‘it is full time now that I have retribution of him by whom I have suffered all this woe.’ ‘Truly,’ said Math, ‘he will never be able to maintain himself in the possession of that which is thy right.’ ‘Well,’ said Llew, ‘the sooner I have any right, the better shall I be pleased.’

  Then they called together the whole of Gwynedd, and set forth to Ardudwy. And Gwydion went on before and proceeded to Mur-y-Castell. And when Blodeuwedd heard that he was coming, she took her maidens with her, and fled to the mountain. And they passed through the river Cynvael, and went towards a court that there was upon the mountain, and through fear they could not proceed except with their faces looking backwards, so that unawares they fell into the lake. And they were all drowned except Blodeuwedd herself, and her Gwydion overtook. And he said unto her, ‘I will not slay thee, but I will do unto thee worse than that. For I will turn thee into a bird; and because of the shame thou hast done unto Llew Llaw Gyffes, thou shalt never show thy face in the light of day henceforth; and that through fear of all the other birds. For it shall be their nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee. And thou shalt not lose thy name, but shalt be always called Blodeuwedd.’ Now Blodeuwedd is an owl in the language of the present time, and for this reason is the owl hateful unto all birds. And even now is the owl called Blodeuwedd.

  Then Gronw Pebyr withdrew unto Penllyn, and he despatched thence an embassy. And the messenger he sent asked Llew Llaw Gyffes, if he would take land, or domain, or gold, or silver, for the injury he had received. ‘I will not, by my confession to Heaven,’ said he. Behold this is the least that I will accept from him; that he come to the spot where I was when he wounded me with the dart, and that I stand where he did, and that with a dart I take my aim at him. And this is the very least that I will accept.’

  And this was told unto Gronw Pebyr. ‘Verily,’ said he, ‘is it needful for me to do thus? My faithful warriors, and my household, and my foster-brothers, is there not one among you who will stand the blow in my stead?’ ‘There is not, verily,’ answered they. And because of their refusal to suffer one stroke for their lord, they are called the third disloyal tribe even unto this day. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I will meet it.’

  Then they two went forth to the banks of the river Cynvael, and Gronw stood in the place where Llew Llaw Gyffes was when he struck him; and Llew in the place where Gronw was. Then said Gronw Pebyr unto Llew, ‘Since it was through the wiles of a woman that I did unto thee as I have done, I adjure thee by Heaven to let me place between me and the blow, the slab thou seest yonder on the river’s bank.’ ‘Verily,’ said Llew, ‘I will not refuse thee this.’ ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘may Heaven reward thee.’ So Gronw took the slab and placed it between him and the blow.

  Then Llew flung the dart at him, and it pierced the slab and went through Gronw likewise, so that it pierced through his back. And thus was Gronw Pebyr slain. And there is still the slab on the bank of th
e river Cynvael, in Ardudwy, having the hole through it. And therefore is it even now called Llech Gronw.

  A second time did Llew Llaw Gyffes take possession of the land, and prosperously did he govern it. And as the story relates, he was lord after this over Gwynedd.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE BULL-FOOTED GOD

  Poets who are concerned with the single poetic Theme, cannot afford to draw a disingenuous distinction between ‘sacred history’ and ‘profane myth’ and make the usual dissociation between them, unless prepared to reject the Scriptures as wholly irrelevant to poetry. This would be a pity, and in these days of religious toleration I cannot see why they need accept so glaringly unhistorical a view of the authorship, provenience, dating and original texts of the Old Testament, that its close connexion with the Theme is severed. In the following chapter I will knit up a few more broken strands.

  The myth of Llew Llaw Gyffes has kept its original outlines pretty well, though carefully edited so as to give gods all the credit for magic feats which we know, by comparison with myths of the same type, were originally performed by goddesses. For example, the Divine Child Llew Llaw is born of a virgin, but by the wizardry of Math, and Arianrhod is not only unaware that she has brought forth a child, but righteously indignant that she is accused of being an unmarried mother; whereas in the Cuchulain version of the Llew story his mother Dechtire conceives by swallowing a may-fly without magical aid. And Nana, who is the Phrygian counterpart of Arianrhod and whose son Attis has much the same later history as Llew Llaw, conceives of her own free will by the magic use of an almond or, some mythographers say, a pomegranate; again, Blodeuwedd, Llew’s wife, is created by Gwydion from the blossoms of oak, broom, meadow-sweet and six other plants and trees; whereas in the older legend she is Cybele the Mother of All Living, and wholly independent of any male demiurge.

  That Blodeuwedd’s fingers are ‘whiter than the ninth wave of the sea’ proves her connexion with the Moon; nine is the prime Moon-number, the Moon draws the tides, and the ninth wave is traditionally the largest. Thus Heimdall, Llew’s counterpart, porter of the Norse heaven and rival of Loki, was ‘the Son of the Wave’ by being born from nine waves by Odin’s (Gwydion’s) enchantment. After his fight with Loki, in which both of them dressed in seal-skins, Heimdall was given the apple of Life-in-death by Iduna, born of flowers, Blodeuwedd’s counterpart, and rode his horse ‘Golden-mane’ along the Milky Way which also occurs in the Llew Llaw story. But the Norse scalds have tampered with the myth, awarding Heimdall the victory and doubly disguising Loki’s seduction of Heimdall’s bride, Iduna.

  When Blodeuwedd has betrayed Llew, she is punished by Gwydion who transmogrifies her into an Owl. This is further patriarchal interference. She had been an Owl thousands of years before Gwydion was born – the same Owl that occurs on the coins of Athens as the symbol of Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, the same owl that gave its name to Adam’s first wife Lilith and as Annis the Blue Hag sucks the blood of children in primitive British folk-lore. There is a poem about Blodeuwedd the Owl by Davydd ap Gwilym, in which she swears by St. David that she is daughter of the Lord of Mona, equal in dignity to Meirchion himself. This is to call herself a ‘Daughter of Proteus’ – Meirchion could change his shape at will – and perhaps to identify herself with the old bloody Druidic religion suppressed by Paulinus in Anglesey in 68 AD. Davydd ap Gwilym, the most admired of all Welsh poets, was distressed by the contemporary attitude to women and did his best to persuade a nun whom he loved to break out of her cloister.

  In the Romance, only the carrion-eating Sow of Maenawr Penardd is independent of the male magician’s rod. She is Cerridwen, the White Sow-goddess, in disguise. It will be seen that Arianrhod the Birth-goddess; and Arianrhod the Goddess of Initiation who gives a name and arms to Llew; and Blodeuwedd, the Love-goddess; and Blodeuwedd the Owl, Goddess of Wisdom; and Cerridwen, the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd, form a pentad. They are the same goddess in her five seasonal aspects: for which Ailm, Onn, Ura, Eadha, and Idho are the corresponding vowels in the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar. Why the two Arianrhods and the two Blodeuwedds are not distinguished here is because the pentad can also be viewed as a triad: the author of the Romance, in order to keep a more intelligible narrative sequence, is story-telling in terms of a three-season year.

  Similarly, Llew Llaw changes his name with the seasons. Dylan the Fish is his New Year name – though in some accounts Dylan and Llew are twins; Llew Llaw the Lion is his Spring-Summer name; his Autumn name is withheld; in mid-Winter he is the Eagle of Nant y Llew. He is represented in the Romance as being a wonderful horseman; for so Hercules rode the wild horse Arion, and Bellerophon rode Pegasus. In Irish legend his counterpart Lugh is credited with the invention of horsemanship.

  The story of his deception by Blodeuwedd recalls that of Gilgamesh’s deception by Ishtar, and Samson’s deception by Delilah. Samson was a Palestinian Sun-god who, becoming inappropriately included in the corpus of Jewish religious myth, was finally written down as an Israelite hero of the time of the Judges. That he belonged to an exogamic and therefore matrilinear society is proved by Delilah’s remaining with her own tribe after marriage; in patriarchal society the wife goes to her husband’s tribe. The name ‘Samson’ means ‘Of the Sun’ and ‘Dan’, his tribe, is an appellation of the Assyrian Sun-god. Samson, like Hercules, killed a lion with his bare hands, and his riddle about the bees swarming in the carcase of the lion which he had killed, if returned to iconographic form, shows Aristaeus the Pelasgian Hercules (father of Actaeon, the stag-cult king, and son of Cheiron the Centaur) killing a mountain lion on Mount Pelion, from the wound in whose flesh the first swarm of bees emerged. In the Cuchulain version of the same story, Blodeuwedd is named Blathnat and extracts from her husband King Curoi – the only man who ever gave Cuchulain a beating – the secret that his soul is hidden in an apple in the stomach of a salmon which appears once every seven years in a spring on the side of Slieve Mis (the mountain of Amergin’s dolmen). This apple can be cut only with his own sword. Her lover Cuchulain waits for seven years and obtains the apple. Blathnat then prepares a bath and ties her husband’s long hair to the bedposts and bedrail; takes his sword and gives it to her lover who cuts the apple in two. The husband loses his strength and cries out: ‘No secret to a woman, no jewel to slaves!’ Cuchulain cuts off his head. There is a reference to this story in one of Gwion’s poems. A Greek version of the same story is referred to Minoan times: Nisus King of Nisa – an ancient city near Megara destroyed by the Dorians – had his ‘purple’ lock plucked by his daughter Scylla who wished to kill him and marry Minos of Crete. The Greeks have given this story an unlikely moral ending, that Minos drowned Scylla as a parricide from the stern of his galley; at any rate, the genealogy of the Kings of Nisa makes it plain that the throne went by matrilinear succession. Still another version occurs in the Excidium Troiae, a mediaeval Latin summary of the Trojan War compiled from very early sources; here the secret of Achilles’s vulnerable heel is wormed from him by his wife Polyxena ‘since there is no secret that women cannot extract from men in proof of love’. It may be assumed that, in the original legend of Osiris, Isis was a willing accomplice in his yearly murder by Set; and that, in the original legend of Hercules, Deianeira was a willing accomplice in his yearly murder by Achelöus, or by Nessus the Centaur; and that each of these heroes was killed in a bath – as in the legends of Minos’s bath-murder by the priestess of Cocalus, at Daedalus’s instigation, and of Agamemnon’s bath-murder by Clytaemnestra at Aegisthus’s instigation – though in the popular version of the Osiris story it is a coffin, not a bath, into which he is decoyed. The Jackals, who were sacred in Egypt to Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, because they fed on corpse-flesh and had mysterious nocturnal habits, must have known all about the murder.

  THE JACKALS’ ADDRESS TO ISIS

  Grant Anup’s children this:

  To howl with you, Queen Isis,

  Over the scattered limbs of wronged Osiris.

&
nbsp; What harder fate than to be woman?

  She makes and she unmakes her man.

  In Jackal-land it is no secret

  Who tempted red-haired, ass-eared Set

  To such bloody extreme; who most

  Must therefore mourn and fret

  To pacify the unquiet ghost.

  And when Horus your son

  Avenges this divulsion