by Rhys Hughes
Castor explains the entire sequence of events in the following manner: “It was just after a crushing defeat against the All Blacks in the Millennium Stadium and I was waiting in the station for a bus back to Porthcawl, feeling rather low, cursing myself for wasting my money on a ticket, when I fell into conversation with a man also waiting in the queue. There was something unusual about him but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was the horned helmet, bearskin coat and broadsword slung at his belt, maybe not. Plenty of people use match days as an excuse to dress up in unconventional clothing.
“We boarded the bus and because the vehicle was crowded we ended up sitting next to each other. At first we talked about the game in a half-hearted manner, in the same way one might talk about a broken washing machine or bicycle puncture, but then I forgot the rules of discretion and bewailed the fact I wasn’t responsible for picking the Welsh side. I felt sure I could select a winning team if I was given a chance to do so. The main difficulty, I admitted, was that my ideal team consisted of players already dead. ‘That isn’t necessarily a problem,’ replied my companion, and I arched my eyebrows at that.
“He lowered his voice to a whisper and went on to explain that he wasn’t really a mortal man but Ullr, the god of skill, hunts and duels from Norse mythology, and that he had powerful contacts in Asgård, the Viking version of heaven. I knew in my heart he was telling the truth; there was something compelling about his whole demeanour, and I felt proud to be sitting next to him. I think he was pleased by my easy acceptance, and he grimly grinned in a reassuring way, if I might be permitted a paradox. Then he closed his eyes and recited, ‘Hann er ok fagr álitum ok hefir hermanns atgervi. Á hann er ok gott at heita í einvígi…’ and though I understood not a word, I nodded in agreement.
“‘That verse is about me,’ he said, ‘and comes from the Gylfaginning of Snorri Sturluson. It’s very flattering.”
“‘I bet it is,’ I responded, ‘but I’ve never read any Viking poetry.’
“‘Don’t worry. Sturluson isn’t like so many other poets, obsessed with his own ego, he’s a good sort and won’t give a damn whether you’ve read him or not if you ever bump into him in Asgård.’
“‘Am I going there?’ I spluttered.
“‘Sure. I’m in a position to give you what you want. You’ve convinced me that you can put together a Welsh side greater than the present one, and I think it’s a grand idea, really I do, and I know that Thor, Odin, Loki, Tyr, Baldr and the rest will agree with me. Asgård has its own rugby team, you see, and we’re good, better than the All Blacks in their prime.’
“‘So why watch rugby in Cardiff?’ I asked.
“‘I often come down to Midgard – that’s the world inhabited by men – to check out the sport. I’ve supported Wales for almost one hundred years. All the Norse deities do the same. In fact I noticed Freyja, the ravishing goddess of fertility, in the crowd, rooting for the other side.’
“‘The blonde in the cloak of robin feathers? I noticed her too!’
“‘Listen to me. If I help you, it’s not an act of charity, it’s purely selfish, Odin’s boys need some decent competition.’
“‘Is the Asgård team really so mighty?’ I asked.
“‘We’ve won the Six Million Nations’ Cup six million times in a row… Our last game was against the Microscopic Giants of Microgigans, supreme champions of Happenstance, and we thrashed them 6,567-3. Naturally we had to perform the ‘Rite of the Blood Eagle’ on their manager after the match, but we always do that to the managers of every losing side.’
“‘Is that a pleasant rite?’ I asked gingerly.
“Ullr leered at me. ‘No.’
“I have to be honest here and report that I felt suddenly nervous, but behind the fear was a stronger emotion, a patriotic desire to see Wales beat the best that Odin could throw at us, and I decided to accept the challenge. We formally shook hands on it and then Ullr explained to me how we were going to get to Asgård. Instead of staying on the bus all the way to Porthcawl, we would get off at Bridgend and he would summon suitable transport from there. I had read some Norse mythology when I was younger, not much but enough to remember it featured a ship named Naglfar that was made entirely from the uncut fingernails of dead men. I confided in my new companion that I didn’t care to travel on such a vessel as I feared my itches might be over-scratched.
“He roared with laughter. ‘Even the Norse gods move with the times! We’ll get to Asgård on a bus like this one!’
“I joined in with his laughter but my mouth drooped sourly when we arrived at Bridgend bus station. Ullr raised a ram’s horn to his lips, blew a vibrant note and suddenly a new bus trundled into view – a bus made from fingernails! I boarded with a sigh, chose a seat without any grime, toe-jam or bum-fluff under it, and gazed indifferently out of the window. The passing landscape rapidly grew strange, the familiar Welsh grey skies became blood red, fiery and full of flying shapes, some of them winged women in armour.
“I formed the distinct impression we crossed a rainbow bridge made of solid light, and drove up the trunk of a monstrous tree, quite against the laws of gravity and sanity, before suddenly appearing at the borders of Asgård, the realm of the Gods. Without pausing for a toilet break, we approached the walls that surrounded this paranormal kingdom and passed through a gate of blood-rusted iron. The road twisted between towering cliffs and finally emerged on the Plain of Idavoll at the very centre of Asgård. A part of this plain was a zone known as Gladsheim where the hall of Valhalla was located.
“Ullr had been silent during the journey but now he asked. ‘Have you had much experience at organizing sporting events?’
“‘Yes, I once arranged a special kind of steeplechase for a local fete. It involved a selection of vicars, sextons, vergers and deacons chasing after the steeple of their church while I ran off with it.’
“‘Ridiculous. How could a mortal man carry a steeple?’
“‘Sometimes I have big hands,’ I said.
“‘I think you are a liar,’ he cried, ‘rather like Loki, the god of mischief, who you might be unlucky enough to meet; but I find you entertaining nonetheless. Tell me something else highly unlikely.’
“‘I once posted myself in a box. Does that count?’
“He was gravely disappointed. ‘No.’ But then he saw that we had nearly reached the hall of Valhalla. ‘Here you will find all the dead Welsh rugby players from the past. You may select any you like.’
“This prospect pleased me and I have to admit that I was feeling confident. Let me describe Valhalla as I remember it. For a start it was large, smoky, dark, smelly and noisy. The floor was awash with spilled mead and ale. I went inside and found myself thrust into a chaos of shouting and fighting. It was just like Wind Street in Swansea on Friday night. There were long dead Viking warriors hitting each other with axes, good practice for Ragnarok, the end of the universe, or so Ullr informed me. I wandered rather nervously among the benches, plates of food and the severed limbs. Red beards and red-rimmed eyes formed an ocean of northern ire into which I wallowed like a punctured coracle.
“Despite the mass of people I felt horribly alone, and then abruptly I recognized a shape in the flicker of a brazier.
“‘Gwyn Nicholls!’ I cried in amazement. ‘You were captain of the side that won the Triple Crown in 1902.’
“‘That’s right, boyo. But who are you?’
“I recognized another shape. ‘Watcyn Thomas! In 1931 you played 70 minutes with a broken collarbone and scored a try.’
“‘That’s right. Against Scotland.’
“Ullr peered over my shoulder. ‘Do you choose these two?’
“I nodded and Ullr prodded them along with the point of his sword. And that is how it went for the next few hours, with me wandering through the dimness and bumping into great dead Welsh players, and Ullr confirming whether I wanted to add them to my team or not. Eventually I had fifteen players and we left Valhalla and plodded along to a
training ground where the god left me with a wink and a shake of the hand. I nursed my bruised fingers and pondered. From what Ullr told me just before he left, I had only one week to get my side in shape before the big match that would take place in the new stadium on the far side of the Well of Urd, beneath Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
“I confided my worries to my team. ‘It’s not much time!’
“‘Don’t be daft, boyo!’ cried Dewi Bebb, winner of thirty four caps between 1959 and 1967. ‘We’re all fit and keen.’
“‘That’s right,’ added Ray Cale, hero of the 1950 Grand Slam and notorious for his robust play. ‘We’re ready for anything!’
“I accepted their reassurances and we started training. My main problem was that I didn’t know the opposition, I hadn’t seen the Asgård team play and thus I couldn’t devise any effective strategies against them. I had to settle for making guesses based on what I remembered about Norse mythology. Then it occurred to me I could ask my players to fill in the details I didn’t know. They regularly went to watch Odin’s boys thrash all other teams in existence. The news wasn’t good and I began to regret ever boasting to Ullr on that bus out of Cardiff. For a start, ordinary rugby balls weren’t used up here but the severed head of a frost giant with quite different bouncing qualities.
“I also learned precisely what the Rite of the Blood Eagle involved. The victim is tied facing a post and his ribs are cut from his spine and his lungs pulled out through his back, so that they resemble wings, inflating and deflating as slowly and agonizingly his life drains away.
“The days passed and my confidence began to drain away also. I realized I had made a bad mistake. Allow me to explain my mistake as best I can… It’s natural for human beings to feel the past is better than the present, that the players of olden times were faster and stronger than those of today. And maybe they were. But the point is this: they weren’t that much better, a little bit better maybe, but twenty or thirty times better? No! And that’s what would be required to beat Asgård, players twenty or thirty times better than the modern Welsh side. I just didn’t have players of that calibre. We were going to be slaughtered, and in my case I was going to be sacrificed in a particularly nasty way.
“The week was already over and Ullr sent a bus to pick us up. I said nothing to my players about my fears. They were in good spirits and I didn’t want to lose the only strength at our disposal – mighty ignorance. The bus took us towards the Well of Urd and the new stadium and we pushed through the crowds on their way to the same place. In the changing room I gave a last inspirational speech and then I went to take some air. The atmosphere inside the stadium was incredible, overpowering, apocalyptic. To settle my nerves I smoked a cigarette and this seemed to attract the rage of a certain section of the crowd who made insulting dragon faces at me until I stubbed it out with a twist of my heel.
“To my amazement I recognized the referee, a fellow who called himself the Postmodern Mariner. We had met shortly after my career as a pirate with Captain Ribs and my island idyll with Charlotte Gallon. He was a reporter who wandered around looking for strange stories connected to the sea. I managed to get close to him and ask what he was doing up here. He shrugged and said he originally came looking for information on Jörmungandr, the serpent that circles the world at the bottom of the sea, but somehow he’d ended up as a forced volunteer in this match. Nobody ever wanted to referee an Asgård game. The abuse from the dead Vikings in the crowd was just too much.
“We didn’t have time for a longer conversation than that. The match was about to start. I paced the touchline as my players walked out of the tunnel to a chorus of insults and threats from the rows of the packed stadium. Every voice in the place was raised against us. The sweat on my skin, already cool, turned to ice when the home side emerged. Fifteen Norse gods in full armour, Thor in the lead, swinging his hammer and shouting with the force of a small volcano. I glanced up at the red sky expecting rain, but it was just Thor’s mocking laughter sounding like thunder. Then the coin was tossed, a coin with only one side – Odin’s mythical disc – and the game began. I covered my eyes.
“The referee used a miniature ram’s horn instead of a whistle to blow off. The stampede of feet was like a landslide. I heard the pitiful shrieks of Arthur Gould, captain of Wales no fewer than eighteen times between 1885 and 1897, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look. Then there was a roar and I knew that Asgård had scored their first try. Finally I had to peer between my fingers. I watched the god Hœnir convert easily for another two points. He celebrated in modest fashion, for he was the silent god and considered something of a ditherer by Odin. I groped for another cigarette, thought better of it and ran my fingers over my ribs. The Rite of the Blood Eagle awaited me…
“Many tries followed in quick succession. All the gods scored at least one, and some of them – including Dagr, Höðr, Njörðr, Váli and Kvasir scored a thousand or more. I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t recognize all the players on the Asgård side. One of their flankers looked like Tommy David, the Welshman who defected to Rugby League in 1974, but that couldn’t be so; my Norse mythology was probably just rusty. I didn’t know whether I wanted half time to come quickly or not, it might be a relief to have a pause in the carnage but it would also mean the moment of my doom was closer. I was in no mood to encourage my players for the second half but I did my best.
“I considered various methods of cheating. I wondered if I might hide myself in the ball and control its movements from within, a trick I had learned from a dwarf surrealist boxer named Engelbrecht5, but I was too bulky, plus there wasn’t a ball in play, just a severed head, and I didn’t fancy hiding inside that even if I fitted. I wondered if I might cause a diversion of some kind, maybe give the gods the idea that Ragnarok had started, and that they needed to be off to fight Surtr and the fire giants, while the universe collapsed around them. This way the match would have to be abandoned. It seemed a good plan and I briefly considered what I needed to do to create the right impression.
“It has been told that certain events will signify the imminence of Ragnarok. If I could duplicate these convincingly everything would be fine. One of these events was the death of the god Baldr by the trickery of the villainous Loki, who slew him with a spear made of mistletoe. Another was the onset of the Fimbulwinter, three successive winters without a summer between them, a time of chaos and fratricide. Yet another was the eating of sun and moon by the wolf brothers, Skoll and Hati. There would also be a series of earthquakes that would snap every bond and fetter in existence, allowing the monstrous Fenrir to escape and wreak havoc, plus the rainbow would crack and fall.
“After a few moments of careful thought, I decided I couldn’t replicate any of these events except in a most amateurish fashion. So I hastily devised a substitute plan, clutching my groin as if I needed to relieve myself, leaving the stadium and looking left and right as if for a place to answer this call of nature. Nobody noticed my departure. They were too intent on enjoying the scrum and the tearing apart of Wilfred Wooller, who helped Wales defeat the All Blacks in 1935 and was a fine cricketer too. His head was ripped clean off and booted into touch. I believe it was Odin himself who did the deed. I looked back and saw a one-eyed man with a long white beard and wide brimmed hat.
“I never discovered what the final score was. It was 3,765,987 to nil when I left, with twenty minutes still to go, so four million to nothing is a reasonable guess. I found the bus made of fingernails in the car park and climbed into the driver’s seat, then I started the engine and off I went with a squeal of tyres. I put my foot down and got back to Bridgend in record time. I didn’t have to wait long for a connecting bus to Porthcawl. I came straight here to the pub where I was mighty pleased to see my friends, Frothing Harris and Paddy Deluxe, sitting at the same table as always, without a care in the world, and I looked so shaken and pale they bought me a few drinks to calm my fraught nerves.
“I’ll never complain about the Welsh squ
ad ever again, even if they lose to the All Blacks on a regular basis. I’ve seen a Welsh side get hammered for real and it wasn’t pleasant. I don’t go out in thunderstorms anymore, and I avoid all the props of Norse mythology as much as possible – horned helmets, trolls, runes, longships, the board game called hnefatafl, – with the exception of mead. They don’t serve mead in this pub, but I’ll have an ordinary lager if you’re buying. Did I tell you about the time I fell through a hole in the fabric of spacetime and ended up back in the Iron Age? It was called the Iron Age because people there ate a lot of spinach. Yes, that’s right, a lager please.”
5 Consult The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, recently reprinted by Savoy Books.
Interstellar Domestic
Nobody outside Porthcawl, and hardly anyone inside it, can remember that Wales once had a space program that enjoyed greater success than the combined efforts of the Americans, Russians and Chinese. Only one mission was ever launched but it was responsible for several important ‘firsts’, including the discovery of alien life and the triggering of a cosmic war. What’s more, it was done on the cheap, without even the need to build a spaceship.
There are those who doubt that men ever walked on the moon, but proof of the Welsh mission can be found at the far end of Porthcawl pier, especially on stormy nights. An object stands there that resembles the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: a Space Odyssey except that it’s a different colour, shape, texture and size, and serves an entirely different function. Porthcawl proof is not like other kinds of proof. That’s what makes it special.