In creating the place-names for Branwen’s world, I have tried to incorporate relevant aspects of the Celtic tradition. For example, rīganī is the reconstructed Proto-Celtic word for “queen,” and since the Land is a female goddess in Iveriu, it made sense for me to name the seat of power Castle Rigani. Likewise, bodwā is the Proto-Celtic word for “fight,” which is fitting as the name of Branwen’s family castle given that their motto is The Right Fight.
The ancient language of trees that Branwen calls the first Ivernic writing is a reference to the Irish Ogham alphabet. It was devised between the first and fourth centuries CE to transfer the Irish language to written form and is possibly based on the Latin alphabet. Ogham is found in approximately four hundred surviving stone inscriptions and is read from the bottom up. In addition to representing a sound, the letters of the Ogham alphabet have the names of trees and shrubs. The Ogham letter coll translates as “hazel” and represents the /k/ sound as in kitten. The Ogham letter uillenn translates as “honeysuckle” and represents the /ll/ sound as in shell. Hence, when Branwen and Essy trace their private symbol, they are only writing two letters rather than a whole word.
The legend of Tristan and Isolt has been retold so many times in so many languages that simply choosing which form of the character names to use also poses somewhat of a challenge. Two possible origins for Tristan’s name include Drustanus, son of Cunomorus, who is mentioned on a sixth-century stone inscription found in Cornwall, or a man named Drust, son of King Talorc of the Picts, who ruled in late eighth-century Scotland.
In the early Welsh versions of the legend, Drust becomes Tristan or Drystan. Tristan was the name propagated by the French poets, who employed its similar sound to the French word tristesse (“sadness”) for dramatic effect. Another consistent feature of the legends is Tristan’s disguising his identity by calling himself Tantris—an anagram of his name—and I therefore decided to do the same.
While the name Isolt is probably the most easily recognized, it is in fact derived from the Welsh name Essyllt. The French poets translated her name as Yso(lt) or Yseu(l)t(e). I have therefore synthesized the two for my Eseult.
In the Continental versions of the story, Isolt’s lady’s maid is usually called Brangien or Brangain. However, this is a borrowing from the Old Welsh name Branwen (brân “raven” + (g)wen “fair”). This choice was also inspired by another Branwen from the Middle Welsh Mabinogion, the earliest prose stories in British literature. The Second Branch of the Mabinogi is called Branwen uerch Lyr (“Branwen, daughter of Llŷr”), the meaning of the patronym ap Llŷr being “Son of the Sea,” and the connection that the Branwen of Sweet Black Waves feels for the sea was inspired by this forerunner.
The Branwen of the Mabinogion is a member of a Welsh royal family who is given in marriage to the King of Ireland to prevent a war after one of her brothers has offended him. When Branwen arrives at the Irish court, the vassals of the King of Ireland turn him against his new queen and she is forced to submit to many humiliations. Her brothers then declare war on Ireland, and Branwen is the cause of the war her marriage was meant to prevent.
Several prominent Celtic scholars have made the case that the Welsh Branwen can trace her roots to Irish Sovereignty Goddesses or that both the Welsh and Irish material derive from the same, earlier source. Particular evidence of this is that Branwen’s dowry to the King of Ireland included the Cauldron of Regeneration, which could bring slain men back to life, and which served as the inspiration for Kerwindos’s Cauldron in my own work.
While there is no evidence of a direct connection between the Branwen of the Mabinogion and the Branwen of the Tristan legends, I find the possibility tantalizing and so I have merged the two into my Branwen as a forceful female protagonist with magical abilities and a strong connection to the Land.
IVERNIC FESTIVALS
Imbolgos—early spring festival of the Goddess Bríga
Belotnia—the Festival of Lovers, held toward the end of spring
Laelugus—the Festival of Peace, held in late summer
Samonios—New Year Festival, held in mid-autumn
IVERNIC LANGUAGE VOCABULARY
derew—a pain-relieving herb
fidkwelsa—a strategy board game
Iverman/Iverwoman—a person from Iveriu
Iverni—the people of Iveriu
Ivernic—something of or relating to Iveriu
kelyos—a traditional Ivernic musical band
kladiwos—an Ivernic type of sword
krotto—an Ivernic type of harp
lesana—ring-forts belonging to the Old Ones
ráithana—hills belonging to the Old Ones
silomleie—an Ivernic type of cudgel made from blackthorn wood
skeakh—a whitethorn bush or tree
KERNYVAK LANGUAGE VOCABULARY
Kernyvak—something of or relating to Kernyv
Kernyveu—the people of Kernyv
Kernyvman/Kernyvwoman—a person from Kernyv
kretarv—carnivorous seabird
mormerkti—“thank you”
sekrev—“you’re welcome”
AQUILAN LANGUAGE VOCABULARY
ama—“I love”
amar—“love”
amare—“bitter”
Aquilan—something of or relating to the Aquilan Empire
de—“of”
est—“is”
eti—“and”
fálkr—a broad, curved sword
la—“the”
mar—“sea”
misrokord—a thin dagger; literally means “mercy”
odai—“I hate”
SOURCES, LITERARY TRANSMISSION, AND WORLD-BUILDING
The legend of Tristan and Isolt is one of the best-known myths in Western culture, and arguably the most popular throughout the Middle Ages. The star-crossed lovers have become synonymous with passion and romance itself.
When I first decided to write Branwen’s story, I put on my scholarly hat and reacquainted myself with the most influential versions of the Tristan tales, then followed their motifs and principle episodes backward in time before arranging them into a frame, a loom onto which Branwen’s story could come to life. Despite the numerous retellings of Tristan and Isolt throughout the medieval period, the structure remains remarkably consistent.
The names of the main characters can be traced to post-Roman Britain (sixth or seventh century CE). There was no real Tristan or King Arthur, but there are tantalizing stone inscriptions in the British Isles that suggest local folk heroes whose names became attached to a much older body of tales, some mythological in genesis. And while there is evidence that some motifs may have been borrowed from Hellenic, Persian, or Arabic sources, the vast majority are Celtic. Rather than viewing these Celtic stories as direct sources for the Tristan and Isolt narratives, however, most scholars agree the medieval Irish and Welsh material should be viewed as analogues that presumably stem from the same, now lost, pan-Celtic source.
These oral tales were probably preserved by the druids and our earliest surviving versions were written down by Christian clerics in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries, and in twelfth-century Wales. Because Ireland was never conquered by the Roman Empire, it didn’t experience the same “Dark Age” as elsewhere in Europe. Women in early medieval Ireland also had many more rights and protections under the law, enshrined in Caín Adomnáin (Law of Adomán), ca. 679–704 CE, than their Continental counterparts—which is echoed in the strong female protagonists of its literature.
There are three Old Irish tale-types that feed into the Tristan legend: 1. aitheda (elopement tales), in which a young woman runs away from her older husband with a younger man; 2. tochmarca (courtship tales), in which a woman takes an active part in negotiating a relationship with a man of her choosing that results in marriage; and 3. immrama (voyage tales), in which the hero takes a sea voyage to the Otherworld.
The Old Irish tales that share the most in common with Tristan and I
solt’s doomed affair are Tochmarc Emire (“The Wooing of Emer”), a tenth-century aithed; and Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (“The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne”), an aithed whose earliest text dates to the Early Modern Irish period but whose plot and characters can be traced to the tenth century. In these stories, the female characters wield tremendous power and are closer to their mythological roots as goddesses. Other tales that are reminiscent of Branwen’s complicated relationship with Isolt include the ninth- or tenth-century Tochmarc Becfhola (“The Wooing of Becfhola”) and the twelfth-century Fingal Rónaín (“Rónán’s act of kinslaying”).
When the Romans withdrew from Britain in the fifth century, many residents from the south of the island immigrated to northern France. For the next five centuries, trade and communication was maintained between Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany. The Bretons spoke a language similar to Welsh and Cornish, which facilitated the sharing of the Arthurian legends, to which they added their own folktales. By the twelfth century, the professional Breton conteurs (storytellers) had become the most popular court entertainers in Europe and it was these wandering minstrels who brought the Tristan legends to the royal French and Anglo-Norman courts—including that of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitane, famed for her patronage of the troubadours in the South of France.
The Breton songs of Tristan’s exploits were soon recorded as verse romances by the Anglo-Norman poets Béroul, Thomas d’Angleterre, and Marie de France (notably, the only woman), as well as the German Eilhart von Oberge. Béroul’s and Eilhart’s retellings belong to what is often called the version commune (primitive version), meaning they are closer to their folkloric heritage. Thomas’s Tristan forms part of the version courtoise (courtly version), which is influenced by the courtly love ideal.
The twelfth century is often credited with the birth of romance, and Tristan is at least partially responsible. Which is not to say that people didn’t fall in love before then, of course(!), but rather that for the first time, the sexual love between a man and a woman, usually forbidden, became a central concern of literature. The first consumers of this new genre in which a knight pledges fealty to a distant, unobtainable (often married) lady were royal and aristocratic women and, like romance readers today, their appetite was voracious. While the audience was female, the poets and authors were male, often clerics in the service of noblewomen. The poetry produced at the behest of female aristocratic patrons might therefore be considered the first fan fiction.
However, while the courtly lady may have appeared to have the power over her besotted knight, in reality noblewomen were rapidly losing property and inheritance rights as the aristocracy became a closed class ruled by strict patrilinear descent. Legends like that of Tristan and Isolt provided a means of escape for noblewomen who were undoubtedly in less than physically and emotionally satisfying marriages of their own, while also reinforcing women’s increasingly objectified status. The portrayal of women in the Tristan legends therefore exemplifies the conflict between the forceful protagonists of its Celtic origins and the new idealized but dehumanized courtly lady.
It is this conflict that particularly interests me as a storyteller and which I explore through my own female characters. Because the legend as I have inherited it is a mix of concerns from different historical epochs, I decided to set my retelling in a more fantastical context that allowed me to pick and choose the aspects of the tradition that best suited Branwen’s story. In this way, I also followed in the footsteps of the medieval authors who, while they might make references to real places or kings, weren’t particularly concerned with accuracy. The stories they produced weren’t so much historical fiction as we think of it today but more akin to fantasy.
During the nineteenth century, the German composer Richard Wagner drew on his countryman Gottfried von Strassburg’s celebrated thirteenth-century verse romance of Tristan as inspiration for his now ubiquitous opera. Gottfried had, in turn, used the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas d’Angleterre as his source material, demonstrating the unending cycle of inspiration and adaption. The Tristan legends started as distinct traditions that were grafted onto the Arthurian corpus (possibly in Wales, possibly on the Continent) and became forever intertwined with the thirteenth-century prose romances.
Concurrently with Gottfried, there was a complete Old Norse adaption by Brother Róbert, a Norwegian cleric, and the Tristan legends gained popularity not only throughout Scandinavia but on the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy. There were also early Czech and Belarusian versions, and it was later translated into Polish and Russian. Dante also references the ill-fated lovers in his fourteenth-century Inferno, and Sir Thomas Malory devoted an entire book to Tristan in his fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the most famous works in the English language.
The popularity of Tristan and Isolt fell off abruptly during the Renaissance but was revived by the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who sought an antidote to the changes enacted by the Industrial Revolution—although they viewed their medieval past through very rose-tinted glasses. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with Tristan and Isolt, as well as their supporting characters, has persisted for more than a millennium and it would be surprising if it did not persist for another.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristina Pérez is a half-Argentine, half-Norwegian native New Yorker who has spent the past two decades living in Europe and Asia. She holds a PhD in Medieval Literature from the University of Cambridge and has taught at the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong. Sweet Black Waves is her debut novel. Visit her online at kristinaperez.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Map
Dedication
Dramatis Personæ
Part I: The Old Ways
Kiss of Life
Odai eti ama
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
A Woman of Honor
A Bleeding Heart
Shadow-Stung
The Lord of Wild Things
The Only Jealousy of Emer
Sea of Flames
Serpent Among the Waves
Part II: Across the Veil
The Rock Road
Ripples
Eseult the Fair
The Right Fight
Blackbirds
The Chalice of Sovereignty
Whitethorn
The Starless Tide
Tongue of Honey, Heart of Bile
Echoes
Like a Fortress
The Loving Cup
Traitor’s Finger
The Last Night of the World
Sealed with a Kiss
The In-Between
The Hand of Bríga
Dragon Rising
Part III: The Dreaming Sea
Dead Calm
The Bitterness of the Sea
Choices
True Colors
Sea-Wolf
Blood and Love
House of Dhusnos
Not You without Me
Dreamless
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Sources, Literary Transmission, and World-Building
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Kristina Pérez
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First hardcover edition, 2018
eBook edition, June 2018
eISBN 9781250132864
An té a dhéanfadh cóip den leabhar seo, gan chead, gan chomhairle, dhíbreodh é go Teach Dhuinn.
Sweet Black Waves Page 35