12 Days of Celtic Myth II - Day 5 Warrior Women?
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- Опубликовано: 25 дек 2023
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The 12 Days of Celtic Mythology, Season 2, Day 1
PLAYLIST for this series: • 12 Days of Celtic Myth...
You can read an annotated translation of the original Welsh text at www.culhwch.info or listen to an excellent storyteller telling the whole thing here: • The Tale of Culhwch an...
If you’d like to join the live online discussions, you need to become a patron (mininimum cost $2 per month. Cancel any time). / krishughes
Information about all my classes is available at: tinyurl.com/GDclasses
Today’s sources
Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru The standard historical Welsh dictionary.
www.geiriadur.ac.uk/
Rachel Bromwich. Trioedd Ynys Prydein. (2014) pp 150, 153, 161-164, 195, 199, 210, 217, 376-380
Fate, Curses, and Taboos in Celtic Myth - / fate-curses-and-66226886
The 12 Days of Celtic Mythology, Season 2, Day 1
PLAYLIST for this series: ruclips.net/p/PLvCdDm0wPhA3ZPWFBswdctH6sNCrGTuqC&si=MQsqkVPxLX0C_vrR
You can read an annotated translation of the original Welsh text at www.culhwch.info or listen to an excellent storyteller telling the whole thing here: ruclips.net/video/gAkiZktLyJk/видео.html
If you’d like to join the live online discussions, you need to become a patron (mininimum cost $2 per month. Cancel any time). www.patreon.com/KrisHughes
Information about all my CLASSES is available at: tinyurl.com/GDclasses
Today’s sources
Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru The standard historical Welsh dictionary.
www.geiriadur.ac.uk/
Rachel Bromwich. Trioedd Ynys Prydein. (2014) pp 150, 153, 161-164, 195, 199, 210, 217, 376-380
Fate, Curses, and Taboos in Celtic Myth - www.patreon.com/posts/fate-curses-and-66226886
I definitely find this court list interesting. The pathways to other stories and lost tales opens us up to endless opportunity for exploration. Yet I also feel like my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to this task. It takes time and dedication to digest
Simply looking into Gwenhwyfar and Gwenhywfach a few months back was a multiday tangent with its own offshoots. I'd imagine looking into the three Gwenhywfars would be an even more winding trail.
I found it somewhat interesting, particularly the etymology of the names. Assuming it was like a refresher course in Welsh folk tales, it could have had a, for lack of a better term, "cozy" quality to it which would fit well with long winter evenings, when tales would most likely be told. Even more speculation, the telling of tales may have had an interactive component. People from the audience could have asked questions about who was that guy? I would imagine a winter's night in Wales or Rheged would last for 12 hours or more. With 8 hours for sleeping, that could leave 3-4 hours to tell a tale. If the teller would be served first, there might even be more time. It would be possible to calculate the length of night during the winder, and how long it would take to tell a tale (it should be done in early medieval Welsh. If there were a lot of time left over, it would support a more interactive story telling session. If not, it would not support that theory. It is also possible that the story teller might have created it as filler with some comic relief to cover the time that they had to entertain the audience. Besides the content, I think we need to look at the process of story telling. Both Fraincis Yates argument that meeting halls were laid out as a memory palace to help bards rememeber the line (I've been meaning to read that book for years, but never got around to it) or that discovery that ancient Greek poets had stock phrases that would fill out the metrical requirements of poetry (Rosy fingered dawn, Swift footed Achilles etc.)
I've enjoyed these three sessions delving into aspects of the court list but it's not a part of the story I usually read in detail. In the past I've skimmed through it to get to the rest of the story. I've gained a deeper appreciation for the nuggets of information in the court list and at some stage I will try and read it more carefully but that's not likely during these holiday weeks :)
I found parts of the court list interesting. Living in South West Scotland some of my main interests are the Old North, Urien and the kingdom of Rheged, and Arthur as a warlord in that environment at some point. The linking in the court list of Urien, his sister and son, with Arthur is therefore a tantalising glimpse into early dark age history. It’s feels a bit like peering into a room lit only with a single candle and filled with filled with many. The figures are all swirling past and I’m trying to catch the details on just a few of them. The fact the names are in Welsh doesn’t help one bit, another layer of obscurity on what is already a dim and ever shifting vision.
I also keep getting distracted by some of the other figures and go chasing off after them rather than just seeking the ones I am most interested in. So the court lists are a bit of a labour, but it is a labour of love.
I can see this list now as an intro to other people you should know, maybe as a teaching aid to the children or young bards in a group. So including it here kind of makes sense, as you have a captive audience waiting for more Culhwch and Olwen. If I was telling the story, I would tailor the list to the audience so I could keep everyone engaged. As a reader, I did a fast look at the names, decided I could skip it for now, and searched for where the story picked up again. Now that you have pointed out some bits from the list, I may come back for more! Score: 5 of 10.
As part of a story to be listened to and enjoyed the court list is a hideous intrusion! By the time you have got to the end the start of the story has vanished from the mind. As a starting point to go down into rabbit holes it is superb. I have gone down a rabbit hole with Uchdryd Farf Dawas-the beard flinger with his well sprouted red beard that he would fling across 50 rafters. It led me to the WElsh legal triad that states shaming a husbands beard was one of the three things that a husband could beat his wife for, it also led back to the whole ritual aspect of hair and hari-cutting, already seen in cullwch request for Arthur to cut his hair, and then seen later in the shaving on Ysbaddeden. It also led me to imaginative fantasies - creating stories to go with his epitaph - perhaps he could fling his beard across a river to create a rope path for other warriers - or allow people to climb down a cliff supported by it. I then decided it was more likely that this was a satire meant to mock an individual who was just overly proud of his big red beard, so the poet took it to a satiirical extreme. Rabbit holes are fun!
The court list to me is something that I would want to come back to from time to time to pick a tiny piece and explore. Maybe it's several members of a family mentinoed there, or one character that comes up in other sources, or a particular theme a want to explore ("women in Arthur's court). It strikes me as similar to reading chronicles and such things, maybe like Monmouth: not something that I would read for pleasure straight through, but something where I'd want to find specific chunks to explore. Either way, I'm much more interested to dive into the other big list here, which is Ysbaddaden's task list.
It dawned on me that this court list may be a collective list of characters from other myths and legends to preserve names specifically, in an early christian period, without being targeted for preserving pagan lore. The list contains alot of Irish deities' and hero/gods' names in their Welsh versions. It would have been a practical and safe way to preserve fading names and stories of an older and forgotten world.
To answer the question from the end of this video: The discussion of names and genealogy was interesting but sometimes difficult to follow.
When I realized that "Gwenhwyfar" was "Guinevere," I kind of felt stupid for not realizing that sooner. Backing up the video, I see the first bit of text calls her the "lady of the land," and the next one mentions her right after Arthur, where she's "dragged from her royal chair." But I still didn't catch it.
And I have been trying to follow up on some of the references. I've bookmarked the sites discussing Culhwch and Olwen, and looked up some books. And I'm looking up info on Gwyn ap Nudd.
Comments like this are so useful to me. It's good to be reminded that a lot of people won't make connections like Gwenhwyfar=Guinevere. Have fun exploring. It was good to meet you in class today.
Although the court list definitely sparked some curiosity and the talks were quite interesting, I’m not nearly proficient enough in reading Welsh to even ballpark the pronunciation of these names. So for where I’m at right now, I’m happy to just skip the frustration and hold onto the goal of revisiting it in the future.
While I appreciate you giving us more context with the names, and going into other connections, I'm actually really bad with names in general so all these names felt really hard to process! It felt almost like looking at a tagged instagram post where there's so many names you can't even see them individually--creates more reach but also more clutter. I appreciate that there are connections to other stories, but for the names of people who are only mentioned there and nowhere else I'm apathetic. It's interesting to be exposed to more of the naming conventions/translations and pronunciations, so I can't say I got nothing from it. But yes, names are just something I'm not great with remembering in any story/mythology, I always need a reference point.
No I haven't read the court lists but I imagine they made a grave mistake in including the names as by doing so shows that there's two sides to every story. Find this very interesting 9/10
I don't know the stories enough to make a judgement on the actual content, but I had a couple of thoughts on the Arthur/Gwyn question (how?) from a religious and symbolic pov....
Considering that the stories are relayed by Christians, and the Christians are making Gwyn out to be some kind of devil figure, and Arthur (at some point in the folklore) as connected to Christ (as a seeker of the graal)... it shouldn't be much of a stretch to see one of God's servants commanding devils.
From a more symbolic pov, if Gwyn represents the wild, the liminal, and Arthur represents a kind of divine order, then I could see it almost like Arthur was simply putting things in their 'proper' place. 'Commanding' Gwyn only in the sense that one might say God commands the planets of our solar system to orbit the sun.
Interesting insights in that last paragraph.
Its interesting, for sure, but i find the amount of names and potential rabbit holes to go down quite overwhelming. I can imagine early listeners of this feeling the same! Even if they recognised each and every name, its a lot to take in and i feel like it distracts from the main story.