Mabinogion Quotes

Death is the one friend who never fails any man.

Questions can be more dangerous than swords.

So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Blodeuwedd.

For cleverness and wisdom are as different as are the circuitous passages of a labyrinth and the straight, upward flight of a bird.

often dost thou utter that with thy tongue which thou wouldst not make good with thy deeds.

Since thou wilt not remain here, chieftain, thou shalt receive the boon whatsoever thy tongue may name, as far as the wind dries, and the rain moistens, and the sun revolves, and the sea encircles, and the earth extends; save only my ship; and my mantle; and Caledvwlch, my sword; and Rhongomyant, my lance; and Wynebgwrthucher, my shield; and Carnwenhau, my dagger; and Gwenhwyvar, my wife

And then Gwalchmai said, ‘No one should distract an ordained knight from his thoughts in a discourteous way, for perhaps he has either suffered a loss or he is thinking about the woman he loves best.

There are well known Arthurian figures in the book, and some not so well known. Mabon plays a pivotal role in the tale as the Motherless Child who helps Rhowbyn, the narrator of the tale, to find and reconcile with his missing parent. Th ere is a game of riddles in which Mabon and Rhowbyn engage that is both an homage to Tolkien and a nod of acknowledgement to events from 'The Mabinogion' and specifically the tale of Culwch and Olwen

At that time Math son of Mathonwy could not live unless his feet were in the lap of a virgin, except when the turmoil of war prevented him.

So a child sobs in its heartbreak that seems so world filling, yet ends so quickly, though it may leave scars that are not of the flesh: scars that twist the self within.

Woman’s power wanes, but nothing ever passes except to wax again. . . . And if men become tyrants, they shape for themselves the doom of tyrants, who are always betrayed.

If men become tyrants, they shape for themselves the doom of tyrants, who are always betrayed.

A true king never robs his people of peace.

Force is an ill broom to sweep anything clean with.

And within himself he reeled and gave the cry that erring humanity has given throughout the ages: “I did not mean it! I did not know that it would be like this.” And the inexorable answered him, “Yet so it is, and by your doing.

I hope I will not be accused of sex bias for saying so; I like penicillin, electric toasters, jet travel, etc., as well as anybody. But when we were superstitious enough to hold the earth sacred and worship her, we did nothing to endanger our future upon her, as we do now. That seems a little ironic.

But after his going his wife walked alone in the court, and was lonely. For so it was with her always; she did not like to be alone. Perhaps her thin being drew in life and warmth through seeing its beauty mirrored in a lover’s eyes. Perhaps otherwise reality was hard to hold to. The air may have seemed too vast, space a gaping maw.

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.

Breathing became a delight and movement a joy, so full was the air of the wine of growing and awakening life. The sun burnt through the veils that had barred him from the world and glowed upon it like a golden smile. The sap ran in the trees; the stags in the forest lifted their heads to sniff the strange glory upon the breezes; and the earth sang her rising-song.

Mâth’s mysterious sap of divinity was not in him, but he was the forerunner of the intellect: the first man of a world that was yet to be. He was an artist, one of the earliest that we have note of in our Western world, for those of Greece and Rome had felt the guiding hands of Egypt and the East. And he loved to use his wits to shape and polish a plan as his brother Govannon, the first of smiths, loved to use his tools to shape and polish a sword.

The King looked keenly at him from under his frosty brows. “Hers are ill deeds; and an unloving mother violates the Ancient Harmonies. Yet you have made her a mother against her will. And that is a thing that has seldom happened in the world before, but will happen often again in the ages that begin. You have done it for love’s sake, in pure longing for a child. But many of those men who are to come will do it for pride’s sake and lust’s; and this breeding of her like a beast will lower the rank and degrade the ancient dignity of woman. Nor will the world go well while that fades, my nephew.

Then we lost consciousness of the Whole in order to get to be individuals?” he asked. “And now that we are individuals it is our business to get back the consciousness of the Whole? That seems like going around in a circle.” “Eternity is a circle,” replied Gwydion, “for only a circle has no end. . . . But before we were conscious only of our own species; that was all we could grasp of the Whole. And when we recover that wider consciousness it too will have widened; and we shall be one with all species, and know all creatures alike for our fellow beings. But millions of ages will pass before all the world has attained to consciousness of the Whole.

She cried aloud to the white evening, “Sorrow that is my sorrow! Woe that ever I was born! For the good of two islands has been destroyed through me.” She moaned once, and her heart broke, and she fell . . . Manawyddan kissed her cheek and closed her eyes. “Sleep may be best for you, beloved, for the world that we grew up in is gone, and you were too tired to help build a new. Sleep and find Gwern again, and our brothers. And maybe even Matholuch can find some new tale to tell, there before Arawn’s face. Maybe it can be your comfort at last, not only your shame, that he was a coward. But it is sad my world will be after you, and the light of you gone out of it.

Yet woman, though she ceased to be a king* and man protected her, was still reverenced as the source of life. Only now when man is learning that she cannot give life without him does he begin to scorn her whom he protects. So she that created property will become property. “So it is already in the Eastern World, so it will be here. And out of that constant injustice will rise continually more evils to breed wars and fresh injustice until men forget that there was ever a world at peace. When humankind lets one half of humankind be enslaved it will be long and long, even when that slavery wanes, before freedom is respected and nation ceases to tear nation; before the world unlearns the habit of force.” He

Impari lentamente, mio amato, ma impari. E ciò che si impara lentamente scende più nel profondo. Voi uomini e i vostri Dei! Vi beffate della Madre per la sua lentezza da lumaca, perché crea ciecamente al buio. Tuttavia quando create senza di Lei, in fretta e alla luce, create davvero ciecamente, dando forma, magari, alla morte di un mondo! Ebbene, avvelenate il mare e il cielo, l'aria che respirate, e persino la dolce pelle bruna del suo seno, che Essa vi ha sempre permesso di lacerare per darvi le messi. Uccidete e uccidete finché non rimane più niente se non ossa nude su una terra squallida e contaminata. La Madre è potente; Essa ha molti corpi, e il vostro mondo è solo uno di quelli. Nella Sua potenza Essa può tuttavia guarire le vostre ferite e far rifiorire la terra, sì: allevare voi uomini, anche se deve partorire di nuovo tutta la vostra razza. Perché una buona madre è paziente; sa che un bambino inciampa più volte prima d'imparare a camminare...

Older still than Rhys as king of the Welsh faeries is Gwynn ap Nudd. He is known as the monarch of the Welsh underworld (Annwn) in the myths of the Mabinogion; later he was seen the leader of his own tribe or nation of faeries, the Plant Annwn (the family or clan of Annwn) or, in Christian interpretations, ruler of hell and overlord of all the demons. Amongst his supernatural subjects are numbered the Welsh lake maidens, the gwragedd annwn, and the ‘hell hounds’ called the cwn annwn, which Gwynn is said to lead in a ‘wild hunt’ of lost souls, riding a black horse.

In particular, he told Evans-Wentz about the king and queen of the tylwyth teg, whom he named as Gwydion ab Don and his wife Gwenhidw.  Gwydion is a character straight out of the Mabinogion, and he is said to live amongst the stars in Caer Gwydion, one of several magical faery fortresses that are mentioned in Welsh legend.  His wife, meanwhile, is connected to the fluffy white clouds that appear in fine weather and which are called 'the sheep of Gwenhidw.

Avaon and many of his men decided to go home, but Kynan and another group stayed, and they determined to cut out the tongues of the women, lest their own British language be contaminated. Because the women were silent and the men could speak, the men of Brittany were called Bryttanyeid, and there have often come and still do come men of that language from Brittany. (Commentary: Conan and his brother Afaon immediately become Maxen's loyal associates, later helping him reclaim the throne of Rome. For this service the grateful Macsen gives Conan dispensation to lead his army to conquer whatever realm he wants. Conan chooses Armorica, where he kills all the men and replaces them with his own soldiers. He then orders the tongues of all the women cut out, lest their speech corrupt that of the Britons; a fanciful etymology connects this event with Welsh name of Brittany, Llydaw, supposedly from the Welsh lled-taw or "half-silent". The Conan story became a dominant founding myth for the Bretons for hundreds of years.)

King Math son of Mathonwy (Math fab Mathonwy) could not live except when he had his feet enfolded in the lap of a virgin, unless he was at war, or else he would die.

That which would make the flowers upon the fruit trees slept, unguessed at, under branches that were hung with the white lace the clouds weave, and that we call snow, and were jewelled with sparkling ice. The fields shivered under the wind and the stubble, hiding the emerald treasures that were to be. In the caves the bears laired, and there was no movement in those caverns except where the cubs waxed within the sleeping mother.

Once we were all phantoms in the mind of a God,” said Mâth. “He thought us into being. . . . Our bodies can call souls into the world. Can our minds do less? Now will we test our magic, you and I.

It is told in the tales of Erinn that she who was to be the great Cuchulain’s mother drank her son’s soul down as a mayfly, given her in a cup of wine.

For he believed in the teachings of his Order, that would seem to have held that the departed soul of man might most easily pass into the light and winged things of the air. And that teaching may be evidence of the kinship of the druids with the builders of the pyramids, for the folk of the pharaohs were wont to picture the soul as passing into the form and shape of a bird.

And now that he is dead, it hurts me to think that my words may have hurt him, though I was nothing and had lost him, and he was everything.

In high ground an oak grows— Rain cannot melt it nor heat blast it. Ninescore the pangs, ninescore the throes, Borne in its branches by Llew Llaw Gyffes.

Gwydion rode on alone toward Dinodig, going forth, after the fashion of all orthodox gods, to damn the creature that he had fashioned ill. . . .

She was ill-fashioned, ill-destined. Is that her fault, or ours that mis-shaped her? It was too great a risk to draw down such a wanderer from the winds as would be content to enter so light a makeshift form. Such could not have been fit to mate with Llew. Would that the gods had withered my brain before I thought of her fashioning.

Lord, is the Great Going-Forward a ladder up which we can climb straight to the top? Or is it a winding mountain path whose turns twist and sometimes confuse? Those who have climbed high may turn back to help those below. Gods themselves have done it, and will again: Showers-of-the-Way.

So began the journey of Penardim the Dark Woman, the mother of the sons of Llyr.

His undemanding, undisturbed friendliness was like the tranquil power of earth herself, that is too big for any man to shatter, too strong and soft and fertile for any fire to burn.

He looked around him happily. “Thank you, men. I will die out here where I can feel the life of earth around me, where everything is always dying, changing, taking new shapes to live again. Walls stay dead forever. What man makes and not the Mothers, that alone can change only to decay; Their handiwork is ever-living.

The Island of the Mighty will have many kings now, but none will reign in peace, and none will found a dynasty. And in the end fair-haired invaders will sweep over all and subject us all—New Tribes and Old alike. Bran might have prevented that had he not given away his sister and the Cauldron, that symbol of the cup within her body—the power of birth and rebirth, the power of woman. Now for ages women will be as beasts of the field and we men will rule, and practice war, our art. By it we will live—or by it, rather, we will struggle and die.

That feast was called by later poets the Entertaining by the Noble Head, and to none of the guests who enjoyed his plenty did it seem strange or sad that Bran’s body was not there. He himself was, and that was enough.

It is simple,” said the Head. “We are never destroyed, though we have all had many bodies that were. And it is the same way with the Cauldron, that never should have had an earth-self in the first place. Sleep now, brother.

Once, he knew, he had said, “Nissyen and Evnissyen. Why were they so different, those two sons of the curse?” Bran’s Head had answered, mellow thunder out of that glowing fog, “Both of them were parts of an Immortal, and Nissyen is not such a part of it as ordinarily is born again into a body of our world. But he chose birth, he came back into this schoolroom that he had outgrown, to keep Evnissyen from doing too much harm.” “Indeed,” said Manawyddan, “I cannot see what harm he ever managed to keep Evnissyen from doing.” “He did much,” said the Head. “He kept you and me from going to war with each other instead of with Ireland. And he made Evnissyen, whose only power was hate, love him, so that in the end the boy broke the bonds that he had been forging upon himself throughout the ages, and sacrificed himself to save us.

That feast at Gwales was a beginning and an end. The end of the reign of the Children of Llyr, of that fabulous early world that for a generation longer Mâth the Ancient kept alive in Gwynedd. What it began is not yet finished; yet many mysteries lie between that time and ours.

There are many worlds, and maybe when the reign of the Ancient Harmonies ended upon earth, those Keepers of the Mysteries who had guarded them in the next world above ours passed on, and made Bran the Blessed their heir. For all Bran’s mistakes had sprung from love, and at last he had understood himself, and therefore had won as much wisdom as man can, and was ready to become a God.

Pryderi stared. “Mâth is a man. A man of Illusion and Glamour, but human. He eats and sleeps and does all the things the rest of us do. When his time comes he will die.” “All Gods die,” said Taliesin. “By dying as a man a God can sometimes show most clearly that He is a God. But now the time comes for Mâth to withdraw from earth and cease to be worshipped for awhile, for now men want fiercer Gods.” “As it may be that that Eastern God is,” said Manawyddan, “for He is a Father, while we bow to the Mothers. But I do not believe those who call Him jealous. The jealousy must be on His priests. No God would ever be such a fool as to wish to keep His people forever in ignorance, for the ignorant can never choose between good and evil and so master neither.

So Taliesin the Much-Remembering left them, he who has had many births and will have many more. Who may be somewhere among us even now, though nobody knows where. At least nobody who will tell . .

I know of that place,” said Manawyddan. “Great is the power of the outer ring, but that of the inner is yet greater. For its twelve Stones are said to be the first Twelve Gods born of Earth, archetype of all the mighty mysterious Twelves that are to come. In their sides is not only the color of the sea that once covered all things, but the ashes of those fires from which Earth the Mother shaped Herself, that mighty travail from which the mountains and the valleys sprang.

I go now, to Gwynedd,” said Taliesin. “I was there at the court of Don, before the birth of Gwydion. And now I would watch him grow.” “Gwydion?” said Pryderi, pleased to understand something at last. “Is he not the little boy who will be Mâth’s heir?” In the dim light Taliesin looked at him long and sadly. “He is a little boy, but that is not all he is. Or all he has been. He has borne many names. But now he is called the son of Don, the sister of Mâth the Ancient, and in time to come you will think that you know that name too well. And later all the world will know him, for there is a universal forge, and our world is metal upon it, and he is the smith who will hammer our part of the world into a new shape. What bloody fools like Caswallon do may be undone, but not the work of wise men who work through the mind.

Evnissyen—‘unlike Nissyen,’” said Bran. “Which the Mothers know he is.

Yet remembering, even in his agony, as the harpooned mother whale remembers not to let her threshing flukes strike her young in her death throes, so Bran remembered not to pull upon those ropes that bound him to the frail barques that bore his men.

His own shape that held Arawn smiled. “Annwn is many places. As a man is, so his sight is. But this is the true World of Middle Light. Here neither your blazing sun nor your black night ever comes. Here in this gentle light, in the all-healing womb of the Mother, the battered and misshapen may find new shape.” “And here too She shapes the unborn?” “The dead and the unborn are one. Even your druids of the New Tribes must have told you that.

For only evil should be feared; Gods should be loved.

Modron, whose care is the whole world, has many daughters, and all of them are Herself. She is one of them, She who watches over our fields and our forests, over our beasts and us.” “She who is Dyved. The White Mare!

The Welsh Mabinogion provides one of the most compelling examples in Celtic literature of an Indo-European divine twin tradition. And it all starts with the house of Don. We are told very little about the parent figure Don, except that Don has a daughter named Arianrhod, and two sons named Gwydion and Gilvaethwy.81 Right away, the alliteration in the two names “Gwydion and Gilvaethwy” should put you on the alert for divine twin symbolism.

He was old, so old that the deeds of his youth are not now remembered, even in legend, and yet they must have been high deeds and many. For he had seen the earlier ages and the world moving upward out of the mists of the Great Beginning. He knew the laws of the cycles, the courses of the earth, and the movements of the stars. Even the stranger yet more mysterious movements in the minds of men. He had been the avatar who saw it as the duty of his kingship to guide his people upward upon the foredestined path of evolution. And he knew how life had been in the beginning, and it may be that he knew dimly how it will be in the end.

The King stroked his beard again. “It might seem that marriage has come too soon,” said he. “For marriage is a noble and beautiful idea that the most of humankind are as yet unfit to put into practice, and in grasping at what lies too high for their reach they fall lower than ever they did before. “In my youth men and women desired each other and were joined, and parted when desire was over-past. Nor was there argument or curiosity or lewd speculation concerning the origin of children, for these were the gift with which the high gods blessed woman: her share in the work of creation. We had no disrespect for women in those days. They were our loves and our creators, our source and our solace: free to give and to withhold. We warred and wandered and built kingdoms. We left to them the care of houses and the giving of life and the drawing of food from the earth.

So now when a man and a woman desire each other they begin to marry and pretend that their desire will never pass, and that the eyes of neither will ever stray to another. And an unmarried woman must pretend to look with cold eyes upon all men. Yet, people go on behaving much as they have always done. And there is no virtue in a lie,” he said, “there never has been, and there never will be.

Memory came to Manawyddan. “She told me that you had found a mate and flown away.” “Yes. She set me free to love my love and build my nest and rear my broods as a bird should. Until that dread night—the night of the storm that came upon Dyved from beyond the world. I died then, of the great sound; I who was no longer young.

Child, no druid of the Old Tribes ever slept upon a bull’s hide. Only they of the New Tribes, that learned druidry from us, but still refuse to live by the Ancient Harmonies, ever needed such devices to focus the Eye within.

There are always riders on the winds, but that night there were many, many. Not your ordinary human dead, that look down with regret and longing or else with forgiving friendliness—maybe even a little wink—upon this earth that once they walked.

But here I lived with Rhiannon; here in our youth and her ignorance we joyously begot our son; here in our ripeness and in our knowledge we loved. We too laughed and built and worked together; for ourselves and for those who would come after us; some of them of our own blood.

Spring came at last. Ice and snow melted; under the brown bark of the trees and under the brown breast of the Mother a multitude of tiny lives stirred; they that rise up to make all greenness, leaves and grass and moss.

No. And when we do, we usually help you, as the higher should help the lower. I think that no Lord of the Bright World will invade earth openly again. Mind is growing stronger, even among mortal men, and the walls between the worlds are growing firmer. We may play with your thoughts again, but only with your thoughts.

They also probably did not think that magic powers should be attributed to so good a man as Manawyddan, but he belonged to the mightiest kingly house in the Four Branches, and of these royal houses Sir John Rhys said: “. . . the kings are mostly the greatest magicians of their time . . . the ruling class in these stories . . . had their magic handed down from generation to generation.” So I have felt free to de-whitewash Manawyddan and have him perform several of the magic tricks attributed to his Irish counterpart, Manannan mac Lir.

GILVAETHWY the son of Dôn was in a bad way. His face, that had once been round and merry as the moon, was grown long and lean as a hungry wolf-hound’s, and his sun-browned skin had bleached to a green and sickly pallor rather like that of an anemic cabbage.

There may have been a sacred well on that isle, as in other parts of Britain, and if so the daughters of Dôn would have been its priestesses and guardians, set to guard that closed Eye of the Deep through which otherwise the greedy water-gods might have risen to swallow more of earth’s surface as once they had swallowed the lost lands of the west that were now Caer Sidi, the Country Undersea.

Arianrhod herself, whose name meant Silver Wheel, perhaps was worshiped by the common folk as incarnation as well as priestess of the moon, the benevolent silver sky-lady herself, come down from her pale bright chariot in the heavens to watch more closely over the tides she ruled, and make them gentle to the coasts of men. Such mystic, mighty song and incantation to control or invoke the elements may have been the rites practices by all the dwellers on those sacred isles around Britain of which Plutarch tells us; on one of which, he says, the Dethroned Father of the Gods sleeps among his men, since sleep is the fetter forged for Him. But those are things lost in mystery, and sages and historians quarrel over the fringes of them, happy in the seemingly barren strife.

IT WAS WINTER and nearing the time of the solstice, that has been sacred everywhere and in all lands since before man can remember, when Arianrhod at last made herself ready for a journey, and fared eastward with her brothers to the court of Mâth the King.

Llaw Gyffes means “Sure Hand.” But the use of lleu is a mystery today. For the word is a dead, ancient one that meant light; and the later scribes rewrote it llew or lion. Yet nobody can say why Arianrhod should have called her little boy either a lion or a light (unless what she really said was that his hand was sure as light); and perhaps the Irish word lu, “little,” was meant; though there is no such form of that word in Welsh today.

Now all in Gwynedd know that Mâth and Dôn were born of the same mother, and the women still live who saw Dôn give birth to Gwydion. Our royal house is above a doubt, and our kings know that their own blood will reign after them. That is the way to have things. What you have seen with your own eyes you know.

After all, if a woman’s sleeping with a man makes a child, why does she not have more of them at a time? How can we be sure how many gettings into bed, or how many men, it takes to make one child? It might have several fathers; you cannot tell what goes on inside of women. . . . I myself have slept with some who have never had any children at all, and I am a proper man. You cannot be sure that that is what does it. It may be irreverent to the gods to say so.

Now Pryderi the son of Pwyll was his name, which means Care the son of Thought, and today none knows what was the truth of these tales: why Thought went to Faeryland and slew a foe of the gods there; or why a Faery princess appeared to him upon a hill of perils and wonders; and why Care was stolen on his birth night and rescued by Teirnyon, who cut off the Demon’s claw. Or if some know, they do not tell. . .

Either the scribes must have made error, or these lands they tell of were not the earthly Dyved and Gwynedd, but their counterparts in Faery, that first layer of it that lies in the Overworld, above our earth and Annwn; and their heroes were not men, but those who had already worked to freedom from the bonds of earth-flesh, the lesser gods whose deeds symbolize and inspire the deeds of men. For world may well fit within world, and each be but the shell of the next. . .

But if so, these gods were very human, not over-upright elder brothers to men. Even if they were gods it is not strange that they are now dead. For death is the means of transportation from world to world, and a time comes to gods, as to men, when their work in one is done. All that is must pass through every world until it reaches the Last of All. . . .

All that has come down to us is that Gwydion was the best taleteller in the world.

But Gwydion did not follow them there. Long after the last of them was snoring he still stood erect and alone in the darkened chamber, and with a slim wand traced designs at his feet by the moon’s white glow; circles he traced, and triangles, and other shapes and symbols whose power we do not know. . .

And it is easy to imagine what experiments that brilliant, inquiring and unreverent mind would have led its owner into, how much he may have proved, through these mute creatures, of the reasons for birth and barrenness, and of the laws of life. He was thinking of these two things when the charm was done at last and he lay down to rest while the sun rose and crept through every crevice and cranny in jets of airy flame. “For I have noted that if I have a cow put in a field alone, she is barren, and if I place other cows with her she is barren, but if I let a bull into the field, even once, she becomes with calf. And after the calf is weaned, she becomes barren once more, and remains so, unless I let the bull into the field again. And if it is so with beasts, why not with men and women? “Folk cry out that beasts cannot be thus compared with humankind, that such questions blaspheme the gods—women in especial cry it, grudging new power to men—but this is arrogance and fools’ vanity, and has no part in the wisdom of my uncle Mâth. We are not so different; we were planned by the one Planner, and the calf is suckled on its mother’s milk as I was on Dôn’s. . . . They are co-heirs with us of destiny. All that is, is eternal and nothing passes but to return again, unless, at the end of the ages, it be time and change. . . . “No, the New Folk are right this once. And it would be sweet to know a child one’s own, part of the essence of one’s own body. I have always envied women that miracle. . . .

and twelve round gold-covered shields that sparkled like a heap of small suns upon the stones. Or like late-lingering stars that had been surprised by day and had fallen, in the haste of their flight, from heaven.

Yet there are tribes in the Isle of the Mighty who deal in magic arts also,” said the old man, shaking his head. “They who were here before us and are wiser than we in old wisdoms that men wrung from the gods in earlier days before the wall was firm between the worlds. Among them there are masters of glamour and dealers in illusion who could steal a man’s own senses and make his very thought obey their will. They have no cause to love us who invaded their island, and they do not forget. They are very wily Lord,” said he.

Yet with a difference. For after a thing has happened nothing can ever go on quite as it did before. We may say that it shall, and that it does. We may even believe this. But a happening can never be un-happened and, faint or strong, its color will creep into the shade of all things and modify it with its own infinitesimal but all-pervading bit of change.

He had carried within him through camp and battle his monumental calm that was one with earth and great trees and the silence of night.

There is snow and there is heat; there are storms and days of sunshine; there are this year’s young growing up and going their ways, and next year’s to be conceived and born: but only to the brains of men do these things reckon time. So like is a beast’s brief span to that of a whole race of men, each generation of which rears but one litter of young, for among them individuals change, but not the Great Plan, nor the order of its shaping.

We do not know what the full extent of his power was, but it seems likely that it extended on both sides of the grave and regulated the conditions of birth and death and of the earthly life that lies between, though not the unearthly years that lie on the other side, beyond time, and between death and birth.

Night had scarce fallen when she foaled—a big, beautiful he-colt. It stood up on wobbling legs, weak and wet and dazed, and the mother washed it. The feel of her tongue comforted it and it pressed closer and found her teats and sucked; it was happy again then, as it had been inside the warm dark nest of her body. So they comforted each other after the squeezing, rending pangs of birth; and so the foal, like all young, discovered this huge world and himself, and her who was the first sharer of its great and terrible loneliness.

It was. Yet all seems like a dream now, that Land of the Ever-Young, where people never die until they grow too wise for our world, and so ready for the next—one that we know as little of as you do of ours.” “So I have heard. And that death among you is different from our death.” “It is only deep sleep, without illness. Well I remember my fear when I first saw the ugliness of earthly death, and knew that it must come to me, and might come first to him—to Pwyll. But not even then did I regret.

For they had enough, and rarely indeed can human beings claim that most perfect of conditions, they who live oftenest in hope of the future, and then, when that piece of it that they have planned and labored for comes, must live on and work on in the hope of a new piece.

And every man and woman is worthy of love, and each calls forth a love that can be given only to himself or herself, never to another.

We have made of “natural” and “everyday” poor words, ordinary and trite, when they should be the Word, full of awesome magic and might; of cosmic power.

Best to love in the afternoon,” he told her once. “After the storm, when the heart has learned wisdom and the body is not yet too old. When love is no longer strain and fear and wine that goes to a man’s head, but the fire on his hearth and the food on his table.

Lord, I rode after Pwyll into the teeth of time, that I knew must tear us and gut us and fling us away like gnawed bones at last. I will not say I came without dread, but I came by my own choice.

To Pryderi it was home, the home that he had long been away from. And to Kigva any land through which she rode with him would have seemed as sweet as Rhiannon’s lovely Land of the Ever-Young. The glamour that was upon their young eyes gilded the eyes of the older couple also; they thought that they never before had realized the goodness and the magical simplicity of earth.

So the stranger fared with them, and they all fared on, and before sunset they came to the place where the King was. It was a place of druidcraft, of wise men and teachers; later, men were to call it Oxford.

And Gwydion smiled, and the light of his smile seemed to close the dizzying abysses and make the sun shine warm over a solid world. “I wanted you indeed,” he said. “Otherwise I would not have been saving you in a box while your much more promising-looking brother was swimming off. The accident that made her give you birth was my doing, and an awkward enough business, but the best I could do, for it is not easy to deal with an unreasonable woman. You were my plan and my contriving. You are my own, more than you ever have been or can be anyone else’s.

This was the shoemaking for which the Triads name Gwydion the Third Gold-Shoemaker. The first of these was Caswallawn the son of Beli of the Deep, when he went to Gaul to save Flur the daughter of Mynach Gorr from Imperial Caesar and her abductor, King Mwrchan the Thief. And the second was the royal Manawyddan, the son of Llyr Llediaith and brother of Bran the Blessed, in the days when he and his were exiles from Dyved through the charms of Llwyd. It was he whose stepson Pryderi Gwydion had later killed.

Of course,” said Gwydion. “For the inside of a man, which cannot be seen or touched, takes many years to change even a little; while the outside of him that can be seen and touched, and which most people therefore think the more important, can be very easily changed or even destroyed altogether. You must remember that.

From the plotting of strangers and iniquitous Monks, as the water flows from the fountain, Sad and heavy will be the day of Cadwallon. The lines come from the Red Book of Hergest, a collection of Welsh poems written in the late-fourteenth century but containing material that is much older. This brings us, neatly, to J. R. R. Tolkien. For according to a learned authorial conceit, the source of his tales of Middle-earth was the Red Book of Westmarch. Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and one of his aims was to create a mythology for England, as the Red Book of Hergest, which contains the Mabinogion and other material, could be said to preserve the mythology of the Britons. Many if not all the writers and scholars involved in Anglo-Saxon studies first came to the field through reading the professor’s stories – and I am one of them, so it is no accident that this story is called Oswald: Return of the King, in tribute and homage. Tolkien writes of Oswald in his seminal essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and the parallels between him and Aragorn – rightful king in exile returning to claim the throne – are obvious.

Let us use our magic and enchantments to conjure up a woman out of flowers.” … Math and Gwydyon took the flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet and from these conjured up the loveliest and most beautiful girl anyone had seen; they baptized her with the form of baptism that was used then, and named her Blodeuedd. “Math Son of Mathonwy,” from The Mabinogion, translated by Jeffrey Gantz