Taliesin

Also Known As: Welsh *tal iesin*, “radiant brow”; born Gwion Bach; called Taliesin Ben Beirdd, “Taliesin Chief of Bards”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Welsh Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He carries the awen, the stolen inspiration that hands him every art at once, total recall of the shapes he has worn, and knowledge of things that have not happened yet.
Role in Mythos: He is the primeval poet of Welsh tradition, the measure against which every later bard in Wales was judged and found ordinary.
Relation to Humans: He lives among people as a fosterling, a household’s luck and a court poet, and the man who pulled him out of the water is the man his verse is spent defending. The gift itself is never shared, only performed at whoever needs convincing.

The cauldron had been on the boil for a year and a day, and the boy feeding its fire had long since stopped counting mornings. Wood smoke had worked into his hair and into the weave of his shirt. Above the coals a blind man called Morda turned the brew with a slow arm, round and round through herbs Ceridwen had gathered on particular days for reasons she explained to nobody. She wanted three drops. Only three, at the end of the year, and they were meant for her son Morfran, whom people called Afagddu, Utter Darkness, because no charm anyone tried could make him less unfortunate to look at. Wisdom was going to be his compensation.

The drops leapt from the pot and landed on the wrong hand. Gwion Bach shoved Morfran out of the way, took the scald across his thumb, put it in his mouth to cool it, and in that instant knew everything: the herbs, the year, what the rest of the liquid in the pot was for, and exactly what the woman who brewed it would do to him when she woke. He ran.

What she chased was not a boy for very long. He went over the field as a hare and she came behind him as a greyhound. He took the river as a fish and she went in after him as an otter. He broke upward as a bird and she rose as a hawk with the light behind her. Cornered in a barn at last, he made himself one grain of wheat among thousands on the floor, which is the cleverest move in the story and the one that fails. She became a high-crested black hen, picked him out of the heap, and swallowed him. Nine months later she bore him, meaning to kill him, and found she could not. He went into the water instead, sewn into a hide bag and set adrift.

He came ashore in a fish trap. Gwyddno Garanhir kept a weir on the tideline, and his son Elphin had the use of it for one night, and that night it gave up no salmon at all. Elphin was already the unluckiest man in his father’s household and had heard about it often. When they cut the bag open on the stones the forehead inside was so white in the grey light that the word came out of him before he could think: *tal iesin*, radiant brow. The bundle answered him in verse. Fair Elphin, cease your weeping. No catch in Gwyddno’s weir was ever as good as tonight’s. The baby sang the whole way home, and Elphin’s fortunes turned that year and did not turn back.

The debt came due at a Christmas feast some years later, when Elphin, warm on his own good luck, informed Maelgwn Gwynedd’s hall that his wife was chaster than the king’s and his bard better than all the king’s bards together. Maelgwn put him in chains. He sent his son Rhun to test the first half of the boast, and Rhun came back with a severed finger wearing Elphin’s signet ring, which Elphin examined and calmly rejected: the nail was badly kept, and there was rye dough packed under it, and his wife had never kneaded bread in her life. That bought him heavier irons and nothing else. Then a thirteen-year-old walked into the hall.

Twenty-four bards stood up to answer him and discovered they could not put a word together. They pursed their lips and played *blerwm blerwm* with their fingers, like men mocking a fool, and could not stop doing it. Taliesin sang in their place. He gave the king a poem about the wind, which has no flesh and no bone and was made before the flood, and by the end of it Maelgwn had lost his appetite for the whole argument and let Elphin out of the cellar. A horse race followed, twenty-four royal horses beaten past the post by one of Elphin’s under a switch of burnt holly, and a cap thrown down where the winner pulled up, and gold in the ground under the cap. Then the boy told the court, at length, how the world was going to end.

There was a real Taliesin, and this is not quite him. Around 830 the compiler of the *Historia Brittonum* listed five poets famous in British verse in the sixth century: Talhaearn Tad Awen, Aneirin, Taliesin, Blwchfardd, and Cian, called Gwenith Gwawd. Two of the five left anything behind. Taliesin’s share sits in a battered fourteenth-century vellum book of ninety-three leaves, copied by a single scribe somewhere in Glamorgan, wanting its first page and a fair portion of its middle. Nobody appears to have called it the Book of Taliesin before the seventeenth century. It holds around sixty poems, and roughly a dozen of them praise Urien of Rheged and his son Owain ab Urien, kings of a British north that was losing ground season by season. Ifor Williams argued that eleven could genuinely go back to the sixth century. They are hard, specific, professional work: cattle, spears, a river crossing, a patron’s open hand.

The rest of the book belongs to the other one. There the voice is enormous and unplaceable, claiming to have been a multitude of shapes before it was set free, to have stood with Arthur’s men when they sailed into Annwn after a cauldron and came back seven strong, to know the fate of Britain and the feats of Hercules and Alexander alike. Marged Haycock reads the manuscript as a compendium assembled around both: the supposed genuine work of the sixth-century poet, and the later pieces declaimed by his bombastic alter ego.

The tale of the cauldron and the weir is late in the form anyone can read it. Its earliest full text was written into a chronicle of the six ages of the world by Elis Gruffydd, a Welsh soldier in the garrison at Calais, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Over twenty manuscripts carry versions, most of them broken off after the birth. Charlotte Guest gave it to English readers in 1849 inside her *Mabinogion*, working in part from a copy in the hand of Iolo Morganwg, an antiquary who forged a great deal of what he claimed to transcribe. That is a thin chain for a story people habitually call ancient, and the honest thing is to say so. What steadies it is the fourteenth-century book itself, where the shape-shifting, all-knowing Taliesin is already boasting two hundred years before Gruffydd sat down to write, and the wider shape of the thing, which recurs across the Irish Sea in the boyhood of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his scalded thumb.

What the awen gives is not a skill. It behaves like a substance: three drops of it and the boy has every art in the world, keeps his memory intact through hare and fish and bird and grain, and comes out the far side able to see forward as easily as back. His verse does things rather than describing them. It binds two dozen trained tongues, empties a king’s argument out from under him, opens a prison, and puts a man’s hand on buried gold.

None of it was ever his. The drops were brewed for another boy and mixed by another woman, and the rest of that pot was poison, so a fourth drop would have finished him where he stood. He can be caught. He is caught, in fact, in every shape he tries, and swallowed, and put out on the tide in a bag with no way to steer. And under the legend the man himself is barely there: a dozen poems, no face in any source, no death on record. The book that carries his name is missing its first leaf, so whatever stood at the front of it went before anyone thought to copy it out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Taliesin?

Taliesin is the greatest poet of Welsh tradition, remembered both as a real sixth-century court bard and as a legendary figure with supernatural knowledge. The historical Taliesin composed praise poetry for Urien of Rheged and his son Owain ab Urien in the British north. The legendary Taliesin is a shape-shifting, all-knowing voice who claims to have existed in many forms and to know the fate of Britain.

What does the name Taliesin mean?

Taliesin means “radiant brow” in Welsh, from *tal* (brow or forehead) and *iesin* (radiant or shining). In the legend, Elphin son of Gwyddno Garanhir names the infant on the spot after seeing how pale and bright the child’s forehead is when the bag holding him is cut open at the weir.

How was Taliesin born?

Taliesin began life as a boy called Gwion Bach, who was tending the fire under Ceridwen’s cauldron of inspiration. Three drops meant for her son Morfran landed on Gwion instead, giving him all knowledge. Ceridwen pursued him through a series of animal transformations, finally swallowing him when he became a grain of wheat, and nine months later gave birth to him. She set him adrift in a hide bag, and he was found in a salmon weir.

Was Taliesin a real person?

Yes, at least in part. The *Historia Brittonum*, compiled around 830, names Taliesin as one of five poets famous in British verse during the sixth century, alongside Aneirin, Talhaearn Tad Awen, Blwchfardd and Cian. About a dozen poems in the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin praise the northern kings Urien and Owain, and Ifor Williams argued that eleven of them could genuinely date from the sixth century.

What is the Book of Taliesin?

The Book of Taliesin is a fourteenth-century Welsh manuscript, National Library of Wales Peniarth MS 2, containing around sixty poems. Copied by a single scribe probably working in Glamorgan, it preserves both the praise poetry attributed to the historical Taliesin and the visionary poems of his legendary persona, including *Preiddeu Annwfn* and *Armes Prydein Fawr*. The manuscript is damaged and has lost several leaves, including the first.