Blodeuwedd

Broom smells of warm honey in June. Meadowsweet smells of almonds gone slightly sour. Oak flower smells of almost nothing at all, green wood and dust. Two magicians carried armfuls of all three onto the floor of a hall in Gwynedd, worked over the heap until the air in the room changed, and when they were done a woman was standing in it, looking back at them.

She existed because a curse needed getting around. Arianrhod had sworn that her son Lleu Llaw Gyffes would never have a wife from any race on this earth, and Arianrhod’s word held. Her brother Gwydion and their uncle Math son of Mathonwy read the wording rather than the intent, which is what magicians are for, and found the gap in it. No race on this earth. So make something that belongs to no race at all. They took the flowers of the oak, the flowers of the broom and the flowers of the meadowsweet and called forth out of them the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen. She was baptised in the manner they practised then and given the name Blodeuedd, which means Flowers and nothing more. Then she was married to Lleu, who had not been consulted either, and the pair were handed Mur Castell in Ardudwy along with the land around it.

Nobody asked her.

For a while it went the way arranged things sometimes do go. She walked the round of the court in the mornings, past the hall and the outbuildings and the smell of woodsmoke, saw the household fed, and was thought a good lady of the place by everyone in the district. The story gives her no unhappiness at all until the day it requires her to be unhappy.

Lleu rode off to Caer Dathyl to visit Math. She was doing her rounds inside the court when a horn sounded beyond the wall, and after the horn a stag came past, run to exhaustion, with dogs at its heels and huntsmen behind the dogs and a crowd of men on foot behind them. The stag was brought down at the river as the light went. She sent a man to ask who the hunter was, and the answer came back: Gronw Pebr, lord of Penllyn. She had him invited in out of the cold. He came in and she looked at him, and in the instant she looked there was not a thought in her that was not full of love for him. He looked back and the same thing happened to him. He stayed three nights.

What they arranged between them took a year to build. Lleu could not be killed easily, and Blodeuwedd asked him about it the way a worried wife would, and he told her everything. No blow struck indoors or outdoors could do it, nor on horseback, nor on foot. The spear had to be a year in the making and worked only during Mass on Sundays. He would have to be standing under a thatched roof on a riverbank with one foot on the rim of a bath and the other on the back of a billy goat. She thanked God aloud that he was so safe, and sent word to Penllyn.

A year later she had the bath set up on the bank of the Cynfael and a goat brought, and she asked Lleu, sweetly, to show her exactly how a man would have to stand. He climbed up to demonstrate. Gronw rose from the shadow of the hill called Bryn Cyfergyd and threw. The spearhead went in and stuck, the shaft dropped away, and Lleu gave a scream and went up out of his own body as an eagle and was gone over the trees.

Gwydion found him eventually, tracked down by a sow that wandered off each morning to feed under an oak on maggots and rotten flesh falling out of the branches. He sang to the eagle in verse until it came down the tree lap by lap into his knees, struck it with his wand, and gave Lleu back his shape, thin and ruined and needing a year of physicians.

Then Gwynedd mustered and marched on Ardudwy. Blodeuwedd heard them coming and went for the mountain with her maidens, across the river, and they were so frightened that they could only walk with their faces turned back over their shoulders. They went into a lake without seeing it and every one of them drowned except her. Gwydion caught up.

He told her he would not kill her, and that what he intended was worse. He let her go in the shape of a bird, never able to show her face in daylight for fear of all other birds, hunted and despised by them wherever they found her, and he took away nothing except the letters. Blodeuedd, Flowers, became Blodeuwedd, flower-face. In the language of the storyteller’s own day that word meant owl, and the story ends the matter by saying that this is why there is hostility between owls and every other bird, and why the owl is still called Blodeuwedd.

Gronw got no mercy either. Offered the chance to make good, Lleu insisted only on standing where Gronw had stood and returning the throw. Gronw asked whether he might hold a stone slab between himself and the blow, and was allowed it. The spear went through the stone and through him. A holed slate answering that description sits on a bank near the Cynfael and has been known for centuries as Llech Ronw, the stone of Gronw; one was recorded there by Frank Ward in 1934 and another, possibly the same, resurfaced along the Afon Bryn Saeth around the turn of this century. The neighbouring smallholdings are called Bryn Saeth, the hill of the arrow, and Bryn Cyfergyd, the hill of the blow. The landscape has been agreeing with the story for a very long time.

Scholarship has never been entirely comfortable with her. W. J. Gruffydd argued that two separate figures had been welded together by the accident of similar names: a flower-maiden called Blodeuedd who betrayed her husband, cousin to the Irish Bláthnat who handed Cú Roí over to Cú Chulainn, and a quite different owl-woman called Blodeuwedd. Whether or not he was right, the medieval text never once calls her a goddess. The flower goddess of modern retellings, the seasonal sovereignty figure, the maiden of the triple year, all of that arrived centuries later and belongs to its own authors.

Her powers are not the kind that show. She has no magic, no weapon and no lineage; she is a made thing without kin to appeal to and without any claim on the land she was installed on. What she has instead is the one advantage of the perfectly trusted, which is that she can ask a direct question and receive a true answer. That single ability is enough to undo the strongest man in Gwynedd, because his invulnerability was never a shield, only a list of conditions, and a list can be recited to somebody else.

Her limits are the same fact seen from the other side. She cannot leave, cannot divorce, cannot go home, and cannot unmake herself, because the only two people who know the working are the two who married her off. When judgment comes she cannot even die of it. Gwydion’s sentence works precisely because he refuses to end her: he leaves her alive, gives her a body no one will sit beside, and lets the other birds do the rest of it forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Blodeuwedd in Welsh mythology?

Blodeuwedd is a woman conjured out of flowers in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the medieval Welsh tale known as Math fab Mathonwy. The magicians Math son of Mathonwy and Gwydion made her from the blossoms of the oak, the broom and the meadowsweet so that Lleu Llaw Gyffes could have a wife, because his mother Arianrhod had cursed him never to marry a woman of any race on earth.

Why was Blodeuwedd turned into an owl?

Blodeuwedd fell in love with Gronw Pebr, lord of Penllyn, and the two of them plotted to kill her husband Lleu. She coaxed the secret conditions of his death out of him and staged the scene that let Gronw strike. Gwydion punished her by turning her into an owl, forbidden to show her face in daylight and hated by every other bird.

What does the name Blodeuwedd mean?

Blodeuwedd means “flower-face” in Welsh, from *blodeu*, flowers, and *gwedd*, face or aspect. At her creation she was given a different and simpler name, Blodeuedd, meaning just “Flowers”; the second name is the one Gwydion left her with as part of the curse, and the story notes that it was also a word for owl in the storyteller’s own time.

How could Lleu Llaw Gyffes be killed?

Lleu could not be killed indoors or outdoors, on horseback or on foot. He could only die from a spear that had taken a year to make and had been worked on only during Sunday Mass, and only while he stood under a thatched roof beside a river with one foot on the rim of a bath and the other on the back of a billy goat. Blodeuwedd persuaded him to demonstrate the pose, and Gronw threw the spear.

Is Blodeuwedd a goddess?

The medieval Welsh text never calls Blodeuwedd a goddess. She is a made being, created by magic for a specific purpose within one story. The reading of her as a flower goddess or a seasonal sovereignty figure is a modern development and does not come from the Mabinogi itself.

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