Gwydion

Twelve horses stood in Pryderi’s yard, gold on every buckle and bridle, with twelve black hounds beside them in gold collars and twelve gilded shields propped in the wet grass. By the next night they would be a scatter of toadstools going soft on the turf, and the pigs they had bought would be four days north and still moving. The man who made them knew precisely how long his work would hold. He had planned around it.

Gwydion son of Dôn belongs to the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the last and strangest of the four Welsh tales copied into the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. His uncle Math ruled Gwynedd and could not live unless his feet rested in the lap of a virgin, except when war was in the land. That single ridiculous condition is the hinge the whole story turns on, because Gwydion’s brother Gilfaethwy fell sick with love for Goewin, the woman whose lap it was, and Gwydion looked at his brother’s grey face and decided to arrange a war.

He did it with a story. Twelve of them rode south to Pryderi’s court in the guise of poets, and Gwydion, who the tale says was the best storyteller in the world, held the hall until midnight before asking for the otherworldly pigs Arawn had sent up out of Annwfn. Pryderi was bound by an oath not to give them away or sell them. So Gwydion offered a trade instead, and produced the horses, the hounds and the shields out of a fungus. The bargain was honest in every particular except the merchandise.

He began a war so that his brother could rape a woman. The tale says it plainly and does not soften it.

Pryderi’s men came north and were beaten back at Nant Call and again at Dol Benmaen, and when the two hosts had bled enough it was agreed that the man who caused the quarrel should answer for it in single combat. Gwydion killed him at Y Felen Rhyd through strength and valour and aggression and magic and enchantment, in that order, and Pryderi was buried above the ford. Then Goewin told Math what had been done in his own bed, and the reckoning came round. Math struck his nephews with his rod and turned them into a stag and a hind, and sent them out to live as deer and to mate as deer. A year later there was uproar under the chamber wall and the court dogs howling, and the two of them stood outside with a fawn between them. He changed them into a boar and a sow, and the year after that into a wolf and a she-wolf, and each year he took the offspring, baptised it and gave it a name. Three sons came out of that punishment: Hyddwn, Hychddwn and Bleiddwn. When the third year ended Math turned the brothers back and told them to wash and dress. They had borne children from one another. He considered the debt settled.

What Gwydion did next is the part that made his reputation. His sister Arianrhod, tested for virginity by stepping over Math’s rod, dropped a yellow-haired boy who ran straight for the sea, and something smaller besides, which Gwydion caught up in a fold of brocade before anyone else got a look at it and hid in a chest at the foot of his bed. Some months later he woke to a thin crying inside the chest. The boy grew at twice the ordinary rate and loved his uncle more than anyone alive. Arianrhod, confronted with him, swore he would never have a name unless she gave it, never bear arms unless she armed him, and never take a wife of any race on earth. Some readers of the tale have suggested the older version made Gwydion the boy’s father rather than his uncle, which would explain a great deal about the way he behaves for the rest of the story.

He beat all three curses. He turned dulse and seaweed into a ship and gilded leather, made himself and the boy into shoemakers, cut Arianrhod’s shoes deliberately wrong twice until she came down to the boat to be measured, and let the boy drop a wren with a stone between the tendon and the bone of its leg. She laughed and said the fair one had a skilful hand, and the name was hers before she heard herself give it. For the arms he raised a phantom fleet in the bay at dawn, filled the air with trumpets, and had her buckle the weapons on herself while the invasion she could see was not there. For the wife he went to Math, and the two of them took the flowers of the oak, the flowers of the broom and the flowers of the meadowsweet and called a woman out of them.

That third solution killed the man it was meant to save. Blodeuwedd took a lover, learned the absurdly specific conditions under which Lleu could die, and arranged them. Struck by the spear, Lleu went up as an eagle, screamed once and was gone. Gwydion walked Gwynedd and Powys looking for him and found him by following a sow that came home fat and would not say where she fed. She led him up a valley to an oak, and under it he saw what she was eating: maggots and rotten flesh dropping from the bird above. He sang three englynion, and with each one the eagle came further down the tree, until it fell into his lap and he struck it with the rod and got back a man who was skin and bone. It took the best doctors in Gwynedd a year to mend him. Gwydion caught Blodeuwedd on the mountain above the Cynfael, told her he would do something worse than kill her, and let her go in the shape of an owl, hated by every bird that flies.

Nothing in the tale says what he looked like. He has no height, no hair, no scar. What the story gives instead is a wardrobe of borrowed shapes: bard, shoemaker, stag, sow, wolf, an ordinary traveller asking a swineherd about his livestock. His powers all run the same way. He makes things that are convincingly real and will not last past sunset, he changes forms with a rod, and he wins arguments. His limits are just as consistent. He cannot lift a curse, only outflank it, and each victory costs somebody something. The greater magic in the family is Math’s, not his, and the Welsh Triads agree, listing the Enchantment of Math son of Mathonwy which he taught to Gwydion son of Dôn among the Three Great Enchantments of the Island of Britain.

The name outlived the story. A tenth-century genealogy in Harleian MS 3859 records Lou Hen map Guidgen, Lleu the old son of Gwydion, which is the paternity the Mabinogi never quite states. The Book of Taliesin has him raising an army of trees against the host of Annwfn in Cad Goddeu, and asks in another poem whether Lleu and Gwydion will work their magic. The Stanzas of the Graves put his grave on the shore below Dinas Dinlle. And from at least 1547, when William Salesbury set it down in his English and Welsh dictionary, Welsh speakers called the Milky Way Caer Gwydion, Gwydion’s fort, which is a considerable promotion for a man who once sold a king a herd of mushrooms.

Two later readings should be kept separate from the medieval material. Robert Graves rearranged Cad Goddeu in The White Goddess to support a druidic tree-alphabet, having admitted he knew no Welsh; Marged Haycock and Mary Ann Constantine read the same poem as a virtuoso bardic joke. And the Triads name Lleu, not Gwydion, among the Three Golden Shoemakers, though the tale itself hands the title to the uncle. The record is not tidy. It rarely is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gwydion in Welsh mythology?

Gwydion fab Dôn is a magician and nobleman of Gwynedd who dominates the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. He is the nephew of King Math son of Mathonwy, brother of Gilfaethwy, Arianrhod, Gofannon and Amaethon, and the foster father of the hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Medieval Welsh poetry and the Triads treat him as the definitive enchanter of Wales.

What magic can Gwydion do?

Gwydion works illusion and transformation. He conjures horses, hounds, shields, ships and an entire invasion fleet out of toadstools and seaweed, changes his own appearance and other people’s, and uses a magic rod to turn a man into an animal or back again. His illusions are convincing but temporary, and in the tale he warns his own men that the magic will not survive from one day to the next.

Why was Gwydion turned into a deer, a pig and a wolf?

Math punished him for engineering a war so that his brother Gilfaethwy could rape Goewin, the king’s virgin foot-holder. Math struck the brothers with his rod and made them live as mated pairs of animals for three years: a stag and a hind, a boar and a sow, then a wolf and a she-wolf. Each year they produced a son, who Math took and named Hyddwn, Hychddwn and Bleiddwn.

How did Gwydion rescue Lleu Llaw Gyffes?

After Blodeuwedd and her lover contrived Lleu’s death, Lleu escaped in the form of a wounded eagle. Gwydion searched Gwynedd and Powys, then followed a farmer’s sow that wandered off each morning and found her feeding on the rotting flesh falling from an eagle in an oak tree. He sang three englynion, coaxing the bird down branch by branch until it fell into his lap, and struck it with his rod to restore Lleu’s human shape.

Is Caer Gwydion really named after him?

Caer Gwydion, meaning Gwydion’s fort, is a traditional Welsh name for the Milky Way. William Salesbury recorded it in his English and Welsh dictionary of 1547, and the usage was clearly not new then. It is the clearest surviving sign that Gwydion was once a much larger figure than the Mabinogi alone would suggest.

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