Idris Gawr

Also Known As: Welsh, “Idris the Giant”; also Idris ap Gwyddno, “Idris son of Gwyddno”; possibly originally Idris Arw, “Idris the Coarse”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Welsh Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He is enormous enough to use a mountain summit as a chair and to shed cottage-sized boulders as grit from his shoe.
Role in Mythos: He is the giant king and overlord of the other giants of Meirionnydd, and the figure the mountain Cadair Idris is named for.
Relation to Humans: Nobody in the surviving tradition is eaten, crushed or hunted by him, which makes him unusual among Welsh giants. What he leaves behind instead is a stone bed on the summit that gives anyone who sleeps in it either poetry or madness, and a scatter of boulders in the valley that local people have been pointing at for centuries.

On the crown of Cadair Idris there is a bed. Not a metaphor, not a dip in the turf, but a long rectangle of set slabs, broad and long enough that a grown man lying in it looks like a child asleep in a rowing boat. Welsh has called it Gwely Idris, the Bed of Idris, for at least four hundred years. The oldest surviving description of it, written down around 1600, says plainly what everyone standing over it has probably thought since: this is not furniture. It is a grave.

The promise attached to that grave is the reason people climbed to it. Sleep a night in the stone bed and one of two things happens. You come down a poet of the finest kind, or you come down entirely out of your mind. There is no third result on offer, no version where nothing happens and you simply wake up cold, which anyone who has spent a night above 800 metres in Meirionnydd will recognise as the most likely outcome of all. The wind comes over the ridge from the sea with nothing to break it. The slabs hold the night’s cold well past sunrise.

Behind the giant sits a real man, and the record of him is short. Idris ap Gwyddno appears in the medieval Welsh genealogies as a king of Meirionnydd, the small kingdom running from the Mawddach down to the Dyfi, with a son named Sualda after him. The Welsh annals give him one entry, under the year 632: the slaughter of the Severn, and the strangling of Idris. That is the whole of it. The annal names no enemy, describes no battle and offers no cause, and later writers have filled the gap in several incompatible ways. Everything else known about Idris was added by the mountain.

The addition begins with his by-name. Gawr is the mutated form of cawr, giant, and by the sixteenth century that is what Idris is: not a king who ruled Meirionnydd but a giant who sat on it. There is a quiet suggestion in the scholarship that the original epithet may have been arw, coarse or rough, and that a single letter turned a rough king into a giant one. The suggestion cannot be proved and the giant is what survived.

What the tradition never supplies is a face. There is no account of his hair, his voice, his clothing or his weapon. The oldest source measures him only against other giants and finds him no smaller, which is a strange kind of portrait: a man described entirely by the furniture he needs. His chair is a mountain. His bed is eight or nine feet of stacked slate. His footwear is known only from what fell out of it.

That last detail is the one the valley kept. Coming down off the ridge one day he stopped by the water at the foot of the mountain, sat, and worked three pieces of grit out of his shoe, because a stone in the shoe is a stone in the shoe whatever your size. He tipped them out on the shore. They are still there. The lake beneath the summit is called Llyn Tri Graeanyn, the lake of the three grains, and nineteenth century travellers were reliably shown the three boulders and invited to calculate the boot. Another telling sends one of the stones much further, flung north from the summit until it came down near Trawsfynydd and stood upright where it landed, a slab of stone that is now a scheduled ancient monument and still carries his name, Llech Idris.

He was not the only one up there. The account written around 1600 works its way along the skyline naming neighbours: Ysgydion on Moel Ysgydion in the parish of Dolgellau, Offrwm on Moel Offrwm in Llanfachreth, Ysbryn on Moel Ysbryn over the river in Llanelltyd, each hill taking its name from the giant who lived on it. All of them, the text says, were of enormous size, and all of them lived in the time of Idris, who was king and chief over them. It is a curiously administrative image, a giant to each parish with a giant king above them, as though Meirionnydd had simply been surveyed twice at different scales.

The mountain has its own behaviour, independent of him. Throw a stick into one of the lakes at its foot, the old account says, and it will surface in the lake on the far side, which argues for a passage running through the rock beneath. And when a dry summer left the mills on the river short of water and the men opened the lake to feed them, thunder came. Not sometimes. Every time, according to the writer, storm and downpour and lightning breaking over that one spot the moment the water was let go.

In the margin beside the Idris paragraph, in the same hand, someone added four words: and Arthur killed him. No account of the fight, no cause, no aftermath. Arthur turns up all through that manuscript killing giants and their sisters by various means, most of them underhand, and Idris gets a single line of it.

Now the part everyone repeats, which is the part that needs a date on it. The Idris of the guidebooks is a poet, an astronomer and a philosopher, a mind as vast as his body, using the summit as an observatory to read the stars. That Idris is not in the sixteenth century record at all. He comes from a triad: the three renowned astronomers of the Isle of Britain, Idris the giant, Gwydion son of Dôn, and Gwyn son of Nudd, whose knowledge of the stars let them foretell anything wanted until doomsday. It is a fine line and it is not medieval. It belongs to the collection Edward Williams, who wrote as Iolo Morganwg, published in the Myvyrian Archaiology in 1807, and which Rachel Bromwich identified as Iolo’s own composition rather than inherited tradition. The astronomer is a Romantic invention roughly two centuries old.

It took hold fast. By 1856 a German traveller was recording the three grains of sand and calling Idris a giant, astrologer and bard of the third or fourth century. By 1862 a French one was writing that Idris, according to the Triads, was a poet, an astronomer and a philosopher, with a mind as great as his body. Both were repeating Iolo without knowing it, and both were sold the story by guides in Dolgellau who had every commercial reason to keep it in circulation.

At least one man tested the bed. Evan Evans, the poet and antiquary who wrote as Ieuan Fardd, went up and slept on the summit deliberately, as an experiment, to find out whether the tradition held. The accounts of what happened to him do not agree. The Welsh record says he did not go mad, but that happiness eluded him for the rest of his life. The German traveller, retelling it forty years on, says flatly that he lost his reason. Given what the mountain is supposed to do to a sleeper, the disagreement is almost too neat.

Idris himself does nothing any more. He has no cult, no festival, no story in which he acts. His power, such as it is, has passed entirely into the ground he sat on, which still offers the same two outcomes to anyone willing to lie down in a stone box at 893 metres and wait for morning. His limits are equally plain. He can be killed, and the record kills him twice, once by strangling in a Welsh annal and once by Arthur in a marginal note. The bed on the summit is the only thing he has left, and the oldest account of it says it is where they put him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Idris Gawr?

Idris Gawr means “Idris the Giant” in Welsh, and he is the giant said to have used the summit of Cadair Idris as his chair. Behind him stands a real king, Idris ap Gwyddno of Meirionnydd, who appears in the medieval Welsh genealogies and whose death the Welsh annals record under the year 632. The giant version of him is a later growth of local tradition around the mountain.

What happens if you sleep on Cadair Idris?

According to a Welsh tradition written down around 1600, anyone who sleeps in the stone bed on the summit, called Gwely Idris, will wake either a poet of the finest kind or completely mad. No third outcome is offered. The Welsh poet and antiquary Evan Evans is said to have gone up and tried it, and the accounts disagree on how it turned out for him.

Was Idris Gawr really an astronomer?

Not in the older tradition. The description of Idris as a poet, astronomer and philosopher comes from a triad naming him alongside Gwydion son of Dôn and Gwyn son of Nudd as the three renowned astronomers of Britain, and that triad belongs to the collection Iolo Morganwg published in 1807, which Rachel Bromwich identified as Iolo’s own work rather than medieval tradition. The sixteenth century account of Idris says only that he was a giant.

What are the stones at the foot of Cadair Idris?

Local tradition says the boulders by the lake below the summit are grit that Idris shook out of his shoe. The lake is called Llyn Tri Graeanyn, the lake of the three grains, after them. A separate standing stone near Trawsfynydd, Llech Idris, is said to be another of the stones, thrown from the summit and landing upright where it stands today.

Were there other giants in Meirionnydd?

Yes. The same account written around 1600 names Ysgydion, Offrwm and Ysbryn, each living on a hill that still carries his name, and says all of them lived in the time of Idris, who was king and chief over them.