Rhitta Gawr

The mantle reached from his crown to his heels and not one thread of it was wool. It was made of beards, cut from the faces of kings he had beaten, sewn edge to edge in every shade from black to iron grey, heavy as a soaked fleece and rank with the oil of the men it came off. Rhitta Gawr wore it the way other rulers wore ermine. When it was nearly finished he sent word south that a single beard was still missing from the collar, and named whose it was.

Arthur’s answer took the form of an army marching into Gwynedd. Almost everything else known about Rhitta hangs off that one exchange, and the eight centuries since have been spent arguing about where he died, whether he was a giant at all, and how much of him was the work of a stonemason from Glamorgan with a genius for forgery.

He surfaces first in Latin. Around 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth put him into the History of the Kings of Britain as Ritho, a giant of a place called Mount Aravius, and gave him no scene of his own. Arthur recalls him afterwards, standing over the body of the giant of Mont Saint-Michel, observing that he had not fought anything so strong since Ritho. The insult itself is preserved whole. The giant had made himself furs from the beards of kings he had killed, and instructed Arthur to flay off his own beard and send it, since the beard of the king of Britain deserved the place of honour. Failing that, a duel, the victor to take both mantle and beard. Arthur went. The fight ended with a sword driven through the giant’s skull to the back of the head.

Geoffrey never says where Mount Aravius was, and nobody has satisfactorily worked it out. It may be his attempt at a Latin form of Eryri, the Welsh name for the Snowdon massif, and the Welsh translations of his chronicle known as the Brut y Brenhinedd, made by the middle of the thirteenth century, put the killing squarely in Gwynedd. Whether they were correcting Geoffrey or drawing on native stories he had already borrowed from is one of those questions the surviving manuscripts refuse to settle.

There is a faint trace of the name older than Geoffrey. The court list in Culhwch and Olwen, a Welsh tale reckoned to go back to about 1100, includes a warrior called Gormant son of Ricca, and nothing else about him survives. Whatever Ricca was to the storyteller reciting that list, he was already worth naming. Going the other way, the beard collector reappears in Thomas Malory in 1485 as King Rience of North Wales, who has trimmed his robe with the beards of eleven kings and wants Arthur’s to make twelve. Malory loses interest in him halfway through and lets him be dragged off by Balin and Balan, which is a poor end for a man with that wardrobe.

Ask what he looked like and the record goes quiet in an interesting way. Geoffrey supplies no face, no colouring, no measurement. The fullest telling of his story refuses even to call him a giant, describing him instead as a man the size of the largest man anyone had seen, and a later retelling simply doubles him. What every version keeps is the mantle. He is a figure defined entirely by what he took from other people and wore.

The tale most retold today comes from the 1790s, and it is not old. Two kings of Britain, Nynniaw and Peibiaw, walk out under a clear night. Nynniaw boasts of his beautiful and extensive field, meaning the whole sky. Peibiaw counters with his countless herds grazing on it, meaning the stars, with the moon for their shepherdess. The argument over whether the cattle may graze the field runs from words to war, and both kingdoms are ruined for it. Rhitta Gawr, king of Wales, consults his laws and his people, marches on the pair, beats them and shaves them. Twenty-eight kings of Britain come to avenge the insult and lose their beards too. Then the kings of the surrounding countries come, and lose theirs. These, Rhitta says, pointing at the heap, are the animals that grazed my field, and I have driven them out. He makes the mantle, and afterwards sets order and law between king and king and nation and nation across Britain, Norway, Germany, Gaul, Spain and Italy.

The man who wrote that was Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who said he had it from an older book and who claimed, as he often did, to be descended from its hero. Iolo’s transcriptions of ancient manuscripts are now known to be forgeries, and the two Triads of the Island of Britain that mention Rhitta are almost certainly his own composition as well. His Rhitta is a pacifist’s tyrant, a conqueror who conquers in order to stop wars, invented by a republican living through the Napoleonic years. Arthur does not appear in it. Neither does Rhitta’s death.

The grave is the other invention, and it took longer. A poem by Rhys Goch Eryri, who died around 1420, puts Rhitta on a ridge of Carnedd Llywelyn, not Snowdon. At the end of the sixteenth century Siôn Dafydd Rhys collected Welsh giant lore and recorded two incompatible accounts: one in which Arthur killed Rhitta and buried him on the summit of Yr Wyddfa, after which his fellow giants carried the body off to the Aran mountains in Merionethshire, and another in which the fight happened on the Arans in the first place. That second version has the tidier logic behind it, since Aran sounds like Aravius and there is a slope near Bwlch y Groes called Rhiw y Barfau, the slope of the beards. In 1899 Sir John Rhys, Professor of Celtic at Oxford, put a query in a magazine asking about the cairn on top of Snowdon. A correspondent from Dolwyddelan wrote back that his grandfather, living near the mountain at the end of the previous century, had called the summit Gwyddfa Rhita. Rhys printed it in Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx in 1901, and that settled it for everyone who came after.

There is no mound up there. No antiquarian or archaeological work has found a burial cairn on the summit, and the usual reading of Wyddfa is not tomb but conspicuous place. Add to this the objection Lewis Morris raised in 1757, that the Welsh cawr means a powerful prince rather than a monster, and the giant of Snowdon starts to look like a translation error standing on a place name standing on a chronicle.

Whatever else he was, he was formidable in a fight. Geoffrey’s Arthur, who kills the Mont Saint-Michel giant almost casually, names Ritho as the harder opponent, and the duel in the fuller Welsh telling goes on long enough to split both helmets, break both skullcaps, shatter their arms and darken the light of their eyes with sweat and blood. Iolo, never one to undersell, left a fragment in which Rhitta strikes the ground with his foot until the earth trembles, and the skies, and the stars, and the tremor runs through all the worlds to the uttermost depths.

His weaknesses come out of the same habit that made him famous. Trophy taking requires an audience, so he announces himself, sends messengers, states his terms and names the day. The mantle only means anything if the next king knows about it, which guarantees that eventually the wrong king does. And the duel he proposes is the narrowest ground he could have chosen, one man at arm’s length with no army behind him and nothing to hide behind but his own reach. Arthur was faster with a sword. That was all it took.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Rhitta Gawr?

Rhitta Gawr was a giant of Welsh tradition who defeated a long succession of kings and cut off their beards, sewing them into a mantle that reached from his head to his heels. He first appears as Ritho in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136, where King Arthur kills him in single combat. Later Welsh tradition attached him to the mountains of Eryri and to the summit now called Yr Wyddfa.

Why did Rhitta Gawr want King Arthur’s beard?

Rhitta collected the beards of kings he had beaten as proof of victory, and he considered Arthur, as king of Britain, to deserve the place of honour on the garment. He sent a messenger demanding that Arthur cut off his own beard and send it, and offered a duel as the alternative, with the winner taking both the mantle and the loser’s beard. Arthur chose the duel and killed him.

Is Rhitta Gawr really buried on Snowdon?

There is no archaeological or antiquarian evidence of a burial mound or cairn on the summit of Yr Wyddfa, and the Welsh name is usually read as “conspicuous place” rather than “tomb”. Earlier Welsh sources put Rhitta’s grave elsewhere, on Carnedd Llywelyn in a poem of about 1420 and on the Aran mountains in Merionethshire in a sixteenth-century account. The Snowdon version became standard only after Sir John Rhys published it in Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx in 1901.

How much of the Rhitta Gawr story is genuinely ancient?

The core, a beard-collecting giant killed by Arthur, goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth in about 1136, and a warrior called Gormant son of Ricca appears in the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen even earlier. The popular version in which Rhitta punishes the quarrelling kings Nynniaw and Peibiaw and brings law to half of Europe was written in the 1790s by Iolo Morganwg, a Welsh antiquarian whose manuscript transcriptions are now known to be forgeries. That later story contains no Arthur and no death.

Is Rhitta Gawr the same as King Rience in Malory?

They are the same figure in different hands. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur of 1485, King Rience of North Wales has trimmed his robe with the beards of eleven kings and demands Arthur’s as the twelfth, which is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s giant with the name and setting changed. Malory does not kill him off, having him captured by Balin and Balan instead.

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