Publisher: Graffeg Press
Publication: 6th June 2024
‘You must go through into the heart of the castle.
In the very central hall you will find my father the Giant. He is so enormous that the ceiling is as high as the sky. You must tell him that you want to marry me. He will give you a list of tasks- of things and people you have to find for him.
For everything he demands, just answer carelessly “Yes, that will be easy for us.”
Never show any doubt or fear. If you show even a flicker of fear, he will kill you all.’
The Demands of the Giant. Re-visiting Culhwch and Olwen
There are many fascinating medieval Welsh stories, but I have always found Culhwch and Olwen to be particularly intriguing, and have wanted to write my own version of it for some time. I’m not an academic, but a writer for children; I make no claims for scholarly accuracy, but I did want to write a modern interpretation for telling and reading for pleasure.
Of course, even a brief reading makes it clear that Culhwch and Olwen is not one story, but many different tales, held inside a framework. It’s a heap, a tapestry, a tangle, a hedgerow of stories. Because of this it has a broad range of styles- comedy, sly puns, pastiche, weirdness, folklore, suspense, romance and pure magic, and it ends with the great Hunt of a ferocious Boar-king. That hunt is printed tightly across the landscape of Wales, so that, while being the most mysterious of tales, it is also, oddly, one of those most linked to the land we inhabit today. Under the motorways and roads, over the fields and mountain tracks, the footsteps of the Twrch Trwyth, the great Boar, can still be traced.
However, like many of these tantalising old tales, it’s the gaps and holes in the narrative, the doubles and inconsistencies, the bits that don’t make sense, that intrigue me most, the feeling that in this episode something is missing, or in another place that some connection is lost, or half-remembered. Filling these gaps with interpretations of my own is a way of making the story partly mine, of contributing to its long history, and adds to the pleasure of the re-telling.
Culhwch and Olwen is the longest of the stories written down in mediaeval times, though it had most probably been told in some form by storytellers in the halls and
monasteries of mediaeval Wales for a long time before it was recorded. It is found in two manuscripts that still survive, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. There are no other versions, and it’s thought by scholars that the earliest text of the White Book may have been compiled about 1100.
The story certainly has an archaic, uncivilised, uncourtly feel. Savagery surfaces in it, dark magic lurks under its events. Its comedy is brash and sometimes a little cruel. It has a power that is difficult to pin down.
Whoever put this manuscript together,- a monk probably, or maybe a literate bard-, I can’t help feeling they were enjoying themselves immensely. Let’s call them the Scribe. He- or even she- seems to have gathered up a pile of all the stories they knew or had written versions of, and decided to pack them tightly, somehow, into one vast, exploding, riotous, often funny tale.
The outline of the story is very simple. Culhwch, a prince born in a pig-sty, is cursed by his stepmother that he must marry only Olwen, the daughter of the ferocious Giant Ysbaddaden. Knowing this marriage will cause his own death, the Giant demands a list of over 40 magical objects, animals and people that must be brought for the wedding, and threatens that if Culhwch fails in even one task, the marriage is off. It seems impossible. But Culhwch is the cousin of Arthur, and in this, the first lengthy Arthurian story, it is the sorcery, skill and swordplay of the men and women of Arthur’s Court, who will actually achieve the tasks. One by one, the objects are assembled, though the Scribe seems to lose track in places- some of the Giant’s demands are never met, and in other places things he hasn’t asked for are brought. Clearly there are some different versions being put together here, and I can’t help feeling that a few of them originally had nothing to do with Culhwch’s quest at all, but were independent tales that have been woven in just because they are enjoyable stories. There are folktales like Six go through the World, mystical episodes like the Oldest Animals, and some that are pure fun, like the Very Black Witch from the Uplands of Hell.
The tale begins with telling us how Culhwch got his name, when his mother fled to the forest and gave birth to him in a pig-run. This is a fascinating episode because, although it resembles similar folk-tales, there seems to be something missing from it. His mother is called Goleuddydd, which means Daylight, or Light of Day. It might almost be the name of a goddess. It made me wonder whether Culhwch should be some sort of hero born of a divine mother, and that his father might not be Cilydd but maybe some more powerful male. Because of the strange theme of pigs that haunts the story, there was a great temptation to suggest in my version that this father might be the Twrch Trwyth himself, an evil king transformed for his sins into a great Boar, especially as the story ends with Culhwch having to hunt the Boar in order to achieve his wedding with Olwen. Olwen’s father must die if they wed. Maybe Culhwch’s father had to die too? Well, it was an idea. But in the end I decided to stay true to the tale as the Scribe told it, even though we never find out why Culhwch’s mother fled to the forest.
But I did add some poems.
There are moments in the story where poetry is needed. The descriptions of Culhwch riding to Arthur’s court, or Olwen’s beauty as she walks, leaving white flowers in her footsteps, are written in a heightened prose and I feel they were once poems. I also found a few other places where I could change the pace of the story in this way, and almost pause it, to muse on a person or event, to step back from the narrative and look at it more obliquely.
I also, alas, had to leave things out. I wanted this version to be accessible to children and adults and it was necessary to streamline a little. Jokes, puns, odd little fragments had to go. The main thing I have omitted, as experienced readers of this story will see at once, is the astonishing Court-list, the roll-call of Arthur’s men and women, with all their crazy abilities and weirdly magical powers. It runs to several pages, and is rather like a compressed and joyful suggestion of all the other stories and amazing characters the Scribe knew about but couldn’t fit into Culhwch’s quest. I love it, and mourn its omission here. Look it up, in the original story, and you’ll see what I mean.
There are also odd doubles in the story, ghosts and repetitions. For example, there are at least two great Boars, several swords and a lot of different huntsmen and dogs, all of whom Culhwch is told to find, though many are not mentioned again. I had to tidy them up a bit. This Scribe knew a lot of stories, or had access to many manuscripts, and was really trying to create something huge out of them all. I think of him as a fantasy writer of his time, a maker of new magical narratives out of old myths and bits of lost lore.
My favourite of all the episodes in the story is the finding of Mabon ap Modron through the questioning of the Oldest Animals. This is a particularly rhythmic, patterned part of the text. The animals’ responses are poetic and haunting, echoing each other. I have written it rather like an oral telling, because it has that sense of back and forth response, of ritual question and answer, broken only at the end by the knowledge of the Salmon, always the wisest of beasts. And the journey of the enormous fish up the river Severn, carried on what surely must be the Severn Bore,
with Cai and Bedwyr on his shoulders, is a joyful, exhilarating climax to a perfectly formed story, fitted skillfully by the Scribe into his jigsaw of nested narratives.
The whole quest culminates in the exciting final section, where the dogs and huntsmen and horses and magical items must be used to hunt the great Boar and obtain the razor, comb and shears from between his ears. When I was writing this episode I noticed how the story changes here. I think the story of Twrch Trwyth, the evil king transformed into a Boar for his sins, was again, originally a wholly separate tale, where Arthur and his Court hunt him down as an enemy. He is certainly linked with Arthur in a text of the ninth century, so their rivalry goes back a long way. The hunt of the Twrch feels different to the rest of the story. For example, the geography becomes very specific. The breathless course of the Hunt from Ireland into Wales from Porth Clais in Dyfed, right across Dyfed and Gwent to the river Hafren and then over to Cornwall, is so clear you can follow it on a map, and there are many place names referenced and explained by the deaths of men or pigs and the events that happened there. Whatever the Scribe was using to construct this part of his story, whether poems or a manuscript, it was highly detailed. I’m sure he had something before him to refer to. It is a completely literate part of the tale, written in great detail, in contrast to some of the earlier sections, which locate their events in the far vaguer, unspecified landscapes of folktale.
The story ends happily. Although, a little strangely, the Boar escapes, the razor and comb and shears are snatched, the tasks are accomplished and the wedding takes place. Culhwch marries Olwen, the Giant is killed, Arthur’s land is at peace. Of course there are small things that are unresolved, and that tickle this reader’s imagination. What happens when Culhwch returns home with his new bride? What
does his stepmother say? Who was it who stole Mabon son of Modron from between his mother and the wall and why? How did the Boar get a razor between his ears? But those are for another day.
Culhwch and Olwen is an amazing treasury of wonder, and we in Wales should be proud of it. It should be an action movie, a game, a fantasy series, an opera, a musical comedy, a cartoon! It has such potential for re-invention that every engagement with it will be different and certainly whole fantasy novel sequences might be extrapolated from it.
I hope that this re-telling will bring it to a new audience of children and adults, who will go on to read the original, in Welsh or in translation, and and enter the amazing and comic world of Arthur’s Court, of talking animals and stolen swords, bone-crushing women and little lame ants. I dedicate it to the Scribe, a genius of story-telling, with thanks for all the wonderful weirdness that he or she preserved for us to enjoy, out of the lost manuscripts of the past.
Some Further Reading
The Mabinogion – trans Sioned Jones Oxford University Press
The Mabinogion – trans Jones and Jones Everyman
Trioedd Ynys Prydein – ed Rachel Bromwich Cardiff
The Arthur of the Welsh – ed Rachel Bromwich et al Cardiff 1991