One of the constantly recurring kingship themes is that of succession, the new king replacing the old. In the context, already established, of kingship being seen as a kind of symbolic mating or marriage between the king and the land, or the goddess representing the land, the relationship between old king and new king takes on an added dimension. In the gods Bel and Bran we see two archetypes: Bel is the young sun-god, the May god, god of the waxing year, Mabon or Maponus, the son, the aspirant, the lover; Bran is the old thunder-god, the god of autumn, god of the waning year, the father. When Bran dies, Bel takes his place, and, of course, eventually becomes Bran: the cycle goes on endlessly. This theme appears in many different forms in Celtic mythology. The tales of rivalry often involve shape-shifting and magic, which led in turn to stories about duelling wizards or druids, but the fundamental battle has a much more basic psychology: it is the battle between father and son for possession of the mother, who here represents not only her sex, but the nation itself.
The most famous of these shape-shifting battles in Celtic literature is not actually between the young god and the old god; rather, it is between the young god and the goddess. In the Welsh story of Taliesin, Cerridwen, the witch-goddess, is brewing the broth of knowledge and inspiration in her magic cauldron. The boy, Gwion, left to stir the pot, sucks his thumb when a drop of the hot liquid splashes on it. He is instantly filled with the knowledge of all things, past, present and future. In symbolic terms, he has acquired the power of the goddess, he has conquered death, he is now the king. Cerridwen pursues him. He changes into a hare, so she becomes a greyhound; he shape-shifts into a fish, so she becomes an otter; he becomes a bird, she becomes a hawk; he hides in a bam as a grain in a heap of wheat, so she becomes a black hen and pecks him up, ending the chase. The message of the legend, not difficult to unravel, is that it is the goddess who always triumphs, no matter how cunning or courageous the hero; the queen-goddess of the land who survives, no matter how powerful the king. There is also an underlying sexual mytho-graphy here. The goddess’s magic cauldron is the womb, from which all life is bora. Cerridwen’s swallowing of Gwion as a grain of com brings him back inside her; and is reminiscent of the many other instances in the Celtic legends where the swallowing of an insect or tiny object is associated with impregnation. In this particular story the symbolism becomes quite explicit, since the next thing that happens is that Cerridwen becomes pregnant by the grain of com and Gwion is bom again, and then goes off on another set of adventures.
The notion of the ritual mating of the king with the land is sometimes graphically explicit. In the Irish tales, the Dagda (‘Good God’), a club-wielding Hercules-type figure, straddles the river-goddess Boann for a nine-month-long night of pleasure. This god in particular, whose appetites are so gargantuan that he sometimes takes on a kind of buffoonish character, is frequently represented as being in pursuit of food or sex, or both. He is not always a buffoon, however. One of his matings is with the Morrigan, the great goddess of war and death, and that is not such a light undertaking. Some of the rival-king myths, particularly the Irish ones, involve sexual encounters which seem remarkably casual; it is only in the later legends, particularly the Brythonic stories that went via Brittany eventually into the Matter of Britain, that the encounters become more mysterious, courtly and romantic, and the male rivalries more subtle and complex.
Sometimes the rivals are brothers, rather than father and son. In the Welsh tradition, Arawn, King of the Underworld, and Amaethon or Amathaon (‘Husbandman’ or ‘Ploughman’), the god of agriculture, are both children of the great goddess Don. Amaethon steals from Arawn a hound, a deer and a bird. As a result, a great battle is fought between them, known as the Cad Goddeu, or Battle of the Trees. The poem Cad Goddeu, which tells the story of the battle, is complex, elliptical and filled with deeply obscure references, and it has been a favourite hunting ground for scholars of early Welsh literature for centuries now, but it appears to be about the capture of a holy oracular shrine by the guessing of a god’s name. Robert Graves relates it to the possible fourth-century BC arrival of Belgic Brythons in the British Isles, and their capture of a religious site, perhaps Avebury, which they subsequendy dedicated to the ash-tree god, Gwydion (the counterpart of Odin or Woden in Teutonic mythology), instead of the former god. Bran or Arawn/
In the Tain, the whole saga hinges around the pursuit of a sacred bull, the Brown Bull of Cooley, but the bull was originally one of a pair of rivals, whose tale is told in The Quarrel of the Two Pig-Keepers. Two faery kings, Ochall Ochne of the Connaught sid, and Bodb of the Munster sid, are rivals. Their rivalry is transferred to their two swineherds, Friuch (‘Bristle’) and Rucht (‘Grunt’). Both are dismissed and begin a battle of shape-shifting. They become birds of prey. Ingen (‘Talon’) and Eitte (‘Wing’); they fight for two years under the sea as Bled (‘Whale’) and Blod (‘Seabeast’); they become two stags, each destroying the other’s herd of does and making a shambles of the herd’s dwelling place; they become two warriors, Rinn (‘Point’) and Faebur (‘Edge’); they become two phantoms, Scath (‘Shadow’) and Sciath (‘Shield’); they become two dragons, and pour snow on each other’s lands; they drop down out of the air and become two maggots, Cruinniuc and Tuinniuc; one of the maggots is eaten by a cow drinking from the River Cronn in Cooley, which duly delivers it as the Donn Cuailnge or Brown Bull of Cooley, while the other maggot is swallowed by a cow belonging to Queen Medb and King Ailill and is duly delivered as the Finnbennach Ai, the White Bull of Ai Plain.
In the Tain itself, the father-son rivalry is explicit: Cu Chulainn kills his own son, Condlae or Connla, the son of Aiofe. The story ends with Cu Chulainn disembowelling his son with a stroke of the ga bulga (see page 35), then carrying his limp body from the shore where they fought amidst cries of lamentation. But Cu Chulainn himself is curiously dispassionate about the death, at least to a modern sensibility. He knows full well that it is his own son whom he is about to kill, and Emer pleads with him that ‘neither fair nor right is it to rise against your son of great and valorous deeds,’ but the battle lust still rises full in him, to the extent that even his speech is semi-coherent, as Jeffrey Gantz’s accurate translation conveys:
‘Silence, woman! It is not a woman’s advice I seek regarding deeds of bright splendour. Such deeds are not performed with a woman’s assistance. Let us be triumphant in feats. Sated the eyes of a great king.
A mist of blood upon my skin, the gore from the body of Condlae. Beautifully spears will suck the fair javelin. Whatever were down there, woman, I would go for the sake of the Ulaid.’
There is a very interesting sexual reference right towards the end of the Tain. The battles have been fought up and down, thousands of warriors have been slaughtered, we have listened to account after account of individual combat and death, and then, at last, Cu Chulainn and Queen Medb meet for the final single combat, the climax of the whole story. At precisely this moment, Medb’s period begins, or, as the text puts it, ‘Medb got her gush of blood’, and she asks her champion, Ferghus, to keep guard while she relieves herself. ‘By god,’ says Ferghus, ‘you have picked a bad time for this,’ to which Medb replies.
‘I can’t help it. I’ll die if I can’t do it.’ So the final showdown between Cu Chulainn and Medb ends in this strange anticlimax, with Medb attending to the ablutions of her menstruation, and Cu Chulainn sparing her life, even though, as he says, ‘If I killed you dead, it would only be right.’ The sudden onset of Medb’s period is a curious detail to have survived so long and through so many tellings of the tale, and it can only be supposed that it must relate to the underlying theme of the rival kings, in which, of course, only the kings die, and the queen, who is the land and the nation, continues to live and be courted. There can be no more direct and unequivocal image of the queen’s fertility than her menstruation, the absolute sign of her ability to bear children.
The Dream of Oenghus, one of the Irish legends, tells the story of Oenghus (Angus), also called Mac Oc (‘Son of Youth), who is the Bel or Mabon archetype. He actually appears in two other stories, but in this tale he is the protagonist. He is given a vision of a beautiful maiden, and pines with love for her. She is Caer Ibormeith (‘Caer of the Yew Berry’). To the Celts, and in general folklore ever since, the yew was associated with death, so Caer represents the challenge that every young king must meet: to face death and the otherworld without fear. The Bran figure or archetype is Ethel Anbhual, Caer’s father. He is the King of Sidh Uamain, in other words a faery king. He refuses to allow Caer to be wooed by Oenghus. To escape from Ethel, Caer and Oenghus shape-shift into swans at the festival of Samhain. Samhain was the time of year when movement between this world and the otherworld was especially easy. In Caer’s case, it was the only time of year when she could shape-shift. The symbolism of the swans is twofold. First, swans are famed for their faithfulness to each other; swans mate for life. Secondly, swans were very frequently associated with death, as evidenced by the many portrayals or models of funerary waggons drawn by swans which have been found at Celtic archaeological sites. Midhir and Etain, in their parallel legend, are also transformed into swans. Finally, Caer and Oenghus fly to Brugh na Boinne, Oenghus’s palace, a place sanctified by his mother, the goddess Boann who gave her name to the River Boyne. Although the tale is a romance, it contains many elements of the rival king pattern.
Perhaps the most complex of the rival theme legends is the story Math, son of Mathonwy, from the Mabinogion. Math, a king of Gwynedd, and Gwydion, his nephew (actually, his sister’s son, which has a special relevance since in Celtic law of succession the throne passes to the sister’s son if the king has no issue of his own), are two magicians of great power. The first part of the story is essentially a wizard duel, like that between Friuch and Rucht in The Quarrel of the Two Pig-Keepers. Gwydion provokes a war between north Wales and south Wales. Now a new character enters the story: this is Gwydion’s sister, Arianrhod (‘Silver Wheel’). Math tests her virginity by requiring her to step over his magic staff. She immediately delivers two objects, a child and ‘a small something’. The first, a boy, immediately runs into the sea and is given the name Dylan Eil Don (‘Sea Son of Wave’). The second, the ‘small something’, Gwydion wraps in a handkerchief and hides in a chest
Bronze sculpture of the dead hero Cu Chulainn. cast in 1916 h Oliver Shepherd, which now stands in the main Post The raven on his shoulder is the Morngan. the goddess queen of death.
At the bottom of his bed. It grows into a boy, and keeps on growing at a prodigious rate. Gwydion brings the miraculous child to meet his mother at her castle, Caer Arianrhod. (The Welsh give the name Caer Arianrhod to the northern constellation Corona Borealis.) The rest of the story tells of the exploits of the prodigious child, who is called Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘Llew, or the Lion, of the Steady Hand’). His mother places several spells on him, one of which is that he shall never taken a human woman to wife. Math and Gwydion then create for him a wife made out of wild flowers, and call her Blodeuwedd {blo-dau means ‘flowers’). While Lieu is away, his flower wife takes a lover, Gronw Pebyi; and plots with him how to kill Lieu. To complicate matters, another of Arianrhod’s spells was that Lieu could only die in very precise and peculiar circumstances: he had to be neither within a house, nor outside; neither on horseback, nor on foot; neither on water nor on dry land. Blodeuwedd contrives to have Lieu demonstrate how these irreconcilable conditions can be met, and he ends up with one foot on the back of a he-goat, the other on the edge of a bath, under a canopy of thatch on the bank of the River Cynfal. As soon as he is in position, Gronw throws a spear at him. Lieu, wounded, immediately shape-shifts into an eagle and flies up into a tree. After some time has passed, Gwydion searches for his nephew by following a sow which escapes from her sty every night. He finds the sow feeding on rotting flesh and maggots at the foot of a tree. Gwydion sings a powerful charm or englyn, and an eagle flies down. Gwydion touches the eagle with his wand and it transforms into Lieu, in piteous condition, nothing but skin and bone. Gwydion brings Lieu back to Caer Dathyl for healing, then pursues Blodeuwedd. He turns Blodeuwedd into an owl (the name means ‘Flower-face’). Gronw is brought back to meet his punishment, which is the punishment of the return blow. He must stand where Lieu stood, and receive the spear as Lieu received it. He asks for a stone to be placed between him and Lieu, which is agreed. Lieu’s spear passes straight through the stone, leaving a hole in it, and Gronw dies.
This charming and richly complex tale clearly has many symbolic themes running though it, but one of them is obviously the theme of the rivals. It is also interesting that the key relationship of sister’s son, the relationship of royal inheritance, appears twice in the story: Gwydion is Math’s nephew (or successor) and Lieu Llaw Gyffes is Gwydion’s nephew (or successor). Gwydion and Arianrhod are children of the goddess Don, who is the Brythonic counterpart of the Irish Dana, whose children are the Tuatha de Danann. There is a strong suggestion of Nordic influence in the tale, not least because Gwydion is the Brythonic variant of the name Odin or Woden, who is a northern Teutonic god. Lieu is often compared with the Irish god Lugh, and both are compared with the classical Hermes or Mercury.
One other element in this particular legend is of interest. Math, son of Mathonwy, can only stay alive by resting his feet in the lap of a virgin, unless it is a time of wai; and then the need disappears. The virgin is a symbol of untapped sexual energy, of the life force to which the king is ‘wedded’; this rather peculiar image is really only a variant of the sacred marriage idea.
Although a rather unusual one. What is interesting is that the ceremonial relationship disappears in wartime, perhaps because at such times the king is staring timelessness full in the face, and the ritual marriage with the land becomes temporarily redundant.
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