Otherworld Wales

Ancient stories are seeds in time, often planted by oral tradition. Enchanted Wales: Myth and magic in Welsh storytelling is an enchanting study in which Miranda Aldhouse-Green traces to the deep past a rich collection of Welsh myths – “transmitted between individuals and communities” – that survive thanks to the monks who set them down in the medieval period. In the Mabinogion, for example, a collection of prose stories compiled in Middle Welsh in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, we encounter the “otherworld”, a place variously depicted as either paradisiacal or menacing. The otherworld is the source of fantastical narrative: within its shifting borders are found tales of vanishing babies; of superhuman kings so large, they can use their bodies to form bridges; of magical golden bowls and star-crossed lovers.

Some of the human cast members in Welsh myth resemble Marvel superheroes. But there are also tales of fantastic creatures, including magical ravens that croak prophetically about future events and are said to have shapeshifting abilities. There are interesting correlations between myths across different traditions, links forged between Wales and Ireland in particular, but also persistent tropes shared by numerous cultures, including “tripleism”, which plays a key role not only in Welsh myth, but also in Macbeth’s trio of witches and old nursery rhymes. Threeness is “an endemic part of British and European Iron Age and Roman provincial symbolism”.

Cauldrons also bubble away in various folkloric traditions: in the Second Branch of the Mabinogion there is a cauldron of rebirth, and another large enough to store all the treasures of Ireland. Aldhouse-Green elaborates on horrific customs involving these vessels, but notes reassuringly that in ancient Greece “separate cauldrons were required for cooking and for sacrificial blood collection”. Cauldrons are indelibly associated with witchcraft, of course: the Mabinogion contains a tale of nine witches plaguing the hero Peredur, son of Efrawg, who fares rather better than Macbeth in disposing of them.

The majority of people accused of witchcraft were women, and Welsh mythology seldom offers sympathetic portrayals of female figures, who tend to be scapegoated or punished in bizarre ways. Branwen, a maiden forced to work and sleep in a castle kitchen, is beaten daily by a butcher with bloodied hands. Blodeuwedd, who cheats on her husband and arranges his murder, has a less obvious claim on our sympathies, perhaps, though the murder itself is a pitiably complex business, given that her spouse must be killed at dusk while wrapped in a net, with one foot resting on a black goat and another in a bath. Aldhouse-Green concludes that ancient storytellers shared their tales with each other and delivered them to Welsh and Irish audiences alike, which accounts for the persistent mythological connections between the countries. She also proposes that there are ghostly traces of druidism in the Mabinogion, while Delyth Badder and Mark Norman tackle ghost lore head on in The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts.

Some of the accounts in this book have never been translated into English before, though historically, as the authors point out, tales of Welsh hauntings have been mostly collected since the seventeenth century by members of the English gentry. At any rate the ghosts in Welsh folklore, on this evidence, tend to have unfinished business with the living, aristocratic or not, and are particularly fond of pubs (spectral presences being rarely bad for business). Typically they also haunt the landscape: highways and byways are crammed with phantoms, fairies, devils and shapeshifting figures that transform from men in bright white clothing to greyhounds bounding across fields.

Reports of phantom animals are infrequent across Britain as a whole, but in Wales they seem to be common. In his history of a parish, Hanes Plwyf Llanegryn (1948), William Davies records local belief in a singular spirit that could assume the form of a bull, a dog, a carrion bird and even a raging fire, but which, if it felt kindly enough towards someone, might simply become a sheep. According to Badder and Norman water spirits may also take the form of peaceably “aquatic dairy cows”, while one of the most terrifying ghouls recounted in the story collection Ysten Sioned (1882) is a weeping child who becomes a pool of blood in the hands of a sympathetic stranger. Ghostly dogs can be traced back to the Mabinogion and are often portrayed as malevolent, though they may equally be spiritual guardians: Badder and Norman are attentive to the intersection of Welsh ghost stories with church culture. The “line between ysbrydion (ghosts) and ysbrydoedd (spirits) in Welsh ghost-lore is tenuous, with angels, demons, fairies and ‘ghosts’ proper often being lumped together”, and evil spirits are as strong an indication of the divine presence as their angelic counterparts. The Devil himself has often been portrayed as “dimwitted and farcical” in Welsh folklore, but “the fear of damnation was no laughing matter”: sins such as breaking the Sabbath have been traditionally met with the sight of the Devil dancing and stamping his cloven feet into the ground.

The earliest recorded Welsh poltergeists (rumbling ghosts) feature in a twelfth-century work, The Itinerary through Wales. One such apparition from the Itinerary allegedly created powerful gusts of wind capable of cracking windows in a village in Gwynedd. These restless spirits might then be confined in receptacles or the beams of houses. The motif of the White Lady, or Ladi Wen, was also widespread. In most manifestations she had wings or clawed fingers and offered greetings that prophesied imminent death. It is interesting that such omens were “particularly prevalent among those communities whose life expectancy was demonstrably shorter than average”, and many folkloric tales seem to echo, or even to anticipate, genuine disasters. Ghost stories conceivably hark back to the ancient Babylonian period and, though the key premonitory or otherworldly features are remarkably consistent across times and cultures, Badder and Norman make an excellent case for Wales possessing “its own extremely specific imagery, rituals and belief systems”.

Gary Raymond’s Abandon All Hope: A personal journey through the history of Welsh literature is very different – a non-linear survey that encourages several approaches. We can choose to: read the book from beginning to end; read the main narrative without consulting the entertaining biographical endnotes; or read just the endnotes, which constitute the bulk of the book. Dante’s Divina Commedia is the model for what the author calls “creative non-fiction, a place where subject and form edify one another in perpetuity”. Readers can canter through thirty-four cantos, meeting a variety of fascinating authors on the way.

Canto I introduces the unnamed protagonist, a stand-in for Raymond himself, who wakes under the shade of a tree with no idea how he got there. He soon meets George Henry Borrow, the author of Wild Wales (1862) and translator of Faust, and has a fractious encounter with the artist and poet Brenda Chamberlain (the founder of the Caseg Press), who died of a fatal overdose of sedatives in 1971. The woods thicken and our protagonist is shepherded through the “otherworld” of his native culture and literature. In the Third Circle of Canto VI authors who refuse to write about Wales are eternally roasted. In Canto XIV the plains are filled with prolific writers, punished for their “profligacy”. They include the novelist, dramatist and Punch columnist Gwyn Thomas, whose “voice is alive on the page, vital and cutting and hilarious and unforgiving”, and Caradoc Evans, the Cardiganshire short-story writer and playwright who “should have been to Wales what Joyce was to Ireland”. (Certainly, Evans’s collection My People: Stories of the peasantry of West Wales, published in 1915, merits comparison with Dubliners.)

In Canto XXXIV the protagonist reaches the end of Uffern, the Welsh otherworld, and hears a voice described as “a horn across the sea”. This is Dylan Thomas, of course, and his appearance is quite something: “buried up to his waist in what looked like cigarette butts and the flicked casings of shelled bar nuts”, he resembles “a giant horrific cherub, bloated and clammy, ash falling gently from the roll-up … between his lips”. It seems fitting to conclude with the appearance of Thomas, a writer of spectacular incantatory abilities – our protagonist is captivated by his voice – whose works thrum with rhythmic cadences, but also “something of a manchild”, incapable (in Raymond’s view) of refraining from outlandish behaviour. It is on meeting Thomas that the protagonist is hauled back to reality.

At one point on Gary Raymond’s Dantean journey, Kate Roberts, the author of the classic novel Traed Mewn Cyffion (1936; Feet in Chains, 1977), set in the quarrying district of North Wales where she was raised, warns the wanderer not to forget about Welsh writing itself, for it is writing, rather than biographical legend, that is magical, and “magic is important”. In these three harmoniously different books the authors manage to distil something of that magic, raising ghosts of the past while pointing towards the appreciative future.

Darren Freebury-Jones’s most recent book is the poetry collection Rambling, 2024. Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers will be published in October

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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