The Mabinogi (Routledge Revivals)

A Book of Essays

C. W. Sullivan III

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317519782
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

The purpose of this collection, which was first published in 1996, is to provide both an overview of the major critical approaches to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and a selection of the best essays dealing with them. The essays examine the origins of the Mabinogion, comparative analyses, and structural and thematic interpretations. This book is ideal for students of literature and Medieval studies.

III

Structural Interpretations

7

A Thematic Study of the Tale Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet

Seán Ó Coileáin

The purpose of this article is to show how a thematic analysis of a given tale may be important for an understanding of its structure and meaning. The tale in question has already been the subject of a good deal of investigation. The most comprehensive attempt to analyse it has been that of W.J. Gruffydd in his Rhiannon.¹ Kenneth Jackson has corrected and supplemented this study on several important points almost to the extent of negating Gruffydd’s conclusions altogether.² I am particularly indebted to Jackson’s observations as they concern the most critical points of the narrative and provide valuable evidence as to the nature of the tradition to which it belongs. Jackson, however, does not provide a comprehensive explanation of the tale as Gruffydd had, however unsatisfactory his theorizing may now seem in the light of Jackson’s criticism. The explanation here provided is an attempt to supply this deficiency.

My principal thesis is that the tale may be understood as a unit and that there is no justification for Gruffydd’s statement that “there is no connection between Part I of Pwyll and Part II in their present form. Part I describes one independent incident in the life of the Lord of Dyfed, which has no connection, whether stated or implied, with the latter portion beyond the fact that the same protagonist appears in both.”³ This division will be seen to be only an apparent one; what Gruffydd calls Part II is in fact a doublet of his Part I, and the reason for the duplication may be explained in terms of theme. Before entering into this explanation we may note the points of correspondence which appear with remarkable regularity between what I prefer to call Sections A and B, rather than Parts I and II:

Section A	Section B
Introductory verbal formula: A threigylgweith yd oed yn Arberth, prif lys idaw	Introductory verbal formula: A threigylgweith yd oed yn Arberth, prif lys idaw …
1. Features which suggest magic: colour of dogs.	1^1. Features which suggest magic: mound of wonders, inability to overtake lady.
2. Pwyll, separated from his companions, encounters stranger, Arawn, king of Annwn, and questions him as to his identity.	2^1. Pwyll, separated from his companions, encounters stranger, Rhiannon, daughter of Hefeydd Hen, and questions her as to her identity.
3. Arawn tells Pwyll of his fear of an enemy, Hafgan of Annwn.	3^1. Rhiannon tells Pwyll of her fear of a loathed suitor, Gwawl (who is not, however, named at this point).
4. Meeting arranged for Pwyll with Arawn’s enemy, “a year from tonight.”	4^1. Meeting arranged for Pwyll, ostensibly ith Rhiannon but also with suitor/enemy as it turns out, “a year from tonight.”
5. Instructions as to how enemy may be overcome.	[5^1. Absent at this point leading to initial defeat of hero Pwyll and further duplication.]
6. Journey to the court of Arawn and reception. Pwyll described feasting, “the queen on one side of him, and the earl, as he thought, on the other.”	6^1. Journey to the court of Rhiannon and reception. Pwyll described feasting, “Hefeydd Hen one side of Pwyll, and Rhiannon on the other.”
7. Encounter with enemy, Hafgan.	7^1. Encounter with enemy, Gwawl.
8. Enemy’s request refused by Pwyll as instructed in 5.	8^1. Enemy’s request granted by Pwyll leading to his temporary defeat.
	4^2. Meeting again arranged for Pwyll, “a year from tonight.”
	5^1. Instructions as to how enemy may be overcome.
	6^2. Journey to the court of Rhiannon. Arrival in time for feast, ostensibly prepared for Gwawl.
	7^2. Encounter with enemy, Gwawl.
	8^2. Two variations on theme of request: (a) Request granted by Gwawl to Pwyll as anticipated in 5^1 leading to latter’s triumph, (b) Request granted by Pwyll to Gwawl: of no structural significance, merely emphasizing (a).
9. Enemy, Hafgan, finally vanquished.	9^1. Enemy, Gwawl, finally vanquished.
[10. Signifigantly absent: pattern has broken down by contamination with Chaste Friend/Brother theme leading to total duplication and continuation of Section A in Section B.]	10. Pwyll and Rhiannon spend the night together “in pleasure and contentment.”

A number of points may be made at this stage. Jackson has already clearly shown that the theme of the Chaste Friend/Brother in what I call Section A is secondary. The real analogues to this section (and indeed to Section B also) are such Irish tales as Echtra Láegaire and Serglige Con Culainn, especially the former. In these a mortal is rewarded for his aid to an other world being with the love of a fairy woman. Of Pwyll, Jackson says: “The mortal hero’s reward, the love of a beautiful woman, is evidently an integral part of the plot, but in the episode in Pwyll this has been very much modified by the introduction of the international themes of the transformation into the likeness of the husband and of the Chaste Brother.”⁴ These two themes are obviously mutually exclusive as in one sexual relationship is specifically granted and in the other specifically denied. What has not been realized, I think, is the extent to which the substitution of one for the other in the case of Pwyll has determined the shape of the tale. In Pwyll we have the added complication that the pattern must conclude with the birth of Gwri/Pryderi, and it is this which makes the substitution of the Chaste Friend/Brother theme completely unacceptable and leads to a new beginning in Section B. The author himself seems to have been uneasy about the substitution and it is possible that at one point in Section A a vestige of the earlier pattern remains. If we compare stages 6 and 6¹ above, we see that in 6¹ (Section B) Pwyll is seated at the feast with Hefeydd Hen on one side and Rhiannon on the other, whereas in 6 (Section A), the queen is on one side and “the earl, as he thought” on the other. Who is this mysterious earl? The structure would indicate that he is none other than Arawn himself. The introduction of the Chaste Friend/Brother theme demands the absence of Arawn, while the earlier pattern requires his presence as the man whom Pwyll has come to aid. Faced with this dilemma the author has compromised with the shadowy figure of the earl of whom he (rather than Pwyll) does not feel quite sure. This is a good example of the genesis of a traditional tale. Each theme brings with it the sum of its uses and associations in the tradition, and some of these may be at odds with the immediate context in a given tale. If the primary theme is then ousted by an associated secondary theme, as in this instance, the tale may be given an entirely new direction which has to be corrected in accordance with the felt purpose and pattern of the narrative. In this way a tension is created between theme and structure, and it is this tension and balance which generates the tale. Again, the underlying structural logic is not always fully consistent with the narrative as we can see from a comparison of 4/7 and 4¹/7¹ above. While in 4¹ Rhiannon does not mention a contest with Gwawl in arranging the meeting with Pwyll, it is structurally inevitable that this contest take place at 7¹, as it does at the equivalent stage of Section A.

As Section A is wholly duplicated in Section B, so Section B is partially duplicated within itself from stages 4² to 8² inclusive. This duplication is of a more conventional and obvious kind similar to that which Propp describes as sometimes occurring in the folktale on the completion of Function XXII of his morphological scheme.⁵ In Pwyll this repetition is brought about by the initial omission of stage 5 the presence of which is necessary for the completion of the pattern. A similar device, the theft of the child on birth, introduces what I would call Section C of the tale the relationship of which to the continuation of Section B may be represented as follows:

Section B (cont.)	Section C
11. Birth of child, associated with birth of puppies.	11^1. Birth of foals.
12. Theft of child.	12^1. Theft of foals.
[Section concludes with secondary Calumniated Wife theme.]	13. Finding of Child: equivalence to rebirth emphasized by feigned pregnancy of Teyrnon’s wife.

Professor Jackson has provided us with an exhaustive analysis of these events in terms of their traditional associations. A factor in the duplication must have been the author’s familiarity with two traditional options as regards the Congenital Helpful Animals (puppies, foals) leading him to include both in a confused manner, as explained by Jackson: “There is some reason to believe that Rhiannon was in some way associated with horses, if not originally actually a horse goddess. This fact, together with the motif of the congenital dogs already in our tale, gave some storyteller the idea of introducing the well-known motif of the congenital horse which is generally associated with the congenital dog in the international tale AT. 303, which he must have known.”⁶ The above set of comparisons expresses this in a different way. Here the pattern of structural relationships is arrived at by reading horizontally, as opposed to the sequence of events which is to be read vertically column by column.

Rather than see Teyrnon as a helper figure, as Jackson does, I would regard him and his wife as variants of Hefeydd and Rhiannon just as the latter in turn are multiforms of Arawn and his wife. (The fact that Hefeydd is Rhiannon’s father rather than her husband is not of any real significance.) Part of the process of duplication is the creation of different male and female figures to whom the tale successively transfers itself as Sections A and B are in turn diverted from their purpose, the first being brought up short by the Chaste Friend/Brother theme and the second losing itself in the equally unproductive theme of the Calumniated Wife. The Calumniated Wife theme is not as fatal to the purpose of the tale as that of the Chaste Friend/Brother, so that the division between Sections A and B appears much more clearly than that between Sections B and C. There is even an unsatisfactory reconciliation scene between the protagonists of the latter sections, and in this scene we may have further evidence of the structural division in the differing names of the child. As Pryderi he is probably to be grouped with Hefeydd and Rhiannon and as Gwri with Teyrnon and his wife. Although he is not given a name within Section B proper, it is thought necessary to rename him on his being retransferred from the Section C to the Section B characters. So the verbal identification of Gwri with Pryderi in the reconciliation scene might be interpreted as an attempt to rationalize a difference in nomenclature which had its real origins in the development of the tale as described above.

The growth process envisaged here would suggest that the basic structure developed on the level of oral transmission, although one could not rule out the possibility that it might also arise in a literary tale belonging to what might be broadly described as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. Origins
• II. Comparative Analyses
• III. Structural Interpretations
• IV. Thematic Interpretations
• Works Cited
• About the Contributors