HIGH IN THE skies above Belorus, a man was plunging to earth. He saw another man soaring up towards him at the same speed. As they passed each other, the man who was rising shouted, “Good morning, Comrade! What is your job?”
“Good morning to you, Comrade!” said the man who was falling. “I design parachutes. And what job is yours?”
“I am a bomb disposal expert,” said the other.1
That story was told to me by a Russian Professor of Folklore in Moscow in 1986. His special area of research was the xenophobic joke, and he said that every country in Europe had an area that was, by tradition, populated by the inept and/or irrational: a Place of Fools. He told me that, historically, every Slav considered the Slav to the west of him to be inferior, and he had developed a thesis, which I would not like to have to subject to rigorous scrutiny, that the Place of Fools always lay to the west.
“And that,” he said, “is why the English have Irish Jokes.” He went on to explain that the cause of there being a Place of Fools was xenophobia, in its original exact meaning of “fear of the stranger”, rather than in its more modern use as “dislike of the stranger”.
It was an interesting conversation, but I did not have the knowledge to test it for flaws. However, it did set me thinking about the relationship between Wales and its marcher counties, especially my native Cheshire. I realised that, although I had been brought up to have strong opinions about the Welsh, I knew of no Welsh Jokes. The antipathy was more the paranoia of neighbours than a xenophobia. One example will show the difference. My mother drilled into me from earliest childhood that the Welsh were not to be trusted, nor was I ever to have anything to do with a Welsh girl, because “their eyes are too close together”. That was a serious warning, not a joke.
I plundered my mind for a Welsh Joke, yet could find none. The nearest I came was in an anecdote about Welshness, told by the late Lord Elwyn Jones, so there can be no charge of racism laid against the story. It is, no doubt, apocryphal, but no less true for that.
Lord Elwyn was driving his car across mid-Wales. He was high in the mountains, in cloud, and thoroughly lost. He saw a small, old man, cap on head, sack on shoulders. He stopped the car, and said, “Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?” The old man looked him slowly up and down, down and up, and replied, “You are in a car.”
Elwyn Jones said, afterwards, that here was the perfect answer to a Parliamentary Question. It is concise. It is accurate. It tells you nothing that you want to know.
More to my point, it certainly was not Irish, in the English, idiomatic, pejorative use of the word. It reminded me more of my father, who was a quiet, gently spoken, kind man, of little formal education and few words. He was a painter and decorator, and I remembered being with him one day as he was up a ladder, painting a house on an isolated road. An open-topped sports car pulled up. In it were two parodies of the chinless wonder English middle class, each wearing his stitched-peak brown cap. The driver started badly with, “I say, my man!” My father rested his brush. “Which is the way to Prestbury?”
“What end do you want?” said my father.
“What end?” said the driver. “Prestbury!”
“Oh, come on,” said the passenger. “The man’s a fool.” With the timing of a professional, in the silence before the exhaust roared, my father said, “I may be a fool. But I’m not lost.”
The old Welshman and my father could have spoken each other’s lines. But my father was not Welsh. Was he?
I thought further. Yes. Without “The Troubles”, we were queasy about the Irish, in an amorphous way. And there was antagonism, but not fear, with regard to the Welsh. But, cry you mercy, we did not have to go to Wales to find antagonism. My own village was perpetually at war with the next one, two miles away: so much so, that the natives never refer to the places by their map names of “Alderley” and “Wilmslow”, but as Sodom and Gomorrah. And to go to the hilltop settlement of Mow Cop was to risk grievous bodily harm. On Mow Cop, in my parents’ youth, the natural reaction to a stranger was to beat him up on sight and to wrap his bicycle around his neck.
I have met only one instance of genuine Anglo-Welsh antagonism, and here both sides were provocative. My secondary education uncovered in me a linguistic ability above the norm. I appeared to soak up languages without effort, and I became a Classicist. In my last year at school, we went for a day trip to Tomen-y-Mur. The weather was hot. Before setting off back to Manchester in the coach, we stopped at Pentrefoelas for sustenance. There were about twelve of us, and our form master.
As we entered the shop, we interrupted an animated conversation that was being conducted in English, but, at the moment the Saxons appeared, everybody switched to Welsh. It was all a bit pointed. We stood there, feeling foolish; then our form master turned to us and asked us, in Greek, what we wanted to buy. So, possibly for the first time in Wales, a shopping list was drawn up in Attic Greek, and total silence from the other customers. Then, insult to injury, the list completed, our form master conveyed the requirements to the shopkeeper in fluent Welsh. It is a matter of record that we, and the coach, left Pentrefoelas unscathed.
However, all the way home, my head was filled with those few seconds of music I had heard in the shop. And, when I got home, I annoyed my parents by using every spare moment I could to find a wavelength on the ancient radio that, through the crackling, would let me hear Welsh. It was a change from Geraldo and from Forces’ Favourites that was not appreciated.
I felt that I understood this language without knowing what it was saying. I could not learn, for lack of facilities, but the sensation was one more of remembering. It was as if I were hearing the knights, who lay in the cave with their king under the hill behind our house, talking in their sleep.
When, three years later, I began to write my first book, which is about that hill and those knights, I knew that the personal names of my other-worldly characters could not be synthetic and had to pre-date the English. So I came upon Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales, and on something called The Mabinogion. And I was angry.
Why had I been filled with so many alien tongues and made especially proficient in Latin and Greek, whose sounds were wondrous, but whose tales were, for me, then, as bloodless and as cold as their marble? Why had I been kept from a language that not only sounded to be “mine”, but also told its stories as I dreamed my dreams? I read that the material was obscure. But, even in translation, it was not obscure to me. Why should something be called “obscure” because it spoke fact as poetry, history as legend, sound as sense? The boon list in “Culhwch ac Olwen” changed me for ever in my heart. When I read Preiddeu Annwfn (The Spoils of the Otherworld), the hairs of my neck rose, as they do to this day.
Complete was the grave of Gwair in Caer Sidi,
In the tale of Pwyll and Pryderi.
No one before him went into it.
A heavy blue chain held the faithful youth,
And before the Spoils of Annwfn gloriously he sings,
And for ever the song shall last.
Three times the fullness of Prydwen we went into it.
Except seven, none came from Caer Sidi.
Am I not worth the fame to be heard in song?
In Caer Pedryvan, four times turning;
The first word from the cauldron, when was it spoken?
Is it not the cauldron of the Chieftain of Annwfn?
What does it mean to do?
It will not boil the food of a coward.
A flashing bright sword to him was raised
And left in the hand of Lleminawg.
And before the gate of the Cold Place
The horns of light shall be burning.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none came back from Caer Vedwyd.
Am I not worth the fame to be heard in song?
In the four-cornered castle, in the island of the strong door,
Where twilight and the black night move together
Bright wine was the offer of the host.
Three times the fulness of Prydwen we went on sea.
Except seven, none came out of Caer Rigor.
I will not let praise to the lords of letters.
Beyond Caer Wydyr they saw not the might of Arthur.
Sixty hundred men stood on the wall.
It was hard to speak to their sentinel.
Three shiploads of Prydwen there went with Arthur,
Except seven, none came from Caer Golud.
I shall not give place to those with trailing shields.
They know not on what day that Chieftain arose.
They know not on what day, or what was the cause of it,
Or on what hour of the splendid day that Cwy was born,
Who caused that he should not go to the Dales of Devwy.
They know not the brindled ox, thick his head-band.
Seven score knobs in his collar.
And when we went with Arthur of anxious memory,
Except seven, none came out of Caer Vandwy . . .
Here was a multi-level logic that gave me no problem. Here was a language that spoke straight. How could some Welsh scholars complain, for instance, of The Third Branch of The Mabinogion, that it is “a medley of themes that are hard to disentangle”, or that to compose The Mabinogion could be likened to trying to create art from a demolition site? The answer was obvious, to me. In order to understand The Mabinogion, especially “The Four Branches”, and “Culhwch ac Olwen”, it was necessary to have the ear of a poet as well as the intellect of a scholar, and to realise that this tongue called Welsh held sound to be as important as sense.
The Mabinogion, at first glance, is a rag-bag of Celtic genius, made of fragments of tales that have cohered as, through the millennia, they have rolled across lands and languages from their Indo-European source, to end up as a tangle of seeming flotsam and jetsam of story upon the Atlantic coast. Though unmistakably Celtic in form and content, which explains the repetitive onomastic elements in the stories, which the Celt uses as tent pegs to pin them down firmly and finally, against being blown out to sea, time and time again, elements of the Mahabharata and the Rig Veda show through.
The result is a masterpiece, mesmeric in its cultural imagination, its gods euhemerised, yet, since it is composed of archetype and metaphor, it is universal and timeless. Where some may see the rubble of a demolition site, I see the perfection of a beaver’s dam: heterogeneous in detail, yet whole.
So I wrote my first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, prefacing it with the Legend of Alderley, the myth of the Sleeping Hero, as taught to me by my grandfather, who knew, though he could not have put it into these words, that it was our inheritance and truth.
As a result, something extraordinary happened. The following letter arrived from Professor Thomas Jones in Aberystwyth.
Dear Mr Alan Garner,
About eighteen months ago, I was editing a sixteenth-century Welsh version of the Arthurian Cave legend for publication in a volume to be presented to Professor M—— S—— of Warsaw. The nearest parallel known to me was the Alderley legend about Merlin, and a colleague of mine drew my attention to it in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Previously, I had relied on the version communicated to me by E. Vinaver. May I say that the version you give is the purest that I have come across anywhere.
What a circle of perfection. I was able to write back to Professor Jones and to tell him that, without his and Professor Gwyn Jones’ collaborative translation of The Mabinogion, he would not have found this “purest version”, taught by a Cheshire smith to his grandson, where neither the Sleeper nor the Guardian is named before the literary impositions of the Romantics of the nineteenth century.
Then I wrote to Professor Gwyn Jones. He did not reply immediately.
July 11 1976
Dear Alan Garner,
Pray read on, though you might be forgiven for throwing a letter from me on to the fire, dunghill, or rubbish collector’s cart. Even assuming that it reaches you.
You wrote to me on September 24, 1965, a most courteous and generous letter. At the same time, you asked for my opinion of the form or meaning of a few names in “The Fourth Branch of Mabinogi”. I won’t attempt explanations: I have none; or offer excuses; none are possible. But you surely received no reply from me. I retired three years ago, and College has very kindly given me the use of a room, which helps with my book problem, and carries with it the inestimable bonus of a parking lot. The Arts Faculty was then about to move into a new building; so, for a year, I had a room on the top floor of the rightly-named Tower Block, from which, on sunny days, I could see Patagonia. But now I have a snug badger’s lair, either till I tire of it or the terriers bite my tail off.
The relevance of this to me is that I have twice shifted my books and papers wholesale, and to you that your letter of 1965 fell on to the floor as I did some determined sorting last week. I have no recollection of having seen it before, and must wonder whether I set it aside at home or in College as I read your admirable Elidor. And yet your Blodeu(w)edd query sounded a note. Perhaps I passed it on to my friend and partner Thomas Jones (who died, I am sorry to tell you, in 1972). It is certain that, if I did, he replied to you, for he was too courteous and generous in measure with his immense learning. But all such fault as there is, is mine.
If I were sure of finding you at your 1965 address, I would be sending you a book as a token of my esteem. Please let me know if my letter finds you safely, and then, if you will bury the hatchet as deeply as I buried your letter, the book shall follow. And that will give me great pleasure.
I send my good wishes and my congratulations on your books. Oh, and The Mabinogion has received further attention for its new edition of 1974 (it appeared in 1975), and that too I should like you to accept at my hand.
[Apropos The Owl Service], my friend Brenda Chamberlain had a lovely sheepdog named Gwyn. He was of the female kind. As Fats Waller used to say: “One never knows, does one?”
He sent both books. The Mabinogion I value for its inscription; the other, because it is so badly edited, so overwhelmed by compositor’s errors, that Gwyn Jones turned it into its own critical text by larding it with such actionable invective, marginalia and footnotes, that it is a unique and colourful treasure.
I met Gwyn Jones at Aberystwyth some years later, where he sat in on what I thought was a pedantic and uninspiring lecture that I gave on linguistics. But immediately afterwards he came up to me and said, “You’re just an old Welsh mystic.”
We were taken out to dinner. We were served lasagne. Some way into the meal, the host asked would anyone like to drink wine. There was a Jones/Garner chorus of “Yes! “The six of us shared one bottle of sweet, warm white wine.
Gwyn Jones and I sipped. Our eyes met. And he quoted from the Gododdin.
“Their lives was the price for their feast of mead.” The Great Man was declaiming Great Poetry. Silence fell. All he said next was, “But I don’t think that I shall be volunteering for Catterick tonight.”
[The Gododdin is the earliest Scottish/Welsh poem, of about 600 AD, which describes the willing suicidal attack on Catterick by mercenaries who had spent the previous year in Edinburgh drinking alcohol as their payment. Only one is said to have survived: Aneirin, the writer of the poem.]
The years between the two Jones letters had been taken up by my reworking, which is necessary if a story is to continue to live, or my pillaging, if you do not agree, of The Mabinogion and most other Celtic texts.
The glaring example, which was deliberate, is The Owl Service. But, and let it remain the field of scholars, there is not a single book I have written that is not as solidly derived from Celtic material, though less obviously so. To begin to list examples would be pointless and tedious: tedious, for its length, and pointless, since you will know that there is scarcely an element in Celtic stories, including The Mabinogion, that is not found elsewhere, in one guise or another throughout Europe and Asia. That is not what I mean when I speak of derivation from Celtic material.
What I owe to the Celtic mind is the realisation that language is music, and it is that which I must write. It is so completely a part of my psyche, that the theme of this conference, “The Influence of The Mabinogion on Contemporary Authors” could be answered by this author simply as, “Total”, and we could all have an early night.
Yet there is something more to be said.
Because of what I have described, for me, The Mabinogion is less a text than a state of mind or being. Despite the onomastic tentpegs, The Mabinogion, though it may not fall into the sea, does not stay fixed. It is, as one example, all around me where I live in East Cheshire.
Late this summer, as I began the research for my next book, I came across a reference to a field twelve miles from my house which was called, in 1841, Osbaldestone Croft. I went. There, against the drystone wall, was a menhir, previously unrecorded. The name is pure Old English, and means “the stone of the shining god”. But I think it is a translation. Of what? Four miles away is the Green Chapel of Sir Gawain, a dramatic natural fissure in the rock. Its name, throughout recorded time, has been Ludchurch. Osbaldestone led me up into a hanging valley, called Thursbitch, which means “the valley of the demon”, from where I could look down on my native hill and its Sleeping Hero. I saw from a vantage point of nineteen hundred feet, that I inhabited a mythic landscape, at the far side of which rose Moel Fammau. [“Hill of the Mothers”: a sacred Welsh mountain.] The only thing about it that was English was the language of its present occupants.
As we went along the valley of the demon, my wife pointed out that the gateposts were too big, and shaped quite differently from the normal Pennine style, and many were of a different stone. Then, high in the valley, and away from the single ruin of human habitation, first there was a well, built of stone, going down into the ground, with a collapsed roof; then we came to stones that had not been moved, and were pecked (worked by stone not metal), and the present evidence, which we are still collecting, is that it is a megalithic complex connected to a stellar cult, possibly of Orion.
But as I stood at the head of the valley next to a brook, my hand on an indisputable menhir, with a neat hole bored through it as if by a projectile, I thought: “And there the stone is, on the bank of the Bol-llyn river in Saltersffordd, and the hole through it. And thus begins this branch of the Mabinogi.”
Let me tell you a story.
I set The Owl Service in the Mawddwy valley. This was because a friend of my wife had inherited Bryn Hall in Llanymawddwy. It had not been used as anything other than a holiday house since 1898, yet it was still looked on by the valley as the place where the people of power came. My wife’s friend wanted the house to be used, and she offered it to us for a long holiday. The concept of The Owl Service had been with me for three years, but it had no context, until I saw the Bryn. I had to do the research, but here was the place.
The hall and its extensive grounds had been in the caring hands of Dafydd Rees Clocydd [bell ringer at church] since 1898, and, in 1962, he was still there.
For some reason, Dafydd took me as an added son. All the anecdotes and topographical stories in the novel are as he told them to me. And I have much more on tape. I never mentioned The Mabinogion to him, but said that I wanted to write a story about the valley.
For the rest of the valley, I was not so immediately acceptable, unless I was in Dafydd’s company. I was staying in the house of the people of power, and assumptions were automatically made. We were ritualistically invited to visit the farms “for a cup of tea”, and conversation was formal, stylised, polite and pre-ordained. I knew that I must obey the rule.
Then Mrs Jones Troed-y-Foel [Bottom-of-the-Hill] invited us. Her daughter had, that year, become Chief Harpist of Wales. After the cup of tea, the daughter was paraded before us, and I inwardly groaned, not least for her discomfort. She had been tricked out in a parody of Welsh costume that looked as though it had been bought at Woolworths, no doubt for the best of hospitable reasons, because that was what Saxons would expect to see in Wales. She sat at the harp, and she played.
And she could play. But all she played were the debased, over-decorated nineteenth-century hymns of the English idea of Welsh folk music. She finished. I thanked her, and praised, genuinely, her command of her harp. Then I said, “Do you know ‘Gosteg yr Halen’?” [The oldest extant Welsh music.] She looked at me as if I had come from Mars. A Saxon. Asking that question. Knowing that the question was there to be asked.
It was then that she really played, her eyes closed. And she went on to play, and played again, but never in that “Welsh” costume. Later, she and her sister made tapes of penillion for me. From that question, “Do you know ‘Gosteg yr Halen’?”, the valley opened its door. That a Saxon should know the questions, and be interested to hear the answers, to show respect, while living in the house of the people of power, was incomprehensible, yet it was received as a compliment, and repaid in kind.
Nevertheless, it was Dafydd who led me through the writing of the book, and gave me, along with much else, an insight into the folk mind, which I have found applies everywhere, especially in my own family.
One day, Dafydd said that he had something to show me. He took me to a farm, and into a stone outbuilding. He pointed up. “See,” he said, “my uncle made that. Good, isn’t it?” I was looking at a superb example of a seventeenth-century queen-post roof of oak. I do not doubt that his uncle built it. But how many uncles ago?
The experience clarified what I already knew but had not voiced. The mind that has not been formally educated is not trapped in linear time. Memories of named individuals are identified for about three or four generations. Then the way is blocked, usually by a patriarch, beyond whom there is nothing, and to whom accrete tales and exploits of a giant. But I suspect that they are the accretions onto an individual of generations of history; for, beyond linear oral memory, we are in mythic time, where everything is simultaneously present; so that, for Dafydd, his uncle built the roof of the barn at the same time that the church where he and his father and grandfather rang the bell was built, and where the sexes are still segregated, and when Owain ab Gruffydd set up his parliament in Maengwyn Street in Machynlleth, at the same time as the Maen Llwyd [a megalith] was brought to the east of the town, and Gweli Tydecho [The Bed of Saint Tydecho: a rock slab] was slept in under Bwlch-y-Groes [The Pass of the Cross] and Tomen-y-Mur [Pigshit Wall] was home to the legions. And he is not wrong to think so.
The matter goes further. I was walking along a lane on a wet day when I found Dafydd, sack on shoulder, cap on head, sitting in the hedge. He was scratching a piece of slate with a pebble. He had written “Blodeuwedd”. I asked what that was. “Just a name,” said Dafydd, and threw the slate into the river. I broke my rule. “Was a man ever killed here?” I said. “Oh, yes,” said Dafydd. “He was standing on the bank there. And a Red Indian shot him with an arrow from up on the Bryn, and the arrow went right through a stone and him. He must have escaped, the Indian, from Buffalo Bill’s circus that was in Dolgelly that time. Funny, isn’t it?”
No, it is not funny. It is illuminating. It explains the need for the onomastic element in folktale, legend and myth, to focus the content of the collective unconscious in the conscious, so that the story becomes actual for the people and for their place.
After The Owl Service had been published, Dafydd said that he wanted me to come to his house one night. “And bring your Missis for my Missis.”
I went, with my wife, Griselda, whose job it was to keep Dafydd’s wife occupied. Dafydd’s wife had spent one week as a maid in Manchester Square, London, when she was a girl, and, as a result, she had never allowed Welsh to be spoken in her house.
Griselda took her off and began to admire the furniture. There was much to see: an anthropologist’s doctorate lay here. For instance, a Queen Anne table, and on it a garish red plastic tomato that was a memory of a tea in Welshpool. Both were equally valued.
Dafydd sat me by the fire, and spoke softly. He said, “I think I shall close my eyes soon.” It was a statement of intent, not a prognosis of an ailment. “When I am gone, my sons will sell what they can, and throw the rest in the river. You are to take the Beauty Things now, in case we do not meet again.”
He reached up into the chimney and pulled down a soot-blackened set of horse brasses. They may have been made in Birmingham for tourists, but Dafydd had used them correctly: as apotropaic talismans; good luck insignia for a harvest; offerings to earth for breaking her. He explained the meaning of each to me. He carried them out of the house surreptitiously and into his shed.
There he assembled what I was to take into my stewardship: the broken gaff snapped in 1908 by the largest salmon ever to be seen in the Dovey; his grandmother’s quern stone, which looks mediaeval; his father’s worn and rusted adze head; an eighteenth-century mattock head, “which we used before They gave us spades”; a grindstone; a small, octagonal piece of limestone (for which Dafydd had no explanation, and had to pull out of the stones of his garden path); a circular laminated slate, lacking its gnomon, which was a seventeenth-century sun and moon dial that remains for me the highest expression of human optimism: a moon dial, correct for Cwm Cowarch.
And so on. The junk beyond price lay on the table. The Beauty Things. I was in tears. “Why me, Diobach?” He looked towards the house. “Because you hear. And your Welsh is better than my sons’.”
I did not see Dafydd again. His sons sold what they could, and threw the rest in the river.
For thirty years I have kept faith with the Beauty Things. But I shall close my eyes in my turn. It is time for them to go. Is it possible, between you, to get them, as an entity, to a place that will be safe? And I have other memorabilia of Dafydd Rees Cilwern, Huw Halfbacon of The Owl Service, and hence Gwydion vab Don, of The Third Branch, magician, golden shoemaker, bard, smith, brother of Arianrhod, and father of Llew.
What, for him, were the essence of the Island of the Mighty, the essence of Being, must not be lost. Please, now you, take the Beauty Things.
1 This lecture was delivered to The Conference of the Welsh Academy, on the theme of “The Influence of The Mabinogion on Contemporary Authors” at Abergavenny on 8 November 1996.