Of the five Welsh goddesses honored in the Avalonian Tradition, we have the most lore about Rhiannon. Appearing in both the First and Third Branches of Y Mabinogi, and with a brief mention in the Second Branch, she is generally accepted to have once been a Sovereignty goddess based upon the content of her tales, the meaning of her name (“Divine Queen”), and her frequent association with horses in her stories—a well-established symbol of Sovereignty for the Celts. She has analogues in the Gaulish horse goddess Epona, as well as the equine goddess Macha, who is a face of the triple-aspected Irish goddess, the Mórrígan. Rhiannon’s name is etymologically connected both to the Mórrígan and to the Gallo-Brittonic goddess *Rīgantona, whose names share the meaning “Divine Queen” and who are both Sovereignty goddesses in their own right
While not conclusive proof that she is in fact herself a Sovereignty goddess, Rhiannon’s association with horses in the narrative of the Four Branches appears to be deliberate as well as symbolic; when she arrives in the First Branch, we see her astride a magical white horse that even when walking could be overtaken by no other horse. Later, when her newborn son is spirited away by a monster, the child is found in a stall with a mare whose own foals disappear annually on the first of May, a significant feast day marking the beginning of summer. Falsely accused of having destroyed the missing baby, Rhiannon is sentenced by her husband the king to a bizarre punishment involving her sitting on a horse block outside of the castle for seven years. While there, she must recount the details of her predicament to strangers and offer to bear them on her back into the presence of the king. In the Third Branch, when she is imprisoned in an Otherworldly fortress with her son Pryderi, she is made to wear an ass’s collar and is forced to carry hay.
The repetitive horse imagery may be significant in that it ties Rhiannon to the equine Sovereignty goddess with whom the king must mate to legitimize his kingship in Irish and other Indo-European traditions. “The worship of and connection between the horse and the fertility goddess, known among the continental Celts as Epona, has been documented as common practice in Europe.” 18
Sovereignty figures are an international folk motif found predominantly in the stories and legends from Celtic cultures. There are several variations on this theme, depending on the time period and culture in question, but in general, a goddess of Sovereignty (or a woman acting as her representative) tests the fitness of potential kings or chieftains, and if they are found worthy, enters into a sexual union with the king on behalf of the land. This sacred marriage ties the fate of the land to that of the ruler Sovereignty has thus empowered; as he prospers, so does the land. Should a king grow to be unrighteous, or else become infirm or maimed, the land is similarly afflicted and a new ruler must be found lest the country become a wasteland suffering from famine, disease, and war.
Another variant of the Sovereignty motif is one we have already examined in our discussion of Blodeuwedd. In this type, the conference of Sovereignty is tied into a period of time rather than rightness of rule. This kind of kingship typically takes one of two forms: it can be seasonal as illustrated by the “love triangle” in the Fourth Branch, or annual as is more commonly found in continental Europe with the phenomenon of the Year King, particularly in Mediterranean cultures.
By the time the story of the goddess we have come to know as Rhiannon was written down in the twelfth or thirteenth century, her tale had evolved over centuries of transmission in oral tradition to where both her divine and sovereign natures had become subtext rather than overt, although her role as one who tests the worthiness of kings is no less present.
In this work with the Moons of the Cycle of Revealing, we focus on the story of Rhiannon in the First Branch of Y Mabinogi, but she has a role in several other tales as well, both directly and indirectly. These mythic accounts are not unimportant in terms of study and greatly contribute to building a relationship with Rhiannon; a brief overview of these stories and some of their meanings is therefore included here.
The Second Branch recounts the tale of Branwen, Daughter of Ll
r and will be explored in greater depth here in Chapter 8. Suffice it to say for the purpose of the present discussion that a brutal war is fought between Ireland and the hosts of the Island of the Mighty under the command of Bendigeidfran—Bran the Blessed, king of Britain and brother of Branwen. Only seven Britons survive the war, including Rhiannon’s son Pryderi and Manawydan, son of Ll
r, brother to Bran and Branwen. Bendigeidfran is fatally wounded in the battle but before dying instructs his surviving men to remove his head and take it with them to his court at Harlech. There, Bran tells them, they would remain together for seven years, feasting and talking with his head as if he were not dead, and the Adar Rhiannon—the Birds of Rhiannon—would come to them. Doing as he instructed, everything Bran said came to pass:
As they began to eat and drink, three birds came and began singing some songs to them, and all the songs they had ever heard were coarse compared to that one. They were a distant vision seen above the waves, yet they were as clear to them as if they were together with them. And they were at that feast for seven years.19
We learn more about the Adar Rhiannon in the medieval Welsh romance, Culhwch ac Olwen. One of the tasks set before Culhwch in order to win the right to marry Olwen was to obtain Rhiannon’s birds so that they might sing to Olwen’s father, the giant Ysbadden who was fated to die the day she was wed on the night before her wedding. These birds, we are told in the tale, have the power to “wake the dead and lull the living to sleep.” 20
In the Third Branch, Pryderi and Manawydan return from their Otherworldly sojourns in Harlech and Gwales after burying the head of Bran at the White Tower in London to watch over the land. As brother to Bran, who had died without an heir, Manawydan was the next in line to ascend the throne as king of the Island of the Mighty. However, as time in the Otherworld runs differently than it does in this world, a period of eighty years had passed while the company had been feasting without memory of the great war in Ireland and its losses; during that time, Manawydan’s nephew Caswallon had ascended the throne. Tired of war, Manawydan decides not to challenge the new king, and so was invited to live in Dyfed by Pryderi, who offers his friend the hand of his mother, the now-widowed Rhiannon, as well as stewardship over the seven cantrifs that had comprised Pwyll’s lands. At the end of the First Branch, we are told almost parenthetically that Pywll, Rhiannon’s husband, had died and Pryderi had married a woman named Cigfa and had expanded his territory beyond the original borders of Dyfed he inherited from his father.
This may seem an odd thing, for a son to play matchmaker for his widowed mother, but it is an accurate reflection of the status of women in medieval Wales. Before marriage, a woman was under the legal authority of her father, after marriage that authority was passed to her husband. Should she outlive her husband, a woman’s eldest son would become responsible for her. Now, even though Pryderi made the offer to Manawydan, who agreed to meet his mother to see if they were compatible, it was still completely Rhiannon’s choice to enter into the marriage or not.
Then began Manawydan and Rhiannon to sit and to talk together, and from their discourse his mind and his thoughts became warmed toward her, and he thought in his heart he had never beheld any lady more fulfilled of grace and beauty than she. “Pryderi,” said he, “I will that it be as thou didst say.” “What saying was that?” asked Rhiannon. “Lady,” said Pryderi, “I did offer thee as a wife to Manawydan the son of Llyr.” “By that will I gladly abide,” said Rhiannon. “Right glad am I also,” said Manawydan; “may Heaven reward him who hath shown unto me friendship so perfect as this.” 21
It is the gifting of lordship over the seven cantrifs of Dyfed that stands out as an oddity here, and its apparent bundling with the offer of marriage to Rhiannon may suggest that rulership over these lands is a consequence of receiving the blessing of the tutelary spirit of the land—by entering into a sacred marriage with the local Sovereignty goddess who is, in this case, Rhiannon.
Soon after the wedding, Rhiannon, Manawydan, Pryderi, and Cigfa visit the Gorsedd Arberth, the mound of wonders from the First Branch, which we will duscuss further later in this chapter. When they get to the top of the hill, an enchantment falls over the land, and every human and domestic animal disappear. After spending time making their way in Dyfed by hunting the land, and then trying to practice various crafts in England in order to survive, the four companions return to Wales. One day while out hunting with their dogs, Pryderi and Manawydan discover a strange fortress on their land that had never been there before. Pryderi’s dogs enter the fortress but never reemerge, so he goes in after them against Manawydan’s advice. The fortress is empty save for a golden hanging bowl; when Pryderi tries to take it, he becomes frozen in place, unable to move or speak.
Manawydan waits for his friend to return, but after hours pass, he returns home without him. When Rhiannon hears what has transpired, she is angry with Manawydan for abandoning Pryderi, and goes off to find him herself. When she enters the fortress and sees her son stuck fast to the bowl, she tries to remove it from his hands, and in the process becomes stuck and paralyzed herself. With that, the entire fortress disappears from Dyfed, taking the imprisoned mother and son with it, leaving their partners behind. Eventually, Manawydan finds a way to lift the enchantment of Dyfed and secure the release of Rhiannon and Pryderi; they had been held captive in the Otherworld where they endured daily punishment as recompense for the abuse of Rhiannon’s rejected suitor at the hands of Pwyll and his men in the First Branch, a matter discussed in full later in this chapter.
18. C. McKenna, “The Theme of Sovereignty in Pwyll,” in C.W. Sullivan, ed., The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 317.
19. Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1877), 383–384.
20. Sioned Davies, trans.,The Mabinogion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 196.
21. Guest, The Mabinogion, 398.