Reflections on Rhiannon and the horse episodes in Pwyll

Western Folklore, Winter 1998 by Hemming, Jessica

The group of stories known collectively as The Four Branches of the Mabinogi contains some of the most fascinating and vigorously disputed material in the entire medieval Welsh literary corpus. It is in the first of these four tales, Pwyll Prince of Dyfed, that the enigmatic figure of Rhiannon features most prominently. The text is full of tantalizing hints that she is more than simply a British chieftain's daughter who happens to take a fancy to the Prince of Dyfed. Rather, she seems to be a complex blend of euhemerized Celtic goddess, fairy mistress, folktale heroine, and elegantly imagined literary character. In this discussion I shall be focusing on two specific incidents in the first Branch which may help shed light on certain aspects of this mixed parentage.

Pwyll tells the story of the early career and marriage of the Prince of Dyfed and the plot falls fairly neatly into three sections. In the first Pwyll meets the Otherworld king Arawn while hunting and exchanges forms and kingdoms with him for the space of a year. The second section deals with Pwyll's meeting with and subsequent marriage to Rhiannon, daughter of Hefeydd Hen. In this part, Pwyll first encounters his future bride by sitting upon a magic mound near his court at Arberth, from which he observes Rhiannon riding by on a slow-moving white horse. No matter how fast his messengers gallop after her, they are unable to overtake the lady until Pwyll on the third try calls out to her to wait. They then arrange to marry, despite the fact that Rhiannon has been promised to another man, Gwawl son of Clud. Pwyll foolishly manages to promise away his wife at the wedding feast, but a year later wins her back by following her clever advice to trick Gwawl into climbing into a magic sack. In the third section, the story has advanced three years and there are grumblings at court because Rhiannon has not produced an heir. Pwyll rejects advice to divorce her and she soon thereafter gives birth to a son. The baby then vanishes mysteriously from his mother's chamber and the terrified maidservants smear puppies' blood on Rhiannon to frame her for infanticide and cannibalism. While Rhiannon suffers penance by sitting next to a mounting block and offering to carry court visitors on her back, some distance away in Gwent there are other strange happenings. The local lord, Teyrnon, who has lost his mare's newborn foal on May Eve of every year, keeps watch this time in the stable and encounters a monstrous claw which reaches in to steal the animal. After cutting it off and rushing outside to find the monster vanished, he re-enters the stable and discovers a baby boy wrapped in silk. Teyrnon and his wife raise the child, Gwri Golden-Hair, as their own until it gradually dawns on them that he is the missing heir of Dyfed. All is then resolved happily, with Rhiannon restored to favor and the boy renamed Pryderi ("anxiety" or "loss").

There is an abundance of scholarship dealing with Rhiannon, much of it concerned with her apparent relationship to horses.l This equine connection is manifested as follows: Rhiannon first appears riding a magic steed which outstrips all pursuers without galloping; when falsely accused of devouring her child, Rhiannon is condemned to sit by a mounting block and offer to carry visitors to the court on her back; Rhiannon's baby is apparently abducted by the same mysterious agency that carries off Teyrnon's foals every year and is rescued in a stable along with the laststolen colt; Gwri at three years old "would bargain with the grooms of the horses to let him take them to water" (lines 552-53)2 and is soon given the colt which Teyrnon rescued along with him; and in the Third Branch, Manawydan, Rhiannon and Pryderi are imprisoned in the Otherworld with asses' collars around their necks.

The prevailing interpretation of this material is that Rhiannon is the literary descendant of a British goddess called *Rigantona (roughly, "Great Queen") who was herself a regional variant of the widely-attested Continental divinity Epona whose mythic affinity to horses has never been seriously in dispute. Edward Anwyl was the first to make this connection, which was then elaborated at length by W. J. Gruffydd some fifty years later (Anwyl 1896-97:288 and 1908:240; Gruffydd 1953). Despite the occasional scholarly attempt to disprove this mythological derivation, the Epona-*Rigantona-Rhiannon relationship has become generally accepted and seems to offer the best explanation for the proliferation of equine motifs in Pwyll.3 There is considerable evidence that Celtic sovereignty goddesses, both Continental and Insular, typically existed in the dual aspect of woman and mare (Linduff 1979; Mac Cana 1955-56, 1958-59 and 1979; Oaks 1986; Puhvel 1970; Schroder 1926). Rhiannon would therefore seem to be comprehensible as a literary reworking of the equine sovereignty goddess of Dyfed.4

It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to pursue this line of enquiry further. Suffice it to say that I am starting from the position that the postulated mythic substrate of this character is well-supported and reasonable. However, we have no information independent of the Four Branches about any myths associated with *Rigantona and therefore cannot simply assume that the story as we have it in Pwyll derives from ancient British mythology. On the contrary, it seems probable that the Four Branches were composed by a highly skilled, literate author who, while drawing on mythological sources for inspiration, shaped these tales out of a combination of several elements. One thing that is clear is that he5 utilized a substantial amount of folkloric material in the final composition, although how exactly he went about interweaving mythological, folk, and legendary strands to produce the finished tales is still the subject of much scholarly discussion. The rest of this paper will focus on possible folkloric sources for two of the horse-related episodes connected with Rhiannon in the First Branch: Rhiannon's bizarre penance for supposed infanticide and the pursuit of the fast-ambling horse. One must begin with the caveat that an analogue and a source are not necessarily the same thing. While there may be good reason to suppose that these particular elements of Rhiannon's story might have their source in international (or at least Celtic) folklore,6 this is not to say that any of the analogues to be discussed here is itself a direct source for the Welsh narrative.