The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (11 page)

And in the days and years and decades to come, some of the men involved in the events will be lucky enough to grow old and grey. But the story ends here. It's not over, it's not finished, but it ends here.

a synopsis

Madog the ruler of Powys sent a hundred men to each part of Powys to look for his brother Iorwerth who was wanted after committing murder in raids on England.

One of the men on this quest is called Rhonabwy. He and two colleagues come to the house of Heilyn Goch. As they approach they see an old black hovel, inside the floor is uneven and slippery with cattle dung and piss. On one dais of bare boards is a hag feeding a fire, on the other a yellow ox-skin which gives good luck to whoever sleeps there. They are tired and want to sleep but the bedding is filthy and flea-infested. His two companions sleep there anyway, but Rhonabwy falls asleep on the yellow ox-skin.

He has a vision in which he and his companions are travelling towards a ford on the Hafren (Severn). They hear a noise behind and see a fierce-looking rider with yellow hair, dressed in yellow and green silk. They try to run away but he catches them and says he is called Iddog Cordd Prydain (The Agitator of Britain), one of the messengers between King Arthur and Medrawd at the battle of Camlan, who stirred up trouble between them.

Another nobleman, dressed in red and yellow silks on a yellow horse passes them, then they follow Iddog to a plain at Rhyd-y-Groes on the Hafren where they can see the huts and tents of a great host and Arthur sitting in a meadow. Arthur laughs, telling Iddog he is sad to see such scum protecting the Island after the fine men of the past. Iddog tells Rhonabwy he will remember the dream as he has seen the ring on Arthur's hand. Then Rhonabwy sees a succession of troops and knights approaching the ford, all splendidly dressed in various colours, with coloured horses and precious stones, whom Iddog identifies for him. Arthur challenges one of the men, Owain son of Urien to a game of
gwyddbwyll
, a board game similar to chess. As they play a squire approaches to tell them that Owain's ravens and Arthur's men are fighting. Each asks the other to call their men off, but they carry on playing and start another game. More squires approach angrily and ask them to end the fighting, but they play on as the fighting escalates into slaughter, and then start another game. At last Arthur wins and the fighting ends. Arthur is asked for a truce and takes counsel. There is a call for men to either back Arthur or stand against him and in the commotion Rhonabwy wakes to find he has slept three days and three nights.

It is said that no poet or storyteller can remember this dream because of the number of colours on the horses and the armour, trappings, precious mantles and magic stones.
 

Synopsis by Penny Thomas:

for the full story see
The Mabinogion, A New Translation
by Sioned Davies (Oxford World's Classics, 2007).

Maxen Wledig is the Emperor of Rome. One day, after a morning's hunting he falls asleep, protected by his men. He dreams that he is travelling along a river valley, then over a mountain as high as the sky, then a wide plain with a river flowing to the sea, with a city at the mouth and a harbour. He boards a ship and comes to the fairest island in the world, which he crosses from one sea to the other, finding lofty crags and rugged land and then another island with a castle. He goes into the castle, its hall made of gold, and finds two lads playing
gwyddbwyll
. An old man sits in an ivory chair and a maiden sits before him dressed in a white shift with clasps of red gold; she is so beautiful, like the sun, that it is hard to look at her. The Emperor dreams he embraces her, but the noise of the hunt around him wakes him up. He finds he can no longer live or breathe for love of the maiden in his dream and he is the saddest man in the world. He will no longer eat or go out with his men, but will only sleep so he can see the woman again in his dreams.

One day a servant tells him his men are unhappy because he won't answer their messages and he calls the wise men of Rome to him to explain why he is sad. They send messengers but have no luck until Maxen sets out to hunt and finds the river of his dream. Thirteen messengers follow the river and take the ship to the island, which is the Island of Britain. They cross the island until they reach the rugged land which is Eryri (Snowdon) and continue until they see the island of Môn facing them and the castle. They enter the castle and find the maiden, Elen. They greet her as the Empress of Rome, but she thinks they are mocking her. She tells them to bring the Emperor to her so Maxen sets out for Britain, taking it by force. He recognises the lands from his dream and the castle. He finds the maiden there and sleeps with her. He asks her to name her maiden fee and she asks for the Island of Britain for her father, three islands for the Empress of Rome and three forts built for her. The forts are built at Arfon, Caerfyrddin and Caerlleon and she builds great roads, the Ffyrdd Elen Luyddog to connect them.

Maxen Wledig stays for seven years, after which his place as Emperor is forfeit and a new Emperor is declared in Rome. Maxen travels back to Rome, conquering all the lands in between, and lays siege to it. The siege lasts a year, until Elen's brothers appear and break it, giving Rome back to Maxen, who in return gives them an army.

The brothers spend their lives conquering new lands, killing the men but leaving the women alive, until one, Gadeon, decides to return home and the other, Cynan, decides to settle where he is. They cut out the tongues of the women there, so that their own language is not corrupted. Because the women are silent and lose their language and the men speak on, the Britons were called Llydaw men (half silent).
 

Synopsis by Penny Thomas:

for the full story see
The Mabinogion, A New Translation
by Sioned Davies (Oxford World's Classics, 2007).

Reading through the acknowledgements of the first two books in this series, I noticed that they were both written on land not Welsh:
The Ninth Wave
in Wicklow, and
White Ravens
in New York. For myself, I tinkered with the preceding stories in an internet caff off the Magnificent Mile in central Chicago. This is no more than coincidence of course – we're jobbing writers, and we go wherever the job takes us – but, being a writer, and thus given to a quasi-pareidolic interpretation of events, I'm going to wilfully draw a symbol from this and read into it the notion that, wherever we travel in the world, in whichever places our emotional or career obligations take us to, the
Mabinogion
, like luggage, follows us there.

This is a good thing. The weight of a deep cultural history is a beneficial one to carry, and I feel safe and secure and settled when ancient masonry and memory are at my shoulder; castles and megaliths and ruins and the like, and the human histories they hold in their stones. I also feel this way when the nomenclature of a country is intimately related to its mythology; the many place names in Wales that contain the word ‘moch' or derivations thereof testify not to the localised history of porcine hus-bandry (of which there is none, or very little) but to the overnight stops made by Gwydion in his journey across the country with his personal herd of swine in The Fourth Branch. So the
Mabinogion
remains alive; the fact that it is barely read beyond the dry pales of academia now has, amazingly, generated no moribundity in its tales, a status further assured by Sioned Davies' superb new translation for the Oxford World Classics and by the Seren series of ‘retellings', a volume of which you are holding in your hands.

So why the Dreams? Why did the reveries of Rhonabwy and Maxen strike me as ripe for a retelling, or a ‘re-imagining' (as the promotional bumf for various facile and lazy Hollywood remakes of perfectly good and recent films has it)? Well, at root, the oneiric has always held a fascination, especially in regard to the tenuity and futility of its interpretation; it's the magnetism of the weirdly logical, the paradigm shift in the REM brain, that attracts. Also, there's the gleefully mischievous rejection of one of the most basic rules of writing creatively, namely tell a dream and lose a reader (that comes from Hemingway, I think, who obviously post-dates the
Mabinogion
, but nevertheless the Dreams remain exceptional in this). This isn't un-common in medieval literature – it can be seen, for example, in Langland, ‘Pearl', even Dante – yet the schematics involved and the satirical, rather than tutelary, intent here make for a rarity. Plus there are preoccupations which find a rhyme with my own: substance abuse, the urge to isolate oneself, a deep yearning for completeness which, somewhere and somehow, twists itself into its ostensible antithesis, the need to reach a condition of calmness even if that necessitates a path of destruction, etc. I could go on. Enough to say that I find a contemporaneity in both Dreams which on careful re-reading came close to astonishing. Timeless writing indeed.

And they are very peculiar pieces. ‘Rhonabwy's Dream', unlike the other tales in the
Mabinogion
, came probably not from an oral tradition but a written one. Its author is aware of tradition and, as Chaucer would later have it, ‘authority', but s/he extracts from it the raw ingredients of satire and parody; not until
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
would the Arthurian myth and its concomitant notions of chivalry face such bombardment. There's a glorious irreverence in having the knights splash through the ordure of cows and sleep in bug-crawled beds, as there is in the total lack of reader-friendly explication; the narrative scaffolding of Arthurian romance itself is here undermined, suggesting an eschewal of cultural authority and precedent that swings harmoniously along with many current attitudes.

Contrasting with ‘Rhonabwy's Dream', which does not indulge in direct personal reference, ‘The Dream of the Emperor Maxen', as Sioned Davies' introduction tells us, directly concerns the actual historical figure of Magnus Maximus, who became emperor of Britain in AD383. A possible transposition here suggested itself attractively; to turn Rhonabwy's dream-figures into recognisable contemporary personages, and allow Maxen himself to become something of a generic city scally. Obviously this meant that I had to forego any extensive mirroring, and, despite the long hours of scribbling and brain-wringing, I could not invent convincing analogues for either Ffyrdd Elen or Cynan, Maxen's brother-in-law, who founds Brittany. But I never felt that measurable transliteration was the point. And besides, I'm sure that the iconoclastic authors of the Dreams would approve.

But to return to matters oneiric, and the Windy City. Re-reading my words at a distance of a few months and several thousand miles, I was taken somewhat aback by the level of my own disgust and dismay, particularly in ‘Ronnie's Dream'. The piece seems aghast, appalled by its targets; so, of course, satire should be, and often is (think of Swift's ‘A Modest Proposal'), but, at that distance from the country and society and government that I was writing about, and adrift in a foreign milieu which I was having great fun exploring (although it does share shortcomings with my subjects), I was a wee bit startled by my own seething. Not for long, however; I recognised it again that afternoon when, in a bar, a fellow drinker told me that every child in Britain and America under six years old has an invisible barcode tattoed on the nape of his or her neck, and again when, that night, in the Green Mill club, a crowd of jocks asked the bouncer if they could sit at the table ‘where Mister Capone used to sit'. Both Rhonabwy's and Ronnie's Dreams are enraged at this; the painless and stupid joy of obedience, the unthinking capitulation to the otiose and attenuative side of myth-making. No matter that these people were just concretising dreams; a reality is found in the acceptance of an invented tangibility (albeit invisible), as Rhonabwy's chronicler knew. And, central to the anger of the dreams, for me – their energiser and propellant – is the nightmarish aspect of a people marching with eyes wide open towards their own destruction. Only in dreams can you not run away from the juggernaut or the monster or the man in the mask: only in dreams, or in despair. So it is with observing the species' trajectory today; we see the flames on the horizon yet we continue to run towards them. This is dream logic. This is the terror of dream logic. And from which chase-dream do you awake more hungry for consciousness, the one in which you are chased or the one in which you are doing the chasing? Today, such choices are a luxury that we cannot afford, because they're not dreams any more; they may seem like such, but they're happening in the waking world, the one, apparently, of sense. The one inhabited by us and by generations yet to be born. How the definitions have been smudged.

Still, the
Mabinogion
, a millennium old, continues to live and breathe and pulse, galvanised every so often by various and diverse treatments and appreciations, in film, animation, theatre, literature. The world it examines and praises and, at times, excoriates, remains, in parts, familiar, lending itself freely and generously to re-interpretation. It'll be around for as long as we are.

Niall Griffiths