The White Goddess (12 page)

Little Gwion has made it clear that he does not offer this encounter as the original
Câd
Goddeu
but as:

Commentators, confused by the pied verses, have for the most part been content to remark that in Celtic tradition the Druids were credited with the magical power of transforming trees into warriors and sending them into battle. But, as the Rev. Edward Davies, a brilliant but hopelessly erratic Welsh scholar of the early nineteenth century, first noted in his
Celtic
Researches
(1809), the battle described by Gwion is not a frivolous battle, or a battle physically fought, but a battle fought intellectually in the heads and with the tongues of the learned. Davies also noted that in all Celtic languages
trees
means
letters
;
that the Druidic colleges were founded in woods or groves; that a great part of the Druidic mysteries was concerned with twigs of different sorts; and that the most ancient Irish alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion (‘Birch-Rowan-Ash’) takes its name from the first three of a series of trees whose initials form the sequence of its letters. Davies was on the right track and though he soon went astray
because, not realizing that the poems were pied, he mistranslated them into what he thought was good sense, his observations help us to restore the text of the passage referring to the hastening green things and trees: 

The following lines seem to form an introduction to his account of the battle: 

This means, if anything, that there had been a recent revival of letters in Wales. ‘Beech’ is a common synonym for ‘literature’. The English word ‘book’, for example, comes from a Gothic word meaning letters and, like the German
buchstabe
,
is etymologically connected with the word ‘beech’ – the reason being that writing tablets were made of beech. As Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century bishop-poet, wrote:
Barbara
fraxineis
pingatur
runa
tabellis
–
‘Let the barbarian rune be marked on beechwood tablets.’ The ‘tangled oak-tops’ must refer to the ancient poetic mysteries: as has already been mentioned, the
derwydd,
or Druid, or poet, was an ‘oak-seer’. An early Cornish poem describes how the Druid Merddin, or Merlin, went early in the morning with his black dog to seek the
glain
,
or magical snake’s-egg (probably a fossiled sea-urchin of the sort found in Iron Age burials), cull cresses and
samolus
(
herbe
d’or
),
and cut the highest twig from the top of the oak. Gwion, who in line 225 addresses his fellow-poets as Druids, is saying here: ‘The ancient poetic mysteries have been reduced to a tangle by the Church’s prolonged hostility, but they have a hopeful future, now that literature is prospering outside the monasteries.’

He mentions other participants in the battle:

None of these mentions makes good poetic sense. Raspberry is excellent food; the plum is a popular tree; pear-wood is so ardent that in the Balkans it is often used as a substitute for cornel to kindle the ritual need-fire; the mulberry is not used as a weapon-tree; the cherry was never slighted and in Gwion’s day was connected with the Nativity story in a popular version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; and the black cherry does not ‘pursue’. It is pretty clear that these eight names of orchard fruits, and another which occupied the place that I have filled with ‘fir’, have been mischievously robbed from the next riddling passage in the poem:

and have been substituted for the names of nine forest trees that did engage in the fight.

It is hard to decide whether the story of the fruit man belongs to the
Battle
of
the
Trees
poem, or whether it is a ‘Here come I’ speech like the four others muddled up in the
Câd
Goddeu,
of whom the speakers are evidently Taliesin, the Flower-Goddess Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn the ancestor of the Cymry, and the God Apollo. On the whole, I think it does belong to the
Battle
of
the
Trees:

By a study of the trees of the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet, with which the author of the poem was clearly familiar, it is easy to restore the original nine trees which have been replaced with the fruit names. We can be sure that it is the sloe that ‘makes not the best of foods’; the elder, a notoriously bad wood for fuel and a famous country remedy for fevers, scalds and burns, that is ‘not ardent’; the unlucky whitethorn, and the
blackthorn ‘of like nature’, that are ‘unbeloved of men’ and, with the archer’s yew, are the ‘strong chiefs in war’. And on the analogy of the oak from which reverberating clubs were made, the yew from which deadly bows and dagger-handles were made, the ash from which sure-thrusting spears were made, and the poplar from which long-enduring shields were made, I suggest that the original of ‘the black cherry was pursuing’ was the restless reed from which swift-flying arrow-shafts were made. The reed was reckoned a ‘tree’ by the Irish poets.

The ‘I’ who was slighted because he was not big is Gwion himself, whom Heinin and his fellow-bards scoffed at for his childish appearance; but he is perhaps speaking in the character of still another tree – the mistletoe, which in the Norse legend killed Balder the sun-god after having been slighted as too young to take the oath not to harm him. Although in ancient Irish religion there is no trace of a mistletoe cult, and the mistletoe does not figure in the Beth-Luis-Nion, to the Gallic Druids who relied on Britain for their doctrine it was the most important of all trees, and remains of mistletoe have been found in conjunction with oak-branches in a Bronze Age tree-coffin burial at Gristhorpe near Scarborough in Yorkshire. Gwion may therefore be relying here on a British tradition of the original
Câd
Goddeu
rather than on his Irish learning.

The remaining tree-references in the poem are these:

The furze is tamed by the Spring-fires which make its young shoots edible for sheep.

The bashful chestnut does not belong to the same category of letter trees as those that took part in the battle; probably the line in which it occurs is part of another of the poems included in
Câd
Goddeu,
which describes how the lovely Blodeuwedd (‘Flower-aspect’) was conjured by the wizard Gwydion, from buds and blossoms. The poem is not difficult to separate from the rest of
Câd
Goddeu
,
though one or two lines seem to be missing. They can be supplied from the parallel lines:

The fruit man is created from nine kinds of fruit; the flower woman must have been created from nine kinds of flower. Five are given in
Câd
Goddeu;
three more – broom, meadow-sweet and oak-blossom – in the account of the same event in the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of
Mathonwy
;
and the ninth is likely to have been the hawthorn, because Blodeuwedd is another name for Olwen, the May-queen, daughter (according to the
Romance
of Kilhwych
and
Olwen)
of the Hawthorn, or Whitethorn, or May Tree; but it may have been the white-flowering trefoil.