The White Goddess by Robert Graves

supersession of Queen Belili, Bel became the Supreme Lord of the Universe, father of the Sun-god and the Moon-god, and claimed to be the Creator: a claim later advanced by the upstart Babylonian god Marduk. Bel and Marduk were finally identified, and since Marduk had been a god of the Spring Sun and of thunder, Bel had similarly become a sort of Solar Zeus before his emigration to Europe from Phoenicia.
    It seems then that Beli was originally a Willow-god, a divinatory son of Belili, but became the God of Light, and that in fourth-century BC Britain, at the Câd Goddeu, his power was invoked by his son Amathaon as a means of supplanting Bran of the alder, whose counterpart had perhaps been similarly supplanted in Palestine. At the same time Gwydion of the ash supplanted Arawn, another divinatory god whose tree is not known. The implications of these peculiar interchanges of divine function will be discussed in a later chapter.
    The author of the Romance of Taliesin evidently knew Amathaon as ‘Llew Llaw’, a Brythonic title of Hercules, since he says in the Cerdd am Veib Llyr (‘Song Concerning the Sons of Llyr’):
    I was at the Câd Goddeu with Llew and Gwydion,
He who transformed timber, earth and plants.
     
     
    The case is complicated by occasional bardic references to Beli and the sea which at first sight suggest that he is a Sea-god: the waves are his horses, the brine is his liquor. But this probably honours him as the tutelary deity of Britain, his ‘honey isle’ as it is called in a Triad –no god can rule over an island unless he also commands the adjacent waters – with a hint also that as the Sun-god he ‘drinks the waters of the West’ every evening at sunset, and that white horses are traditionally sacred to the sun.
    The last form in which the famous conflict between Beli and Bran occurs is the story of the brothers Balin and Balan in Malory’s Morte D ’Arthur, who killed each other by mistake. But, as Charles Squire pointsout in his Celtic Myth and Legend, Bran appears in various other disguises in the same jumbled romance. As King Brandegore (Bran of Gower) he brings five thousand men to oppose King Arthur; but as Sir Brandel or Brandiles (Bran of Gwales) he fights valiantly on Arthur’s side. As King Ban of Benwyk (‘the square enclosure’, called ‘Caer Pedryvan’ in the poem Preiddeu Annwm which will be examined in Chapter Six) he is a foreign ally of Arthur’s; as Leodegrance – in the Welsh, Ogyr Vran – he is Arthur’s father-in-law; and as Uther Ben (‘the wonderful head’), which is a reference to the story of the singing head buried on Tower Hill, he is Arthur’s father. The Norman-French trovères and Malory who collected and collated their Arthurian romances had no knowledge of, or interest in, the historical and religious meaning of the myths that they handled. They felt themselves free to improve the narrative in accordance with their new gospel of chivalry fetched from Provence – breaking up the old mythic patterns and taking liberties of every sort that the Welsh minstrels had never dared to take.
    The modern licence claimed by novelists and short-story writers to use their imaginations as freely as they please prevents students of mythology from realizing that in North-Western Europe, where the post-Classical Greek novel was not in circulation, story-tellers did not invent their plots and characters but continually retold the same traditional tales, extemporizing only when their memory was at fault. Unless religious or social change forced a modification of the plot or a modernization of incident, the audience expected to hear the tales told in the accustomed way. Almost all were explanations of ritual or religious theory, overlaid with history: a body of instruction corresponding with the Hebrew Scriptures and having many elements in common with them.
    1 As barnacles turn Soland-geese,
    I’ th’ Islands of the Or cades.
    (Butler’s Hudibras )

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