The White Goddess by Robert Graves Page A

Four
     

Chapter Five
     

GWION’S RIDDLE
     
     
    When with this complicated mythological argument slowly forming in my mind, I turned again to the Hanes Taliesin (‘The Tale of Taliesin’), the riddling poem with which Taliesin first addresses King Maelgwyn in the Romance, I already suspected that Gwion was using the Dog, the Lapwing and the Roebuck to help him conceal in his riddle the new Gwydionian secret of the Trees, which he had somehow contrived to learn, and which had invested him with poetic power. Reading the poem with care, I soon realized that here again, as in the Câd Goddeu ,Gwion was no irresponsible rhapsodist, but a true poet; and that whereas Heinin and his fellow-bards, as stated in the Romance, knew only ‘Latin, French, Welsh and English’, he was well read also in the Irish classics – and in Greek and Hebrew literature too, as he himself claims:
    Tracthator fyngofeg
Yn Efrai, yn Efroeg ,
Yn Efroeg, yn Efrai.
     
     
    I realized too, that he was hiding an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery, but had not made this secret altogether impossible for a well-educated fellow-poet to guess.
    I here use the name ‘Gwion’ for ‘Taliesin’, to make it quite clear that I am not confusing the miraculous child Taliesin of the Romance of Taliesin with the historic Taliesin of the late sixth century, a group of whose authentic poems is contained in the Red Book of Hergest , and who is noticed by Nennius, in a quotation from a seventh-century genealogy of the Saxon Kings, as ‘renowned in British poetry’. The first Taliesin spent much of his time during the last third of the sixth century as a guest of various chiefs and princes to whom he wrote complimentary poems (Urien ap Cynvarch, Owein ap Urien Gwallag ap Laenaug, Cynan Garwyn ap Brochfael Ysgythrog, King of Powys, and the High King Rhun ap Maelgwn until he was killed by the Coeling in a drunkenquarrel). He went with Rhun in the first campaign against the men of the North, the occasion of which was the killing of Elidir (Heliodorus) Mwynfawr, and the avenging raid of Clydno Eiddin, Rhydderch Hael (or Hen) and others, to which Rhun retaliated with a full-scale invasion. This Taliesin calls the English ‘Eingl’ or ‘Deifyr’ (Deirans) as often as he calls them ‘Saxons’, and the Welsh ‘Brython’ not ‘Cymry’. ‘Gwion’ wrote about six centuries later, at the close of the Period of the Princes.
    In his Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry ,Dr. Ifor Williams, the greatest recent authority on the text of the Taliesin poems, postulates from internal literary evidence that parts of the Romance existed in a ninth-century original. I do not dispute this, or his conclusion that the author was a paganistic cleric with Irish connexions; but must dispute his denial that there is ‘any mysticism, semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism’ in the poems and that the whole rigmarole can be easily explained as follows:
    Taliesin is just showing off; like the kangaroo in Kipling’s story – he had to! That was the role he had to play.
     
    As a scholar, Dr. Williams naturally feels more at home with the earlier Taliesin, who was a straight-forward court bard of the skaldic sort. But the point of the Romance to me is not that a pseudo-Taliesin humorously boasted himself omniscient, but that someone who styled himself Little Gwion, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion, a person of no importance, accidentally lighted on certain ancient mysteries and, becoming an adept, began to despise the professional bards of his time because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic lore. Proclaiming himself a master-poet, Gwion took the name of Taliesin, as an ambitious Hellenistic Greek poet might have taken the name of Homer. ‘Gwion son of Gwreang’ is itself probably a pseudonym, not the baptismal name of the author of the Romance. Gwion is the equivalent (