Gwyn Read online

  The Beltane Line wasn’t discovered until the 1960’s, so how on earth did the ancient Welsh come to connect Gwyn, Glastonbury Tor and the May Day sunrise?

  A shape started to form in the mists. Suddenly there was a legend that hinted about knowledge of Glastonbury Tor, something that was unknown (unrecorded, or perhaps lost in the fire of 1191) by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey.

  ‘THE MIST OF ‘WELSH’

  Much of this unfolding story involves that which we now call ‘Welsh’, something being of the country of ‘Wales’. The first thing to know is that there is no such thing as ‘Welsh’, or at least, there wasn’t. ‘Welsh’ like ‘Celtic’ or ‘Iron Age’ is an invented description. Just as the Inuit people never called themselves ‘Fish-eaters’ (Eskimo) the people of Wales never called themselves ‘Welsh’. This was an insulting term, which comes from the Anglo Saxon word ‘Weallas’ meaning ‘Foreigner’!

  Why do I mention this?

  Because many of the oldest place names in and around Glastonbury are Welsh place names, yet Wales is far away across the Sabrina Sea from Glastonbury, and yet the most intimate knowledge of Glastonbury’s past comes from Welsh folklore. How can this be?

  The oldest name of Glastonbury was ‘Ynys Witrin’ which is Welsh for ‘The Glass Isle’. The neighbouring town of Street was called ‘Llantokay. In Welsh this means ‘The Church of St. Key’, one of the earliest saints from Glastonbury Abbey.

  To understand ‘Old Britain’, old Somerset and old Glastonbury one must keep in mind that ALL this land was once Welsh; that is, it belonged to the ‘Foreigners’ who lived here before the Saxons arrived.

  In our new world of political correctness, I prefer to use the term ‘native Briton’ for describing the ‘Welsh’ of the British Isles. Prior to the 1st century and the arrival of the Roman Empire these native Britons were a tribal society, very similar indeed to the Native American tribes. Each tribe having a chief (or king) and belonging to a certain area of land. Occasionally fighting with each other but most of the time surviving in co-operation. It is to these native people that Gwyn was a god who held open the doorway to their idea of paradise.

  The native Britons were a proud and noble people with a long, long history. Structured socially as we know them through the misty glass of modern archaeology, as ‘Celts’ they date back to about 350 B.C. As ‘Iron Age’ people they date back to 600 B.C. But these descriptions are meaningless really. The native Britons evolved through the shifting and changing social landscape of ancient peoples; their ancestors built Avebury and Stonehenge, and even further back in time than these great megalithic structures, the natives of Somerset were building wooden track-ways across the Somerset Seas as long ago as 3840 B.C. During all that time the majestic Tor dominated the landscape for miles around, almost 4000 years before Joseph of Arimathea is said to have arrived here!

  Gwyn is our primary window to understanding Glastonbury Tor, and the spiritual mind-set of the ancient local natives.

  The ‘Welsh’ speaking natives of Glastonbury that Rome encountered in the 1st century were a people of long and far reaching heritage, with a very complex society. Their trading connections were very well established. Among the findings of the Iron Age ‘Lake Villages’ at Glas-tonbury were small beads made from glass that came from far away Scotland!

  When the Roman Empire came to Britain it had every intention of staying and was here for four hundred years or so. The native Britons were eventually absorbed into this distant arm of the Empire and we call these people from the 1st to the 4th century ‘Romano British’. When Rome finally left the British Isles these ‘Romano Britons’ were left to the chaos of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. Then in the mid 7th century they were finally pushed into the west by the invading Anglo Saxons and ‘Wales’ was born.

  Glastonbury Tor (and its god Gwyn), Somerset, Britain and its gods and goddesses, all belong to that which is ‘Welsh’. The earliest Grail romance is ‘Welsh’, King Arthur and Sir Perceval are both ‘Welsh’, that is, ‘native Briton’. The Saxons ruled England for around five hundred years and never in any of that time did they make a hero out of Arthur (because he was a welsh man?). In ‘Le Conte du Graal’ the very first Grail Romance, to express the foolish naivety of Sir Perceval, the author reminds the reader that he (Perceval) was a ‘welsh man’). It wasn’t until the 12th century and the end of Saxon rule that the tales of King Arthur became popular. Arthur is a British King, not an English King and there was a whole world of difference.

  All of this Welsh discussion has been necessary because this story of Gwyn is also the story of the struggle of Briton against Saxon and old gods, representing the old ways against Christianity. Gwyn represents the older landscape and the times that were before. The Saxons may have been pagan ‘Sons of Odin’ when they first arrived but they brought to their England the Roman Catholic Church, and attempted to do away with all heresy and pagan beliefs that belonged to the ‘old ways’.

  The story of Gwyn is also the story of the local Britons and their final struggle. It is the story of their eventual defeat at the hands of the Anglo Saxons and of their exodus away from Somerset (their ‘Summer Lands’) across the Sabrina Sea to the valleys and mountains of Wales.

  Chapter Two

  The Children of Don

  “. . . in the time when the divine race and the human race and the soulless race and the dumb races that are near to man were all one race.”

  (Fiona Macleod, ‘The Winged Destiny’)

  The native people of the British Isles believed in many different gods and goddesses, which were, just like the great pantheons of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, related to each other as one large family.

  Knowledge of these deities was passed down in stories for many centuries until they were finally written down in the early medieval times by Welsh historians. These ancient books have been given great romantic sounding names like ‘The Black book of Caermarthen’, ‘The White book of Rhydderch’ and ‘The Red book of Hergest’.

  The main family of the British gods and goddesses were known as ‘The Children of Don’ (Note: The ‘o’ in ‘Don’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in bone, and home). Don is the great mother-goddess of these deities, and the ‘Children of Don’ mirror the early gods of Ireland, known as the ‘Tuatha de Danaan’ - themselves named after their own mother-goddess, Danu.

  Don the mother-goddess had a husband, Beli, and he was the mighty father-god of Britain. Beli and Don had many children, which can be loosely divided into two smaller family groupings. These can be characterized as the deities of the Light, of the sun and of the heavens; and those which are the deities of the Dark, mysterious hidden places and of the Sea.

  Gwyn’s full title, ‘Gwyn ap Nudd’, means ‘Gwyn the son of Nudd’ which makes him one of the gods on the ‘light’ side of the Children of Don family. As a champion against ‘darkness and confusion’ he could be considered a pre-Christian archangel Michael. But who was Nudd?

  Nudd (pronounced ‘neeth’) - whose complete name was Nudd Llaw Eraint; or “Nudd of the Silver Hand”, is one of Don’s sons and the father of Gwyn. The respect he deserved and achieved can be seen in the remains of a Romano British temple, to Nudd, that dates to about 350 A. D. which still exists today on the River Severn, at a place called Lydney. His importance is also seen in the derivation of the capital’s eventual name. Nudd is also spelt as ‘Lludd’ and with this etymology he can be seen to be the namesake of London;

  “Under his name Lludd he is said to have had a temple on the site of St. Paul’s in London, the entrance to which, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was called by the British tongue ‘Parth Lludd’, which the Saxons translated ‘Ludes Geat’, our present Ludgate.”

  (T.W. Rolleston; ‘Celtic Myths & Legends’)

  Nudd’s temple locations, one upon River Severn and the other, close to the River Thames help to express his nature as a great River God. As a ‘Light’ deity he has as a stellar representation, the great river of the
night sky - The Milky Way. It’s believed that at Lydney, upon the Severn, he was worshipped as a god of healing.

  The gods and goddesses of the Children of Don are a rich source for further research and a great deal more could be said about Nudd alone. Nudd’s brother Gwydion was the god of science, poetry, and magic while his sister Arianrod of the ‘Silver Circle’ was the goddess of the dawn. Other siblings among the gods include Gilvaethwy; Amaethon, the god of agriculture; Govannan, the god of Smithing and metal working; twin brothers Nynniaw & Peibaw; and their sister Penardun, who was married to Llyr, the figurehead of the gods of the ‘Darkness’.

  Although siblings, Gwydion and Arianrod had children of their own; Nwyvre, a deity of the atmosphere and space; Llew the sun-god and Dylan the sea-god.

  The ‘Dark’ gods were also ‘Children of Don’ and were connected to the ‘Light’ gods by the marriage of the goddess, Penardun and the head of the dark gods, Llyr. But, before Llyr married Penardun he was married to a goddess called Iweriadd. She was a personification of Ireland and represented the mystic islands in the west, where the sun sets, a hidden magical realm. They had two children, the god Bran - a gigantic god of the otherworld who was also a god of wisdom and music - and his sister Branwen, the goddess of love. Llyr and Penardun had a son, Manawyddan -the god of the sea and enchantments; he gave his name to the Isle of Man. Penardun also had children with a god called Euroswydd, their children were Nissyen and Evnissyen.

  There were also otherworldly deities outside of the Children of Don family tree that became connected by marriage. The goddess Rhiannon was married to Manawyddan but she was also the wife of Pwyll, a king of the otherworld. Together they had a son called Pryderi, a lord of the otherworld, who was killed by the god Gwydion. As a result, Rhiannon’s kin were allied with the Children of Llyr, in their strife against the Children of Nudd.

  This confusing mass of names, these different gods and goddesses, are just a taster to give the reader an idea of how complex and varied are the relationships between the gods and goddesses of the native ‘Celtic’ Britons. Gwyn, the god of Glastonbury, is not an obscure entity on his own: a fairy on top of a hill in Somerset! He is a profound and unique spirit interconnected with all the gods and goddesses of the Children of Don. He has a central role to play in the eternal struggle of Light and Darkness - not a struggle between good and evil - but a struggle between understanding and confusion.

  It must be understood that the battle between Light and Darkness isn’t as two-dimensional as Good verses Evil. It’s deeper and more profound than that. All these deities are Don’s children and are all part of a whole united ‘oneness’. ‘Light’ represents knowledge, understanding, clarity and enlightenment; the things that can be seen and understood in this physical reality that we call ‘life’. They are the things that make us feel secure. ‘Dark’ represents mystery, confusion, chaos and bewilderment; the things that are hidden beyond the physical realm and are thus unknowable. It is often this fear of the unknown that makes us feel insecure. So dark gods like Llyr and Manawyddan are not ‘evil’ as such, neither are gods like Gwydion purely ‘good’. Gwydion for instance killed Pryderi and tricked his sister Arian-rod with enchantments, again and again. When the Goddess Blodeuwedd, (pronounced ‘blo-doo-with¹) whom Gwydion had created out of flowers as a bride/lover for his sun-god Lieu, betrayed her husband, . Gwydion punished her by turning her into an Owl, to live in the darkness of night forever.

  So, as a kindred of the ‘Light’ Gwyn represents qualities like ‘clarity, clear thought, and understanding’. The early name of his island, ‘Ynys Witrin’, is Welsh for ‘the glass’ or ‘glassy’ island - a solid physical substance, yet a substance through which one can see. A kind of ‘there but not there’ enigma and, as we will see, a reflection of the ‘otherworld’ that Gwyn governs.

  In my daydreaming mind, the names of the old gods seem to echo in the landscape that the Tor oversees. The goddess Penardun seems to lie hidden in the name of West Pennard, to the east of the Tor. Further east still, the villages of Pyll and Pilton seem to hint at Pwyll the ‘otherworld king’. Most profoundly, the nearest Iron Age hill fort is that of Compton Dundon. Dundon is said to mean, ‘The Court of Don’, the supreme mother goddess and Gwyn’s Granny!

  Whether Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail to Glastonbury, or not, in the first century, the British Isles did not become fully Christian until sometime in the 8th or 9th centuries. Christianity was around, but it did not dominate Britain. As we have seen, there was a Temple dedicated to Gwyn’s father at Lydney and upon Brean Down too, a Romano British temple that also dated to about 350 A.D. In recent years it has been speculated that there was a Romano British temple atop Glastonbury Tor itself. Then came the Dark Ages and the coming of the Saxons. Despite this threat, it is quite possible that the families of old gods were remembered in Avalon until the late 7th century, up until the mass exodus of the natives to ‘Wales’. It is a well-known observation that Glastonbury Abbey was deliberately situated, hidden behind Chalice hill, at such an angle that the Tor could not be seen from the earliest church. The Saxons did not relocate the Christian settlement, and so at least in the 8th century, the Tor was still viewed as something not right for Christian eyes. Perhaps the Tor was still the spiritual home of Gwyn the grandchild of Don?

  With the Saxon occupation of Somerset, knowledge of this ancient culture was forced into Wales and finally recorded as Welsh folklore between the 10th and 12th centuries. Although, through many troubled centuries, great libraries and books were burnt and destroyed, thankfully, a few (literally a few) have survived. From these fragile and faded old manuscripts we can attempt to reveal Gwyn’s story.

  Chapter Three

  The Otherworld

  “. . . Procopius* tells us that at the western part of Britain there were islands whither the souls of the departed were ferried; and ‘Ynys-Vitrin’ or Ynys-Wydryn, was the isle, not of glass, but of perpetual youth.” (*A 6th century Byzantine chronicler)

  (Frank Lomax’s introduction to ‘The Antiquities of Glastonbury’ by William of Malmesbury)

  We appear to live in a physical world. In solid, three-dimensional bodies, we walk around our three-dimensional world. And the fixed laws of physics are all around us, as if living in a closed box. When you are living in this box of physical reality it is difficult to see things beyond the box.

  Some people can see beyond this physical box. Many people cannot but like to imagine, hope, believe, that there is something beyond. Other people refuse to believe that there is anything beyond the box, believing in only what they can see and touch. They believe that we are born into the box, live our lives in the box and then die in the box, and that is all there is to life that; this physical realm is the only reality.

  The ancient Britons believed in other worlds beyond this physical realm. They believed that you existed before you were born into the box, and that you continue to exist after you died in the box; and that this world of ours was just a realm that we enter into and then we leave.

  Earlier writers of Celtic traditions (mostly scholars of the 1800’s & 1900’s) would often compare British spirituality and mythology to the classical Greek, Roman and Christian mythical systems. Often I have read descriptions of the Celtic Otherworld as some sort of Hades or Hell - a dark realm of shadows. This view really is an error because Welsh literature describes the Otherworld quite differently; it is described as a ‘Golden Realm’ or a ‘Land of Eternal Youth’. So what is the truth of the Celtic/British Other-world?

  Firstly, there were numerous ‘other’ realms, possibly, an unknowable amount. The Welsh gave these worlds many different names, like these below;

  Annwn(Annwyn) = “The Not-world”

  Anghar = “The Loveless Place”

  Difant = “The Unrimmed Place”

  Affwys = “The Abyss”

  Affan = “The Invisible Land”

  Caer Sidi = “the Sidhe (fairy) Castle”

  Caer Wydyr = “
the Glass Castle”

  The origin and meaning of the word Avalon is still hotly debated by many scholars. It was first described by Geoffrey of Monmouth around 1145 A.D. as the magical realm where Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged, and also to where Arthur’s wounded body was taken, to be healed at the end of his life. Geoffrey was writing old Welsh stories for a Norman/French speaking audience, and he often changed words, re-spelling them. Possibly the most well known example is his created name ‘Merlin’, from the Welsh ‘Myrddin’. So too, ‘Avalon’ seems to be his creation based upon the names ‘Annwn’ and ‘Affan’; - ‘the otherworld’ or ‘invisible land’.

  Annwn (pronounced ‘anoo-in’) means ‘The Not-World’. I prefer to use the term ‘Otherworld’ as opposed to ‘underworld’ which is misleading and a prejudicial word helping to perpetuate a Hades or Hell misunderstanding. Annwn is not below our world, neither is it specifically inhabited by dark and menacing spirits. Well, no more so than our own world. It is supernatural and invisible, and all around us in every direction - a realm that co-exists with our own. At any given moment you could unknowingly walk into it, or ‘it’ could walk into our realm, especially for those who can stand ‘in-between worlds’. Where opposites co-exist - Dawn or Dusk (neither night nor day but both), and the Equinoxes (halfway between Mid Winter and Mid Summer) meet.