The Hero with a Thousand Faces

And she put our hero, Gwion Bach, to stir the cauldron, and a blind man named Morda to keep the fire kindled beneath it, and she charged them that they should not suffer it to cease boiling for the space of a year and a day. And she herself, according to the books of the astronomers, and in planetary hours, gathered every day of all charm-bearing herbs. And one day, towards the end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations, it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach. And by reason of their great heat he put his finger in his mouth, and the instant he put those marvel-working drops into his mouth he foresaw everything that was to come, and perceived that his chief care must be to guard against the wiles of Caridwen, for vast was her skill. And in very great fear he fled towards his own land. And the cauldron burst in two, because all the liquor within it except the three charm-bearing drops was poisonous, so that the horses of Gwyddno Garanhir were poisoned by the water of the stream into which the liquor of the cauldron ran, and the confluence of that stream was called the Poison of the Horses of Gwyddno from that time forth.

Thereupon came in Caridwen and saw all the toil of the whole year lost. And she seized a billet of wood and struck the blind Morda on the head until one of his eyes fell out upon his cheek. And he said, “Wrongfully hast thou disfigured me, for I am innocent. Thy loss was not because of me.” “Thou speakest truth,” said Caridwen, “it was Gwion Bach who robbed me.”

Figure 46. Caridwen in the Shape of a Greyhound Pursuing Gwion Bach in the Shape of a Hare (lithograph, Britain, a.d. 1877)

And she went forth after him, running. And he saw her, and changed himself into a hare and fled. But she changed herself into a greyhound and turned him. And he ran towards a river, and became a fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water, until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air. She, as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky. And just as she was about to stoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped among the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains. Then she transformed herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed him. And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast him into the sea to the mercy of God, on the twenty-ninth day of April.^[2]

The tale of Gwion Bach comes to us through “Taliesin” in The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh romances translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in four volumes between 1838 and 1849. Taliesin, “Chief of the Bards of the West,” may have been an actual historical personage of the sixth century a.d., contemporary with the chieftain who became the “King Arthur” of later romance. The bard’s legend and poems survive in a thirteenth-century manuscript, “The Book of Taliesin,” which is one of the “Four Ancient Books of Wales.”

A mabinog (Welsh) is a bard’s apprentice. The term mabinogi, “juvenile instruction,” denotes the traditional material (myths, legends, poems, etc.) taught to a mabinog, and which it was his duty to acquire by heart. Mabinogion, the plural of mabinogi, was the name given by Guest to her translation of eleven romances from the “Ancient Books.”

The bardic lore of Wales, like that of Scotland and Ireland, descends from a very old and abundant pagan-Celtic fund of myth. This was transformed and revivified by the Christian missionaries and chroniclers (fifth century a.d.following), who recorded the old stories and sought painstakingly to co-ordinate them with the Bible. During the tenth century, a brilliant period of romance production, centering primarily in Ireland, converted the inheritance into an important contemporary force. Celtic bards went out to the courts of Christian Europe; Celtic themes were rehearsed by the pagan Scandinavian scalds. A great part of our European fairy lore, as well as the foundation of the Arthurian tradition, traces back to this first great creative period of Occidental romance.^[3]

The flight is a favorite episode of the folktale, where it is developed under many lively forms.