The White Goddess by Robert Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

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 broom with its children…
     
    The furze not well behaved
   Until he was tamed….
     
    Bashful the chestnut-tree….
     
     
    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:
    Of nine kinds of faculties.
    Of fruit of fruits,
Of fruit God made me.
     
     
    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.
    H ANES B LODEUWEDD  
    line 142
     
Not of father nor of mother
    144
     
Was my blood, was my body.
    156
I was spellbound by Gwydion,
    157
Prime enchanter of the Britons,
    143
When he formed me from nine blossoms ,
    149
    Nine buds of various kind:
    148
From primrose of the mountain ,
    121
Broom, meadow-sweet and cockle ,
    Together intertwined ,
    75
From the bean in its shade bearing
    76
A white spectral army
    150
    Of earth, of earthly kind ,
    152
From blossoms of the nettle ,
    129
Oak, thorn, and bashful chestnut –
    [146
Nine powers of nine flowers,  
    145]
    Nine powers in me combined,
    149
    Nine buds of plant and tree.
    220
Long and white are my fingers
    153
    As the ninth wave of the sea.
    In Wales and Ireland primroses are reckoned fairy flowers and in English folk tradition represent wantonness (cf. ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ – Hamlet ;the ‘primrose of her wantonness’ – Brathwait’s Golden Fleece ) . So Milton’s ‘yellow-skirted fayes’ wore primrose. ‘Cockles’ are the ‘tares’ of the Parable that the Devil sowed in the wheat; and the bean is traditionally associated with ghosts – the Greek and Roman homoeopathic remedy against ghosts was to spit beans at