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

them – and Pliny in his Natural History records the belief that the souls of the dead reside in beans. According to the Scottish poet Montgomerie (1605), witches rode on bean-stalks to their sabbaths.
    To return to the Battle of the Trees. Though the fern was reckoned a ‘tree’ by the Irish poets, the ‘plundered fern’ is probably a reference to fern-seed which makes invisible and confers other magical powers. The twice-repeated ‘privet’ is suspicious. The privet figures unimportantly in Irish poetic tree-lore; it is never regarded as ‘blessed’. Probably its second occurrence in line 100 is a disguise of the wild-apple, which is the tree most likely to smile from beside the rock, emblem of security: for Olwen, the laughing Aphrodite of Welsh legend, is always connected with thewild-apple. In line 99 ‘his berries are thy dowry’ is absurdly juxtaposed to the hazel. Only two fruit-trees could be said to dower a bride in Gwion’s day: the churchyard yew whose berries fell at the church porch where marriages were always celebrated, and the churchyard rowan, often substituted for the yew in Wales. I think the yew is here intended; yew-berries were prized for their sticky sweetness. In the tenth-century Irish poem, King and Hermit ,Marvan the brother of King Guare of Connaught commends them highly as food.
    The remaining stanzas of the poem may now be tentatively restored:
    (lines 110, 160, and 161)
     
I have plundered the fern ,
    Through all secrets I spy ,
Old Math ap Mathonwy
    Knew no more than I.  
     
    (lines 101, 71–73, 77and 78)
     
Strong chieftains were the blackthorn
    With his ill fruit,  
The unbeloved whitethorn
    Who wears the same suit.  
    (lines 116, 111–113)
     
The swift-pursuing reed ,
    The broom with his brood ,
And the furze but ill-behaved
    Until he is subdued.  
    (lines 97, 99, 128, 141, 60)
     
The dower-scattering yew
    Stood glum at the fight’s fringe,  
With the elder slow to burn
    Amid fires that singe ,
    (lines 100, 139 and 140)
     
And the blessed wild apple
    Laughing for pride
From the Gorchan of Maelderw ,
    By the rock side.  
    (lines 83, 54, 25, 26)
     
But I, although slighted
    Because I was not big,
Fought, trees, in your array
    On the field of Goddeu Brig.  
    The broom may not seem a warlike tree, but in Gratius’s Genistae Altinates the tall white broom is said to have been much used in ancient times for the staves of spears and darts: these are probably the ‘brood’. Goddeu Brig means Tree-tops, which has puzzled critics who hold that Câd Goddeu was a battle fought in Goddeu, ‘Trees’, the Welsh name for Shropshire. The Gorchan of Maelderw (‘the incantation of Maelderw’) was a long poem attributed to the sixth-century poet Taliesin, who is said to have particularly prescribed it as a classic to his bardic colleagues. Theapple-tree was a symbol of poetic immortality, which is why it is here presented as growing out of this incantation of Taliesin’s.
    Here, to anticipate my argument by several chapters, is the Order of Battle in the Câd Goddeu :
     
    It should be added that in the original, between the lines numbered 60 and 61, occur eight lines unintelligible to D. W. Nash: beginning with ‘the chieftains are falling’ and ending with ‘blood of men up to the buttocks’. They may or may not belong to the Battle of the Trees.
    I leave the other pieces included in this medley to be sorted out by someone else. Besides the monologues of Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn and Apollo, there is a satire on monkish theologians, who sit in a circle gloomily enjoying themselves with prophecies of the imminent Day of Judgement (lines 62–66), the black darkness, the shaking of the mountain, the purifying furnace (lines 131–134), damning men’s souls by the hundred (lines 39–40) and pondering the absurd problems of the Schoolmen:
    (lines 204, 205)
     
Room for a million angels
    On my