The Wooing Of Olwen
The Wooing Of Olwen: Shortly after the birth of Kilhuch, the son of King Kilyth, his mother died. Before her death she charged the king that he should not take
The Wooing of Olwen
Canonical Attribution
| Welsh Title | Culhwch ac Olwen — “Culhwch and Olwen” |
|---|---|
| Manuscripts | Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (White Book of Rhydderch), c. 1325, NLW Peniarth MS 4-5; Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest), c. 1382-1410, Oxford Bodleian Jesus College MS 111 |
| Date of Composition | Surviving redaction c. 1090-1100 CE, making it the earliest extant Arthurian prose tale in any language; mythic substance is centuries older, drawing on Brythonic, pre-Christian Welsh oral tradition. A 2005 reassessment by Simon Rodway dates the surviving text to the latter half of the 12th century, but the underlying material is older. |
| Cycle | One of the eleven tales of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, structurally one of the “Native Tales” of Welsh tradition (alongside Lludd and Llefelys, The Dream of Rhonabwy, The Dream of Macsen Wledig). |
| First English Translation | Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion, three volumes 1838-1845, from the Red Book of Hergest. Modern scholarly translations: Gwyn and Thomas Jones (1948), Patrick K. Ford (1977), Jeffrey Gantz (1976), Sioned Davies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007). |
| Subject | Culhwch son of Cilydd, cursed by his stepmother to love no woman but Olwen daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr, the chief-giant; the impossible tasks (anoethau) Ysbaddaden sets to prevent the marriage; Arthur’s warriors performing every task; the killing of the giant; the great hunt of the boar Twrch Trwyth. |
| ATU / Motif | ATU 313C (The Bride Sought from the Lower World); also overlapping with ATU 530A and ATU 461; Motif H335 (Tasks assigned suitors); Motif H1010 (Impossible tasks); Motif F531 (Giant); Motif B16.2.4 (Devastating boar); uniquely Welsh: Culhwch’s invocation-list of 260+ named Arthurian warriors — the earliest surviving Arthurian catalogue. |
| Scholarly Note | Described by Welsh medievalist Rachel Bromwich as “the door that opens onto the oldest Arthurian world we still possess.” The text predates Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae by half a century and Chretien de Troyes’ romances by nearly a century. The Arthur of Culhwch is not yet the courtly emperor of later French romance: he is a chief-warrior of the Britons, surrounded by named warriors many of whom appear nowhere else in surviving literature. |
I. The Stepmother’s Curse
Cilydd son of Celyddon Wledig had a son by his first wife Goleuddydd: a boy named Culhwch (from cul, “narrow,” and hwch, “pig” — the storyteller explains he was born in a pig-run), and of the cousinship of Arthur. Goleuddydd died, and on her deathbed she laid an injunction on her husband not to marry again until he saw a brier with two heads upon her grave. After many years the brier appeared, and Cilydd took to wife the widow of King Doged. The new queen had a daughter, and she wished her stepson Culhwch to marry her — but Culhwch declined, being not yet of an age for marriage. The stepmother, angered, swore a destiny upon him (a tynged, the Welsh geis): that his side should never strike against a woman until he won Olwen, the daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr, chief of giants.
At her name his cheeks reddened and love of the maiden entered into every limb of him, though he had never seen her. His father, hearing of his trouble, told him to ride to the court of his cousin Arthur to ask the hand of the maiden as a boon. Culhwch armed himself: a four-cornered cloak of fine purple wool with a golden ball at each corner, gold spurs, two greyhounds with white breasts and collars of red gold, a sword of gold-hilted steel, and a horse of bright pale grey, four winters old. Two spears of silver, well-tempered, were in his hand. Thus he came to Arthur’s court at Celli Wig in Cornwall, the courser’s hoof cutting four pieces of turf with every stride like four swallows about his head.
II. The Invocation of the Warriors
When Culhwch demanded entry, the porter Glewlwyd Mighty-Grip would have turned him back, for Arthur was at meat. But Culhwch swore that if he were refused entry he would raise three shouts that would be heard in Ireland and in the headlands of Cornwall, and that women with child would miscarry and others fall barren at his cry. Arthur sent for him, and Culhwch made his request: he asked the gift of Olwen daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr, and as the surety of the gift he invoked the help of two hundred and sixty named warriors of Arthur’s court.
The invocation-list of Culhwch ac Olwen is one of the most extraordinary passages in early Welsh literature: a sustained roll-call of named heroes, each with epithets and characteristics that often hint at lost tales we will never recover. Cei the fair, son of Cynyr Fair-Beard, who could hold his breath for nine days and nine nights underwater. Bedwyr One-Hand, swiftest of warriors. Drem son of Dremidydd, who could see from Celli Wig in Cornwall to Pen Blathaon in the North on a clear day. Gwallgoig, who could keep all the villages between two seas awake at his pleasure. Sgilti Lightfoot, who could run upon the tips of reeds. The names go on for pages, and many appear nowhere else in any surviving Welsh text — orphan heroes of a vanished mythology preserved here alone.
“Ti a gei dy gyfarws, hyd y bo iawn dy ben.”
“You shall have your boon — as far as the wind dries, as far as the rain wets, as far as the sun runs, as far as the sea reaches, as far as the earth extends.”
— Arthur’s grant to Culhwch, the great formula of Welsh sovereign promise; Culhwch ac Olwen, c. 1100 CE
Arthur granted the boon, and dispatched six of his finest warriors with Culhwch to seek out Olwen: Cei, Bedwyr, Cynddylig the Guide, Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues (who knew all human and animal speech), Gwalchmei son of Gwyar (the figure who would become Sir Gawain in later Continental romance), and Menw son of Teirgwaedd, a master of enchantments who could cast a glamour over the company so that they walked unseen through hostile country. They set forth across the great plain of Britain searching for the fortress of the chief-giant, riding for a year and a day before they came to it.
III. The Forty Impossible Tasks
After long searching they came to a great fortress, the greatest they had ever seen, in the heart of a vast plain. In its orchard they found a maiden of such extraordinary beauty that the warriors fell silent at the sight of her. Her hair was yellower than the flower of the broom, her skin whiter than the foam of the wave, her cheeks redder than the reddest foxglove. Wherever she walked, four pure white trefoil clovers sprang up beneath her feet. From this — ol, “track,” and gwen, “white” — she was called Olwen, White-Track.
Culhwch declared his love at once, and Olwen answered with grave Welsh courtesy: she would come willingly, but her father had set a destiny upon his own life that whenever she went to a husband he must die. She advised Culhwch to ask her father for her, and to promise whatever was asked, for only by doing so could the matter be resolved.
Ysbaddaden Pencawr, the chief-giant, was an extraordinary figure: so vast and so weighed down by age that his eyelids had to be propped up with great wooden forks before he could see his visitors. Three times Culhwch and the warriors came to demand Olwen, and three times the giant threw poisoned stone-spears after them as they left — spears that the warriors threw back, blinding him in one eye, his knee, and at last striking him through the eyeball. At the fourth coming the giant set out his terms: forty impossible tasks, the anoethau, each of which had to be completed before he would give Olwen.
The tasks form one of the most elaborate sequences of medieval narrative: clear a great thicket and plough it and sow it and reap it all in a single day with the plough of Amaethon son of Don, who will not come willingly; obtain the cauldron of Diwrnach the Irishman, which boils only the food of brave men; fetch the comb and shears and razor from between the ears of the magical boar Twrch Trwyth, once a king transformed for his sins, the fiercest beast in Britain; obtain the blood of the Black Witch (Orddu daughter of Orwen) of the Valley of Grief; retrieve Mabon son of Modron from his hidden prison; secure the leash of Cors Cant-Ewin, the collar of Canhastyr Hundred-Hands, and the chain of Cilydd Hundred-Holds; and many more — forty in total, each apparently impossible. The catalogue of tasks is the structural spine of the second half of the tale, and each task is a story-seed of its own.
IV. The Hunt of the Twrch Trwyth
Arthur and his warriors set about the tasks. They are described in a sequence of episodes that occupy most of the tale’s length, ranging across Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and the legendary lands of the Otherworld. The greatest of these is the hunt for Twrch Trwyth — a hunt that gave the medieval Welsh a national epic of the chase, and that left its traces in the place-names of southern Britain to this day. The boar, transformed from a wicked king for his sins, was pursued through Ireland (where he killed many warriors), across the Severn Sea to Wales, fought in the Preseli mountains, driven through Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire, fought a great water-battle in the Severn estuary (where Mabon son of Modron seized the razor from between his ears, and Cyledr the Wild seized the shears), and finally driven over the cliff of Cornwall into the sea, taking the last of the implements with him into the depths.
One by one the other tasks were completed. The cauldron of Diwrnach was seized after Bedwyr boarded his ship and Llenlleawg the Irishman threw the cauldron over the side. The Black Sorceress was killed by Arthur himself, who hurled his knife Carnwennan at her and clove her into two tubs — and the blood of the Black Witch was carried back in a vessel. Mabon son of Modron was freed from his stone prison at Gloucester after Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues asked five of the oldest animals in the world (the Blackbird of Cilgwri, the Stag of Rhedynfre, the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, the Eagle of Gwernabwy, and at last the Salmon of Llyn Llyw) where he was held. At last all forty tasks were complete, and Arthur’s warriors returned to Ysbaddaden’s fortress.
Goreu son of Custennin — a cousin of Culhwch whose father had been wronged by Ysbaddaden and whose brothers the giant had killed — performed the final office: he shaved the giant’s beard with the razor of Twrch Trwyth and his hair with the shears, cut off his head, and set it on a stake on the citadel. The chief-giant’s hall fell silent. Olwen and Culhwch were married that night, and as long as Culhwch lived, she was his only wife. The tale ends with the formula of the medieval Welsh storyteller: “Ac uelly y kauas Kulhwch Olwen, merch Yspadaden Penn Kawr. A dyna ual y gorffowyssawd y kyfarwydyt hwnnw.” — “And thus did Culhwch get Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr. And so the story rested.”
The Moral
“Nid hawdd cael perl heb nofio ar waelod mor.”
“A pearl is not easily won without diving to the seabed.”
— Welsh proverbial wisdom; the matter of Culhwch and Olwen in a single line
The moral of Culhwch ac Olwen lies in the architecture of its forty tasks: love of the right person is not a sentimental gift but a structural transformation of the world. To win Olwen, the entire heroic order of Arthurian Britain has to be mobilised; entire regions have to be hunted across; ancient enchantments have to be undone; a giant has to die. The tale insists that true love of a worthy person is not separable from the wider justice of the world — that to claim Olwen is also to clear the brier-fields, kill the cursed boar, and end the reign of the giant who has held the land in fear. The wooing is also the redeeming, and the redeeming is also the wooing.
The Translation History of the Tale
The first translation of Culhwch ac Olwen into modern English was made by Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-1895), an English aristocrat who learned Welsh after her marriage and devoted decades to mastering its medieval prose. Her translation, published between 1838 and 1845 as part of her three-volume The Mabinogion: Translated from the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, took its source-text from the Red Book of Hergest in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Lady Charlotte gave the eleven tales their now-familiar collective title (the medieval manuscripts did not use the word “Mabinogion” as a collective noun); her renderings — archaising, sometimes loose, but always devoted — introduced the Welsh Arthurian world to English literature for the first time. It is in her version that names like Kilhwch (Culhwch) and Olwen first entered English print, and it was from her translation that Tennyson, William Morris, and the later Victorian medievalists drew their picture of Welsh romance.
Twentieth-century scholarship has produced more philologically rigorous translations: Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (1948), Patrick Ford (1977), Jeffrey Gantz (1976), and most recently Sioned Davies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007). Each translator has confronted the distinctive verbal texture of the Welsh original — its triadic rhythms, its formulaic phrases, its catalogues of names, its sudden shifts from rapid action to elaborate description. Sioned Davies’s translation in particular has been praised for restoring the oral grain of the storyteller’s voice, treating Culhwch not as a fossilised text but as the script of a performance that took place over multiple evenings in the chieftain’s hall. To read any of these translations is to enter a living, contested, scholarly tradition that has been refining its understanding of the Welsh original for nearly two hundred years.
The Welsh Geography of the Tale
One of the most distinctive features of Culhwch ac Olwen, and a major reason for the special place it holds in Welsh cultural memory, is the way it embeds itself in the actual geography of southern Britain. The hunt of Twrch Trwyth in particular is constructed as a kind of mythic gazetteer. The boar lands at Porth Cleis in Dyfed (modern Pembrokeshire), is fought along the rivers Llwchwr and Tywi, crosses the Severn at Aber Hafren, is driven eastward through Cornwall, and is finally pushed over the cliff at the tip of Penwith into the sea. Every stage of the chase is anchored in a named real place, and many of those places carry, even today, an echo of the tale in their names: Cwm Cerwyn in the Preseli hills, where Arthur fought the boar; Llyn Llyw, the great salmon-pool; the Wye and Severn estuaries where Mabon won the razor. The medieval Welsh audience would have been able to walk parts of the route, and the tale clearly invited them to do so.
This is something the courtly Arthurian romances of the Continent never attempt. Chretien de Troyes places his Arthurian stories in a vague chivalric never-where; Geoffrey of Monmouth gives Arthur an imperial geography (Rome, Gaul, the British Isles in the abstract). Culhwch ac Olwen alone roots its hero in a specific landscape that its first hearers knew with their feet. This is what makes it not only the earliest surviving Arthurian tale but also the most local one — and what allows modern readers, walking the Preseli hills or following the southern Welsh coast, still to feel the mythic substrate of the British landscape beneath their boots.
The same locality-instinct is at work in the figure of Olwen herself. Her name, “White-Track,” is etymologised in the tale by the four white trefoil clovers that spring up wherever she walks — an image deeply rooted in the agricultural Wales of the storyteller’s listeners. The trefoil (Welsh meillion) is the clover, the flower of fertile spring meadows. To make the heroine literally the bringer-of-clover is to bind the love-quest to the renewal of the land itself: the wedding of Culhwch and Olwen is also, on the mythic register, the marriage of the hero to the springtime of Britain, the lifting of the giant’s blight from the soil. This kind of land-poetry is what gives the tale its peculiar luminosity, and is why it has survived in the Welsh imagination long after the courtly romances of its century have faded into university libraries.
Why This Story Has Lasted
Culhwch ac Olwen has lasted nine centuries because it is the doorway to a world. It preserves, in a single elaborate prose tale, an entire shadow-mythology of Britain that would otherwise be lost: hundreds of warrior-names, dozens of fragments of older legend, a portrait of Arthur as a Welsh chief-warrior rather than a courtly emperor, and an embedded catalogue of place-names tied to the route of the Twrch Trwyth that allowed medieval Welsh readers to walk the geography of their own mythic past. Without this text the figure of Gawain, the magical comb-and-shears, the cauldron of plenty, and many more elements that would later flow into Continental Arthurian romance would have no surviving Welsh origin. The Arthur it gives us — chief among the Britons, surrounded by named warriors with strange and specific gifts, rooted in the southern Welsh landscape — is closer to the historical (or legendary) original than anything that would follow.
The deeper reason for its permanence is structural. The shape of the tale — the impossible courtship, the giant who would not give the girl, the forty labours, the great hunt, the final winning — is one of the universal shapes of the human imagination. It appears in the labours of Heracles, the trials of Psyche, the hunt for the Calydonian boar, and a hundred other tellings across cultures. Culhwch ac Olwen gives that universal shape a uniquely Welsh form: the catalogue of warriors, the four white trefoils, the propping-up of the giant’s eyelids, the boar pursued across the British map, the salmon-pool at Llyn Llyw, the cauldron seized in Ireland. It is local in its details and universal in its bones, and that combination — the universal narrative arriving in the particular landscape — is what allows a story to last as long as the language that contains it. To read Culhwch ac Olwen today is to hear, faintly but unmistakably, the voice of a Welsh storyteller in a hall lit by torchlight, nine hundred years ago, speaking of a hero, a maiden, a giant, and a hunt that went over the edge of the world.
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