Annwn, Otherworlds, and Kingdoms Under the Earth

In the late Middle Ages, the fairy emerges as a distinct, folkloric figure.

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The Riders of the Sidhe, John Duncan ca. 1911. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A prince and his men are on a walk in the countryside, when the prince decides to hike to a mound near his castle. A courtier tries to dissuade him:

‘Lord,’ said one of the court, ‘the strange thing about the mound is that whatever nobleman sits on it will not leave there without one of two things happening: either he will be wounded or injured, or else he will see something wonderful.’¹

The prince Pwyll doesn’t listen. There are plenty of attendants beside him, he reasons. Shortly after, he indeed sees something astonishing:

He sat on the mound. And as they were sitting, they could see a woman wearing a shining golden garment of brocaded silk on a big, tall, pale-white horse coming along the highway that ran past the mound. Anyone who saw it would think that the horse had a slow, steady pace, and was drawing level with the mound.

‘Men,’ said Pwyll, ‘do any of you recognize the rider?’

‘No, lord,’ they said.

‘Let someone go and meet her to find out who she is,’ he said.

One of them got up, but when he came to the road to meet her, she had gone past. He followed her as fast as he could on foot. But the greater his speed, the further she drew away from him.

There’s no use—the horse is a magical horse, and its rider is Rhiannon, a woman of Annwn. Rhiannon reveals that she is running from an arranged marriage, and after several trials, she and Pwyll can finally marry.

Rhiannon and Pwyll are two of the protagonists of The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh folktales that were written down from roughly 1350 to 1410. The first four tales are known as “The Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” and the other seven stories range from Arthurian legends to fictional interpretations of British history. In the past, it was popular to look at these tales as preservations of pre-Roman Celtic myths, but scholars now reject this notion. After all, these tales were recorded over a thousand years after the Romans arrived in Britain. They are works of literature woven from popular folklore.²

The tales draw on oral storytelling traditions, but the authors, like authors today, are just as capable of shaping tales to suit their creative goals.³ It is possible that certain figures, like Rhiannon, may reflect pre-Christian deities; in Welsh legends, names that end in -on (Mabon, Modron, Rhiannon, etc.) are likely of ancient origin.⁴ That being said, the preservation of a name itself doesn’t necessarily indicate that the writers of the story had knowledge of the pre-Christian figure who might lie behind it. To use a modern analogy, a woman named Mary in a television show is not necessarily meant to represent the Virgin Mary. In such murky territory, we must be careful about making assumptions.