Rhiannon | A Welsh Mythology Deep Dive

[00:00:00]A woman on a white horse appears at [music] the edge of the world and nobody can catch her. When they finally stop chasing, she tells them that she has been looking for them [music] the whole time.

[00:00:13]That is Rhiannon. By the end of this video, >> [music] >> you're going to understand why the man that she said no to never let her go. Hi friends, I'm Betty Rage, your favorite nerdy goth mom, and this hot mess here is Lashes and Lore, where I break down lore, literature, and other dark history in my own little way while I crochet a granny square for our blanket that we are creating. The thing about this yarn is that it was once a sweater on its way to a landfill and I pulled it out of that path, unravelled it, and now we're making a Frankenblanket. Some of the other squares we've created here on our show hang out here in the background while I tell a new story this week, and that's right, it's going to be Rhiannon.

[00:01:04]I used to put on my makeup while I told stories and now I crochet granny square. It's really not that big of a deal. I have ADHD and I needed something to do while I talk to you about these stories that sometimes I get genuinely a little outraged by. Can you tell that I've already been Halloween shopping? My new yarn bowl is very cool.

[00:01:27]It sees you. I'll keep working on our Frankenblanket, our Blankenstein.

[00:01:32]Somebody said something in the comments the other Franket.

[00:01:36]Yeah, there's the third one. It's here now. Anyways, we're going to keep working on that while we dive into the myth that is Rhiannon.

[00:01:46]Got my energy drink today and my Reanimate Threads cozy that I have here on it. Yeah, I made that. Speaking of stitching blankets, what happens when you stitch a piece into a blanket and then the blanket tells the story of that piece so completely that people forget that the piece itself existed on its own before that. Well, Rhiannon got stitched into Welsh folklore so tightly that most people don't know that there might have been something older underneath there. So, it's our job today to find her. Let's get into that. Before we talk about Rhiannon, we need to talk about the book that she lives in. Because the survival of that book is its own miracle. The Mabinogion is a collection of four interconnected stories called the Four Branches, compiled between the late 11th and early centuries.

[00:02:40]Nobody knows who actually wrote it. The best theory is that one person took older oral material, older fragments of mythology, and wove them into something new. The Four Branches are Pwyll Pendeuic, Branwen ferch Llŷr, and Manawydan fab Llŷr, where she appears, and Math fab Mathonwy. Side note, I've been learning Welsh on and off on Duolingo for years. I'm married to a Welshman, and his mother teaches Welsh language.

[00:03:19]So, it's a hard one. I already struggle with language as it is um because of a lovely speech impediment. But, um it's really fun when you get these ones right.

[00:03:31]It's it's also kind of rare for me to get them right, but I try.

[00:03:36]Gosh darn it, I try.

[00:03:38]Okay, but anyways, and I have my copy of The Mabinogion. Stay.

[00:03:43]Do not fall and embarrass me.

[00:03:45]So, this text survived because Welsh scribes kept copying it. Generation after generation, they picked up a pen and copied it again.

[00:03:54]Because they understood that losing this story meant losing something irreplaceable about who they were. Then, in the 19th century, Lady Charlotte Guest translated it and gave it the English title that we now know as the Mabinogion. It's been translated since by scholars working directly from the medieval Welsh. Without those scribes, without that refusal to let the story die, you wouldn't be here listening to this at all, because I wouldn't have the information to share with you. So, let's meet Rhiannon.

[00:04:30]And yes, it's Rhie.

[00:04:33]Rhie Rhie cuz of the r h.

[00:04:37]Rhiannon. And unless you were born and raised in Wales, do not mess with my pronunciation of this. I've worked hard on it.

[00:04:44]And I don't I don't I never say that.

[00:04:46]So, Rhiannon enters the story in the first branch, and her entrance is one of the strangest and literally most beautiful scenes in medieval literature.

[00:04:59]Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, sits on a magical mound called Arberth, where legend says you'll either be injured or you'll see something marvelous.

[00:05:10]He sees a woman in a golden dress on a white horse. So, I mean, it still could be either way, honestly. But [snorts] she was moving at a pace that somehow could not be caught. He sends his men after her.

[00:05:22]He tries himself. For days, they just travel and travel. No matter how hard anyone rides, her horse never moves faster than like a gentle trot.

[00:05:35]Yet, they cannot close the distance.

[00:05:38]Finally, he just, you know, uses his brain and calls out and says, "Hey, stop."

[00:05:43]Well, she stops immediately.

[00:05:45]She was never running. She was waiting for someone to actually ask. Wow.

[00:05:50]She tells him that her name is Rhiannon.

[00:05:52]She tells him she's been looking for him. She's supposed to marry a man named Gwawl ap Clud, but that is not what she wants. She chose Pwyll before she ever met him, and she's come to ask him if he'll have her instead.

[00:06:12]What are you going to do? Which is a pretty wild story. It also suggests that she knew things about him before she showed up there on the horse, unless she was just traveling on the horse and was like, "I don't want to marry this other guy.

[00:06:28]That guy looks good. Let's do Let's do that one instead." And who knows? We don't have that much information.

[00:06:34]Anyways, more about Rhiannon. Her name traces back to Rigatona in the older Brythonic language, meaning great queen.

[00:06:45]Scholars connect her to Epona, in the Gaulish horse goddess. Macha of Ireland, who carried the same domains of horses and sovereignty. Ronald Hutton, a historian of Celtic religion, described her as one of the great female personalities. There's nobody quite like her in the text that came before. A woman who cannot be caught unless she chooses to be caught. And the man that she said no to is just going to make sure that she pays for it for like the rest of her life.

[00:07:16]So, we'll get to that in a moment. Regarding the Mabinogi, the first branch does something brutal to her. And it's a story type folklorists actually have a name for, the the calumniated wife.

[00:07:30]Pwyll and Rhiannon marry, and they have a son, Pryderi. The night that he is born, he disappears from the room.

[00:07:40]Now, the women who are supposed to be watching him panic. They know that they are going to be punished for losing the prince, so they smear puppy's blood on Rhiannon's hand and face while she's asleep, and these women accuse her of killing her own child and eating him.

[00:07:59]Of course, it's a lie to save themselves, but she's brought before the court with the evidence still on her own skin.

[00:08:06]The medieval Welsh law gave Pwyll legal grounds to set her aside.

[00:08:12]He doesn't, but the court still demands a penance, and it's designed to humiliate her completely.

[00:08:20]So, for 7 years, she has to sit by the castle gate and tell every single visitor of what she's accused of, and then offer to carry them on her back to the court, like a horse, like the very animal that her mythology ties her to. She does it. The story never says that she breaks. Meanwhile, a man named Teyrnon finds an abandoned baby boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pwyll and shows a strange natural gift with horses. So, eventually the child is returned, her innocence is proven, and the boy, Pryderi, eventually becomes the king of Dyfed. You would think that that's the end of her suffering, but it's really not even close. So, you remember Gwawl, the man that she turned down at the begin the very beginning?

[00:09:16]She was supposed to marry him, but decided to marry Pwyll instead. Well, he's been waiting the whole time.

[00:09:23]So, Pwyll dies. Pryderi takes the throne. Rhiannon remarries to Manawydan fab Llŷr, rightful heir to Britain, currently locked out of it. In the third branch, a mist falls over Dyfed. Everyone vanishes except Rhiannon, her husband Pwyll Pendaran, and Pwyll Pendaran's wife Cigfa.

[00:09:47]The four of them survive in an empty land, but they try hunting. There's nothing to hunt.

[00:09:54]They [snorts] move to England, become so skilled at crafting saddles and shoes that the local tradesmen drive them out of town. Eventually, they return to Dyfed and a white boar leads Pwyll Pendaran into a mysterious castle.

[00:10:12]Inside the castle, he grabs this golden bowl, but in doing so, he's frozen there.

[00:10:18]Unable to speak, Rhiannon goes in after him and it does the same thing to her.

[00:10:24]The castle vanishes with both of them trapped inside. It turns out that the enchantment was created by Llwyd ap Cil Coed in revenge for the humiliation of his friend Gwawl.

[00:10:39]Yeah, okay. Math fab Mathonwy eventually forces Llwyd to release them and lift the curse. The man that she said no to never let her go. Quick break. If you want to support this channel, the best way to do it is through >> [music] >> Reanimate Threads.

[00:10:58]It's my shop where I make sustainable crochet pieces from thrifted [music] and upcycled yarn. Kind of like monster witchy themes uh mostly because I believe that good craft can outlast fast fashion [music] always. Things like this cute little cozy for my energy drink.

[00:11:15][music] The shop is open now at this QR code and I have it in the description below as well. And every single purchase goes directly [music] back into making more episodes like this one. So, thank you for your support. Back to the story.

[00:11:28]Right, so who was Rhiannon before medieval author wrote down. This is where the scholarship genuinely splits.

[00:11:36]So, Ronald Hutton and others, who we discussed before, they argue that she is a Welsh survival of an older Celtic horse goddess, the same archetype behind Epona and Macha.

[00:11:50]Other scholars push back, pointing out that the gap between any theorized pig in source and the written medieval tale is literal centuries wide and is impossible to prove any of that.

[00:12:05]Catherine McKenna reads her differently.

[00:12:07]She sees Rhiannon as a sovereignty figure, someone who chooses her king through marriage and blesses his rule by that choice.

[00:12:18]On this reading, her marriage to Pwyll isn't just a love story. It's what makes him legitimate. The truth is, we don't actually know what she was before the manuscript. What we know is the pattern that she carries, a woman on a white horse, a chosen king, a door to the other world. That pattern is older than the page. And then, almost 2,000 years later, a woman in California, who probably had never read a single word of Welsh mythology, sat down at a piano and conjured up that exact same pattern without even knowing that she was doing it. Yeah, this is the part where we're going to talk about Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks, okay?

[00:13:01]So, jump into 1974.

[00:13:03]Stevie Nicks.

[00:13:05]Why did I put the crochet away?

[00:13:07]Betty, this is the whole thing. Okay.

[00:13:10]Stevie Nicks, not yet in Fleetwood Mac, picks up a cheap paperback either at an airport or off of a friend's couch, depending on which interview you read about this. She may have actually said both. The book is Triad by Mary Leader, about a woman named Bronwyn, another Welsh deity.

[00:13:29]She is possessed by another personality named Rhiannon.

[00:13:34]Nicks didn't care about the plot, she cared about the name. So, she sat at the piano and wrote a song about a celestial woman tangled up in birds and magic.

[00:13:47]Someone that she called not of this world. She had no idea who the real Rhiannon was. She just thought the name was beautiful. The song landed on Fleetwood Mac's self-titled 1975 album.

[00:14:00]It was released as a single in 1976 and it hit number 11 on the Billboard chart and became one of the band's defining songs.

[00:14:10]Nicks introduced it live as a song about an old Welsh witch.

[00:14:16]But get this, Nicks didn't even learn that Rhiannon was a real figure from Welsh mythology until 1978.

[00:14:24]That is three full years after the song was already a hit. She found out that the goddess rode a white horse and traveled with three magical birds whose song could heal pain and erase the memory of danger. That when trouble struck, Rhiannon would ride in, you'd black out and then you'd wake up to find the danger gone and hear the birds singing as they flew away.

[00:14:44]A woman who knew nothing about Welsh mythology wrote a song about a celestial woman tied to birds and magic and accidentally described the actual Welsh goddess.

[00:15:01]And I don't have that one, but I have this original 1977 Uh okay, so who is Rhiannon now? Today, centuries after the Mabinogion was written down and decades after Stevie Nicks sang her into the modern world, Rhiannon means different things to different people. Welsh folk witch Mhara Starling, who is one of my favorite Welsh sources, um because of the excitement that she has with the subject matter.

[00:15:33]Several really cool books that she has, I will link them below. Mhara Starling is a first language Welsh speaker and a Celtic polytheist, and she describes Rhiannon today as the goddess of grief, of overcoming trauma and anxiety. A maternal figure that is called on for comfort and understanding by those carrying pain that they didn't cause. And that's not really different from what the Mabinogi was saying. It comes directly from it. A woman blamed for a death that she didn't cause, who carried a penance for a crime that never happened, and endured it without breaking. She is also claimed by neo-pagans as a horse goddess and a sovereignty figure. Folk witches call on her for grief work. To some people, she is the Welsh witch from the Fleetwood Mac song. And academics still argue over whether she is ancient or invented. But none of that really matters because she's kind of all of those things at once, in my opinion.

[00:16:36]And here is a fun little bit of divine snubbing. And I play D&D, you got to hear about it. D&D's official Celtic pantheon does not have Rhiannon entry in it.

[00:16:49]Not in the player's handbook, not anywhere official. She got left off the guest list entirely. Now, Epona is the closest thing the game actually gives. She's the Gaulish horse goddess. Real-world scholars already link to Rhiannon anyway. So, the same divine pattern, same sovereignty, and threshold energy.

[00:17:12]But even Epona is just folded into Celtic as a vibe, not even really given her own proper write-up. So, if D&D wasn't going to build her, I did.

[00:17:24]Rhiannon, goddess of horses, sovereignty, and grief. Chaotic neutral.

[00:17:29]Life domain. Holy symbol is a white horse with three birds in flight. The punishment, the seven years, the sun coming back, all of it, it's baked into the portfolio. Because a goddess who survived getting blamed for something that she did not do, and came out the other side still sovereign, well, that's exactly the kind of cleric that your table needs when the story gets heavy.

[00:17:53]D&D left the gap, and Wales already told you what belongs there. And hey, if you want the full Rhiannon stat block for your own table, I made a free PDF. It's just sitting on my Patreon. No paywall. Just go grab it.

[00:18:08]You're welcome. And if you don't care about that thing, just don't worry about that. Don't worry about it. Okay, but I still have a mom moment, and I want to talk to anyone watching who's been told that their pain isn't legitimate because nobody important enough has written it down yet. Rhiannon's story has survived through voice and memory, carried by people who refuse to let her disappear, long before a monk ever wrote it down.

[00:18:34]When it was finally written down, scholars spent centuries afterward arguing whether the goddess underneath was even real. And you don't need a citation to know what you have survived.

[00:18:46]You don't need a peer-reviewed source, you know what I mean, to know your own grief is real. Rhiannon carried a penance for a crime she did not commit, and she never stopped being herself underneath it. So, whatever you are carrying that nobody has validated yet, it's allowed to be true anyway. So, that is Rhiannon.

[00:19:10]And this is our granny square for our franken blanket.

[00:19:16]Our franket, our blankenstein.

[00:19:19]Yeah, that list [snorts] is getting really long. Okay? Let me know what you thought about today's story. Leave your thoughts down in the comment below. Of course, the comment word is Frianan.

[00:19:29]And if you are interested in getting my homebrew D&D goddess, there's a link below to my Patreon where you can get it for free. No paywall.

[00:19:36]Just yours if you want it. And don't let the story stop here because this video you're about Baba Yaga is just for you.

[00:19:43]I'm Betty Rage and this is Faye.

[00:19:46]Be good to each other, love each other, and as always, free mom hugs from me to you.

[00:19:53]Bye. I'll see you in the next one.

[00:19:55]Again, whoop.

[00:20:01]>> [music]