King of an Otherworld or Lord of the Underworld?

Arawn of Annwfn's Changing Role from the Mabinogi to Modern Fantasy

by Amina Malak Otto

In modern times, the medieval Welsh literary figure known as Arawn King of Annwfn (Annwn, Annwuyn, Annuvin) has taken on a much darker and ominous aura than his representation in the source material.(1) He has undergone a transformation in the interluding centuries that causes him to now be portrayed as death god, a lord of the underworld, and a generally sinister entity in both fiction and nonfiction sources. Annwfn has become an equally lugubrious place which at some point became synonymous with the Christian Hell and has carried connotations of perdition into the present day. Different manifestations of Arawn and Annwfn in fantasy literature of the twentieth century display how multifaceted his character has become and present a stark contrast to the benign otherworldly king in the Mabinogi. This presentation aims to trace the threads of these modifications to their source and explore how various influences from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries have altered Arawn by analysing his and Annwfn’s presence in four modern fantasy works written between 1964 and 1986 that draw on Welsh literary traditions for their inspiration, The Chronicles of Prydain, Dogsbody, The Dark is Rising , and The Fionavar Tapestry. Annwfn’s, and by extension Arawn’s, significance has changed drastically even outside of fantasy literature. Death Gods: An Encyclopedia of the Rulers, Evil Spirits, and Geographies of the Dead describes Annwfn as ‘the Underworld… in which the souls of the damned lived. Annwn was a place of gloom, despair, and torment’.(2) In contrast, in the Mabinogi, the court of Annwfn holds ‘sleeping quarters there and halls and rooms and the most beautifully adorned buildings that anyone had seen’ with ‘a war-band and retinues coming in, and the fairest and best-equipped men’, and Arawn’s wife is ‘the most beautiful woman that anyone had seen, wearing a golden garment of shining brocaded silk… [Pwyll] found her to be the most noble woman and the most gracious of disposition and discourse…’.(3) This evolution and association with death and perdition is the result of a centuries-long process that draw together threads of folklore that span many different Welsh, Celtic and Germanic traditions. Several major literary influences such as Dafydd ap Gwilym, the Brothers Grimm and even Shakespeare have also contributed to the forms of Arawn and Annwfn seen in the above description and in many of his roles in modern fantasy literature.

The closest example of Annwfn as described by Abel appears in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, released in five books from 1964–68. Alexander acknowledges his departure from the source material in a note in the first book, claiming that he has made Arawn more ‘villainous’ than his depiction in The Four Branches.(4) In this series, he is an ancient, evil, and probably immortal being who desires to conquer the land and bring all beings under his control. Annwfn, or Annuvin, is a physical place in the fictional world of Prydain but is described as a land of the dead and a ‘treasure house’ with magical items that Arawn guards. This depiction of Annuvin draws on another medieval source, a poem from The Book of Taliesin called Preiddeu Annwn, in which Arthur sails to Annwfn in search of treasure but suffers heavy losses.(5) This portrayal of Annwfn as a treasure house appears in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry as well,(6) and a specific cauldron from Annwfn that has the ability to resurrect the dead causes many problems for both Alexander’s and Kay’s protagonists. Annwfn as an ‘otherworld’ is sometimes described as subterranean and other times, as in Preiddeu Annwn, as an island across a sea. This portrayal as a perilous treasure trove with items such as a cauldron of resurrection allows for associations to be drawn between Annwfn and death, though does not entirely explain the modern perception of Arawn as a ‘death god’.

To begin to understand this aspect of his portrayal, it is helpful look to another figure from the Arthurian context of medieval Welsh literature, Gywn ap Nudd, who is even less present than Arawn, but with whom Arawn and Annwfn have come to be merged or closely associated. Gwyn ap Nudd has close ties with Annwfn, death and Hell in his various appearances. Arawn and Gwyn also share a strong association with the act of hunting and the wondrous hounds known as the Cwn Annwn, who themselves have changed over the centuries from otherworldly (but completely un-sinister) dogs into hellhounds. In Chronicles of Prydain, Arawn and Gwyn are two explicitly separate entities, with ‘Gwyn the Hunter’ being a neutral character whose mournful horn and belling hounds can be heard, heralding death and misfortune.(7) Gwyn ap Nudd’s direct links to damnation or Hell are alluded to in medieval sources but never fully explained, and his relationship to Arawn can only be explored by teasing apart a tangle of convoluted associations that result in both being portrayed as hunters, death gods or lords of an underworld today.

The most explicit link between Gwyn and Arawn is perhaps the Cwn Annwn, who have shining white coats and red ears and accompany their master on hunts. These creatures form the central focus of Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody which follows the life of a dog named Sirius who is half Cwn Annwn, half Irish setter. He finds the otherworldly pack led by a shadowy mounted figure and runs with them, chasing a mounted figured who may be their master or their quarry and following them into an otherworld.(8) The mounted figure is identified as Arawn by Sirius’ owner, but is a neutral figure and depicted as an old powerful being who is neither good nor evil. The Otherworld which he inhabits is also not an unpleasant one, and while the pure-bred Cwn Annwn may be gruff and aloof, they are certainly not hellhounds as other modern sources portray them to be. According to Abel, ‘Gwynn (aka Gwynn Ap Nudd) in Celtic mythology, a death god and ruler of the Underworld, where the souls of those who died in battle were sent. Gwynn was also master of (9) The Cwn Annwn are included in the entry for Hell Hounds in the encyclopaedia, and Abel claims ‘Cwn Annwn… is [sic] a ferocious red-eyed ghostly Hell Hound who accompanied the black faced Gwynn Ap Nudd , the ruler of Annwn , when he ventured into the land of the living to abduct and bring unlucky victims to his domain’.(10) No such mention of either Gwyn or the Cwn Annwn bringing souls into Annwn is made in either the Arthurian legends or the Four Branches.

Though there is no evident pivotal moment where Annwfn began to be perceived as a hellish underworld instead of an otherworld, the influence of Christianity played a significant role, and the association was reinforced in literature. In the explanatory notes on The First Branch in The Mabinogion, Davies notes that Annwfn was ‘a name for the Celtic Otherworld, derived from an (‘in, inside’) + dwfn (‘world’). Under Christian influence, Annwfn came to be regarded as synonymous with hell’.(11) The meaning of the word ‘Annwfn’ and its significance is still debated, and Davies’ interpretation should not be taken as the absolute agreed-upon definition, but there are associations across literature of Annwfn being chthonic, hellish, and bleak. An explicit mention of Annwfn and damnation appears in How Culhwch Won Olwen when Ysbadadden is explaining the anoethau to Culhwch: ‘Twrch Trwyth will not be hunted until Gwyn son of Nudd is found—God has put the spirit of the demons of Annwfn in him, let he will be destroyed. He will not be spared from there’.(12) The renowned fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym emphasises these associations in his work, as has been noted by Rowlands. (13) In Mawl i’r Haf, the summer explains to the poet that ‘to avoid the winter wind/ I go from the world to Annwfn’ possibly associating Annwfn with the coming of winter and implying that it is an otherworld.(14) In Y Niwl, the mist is described as ‘towers of Gwyn's tribe’, ‘flaccid headland of Gwyn and his tribe’ and the ‘ointment of the witches of Annwfn’, further drawing connections between cold or bad weather, Gwyn ap Nudd and Annwfn. (15) When cursing the peat-pond in which he is stuck in Y Pwll Mawn, the poet calls it a ‘fish-pond belonging to Gwyn ap Nudd’ and also claims that it is not easy to follow the fox in Y Llywnog ‘since his dwelling is as far down as Annwfn’.(16) This allusion of Annwfn being ‘down’ or a hole belonging to Gwyn ap Nudd (and therefore tied to Annwfn) does emphasize the idea of a chthonic otherworld, or even, as Rowlands suggests, the entrance to Annwfn being a lake or a hole in a wetland.(17)

A major factor of Arawn’s (and by extension Gwyn ap Nudd’s) depiction in modern fantasy is as a hunter or leader of a hunt, as seen in both Dogsbody and Chronicles of Prydain. This can be easily traced to Arawn in the First Branch (and Gwyn in How Culwch Won Olwen) and so requires only a small leap to associate Arawn with the northern European myth of the Wild Hunt, a phenomenon that can be found across many traditions from Classical to Slavic to Scandinavian. In some Germanic traditions, the Wild Hunt was an occurrence that heralded either the coming of winter or Midwinter, which may loosely play into Rowlands’ claim that Gwyn and Annwfn had ties to that season. The Wild Hunt was described by Jacob Grimm in an 1835 publication as a three-part model, with the third part being a spectral huntsman riding with a pack of hounds… possibly damned souls pursued by the Devil as the huntsman or a cursed huntsman doomed to wander but never finding rest.(18) This piece of Grimm’s model is the most notable to Celtic or British legend since Britain has a firmly-established tradition of otherworldly or even demonic dogs. This tradition was brought into the Celtic context in 1901 when Sir John Rhys identified leader of Wild Hunt as Gwyn ap Nudd and proposed him as ‘a pagan god of winter, death, and darkness’, but he received much criticism for it.(19) When applying Grimm’s model to Arawn the huntsman and his Cwn Annwn, it is not difficult to see how they came to be perceived as Hell Hounds and death god instead of unusually-coloured hunting dogs and their magical yet neutral master.

The Wild Hunt appears in one form or another in each of the above works of modern fantasy. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series portrays the eponymous Dark as a mysterious mounted figure known as the Rider or the Dark Rider who is never explicitly identified as Arawn, and also includes an otherworldly huntsman character, the antlered Herne the Hunter, who rides with a pack of Hell Hounds and fights for the Light.(20) The Fionavar Tapestry also makes no explicit mention of Arawn or Gwyn, but does include the Wild Hunt, ‘the wildest magic that ever was’ consisting of mounted beings who ride out of the sky and can be summoned by blowing ‘Owein’s horn’.(21) The Chronicles of Prydain includes both Arawn and Gwyn by name, but also a third character known as the Horned King, Arawn’s chief warlord who leads the Huntsmen of Annuvin, carrying out Arawn’s agenda. ‘He wears an antlered mask’ and is ‘a man of evil for whom death is a black joy’. (22) Dogsbody provides readers with a perspective from inside the hunt itself and follows the mounted Arawn into an otherworld. As seen in these examples, Arawn and Annwfn are still presented as very closely related to the Wild Hunt, likely as a result of the coalescence of existing British legends, widespread Germanic traditions, and Jacob Grimm’s model.

One aspect of these modern representations that is not accounted for in Grimm’s model is the depiction of Arawn or the leader of the hunt as having antlers. Wynne-Jones’ maters of the hunt/ Arawn has shadowy antlers, Alexander’s ‘Horned King’ and Cooper’s ‘Herne’ are explicitly described as having antlers, and all three are following a tradition brought about by the author William Harrison Ainsworth in his 1843 novel Windsor Castle. (23) Ainsworth took a minor character in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor called Herne the Hunter (Cooper has continued the tradition) and inserted him into his novel. Herne is described as a ‘keeper’ of Windsor Forest who goes around at wintertime ‘with great ragg’d horns’ of a stag bringing various misfortunes to farmers and livestock.(2)4 It is unclear if Herne a creation of Shakespeare’s or a local Windsor legend, but the antlered hunter has become a part of British-inspired fantasy today.(25)

The transformation of Arawn from the generous otherworldly king of the 12th century into today’s shadowy and sometimes sinister lord and leader of the hunt is convoluted and required context from many disparate sources. Though modern depictions of Arawn and Annwfn depart significantly from the source material, it is not necessarily unfavourable.

The many threads of legend and folklore that are interwoven into the modern stories keep all of them alive at the surface level and continue the process of adaptation, interpretation and the influence of artistic license that lies at the core of all folklore and myth. Modern authors breathe new life into these tales and while their depictions of certain figures may blend characters, cast them in a new role, or change everything about them but their name, their work nonetheless generates interest and curiosity about their origins.

1 In branches one and four of The Four Branches of the Mabinogi .

2 Abel, Ernest L., Death Gods: An Encyclopedia of the Rulers , Evil Spirits , and Geographies of the Dead , (Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 20. It should be noted that Ernest Abel, while an accomplished expert in his field of obstetrics and gynecology, seems to have no record of research in mythology or folklore. This encyclopedia appears to be a passion project or a secondary interest of his.

3 Davies, Sioned, The Mabinogion, (Oxford, 2007), p. 47.

4 Alexander, Lloyd, The Book of Three, (New York, 1964), p. 282.

5 Loomis, Roger S.,887.

6 Kay, Guy G., The Fionavar Tapestry,

7 Alexander, The Book of Three, p. 56.

8 Wynne-Jones, Diana, Dogsbody, (London, 1975). ‘The Spoils of Annwn: An Early Arthurian Poem.’ PMLA, vol. 56, no. 4, (1941), p.the Hell Hounds’.

9 Abel, Death Gods, p. 73.

10 Ibid., p. 82.

11 Davies, p. 320.

12 Ibid., pp. 279–80.

13 Rowlands, D. ‘Cyfferiadau Dafydd ap Gwilym at Annwn’, Llên Cymru 5, (1958–1959), pp. 122–3.

14 dafyddapgwilym.net, Mawl i r Haf, l. 39–40.

15 Ibid., Y N i wl , l. 31, 39, 44.

16 Ibid., Y Pwll Mawn, l. 29; Y Llywng, l. 42.

17 Rowlands, pp. 122–3.

18 Hutton, Ronald,

19 Ibid., 178.

20 Cooper, Susan, The Dark is Rising, (1965-1977).

21 Kay, Guy G., The Summer Tree, (1984), p. 601.

22 Alexander, The Book of Three, p. 13.

23 Hutton, p. 182.

24 Clark, William G., and John Glover (eds.),S hakespeare, 9 vols., (Cambridge, 2007). ‘The Wild Hunt in the Modern British Imagination, Folklore’, (2019) 130:2, p. 176. ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in The Works of William Shakespeare

25 Hutton, T h e W i l d H unt , p. 182.

Bibliography

Abel, Ernest L., Death Gods : An Encyclopedia of the Rulers, Evil Spirits, and Geographies of the Dead, (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Alexander, Lloyd, Chronicles of Prydain, (1964–1968), (Henry Holt, 1999).

Bromwich, Rachel, Selected Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, (Penguin, 1985).

Clark, William G., and John Glover (eds.), ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in The Works of William Shakespeare, 9 vols., (Cambridge, 2007). Accessed via Project Gutenberg.

Cooper, Susan, The Dark is Rising, (1965–1977), (Puffin, 2019).

Dafyddapgwilym.net and notes therein.

Davies, Sioned, The Mabinogion, (Oxford, 2007).

Hutton, Ronald, ‘The Wild Hunt in the Modern British Imagination, Folklore’, (2019) 130:2, pp. 175–191.

Kay, Guy G., The Fionavar Tapestry, (1984–1986), (ROC, 2001).

Loomis, Roger Sherman. ‘The Spoils of Annwn: An Early Arthurian Poem.’ PMLA, vol. 56, no. 4, (1941), pp. 887–936.

*Rowlands, D. ‘Cyfferiadau Dafydd ap Gwilym at Annwn’, Llên Cymru 5, (1958–1959).

Wynne-Jones, Diana, Dogsbody, (1975) (Firebird, 2012).

*Note: Google Translate was used for Rowlands’ article, which was originally written in Welsh.