This is the first post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, edited by Shannon Stunden Bower, which is introduced here.
Medieval Welsh authors thought about environmental adaptation as a core part of how they understood the past. Whilst we might now find these stories weird, concerned as they are with the magical and saintly, they represent attempts to think about the challenges faced by distant forebears in known and knowable places. Taking seriously the Weirdness – the disjuncture between our worldviews and those of (medieval) others – helps us understand how some high medieval people understood environmental adaptation, and also speaks to the crises of the Anthropocene.
Medieval Welsh authors thought about a variety of historic adaptations to environmental change, from tamed deer to land reclaimed from a fugitive sea. However, my focus here is on a particularly interesting example: the Third Branch of the Mabinogi. The “Four Branches of the Mabinogi” are four, complex, interconnected Middle Welsh stories written in a Christian context, thinking with the pre-Christian mythic British past. They survive in two fourteenth-century manuscripts but are generally held to be substantially older: whilst they may well have some genuinely ancient elements and sources, their spelling suggests that they reached something like their current form around the twelfth century. Whilst not ‘historical’ in the same way as (say) chronicles, recounting a variety of events that (generally) actually happened, these texts were still means by which medieval Welsh authors thought about their past.1 The Mabinogi reflect on cultural origins, the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary agency, as well as between this world and the “otherworld” (a space beyond the conventionally known world that does not work like it).2
The Third Branch
The Third Branch, often called “Manawydan” after its protagonist, is perhaps best conceived as a story about – as much as a story set in – the land of Dyfed. Whilst I recommend anyone read it,3 I’ll retell it here. Four noble heroes – Manawydan, Rhiannon (Manawydan’s wife), Pryderi (Rhiannon’s son), and Cigfa (wife to Pryderi) – return to Dyfed in South West Wales to enjoy the quiet life after being away at war in Ireland. Between courses at a feast at Pryderi’s court at Arberth, they climb a local hill, Gorsedd Arberth, which in the First Branch is described as producing either wonders or wounds for those sitting on it.4 Having sat down, a fog noisily descends, obscuring their view of the land. When the fog lifts, the landscape has been transformed, with all forms of habitation removed from a landscape previously described as “cyuanhedach” (more inhabitable and delightful).5 “When they looked to where they had once seen the flocks and herds and dwelling-places, they could now see nothing at all, neither building nor beasts, neither smoke nor fire, neither man nor dwelling-place”.6 They are left to adapt to the new, enchanted, environmental regime.
In thinking about adaptation, medieval and modern, we often talk about “resilience” as the ability to withstand shocks. As nobles on their home turf, the four protagonists have particular buffers by which they are able to sustain themselves. The larders are stocked, presumably in large part through food renders – similar to those described in the high medieval Welsh law codes Cyfraith Hywel – from their tenants.7 Once they exhausted the food at the court, the protagonists “began to live on meat they hunted, and on fish and swarms of wild bees”.8 Their expertise in, and possession of the equipment for, hunting is also to an extent a product of their noble station, enabling another means of adapting to the enchantment. After two years, they tire of the hunt, and Manawydan suggests a new adaptation: migration beyond the boundaries of the enchantment to Hereford (a city just across the border into England).
Taking up urban trades proves to be a temporary solution. The craftsmen in each city they move to (first Hereford, then elsewhere) successively turn to violence against the four, finding that local goods cannot compete against the leathergoods Manawydan makes. Unable to sustain the adaptation of migration and taking urban employment, the protagonists return to Dyfed and attempt once more to live off the land. During a hunt, Manawydan, Pryderi and their dogs give chase to an otherworldly gleaming-white boar. The boar runs into a newly-appeared castle, followed by the dogs and Pryderi – despite Manawydan’s caution that the castle was likely placed there by the caster of the enchantment. After waiting for his companion to emerge from the castle, Manawydan returns home without the hounds or Pryderi, prompting Rhiannon9 to search the castle for her son, becoming trapped herself. The castle then disappears, leaving Manawydan and Cigfa alone in Dyfed.
The two go again to England, where Manawydan takes up shoemaking until they are again chased out of town. Returning to Dyfed with a load of wheat, Manawydan starts to till the ground, planting three fields of wheat. Earlier in the Third Branch, the author described the protagonists’ presence in Dyfed as them “spending” (“threulaw”) periods of time, but at this point the author switches to describing Manawydan and Cigfa’s presence as them “settling there” (“cyuanhedu yno”).10 Note that “cyuanhedu” is the verb behind “cyuanhedach,” the praising comparative adjective of settlement and pleasantness which Dyfed abounded in at the start of the narrative. In bringing back settled agriculture, Manawydan is presented as attempting to return the landscape to a previous set of environmental logics, creating permanent adaptations rather than spending time.
On successive harvest-tide days, Manawydan finds each field ripe, and decides to reap each in the morning. However, arriving each morning at the first two he finds all the ears of wheat carried off, leaving just bare stalks in the field. Realising that this has something to do with the enchantment, he decides to keep watch over the final field that night. A hoard of mice descends, plucking the ears of wheat from the stalks. Rushing amongst the mice, Manawydan manages to grasp only one particularly plump mouse, which he imprisons in his glove. Though Cigfa urges him to release the mouse, since she considers it beneath his status to punish a rodent, Manawydan sets about building a gallows atop Gorsedd Arberth on which to string up the thief.
A series of clerics then interrupts Manawydan at his work, each offering an increasing ransom for the mouse, whilst reminding him of Cigfa’s status-based objection. Finally, the bishop asks Manawydan to name his price.11 After being granted the return of Rhiannon and Pryderi, Manawydan asks for the removal of magic and enchantment from the seven cantrefs (administrative units) of Dyfed. Manawydan then seeks an explanation for recent events and learns that the bishop is a magician (named Llwyd) avenging an episode described in the First Branch, the rodents were his court who had asked to be turned into mice to destroy the corn, and the fat mouse is his pregnant wife. Armed with this knowledge, Manawydan ups his price to include the forbidding of future enchantments and protection from vengeance. Llwyd agrees, Manawydan releases Llwyd’s (unnamed) wife, and the land is restored “inhabited and complete with all its herds and houses.”12 Whilst the Third Branch thinks through forms of adaptation, it is only through Manawydan confronting (in both senses, facing up to and addressing) the agent behind the enchantment that it is able to be negotiated away.
Reflections on Enchantment and Derangement
The Mabinogion tales were probably not written as serious histories, but they still reflect purposefully on the Welsh past. The Third Branch, with its careful exploration of how the contemporary richness of Dyfed came to be, reads out a past of adaptation and negotiation from the twelfth-century landscape. This was a productive lowland landscape, rich enough for Anglo-Normans to conquer and settle with Flemish refugees.13 The author of the Third Branch, in exploring the origins of Dyfed’s richness, chose to explore the complications of a destructive complex human-natural-magic hyper-object (following Morton, “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”) of enchantment.14 This provided them a means by which to think about the vulnerabilities of medieval agriculture to rapid and complex shocks – human and natural. To follow Helen Fulton, the magic naturalism of early Welsh and Irish literatures present an agentless, naturalistic magic that neither readers nor protagonists fully understand.15 Whilst Llwyd provided an explanation for why he set the enchantment, the nature of the magic is accepted as natural – until Manawydan negotiates it away. Whether or not the author and their audience believed an enchantment had really been laid on Dyfed, and future enchantments prevented, the Third Branch gave them a way to explore the prospect of adaptation and the limits to systems of agency, whether human, natural, or supernatural.
The alterity and narrative arc of the Third Branch have the potential to give us cognitive resources to face the Anthropocene. In his 2016 work, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh highlighted the need to find new ways of telling stories beyond realism and beyond the probable, allowing for the complexity of hyper-objects and messy teleconnections. The Mabinogi perhaps offers a way of escaping Ghosh’s modernist “derangement,” a means of thinking about agents beyond the full comprehension or control of humans. Whilst Ghosh does fairly highlight that thinking about the crises of the Anthropocene through the lens of magic runs the risk of undermining its reality, immediacy, and severity, thinking like Manawydan might offer paths out of the “Great Dithering.”16 Manawydan did not need to fully know the nature of the enchantment of Dyfed to be cautious of newly-appeared castles and pillaged fields, nor to negotiate his way out of it. Further, whilst the enchantment crisis was a product of magic, Manawydan adapted to and addressed the crisis without possessing any extraordinary or magical agency himself, beyond being an elite man.
We may one day have chimeric technologies like carbon capture and fusion energy that will enable us to have the cake of modernity, share it with all of humanity, and eat it too, without intensifying the climate crisis. Until then, we must carry on with mundane adaptations and holding to account the mice who undermine them, even if that means losing something of our inherited privileges. Taking seriously the Weird in pre-modern understandings of environmental pasts allows us to think outside the constraints of modernity, reminding us that the world was not, and need not be, always so. These histories remind us of our ability to choose the futures we want and force us to confront the decisions we need to take to get there.
Author’s note: I thank Roan Runge and Thomas Green for comments on a draft of this blogpost, and Shannon Stunden Bower for her close editorial attention to this piece.
Feature image: The opening lines of the Third Branch in the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus College MS. 111, f. 182v. You can view the whole manuscript here: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/9bf187bf-f862-4453-bc4f-851f6d3948af/surfaces/1ae0f60d-208c-4c32-a028-d7757ce82f12/ Citation: Image via wikicommons, via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesus-College-MS-111_00364_182v_(cropped).jpg (accessed 10/01/2025) used under CC BY 4.0 license from the Bodleian Library.
Notes
1. This is necessarily a truncated introduction to the Mabinogi and the vast multi-lingual and multi-national scholarship of it over the last 150 years. For a fuller introduction for generalists see Diana Luft, ‘Commemorating the Past after 1066: Tales from The Mabinogion’, in Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton (eds.), The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (Cambridge, 2019), 73-92.
2. The entry on ‘The Otherworld’ in John Koch, Celtic culture: a historical encyclopaedia, (Santa Barbra, 2006), 1403-1406 is a good overview.
3. The best modern translation is The Mabinogion, transl. Sioned Davies, (Oxford, 2007) [hereafter, Davies, Mab.], 35-46, though Lady Charlotte Guest’s popularising translation remains serviceable if dated – The Mabinogion, ed. and trans. Charlotte Guest, (London, 1849), Vol III, 162-184 accessible via < https://archive.org/details/mabinogionfromll00unse_1/page/162/mode/2up> accessed 17/12/2024. The best edition of the Welsh text is Manawydan uab Llyr, ed. Ian Hughes, (Caerdydd, 2007) [hereafter, Manawydan, Hughes] though Pedeir Keinc Mabinogi, ed. Ifor Williams, 2nd Ed. (Caerdydd, [1930] 1974) generally agrees and is easier to find copies of.
4. It’s worth noting that ‘gorsedd’ can mean either a mound/hillock or a throne (cf. the prize given to the bard at the modern Eisteddfod). Davies, Mab., 8; Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, ed. R.L. Thomson, (Dublin, 1957), 8.
5. Davies, Mab., 36; Manawydan, Hughes, 2.
6. Davies, Mab., 37; Manawydan, Hughes, 2.
7. The Law of Hywel Dda, ed. and transl. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul, 1986) is the most accessible translation.
8. Davies, Mab., 37; Manawydan, Hughes, 3.
9. The second half of the First Branch depicts Rhiannon’s Otherworldly origins and Pryderi’s infancy: Davies, Mab., 8-21; Pwyll, Thomson, 7-23.
10. Davies, Mab., 41; Manawydan, Hughes, 7, 47.
11. Whilst explicitly set at a specific point in the pre-Christian past, time does weird things in the Four Branches. The author might have used the language of Christian hierarchy for a presumed pre-Christian religion, or wanted to highlight the sense of enchantment with these figures before their time.
12. Davies, Mab., 46; Manawydan, Hughes, 11.
13. On Flemmings, and medieval texts labelling them as refugees from sea-flooding, see R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063-1415 (Oxford, 1987), 98-99 and references therein. On the richness of Dyfed, see Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Cambriae, I,12 translation: Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales, transl. Lewis Thorpe, 151. The enchantment of Dyfed has been read as referring to the settlement of Flemings: Byron Huws ‘Manawydan vab Llŷr: A tale of the Norman Conquest of Deheubarth’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion 16 (2010), 17-23.
14. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, 2013), 1.
15. Helen Fulton, ‘Magic and the Supernatural in Early Welsh Arthurian Narrative: Culhwch ac Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy,’ Arthurian Literature Vol. 30 (2013): 23-26.
16. Ghosh, Great Derangement, 27; ‘Great Dithering’: A term borrowed from Kim Stanley Robinson by Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, (Durham, NC, 2016), 221, n.19.
