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Looking Principally at Lifris' Vita Cadoci and Culhwch Ac Olwen, To

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Looking Principally at Lifris' Vita Cadoci and Culhwch Ac Olwen, To Looking principally at Lifris’ Vita Cadoci and Culhwch ac Olwen, to what extent can we equate mediaeval Welsh ideals of sainthood and heroism? Written for: Past and Present in Mediaeval Wales November, 2011 by Marissa Smit The Vita Cadoci is a curious text. Written in the second half of the eleventh century by the cleric Lifris, it combines many standard features of the hagiographic genre with marvels “often curiously reminiscent of incidents in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and kindred tales.” 1 These include such episodes as the recovery of a lost book from inside the belly of a salmon, the transformation of ravening wolves into stone, and the resurrection of a giant. 2 In addition to these wonder miracles, the saint also clashes with figures from Britain’s legendary past, most notably Maelgwn Gwynedd and King Arthur. Many of these themes have recognized analogues in heroic literature, and a trend in twentieth-century historiography has been to extrapolate from the anecdotal comparisons, like that above, into a more complete view of the relationship between hagiography and folklore. 3 Most recently, Elissa Henken has worked exclusively with the Welsh saints’ lives to create an archetypical biographical pattern, the motifs of which she portrays as Christianised versions of those of the Indo-European hero. 4 On the basis of her genre-wide investigation, she has concluded that in mediaeval Wales “the saint has taken on the role of the hero” and that both figures therefore represent the same ideal. 5 It is the aim of this essay to assess this view through the specific comparison of the Vita Cadoci, introduced above, and the vernacular prose tale Culhwch ac Olwen,6 which relates the turbulent wooing of the giant’s daughter Olwen by Culhwch and his companions. The story makes a fitting text for comparison both because its overall amoral sensibility distances it from the ecclesiastical context of the Vita, and because 1 A.W. Wade-Evans, ‘Introduction,’ in idem. Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Geneologiae, (Cardiff, 1944), p.xi. 2 Lifris, Vita Cadoci, trans. A.W. Wade-Evans, Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Geneologiae, (Cardiff, 1944), §29 p.93, §30, p.93, and §26, pp.83-85. This essay will use Wade-Evans system of section numbering, beginning after the preface and prologue, throughout. 3 The two major contributors to this field for our purposes were Lord Raglan, who elaborated an heroic archetype from traditional Indo-European material, and Alwyn Rees, who adapted his work for the study of Celtic saints; Alwyn Rees, ‘The Divine Hero in Celtic Hagiology’, Folklore 47.1 (1936), p.30. 4 Elissa R. Henken, The Welsh Saints: A Study in Patterned Lives, (Woodbridge, 1991), p.2. 5 Henken, The Welsh Saints, p.1. 6 How Culhwch won Olwen, trans. Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion, (Oxford, 2007), pp.179- 213. It will be referred to by its Welsh name throughout the essay. its two major heroic figures, Culhwch and Arthur, provide ample material for examination.7 Given this presence of two heroes—one, Culhwch, quite standard in aspect, the other, Arthur, more controversial—this essay will proceed by comparing St. Cadog to each in turn. The first section will focus on the straightforward question of correspondence between the sainthood of Cadog and the heroism of Culhwch, drawing especially on the biographical stages of Henken’s model. The second section will continue the comparison into St. Cadog and Arthur, while introducing considerations of rulership and its religious, rather than secular, inflections. It will thus be demonstrated that while Henken has correctly noted the similarities between the motifs in both genres, she has incorrectly assumed this corresponds to a similarity in message. The Vita Cadoci, while strongly paralleling Culhwch ac Olwen, consistently inverts its heroic model, a process Lifris uses to assert the superiority of values like humility, forgiveness, and meekness over secular norms. From Cadog’s example, therefore, we must conclude that the saintly ideal could in fact behave very differently from the hero, to the point even of becoming an anti-hero, and these two ideals should not be equated across the spectrum of mediaeval Welsh literature without further investigation. 8 7 For this assessment of the story’s moral standpoint, see Brynley F.Roberts, ‘Culhwch ac Olwen, the Triads, Saints’ Lives”, in Rachel Bromwich, A.O.H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (eds.), The Arthur of the Welsh, (Cardiff, 1991), pp.73-74, and Rachel Bromwich and Simon Evans, ‘Introduction’, in idem., Culhwch ac Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale, (Cardiff, 1992), p.lxxviii, which are in agreement on this point. 8 It is worth raising, at least, the question of direct influence between the two texts. As will be shown below, they contain at times remarkably similar episodes, almost to the point that one seems to be a response to the other. The direction of this influence, if it exists, would be almost impossible to discern given the uncertain age of Culhwch ac Olwen and our still imperfect knowledge of manuscript circulation. Suffice it to say that they may be so linked; however, the international and possibly polygenetic nature of the motifs, in addition to the possible existence of third-party to which both works responded independently (but which has not survived), should not be discounted. See Bromwich and Evans, pp.lxxxix-lxxxx and Roberts, p.82. The south-Welsh setting of Culhwch, particularly during the hunt of Twrch Trwyth, does raise the interesting possibility of geographical proximity to Lifris’ assumed place of writing, St. Cadog’s cult centre Llancarfan. For a map of known place names from Culhwch, see Bromwich and Evans, p.viii; for Cadog’s cult, see Wade-Evans, p.xi and J.R. Davies, p.378‘Introduction’, in idem., Culhwch ac Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale, (Cardiff, 1992). As the title characters of the texts in which they appear, Cadog and Culhwch both exert a powerful influence, shaping the narrative according to their lives and experiences. This biographical tendency enables an analysis structured upon Elissa Henken’s saintly model, which notes not only a set of life stages shared across the Welsh hagiographical corpus, but also the reoccurrence of smaller motifs within those stages. Her stages are 1) Conception and Birth, 2) Childhood and Education, 3) the Coming of Age Miracle, 4) Journeying in the world, 5) Conflict with Secular Powers, 6) Ruling a Territory, and finally 7) Death. Within these seven, motifs like regal ancestry, or childhood precocity, create additional layers of nuanced comparison.9 She notes that stages one, two, and four usually overlap most with the heroic standard, 10 and this part of early life will dominate the comparison of Cadog and Culhwch. In particular, the examination of the birth and ancestry, expulsion from home, and first journey episodes will demonstrate that while Cadog and Culhwch shared a superficially similar biographical pattern, the comportment of the saint, and the motivations for his actions, differentiate him sharply from the heroic norms personified in Culhwch. The greatest overlap between saint and hero occurs in the textual representation of their origins, which both rely on the motifs of regal ancestry, anomalous circumstance, and public significance to communicate the singular importance of the births. The Vita Cadoci, for example, not only begins the text with Cadog’s family, but also discusses them at length, in both a preface and a prologue. These encompass not only Cadog’s father Gwynllyw’s status as king, and the “most noble lineage” of his mother, 11 but also details on the inheritance and territory of Cadog’s uncles. 12 Culhwch is likewise well born—both parents are called Wledig—although there is no indication that he, like Cadog, can count a saint among his relatives. 13 A further indication of Culhwch’s high status is his claim of kinship with King Arthur as a cousin through his 9 Henken, The Welsh Saints, p.2. 10 Ibid., p.2-4. 11 Vita Cadoci, Prologue, p.25. 12 Ibid., Preface, p.23. 13 Sioned Davies defines wledig as “lord, noble”, p.261; The Vita Cadoci discusses Cadog’s uncle Pedrog’s career as a saint in much greater detail than it does the lives of his father’s other brothers, Vita Cadoci, Preface, p.23. mother’s side.14 Noble ancestry is a trait noted by both Henken and Rees as significant to the identity of saint or hero—it marks them out, as do any anomalous circumstances associated with their birth. 15 In the Vita, these anomalies appear in both standard hagiographical and more unusual guises. The traditional motifs include the lights shining from Cadog’s home during his mother’s pregnancy, the angelic annunciation of his birth both to his father and to his spiritual mentor Meuthi, and the fountain that gushes forth to provide water for his baptism. 16 Less typically, the text also focuses on an extended retelling of the violent abduction of his mother Gwladus, and the bloody battle for her that preceded his parent’s marriage. The vivid episode, in which King Arthur makes an unflattering cameo appearance, 17 enhances Cadog’s singular nature much the way the insanity of Anlawdd during her pregnancy enhances Culhwch’s. 18 Both events create an atmosphere of violence and wonder, in which strange happenings—particularly Culhwch’s birth in a pig run—prefigure the nature of the encounters to follow. The final characteristic that sets Culhwch and Cadog apart from other men, but brings them closer together, is the highly public nature of their births, where popular involvement highlights the importance of the child.
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