Enchanted Wales - Cauldrons and Miraculous Heads

 I treated myself to a talk at the Winter Festival, in St Mary's Church.

The speaker was Miranda Aldhouse-Green, who has just written a book called Enchanted Wales, so this was all about the myths and legends of Wales.  She's an archaeologist, and a professor at Cardiff, and I've heard her speak before, at a Pagan Conference.  She was talking about gods in Roman Britain then, and she was fascinating.

This time she brought her own cauldron with her.  Cauldrons are important in Welsh mythology, particularly the one that Bran the Blessed gave to the King of Ireland, which would bring dead warriors back to life (but unable to speak).  In archaeological contexts, they are often found buried with treasure or weaponry inside them.  She also gave a brief outline of the story of Bran, his sister Branwen, and the war with Ireland - when Efnysien, Bran's brother, leaps into the cauldron that revives dead warriors and breaks it apart, dying himself in the process.  Bran is fatally wounded in the war, and tells his followers to cut off his head (miraculous heads are also an important part of Welsh mythology), which continues to converse with them for many years, until he tells them to bury it on the White Mound in London, to protect Britain from invasion.

In the question and answer session, she was asked what her inspiration for becoming an archaeologist was, and she talked about the books of Malcolm Saville, especially Lone Pine Five, set around the Long Mynd in Shropshire (in fact, set so securely round the Long Mynd that a fan of the books used to lead walks to places that were mentioned in the text).  One of the characters finds a Roman spoon in a cave, and that was the moment she decided she wanted to be an archaeologist.

Someone else asked if she'd had a 'silver spoon' moment, and she said she had.  She was a student on a dig in Usk, and she found a Claudian coin (minted during the reign of the Emperor Claudius, so very early in the Roman period in Britain).  She knew that nobody had touched that coin for 2,000 years, until she picked it up again.  It's a very special kind of excitement, and I know exactly how she felt, because I felt it too when I was an archaeologist - mine was a Saxon pot that hadn't been touched since the Saxon housewife threw it in the rubbish pit because it had a hairline crack in it.

Up until that point, the other speaker for the evening hadn't said much at all, but now he took over.  He was the storyteller Daniel Morden, and he was spell binding!  He told the story of Gwion, who stirred the cauldron with the potion of inspiration in it for a year and a day, and accidentally got the inspiration for himself, instead of it going to his mistress's son - which sets off a wonderful chase sequence, with Gwion and Ceridwen changing form again and again, eagle chasing hare, otter chasing salmon, until finally Gwion changes himself into a grain of corn, and Ceridwen becomes a hen and eats him!

"And that's the end of the story!  No!  Stories don't end like that!"  So he went on to tell of Ceridwen becoming pregnant and giving birth to Gwion, who then became the great poet Taliesin.

The last time I heard a really good storyteller like that was Hay's own local storyteller Rob Soldat, who sadly died a few years ago.

Daniel Morden went up to the Castle later that evening to tell more stories there.