The Lady on the White Horse

Rhiannon is a major figure of the Welsh Mabinogi, appearing in its First and Third Branches. She first arrives as a mysterious woman on a shining white horse who cannot be overtaken however hard the riders pursue her, and who has chosen Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, for her husband. When their infant son vanishes on the night of his birth and her attendant women, to save themselves, smear her with the blood of a slaughtered pup and accuse her of killing and devouring him, Rhiannon accepts a strange penance, to sit at the horse-block outside the gate, tell her tale to newcomers, and offer to carry them into the court on her back, which she bears until the child is at last found and restored. Her associations with horses, with birds whose song can wake the dead and lull the living, and with the Otherworld have led many scholars to see behind her a Celtic horse-goddess comparable to the Gaulish Epona; but the Mabinogi itself presents her as a woman of the tale rather than as a goddess, and the equation, though widely made, is an inference.