Arianrhod

Arianrhod (Silver Wheel) is a figure of the Fourth Branch of the Welsh Mabinogi, daughter of Don and sister of the magician Gwydion. Asked to step over a magician's wand to prove her virginity and so qualify as royal footholder, she instead gives birth, to a boy who becomes the sea-associated Dylan, and to a second child that Gwydion snatches up and rears.

Angered and shamed, Arianrhod lays three destinies (tynghedau) on this second son: that he shall have no name, no arms and no wife of any race now on earth unless she herself grant them, prohibitions that Gwydion overcomes each in turn by trickery, so that the boy gains the name Lleu Llaw Gyffes, receives arms from his mother by a ruse, and is given a wife, Blodeuwedd, conjured out of flowers. Her name, and the caer later attached to the constellation Corona Borealis, have encouraged readings of Arianrhod as a star- or moon-associated figure, but such astral interpretations are later inference; in the Mabinogi itself she is a proud and formidable woman of the tale.

Off the coast of Dinas Dinlle in Gwynedd lies a rocky reef exposed at low tide and known in Welsh folk tradition as Caer Arianrhod, said locally to be the remains of a drowned court that once belonged to the figure of the Mabinogi, submerged beneath the waves like other legendary sunken lands of Welsh lore. The identification of a real tidal feature with the tale's heroine is a matter of local folklore and place-name tradition recorded by antiquarians rather than anything stated in the medieval text itself, which locates her within the narrative world of the Fourth Branch rather than any specific coastal geography.

Arianrhod's modern reputation as a lunar or star goddess owes a great deal to twentieth century writers, most influentially Robert Graves, whose 1948 study The White Goddess wove her name, her silver wheel, and her associated constellation into a wide ranging and highly speculative synthesis of a supposed pan-European moon goddess, an interpretation embraced enthusiastically within later Wiccan and Goddess-movement practice but treated with considerable skepticism by specialists in medieval Welsh literature, who read her primarily as a proud, wronged noblewoman within a dynastic tale rather than a survival of an ancient sky cult. The gap between the careful, text-based reading of the Mabinogi and the freer modern reimagining is itself instructive: Arianrhod has, in effect, two afterlives, one as a literary character preserved in medieval manuscript, the other as a contemporary goddess archetype largely built in the last hundred years.