Cerridwen

Cerridwen is a figure of medieval Welsh legend, the keeper of a cauldron of poetic inspiration and transformation, who came in later tradition to be regarded as a goddess of rebirth, wisdom and the awen, the flowing inspiration of the bards. It is worth being clear about the nature of the source. Cerridwen appears in the Tale of Taliesin, a story preserved in comparatively late Welsh manuscripts, and her standing as a goddess is largely a development of later, and especially modern, interpretation; the medieval text presents her as an enchantress rather than as an object of worship, and readers should keep that distinction in mind.

In the tale, Cerridwen brews a potion in her great cauldron for a year and a day to give wisdom and poetic gift to her own ugly son, since only the first three drops carry the virtue and the rest is deadly poison. She sets a boy, Gwion Bach, to stir it; but three scalding drops splash onto his thumb, he sucks it, and the whole gift of inspiration passes to him instead. Enraged, Cerridwen pursues him, and the two run through a series of shape-changes, he a hare and she a greyhound, he a fish and she an otter, he a bird and she a hawk, until he becomes a grain of wheat and she a hen and swallows him. She then bears him again, and the reborn child becomes Taliesin, the greatest of the legendary Welsh poets. The cauldron, the transformation-chase and the rebirth have made Cerridwen a powerful emblem of poetic initiation and of death and renewal, and she is much invoked in modern traditions, though the medieval basis for these later meanings is a single remarkable tale.

Readers encountering Cerridwen inside a modern edition of the Mabinogion are often unaware that her story, Hanes Taliesin, the Tale of Taliesin, does not actually belong to the medieval Four Branches that give the collection its core, the tales preserved in the fourteenth century White Book of Rhydderch and Red Book of Hergest. The fullest early version of Cerridwen's tale instead survives through the sixteenth century Welsh soldier and chronicler Elis Gruffydd, who included it, along with other material, in his lengthy historical compilation written while he served in Calais, and later scribes and antiquarians continued copying and reshaping the story into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Lady Charlotte Guest produced her influential nineteenth century English translation of the Mabinogion, she appended the Taliesin material to the Four Branches proper, a publishing decision that has shaped popular perception ever since, so that most readers today meet Cerridwen bound into the same volume as tales several centuries older than hers without any signal of the gap.

This transmission history does not mean Cerridwen or her cauldron were invented wholesale in the sixteenth century; fragmentary references to Taliesin's transformations appear earlier, in medieval poems attributed to him in the Book of Taliesin, suggesting some version of the tradition circulated well before Gruffydd wrote it down at length. What the manuscript record actually supports is more modest than either the story's apparent antiquity or its modern reputation as ancient goddess lore: a genuinely old poetic tradition about the bard Taliesin's transformation, given its fullest surviving narrative shape considerably later than the Mabinogion tales it now keeps company with.