Taking Flight: Branwen’s Grave

So, it’s release day for Taking Flight! Yay! I’ve been around and about visiting at various blogs over the last few days…Nell Iris (10^th), Holly Day (11^th), Addison Albright (today!) and I’ll be over at Ofelia Grand’s place on the 16^th.

Taking Flight is based on a tale from The Mabinogion, about Brânwen, sister of King Brân of Wales. Her brother marries her off to Matholwch, King of Ireland, but the marriage goes bad for complicated reasons to do with her step-brother mutilating her husband’s horses. Once Matholwch gets her home to Ireland, he banishes her to his kitchens. She tames a starling and sends it with a message to her brother for help. I’ve made the Brânwen character a trans man called Gwyn; and he extracts himself from his own difficulties with the help of Darren Starling rather than passively waiting to be rescued.

It’s a tiny, tiny bit of the whole legend. The tales in the Mabinogion tend to be very complicated and pretty dark and wouldn’t fit into a short story. They were handed down orally in Wales until they were written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

My background before I was a parent, a writer, a chicken-farmer, an audio-visual technician, an IT teacher and an IT professional was archaeology and history. I have always thought of myself as an Archaeologist and/or a Historian—I studied both at York for three years. However, I have never been on a dig! It’s a weird way to still self-identify thirty years after my time in that world ended; but I still do. I read a lot of history and of course I write historical stories. Even these Contemporary Celtic Myths are based in the past.

For some of the saints stories, there are obvious bits of physical evidence tied in with them. There’s a St Dwynwen’s Chapel on Anglesey—the one with the well full of fortune-telling eels I mention in Playing Chicken. St Kevin from As the Crows Fly has a hermit’s cave you can look at in a valley in Ireland. But the tales in the Maginogion go back far beyond the Christian era.

There’s no actual evidence for the Irish King Matholwch ever existing, I understand he only appears in the Mabinogion. It’s probable he was a minor leader, obviously near the coast because he had ships. The one thing that is possible evidence for the story being true is the Bronze Age burial mound known as Bedd Branwen on the Isle of Anglesey. This is such a good article, I do recommend it, there are links to the Mabinogion and photos of the site. In the tale, after lots of war and horrible things only eight people were left in Ireland and eight in Wales. The Welsh came home and

“…they came to land at Aber Alaw, in Talebolyon, and they sat down to rest. And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them. “Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me!” Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.”

When Bedd Branwen was excavated in the 1960s by Frances Lynch, various Bronze Age burial urns and grave-goods were found and the site was dated to between 1650BC-1400BC.

So the original story had its seeds sown 3,500 years ago.

I find this absolutely fascinating. Oral history has handed that story down in one form or another with embellishments and omissions for all those years and in all those different languages. What we have in The Mabinogion is a faint echo of the past, resonating down the years from a small grave-mound by an insignificant river in a far corner of Europe.

Anyway. Here’s the blurb for Taking Flight. I do apologise for missing out the bit about the resurrection cauldron, but I just couldn’t get it in and keep the word-count low enough!