The Fairyland Fantasy View

The standard view of Preideu Annwfyn is that the poem is a fantasy composed to entertain, where Arthur and his men sail to a Celtic Otherworld inhabited by fairy creatures. Their aim is to steal a magic cauldron. On the way the sailors see a ‘glass fortress’, usually interpreted literally as a glass fairy castle (for example, Loomis, 1956: 165-7). The fairies standing on a wall of the castle refuse to speak to Arthur’s crewmen. Arthur succeeds in stealing the cauldron which is decorated with pearls. At some stage the men see a brindled ‘ox’ with a huge head and neck and an animal with a silver head. No explanation is usually given for these, but they are sometimes explained away as just ‘magical animals’. The expedition enters a region called kaer sidi, which Sarah Higley translates as ‘mound fortress’ (Higley, 1996: 45). Here the mounds are thought to be fairy mounds where the fairies live. Kenneth Jackson translates kaer sidi to mean ‘Faery City’ and John Bollard translates it to mean ‘fairy fortress’ (Jackson, 1959: 16; Bollard, 1994: 20). One of Arthur’s men, Gweir, is captured by the fairies. This is reported by Pwyll and Pryderi, who John Rhŷs calls ‘dark divinities’, while Kenneth Jackson views Pryderi as an Otherworld divinity (Rhŷs, 1891: 282; Jackson, 1959: 17).

The Britons are decimated by the fairies, with only a few survivors. Arthur’s fate is unknown. The bard who survived is overwhelmed with grief at the losses and turns to Christ for comfort. However this Christian feature is usually viewed as a later interpolation made by monks who were eager to insert Christian references into a ‘magnificently pagan’ poem (Nash, 1858: 214; Rhŷs, 1888: 248; Squire, 1905, 318). Beyond this outline, little is understood about the poem and the cryptic allusions within it. In this book, it is argued that the fairyland interpretation of the poem is fundamentally incorrect and that Arthur’s expedition to the unknown land of Annwfyn was real – that the mysterious Annwfyn was sixth-century America.

The Historical View as argued here

Arthur and his men sail ‘across the shores of the world’ (dros traeth mundi) to a distant land. No one before him had visited it. On the way the sailors see a ‘glass fortress’, the same object as the ‘glass tower in the middle of the sea’ in the related story from the Historia Brittonum (Koch and Carey, 2003: 291). It is also called a ‘crystal pillar’ in the sea in the Navigatio of St Brendan (O’Meara, 2002: 53-4). These three instances suggest that it is a metaphor for a large iceberg. An iceberg zone occurs in the northern route from Britain to America, where the icebergs drift down the east coast of Newfoundland. One of these icebergs, travelling further south than expected, sank the Titanic in 1912. From their northern route, the Britons probably entered the Gulf of St Lawrence and appear to have sailed partway up the St Lawrence River. At some point in their journey they had to endure a ‘camp of extreme coldness’ as Winter set in before they could travel far enough south. They appear to have reached Montreal, the ‘four-peaked camp’, named after its four striking peaks – Mont Royal, Mont St-Bruno, Mont St-Hilaire and Mont Rougemont. At the time of the Britons’ arrival in the sixth century, with the absence of modern buildings, these peaks would have dominated the site. Here the men were in good spirits with the bard singing his poetry. The expedition continued south, past the Great Lakes, entering the eastern woodlands that had been formerly occupied by the Hopewell Native American culture.

There the Britons encountered man-made earthen mounds at a place called kaer sidi in the poem, translated as ‘mound fortress’ as noted above. The Hopewell are renowned as ‘the moundbuilders’, well known for their building of numerous earthen mounds (and mound walls in geometric patterns) across the eastern woodlands. At some point on the mainland, the Britons meet a large gathering of the Native Americans who are standing on a wall, probably one of the earthen walls which enclose their mounds. As the two groups have completely different languages they cannot understand each other. While in Hopewell lands, the Britons see a brindled ‘ox’ with a huge head and neck. This is identified with the buffalo which has a patchy yellow-brown ‘cape’ on the shoulders and back (Reynolds et al., 2003: 1012). According to missionary David Zeisberger, herds of buffalo grazed along the rivers there in the former heart of the Hopewell territory and were still plentiful in the late 1700s (Hulbert and Schwarze, 1910: 59). The bard also states that the inhabitants had tamed an animal with a ‘silvery head’, an apt description of the North American river otter, whose head, chin and throat give a silvery sheen when the fur is wet. The focus on the ‘head’ probably stems from the bard watching it swimming where it holds its head above water (Larivière and Walton, 1998). This otter was plentiful in Hopewell lands. They had made realistic carvings of it, often depicted carrying a fish in its mouth (for example, Lepper, 2005: 127).

The bard refers to the capture of a ‘cauldron’ (a decorated clay pot) belonging to the inhabitants. It was decorated with pearls, which had been used in abundance by the Hopewell, where one site alone produced about 100,000 freshwater pearls (Prufer, 1964: 93). The poet comments on the bravery of the inhabitants, the owners of the cauldron – that ‘it does not boil the food of a coward’. This respect for the courage of the Annwfyn warriors indicates that the bard regarded them as real people who could be wounded or killed, not fairies who could use magic to remove themselves from danger. At kaer sidi conflict arises between the Britons and the Native Americans. Gweir, a loyal youth known to the bard, is captured which was reported by Pwyll and Pryderi who are two of Arthur’s men. The Britons are ultimately decimated in the fighting. The bard is one of the few to escape and vows to pray for the captured Gweir until Judgement Day. Back in Britain as one of the few survivors, he describes a scene where the lords who know about Arthur’s death are clashing with the monks. A few lines later he announces Arthur’s death, stating that his grave and body are lost. He then turns to Christ for comfort. This view gives a coherent naturalistic explanation for a poem which is otherwise considered baffling.

Support for this naturalistic view of Preideu Annwfyn comes from a 16-line section of Kat Godeu. These two poems are the only works that portray Annwfyn as a disaster rather than a paradise. In Kat Godeu, the bard states that the inhabitants of Annwfyn gathered for battle by means of the rivers and streams, quite apt for the Native Americans, but preposterous for fairies. This section also refers to heated fighting between the Annwfyn inhabitants and the Britons and has an enigmatic ending where the dying Arthur gives an honour to his bard, as discussed in detail in Chapter 6.