Subject: (urth) Llew Llaw Gyffes

From: James Wynn <crushtv at hotpop.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:12:00 +0000

Well, for most of it, you would have to accept some of my presuppositions
about Chenille and Tussah (realizing he was definitely human really opened
things up for me) which I've yet to prove. But Silk (like Llew Llaw Gyffes)
is grown from a hidden indeterminate mass after the death of Pryderi (who
when born was found wearing brocaded silk - chenille). One gets the sense
that LLG is Pryderi reborn somehow - although it is never so stated.
Actually, if you accept that Pryderi an LLG are "sun heroes" then it is
inescapable that they are the same person.

Pryderi's name is said by the Mabinogion to mean "sense" while his
father/not-his father Prydain's name is said to mean "head" (a very Vironese
naming convention). "Llew Llaw Gyffes" is said to mean "bright lion of the
steady hand" which made me immediately think of Silk with his cane. But this
name is even better connected to someone else. :)

If you accept certain narrative suspicions I have (which I came by
independently), then story of LLG overlays nicely with the story of the
family of Tussah.

Yes, Andrew, that riddle was the one to which I was referring. Graves posits
that the poem is deliberately "pied" and it is the job of the reader to
figure out how. It seems to me that Wolfe has done exactly that with
innumerable ancient myths and folklore in the LS/SS.

While I suppose it is possible to make too much of it, it is difficult not
to make a lot of it. Every time I examine something, I find another old
story moving perpendicular or parallel to the one's I've already seen. It's
a kind of "magic square" where the numbers add up the same way up, down,
across, and diagonally.

-- Crush

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Bollen [mailto:abollen at internode.on.net]
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2002 11:01 PM
To: urth at urth.net
Subject: Re: (urth) Trees & transformations

Crush - I just came across your interesting site, and had a couple of
questions. In the intro, you say: "[Wolfe has] recreated Gwydion's riddle as
exegeted by Robert Graves in his The White Goddess.."  I assume you mean
"Gwion/Taliesin's" riddle, no? The one which goes:

"An impartial Chief Bard
Am I to Elphin.
My accustomed country
Is the land of the Cherubim.

Johannes the Diviner
I was called by Merddin,
At length every King
Will call me Taliesin.

I was nine months almost
In the belly of the hag Ceridwen;
I was at first little Gwion,
At length I am Taliesin."

etc.

Would love to here more on this! As far as I can recall, RG's (rather
tortured) exegesis is in terms of recreating the tree-alphabet from the
answers to the sections of the riddle, and finally a holy-name-of-god. A
fair amount of the imagery involved seems to be correspond with Wolfe's
imagery, but beyond that I am unclear on the connection. Ditto for the
connection between Llew and Silk?

...It's obviously possible to make too much of this. Wolfe may borrow or
allude
to bits & pieces of imagery and thematic fragments, but I see them as mainly
"chrome" on the important things - the narrative, the characterization, the
moral issues bound up in them.

--