Pryderi: The Son Twice Lost

He is taken from his mother before she wakes and returned to a stranger’s stable the same night.

Pryderi is six months old when the supernatural force takes him from the royal cradle, simultaneously delivering a foal to Teyrnon Twryf Liant’s stable across the province. Rhiannon wakes to the empty crib and the blood-smeared accusation and the six years of penance that follow. The boy grows up in Gwent, looking increasingly like a description of Pwyll, until Teyrnon’s conscience outgrows his attachment to the child he has raised.

He is brought home to Dyfed and given his name. He grows. He becomes the lord his lineage promised.

The second loss comes on a mound.

Pryderi is a grown man with a wife — Cigfa, a woman of substantial dignity — and his mother Rhiannon has remarried Manawydan Son of Llŷr. The four of them are sitting on the mound of Arberth at evening, the sacred mound above Dyfed, because something always happens on that mound. Something always does.

They see, on the plain below, a mist, and then a light brighter than anything, and then they are in Dyfed but not in Dyfed: the same landscape, the same hills, but empty. Every person is gone. Every animal is gone. Every building stands but no one is in it. The entire province of Dyfed has been enchanted into a wasteland.

They survive in the empty landscape for two years on hunting. Then Pryderi finds a caers — a fort — that wasn’t there before, made of marble, with a golden bowl on a marble fountain inside.

He goes in to look at the bowl.

He touches the bowl.

His hand sticks. His feet stick. He cannot call out. He stands in the fort, frozen, until evening when his mother Rhiannon goes in to look for him, touches the bowl herself, sticks to it, and the fort vanishes with both of them inside it.

Manawydan and Cigfa are left in the empty wasteland, alone.

Manawydan solves the enchantment the slow way — through patience, through agriculture, through catching the enchanter’s mice in a snare and refusing to release them until the enchanter, running out of options, restores Dyfed. The enchanter is Llwyd Son of Cil Coed, friend of Gwawl, taking revenge for Rhiannon’s choice of Pwyll over Gwawl a generation ago. The revenge has been compressed into a trap and waited out over twenty years.

Pryderi and Rhiannon come out of the fort when Llwyd releases the enchantment. Pryderi does not remember the fort. He does not remember the bowl. He has been in a place between the worlds that the Third Branch does not describe in detail, which is how the Welsh tradition handles the Otherworld: by not fully describing it, letting the absence carry the weight.

He dies in the Fourth Branch — killed by Gwydion the magician in single combat, as the final casualty of a war begun by a magic pig-trade. His death is unremarked by commentary in the text, which is the most devastating way to record the death of the man who was the thread through the whole collection.

He was born in trouble. He lived in trouble. He was named for it honestly.