The Open Door

Heilyn opens the door to end the sojourn on Gwales; The Birds of Rhiannon fly.
Illustration by Margaret Jones
 

~*~

When the door is opened,

when Rhiannon’s birds still their song

and the head of Brân is silent,

who will speak to us as we pass

the door that can never again be closed

in our Time?

“Shame on my beard” said Heilyn

“If I do not open it” - 

The door that Manawydan counselled

Should not be opened , for he knew

The pain that would fall upon him,

The grief of many deaths

And his world changed beyond enduring.

For now a blackbird sings in a garden enclosed,

fills the bare boughs of a tree with strident beauty.

It is enough. Buds will break. The tree will bear green leaves.

Other doors will open. 

The Birds of Rhiannon

Woodcut by Sarah Young

For those who dwell apart, 

for those who are passing, 

for those who suffer anguish,  

may the Birds of Rhiannon sing the song you need to hear.

The Birds of Rhiannon are mentioned in two of the texts included in the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion. In the earliest of these tales - Culhwch and Olwen - the giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr says he wants the Birds of Rhiannon - "they that wake the dead and lull the living to sleep" -  to entertain him on the night Culhwch weds his daughter.  This is one of the many seemingly impossible tasks he sets for Culhwch as a condition of the marriage. Although the tale does describe how several of the tasks are achieved, it does not describe all of them and there is no mention of how - or if - the Birds of Rhiannon are obtained. Of all the tasks set this would require more than the skills and ingenuity of Arthur's men that enables most of them to be completed. We learn no more about the birds in this tale.

But they are also mentioned in the second of the sequence of four Mabinogi tales. On their return from Ireland with the head of Bendigeidfran the seven survivors of an expedition to rescue Branwen hear the song of these birds far out over the sea. Bendigeidfran had told them that this would be so before they returned: "You will be feasting seven years, with the Birds of Rhiannon singing to you". So it was, and when they heard these birds there were three of them "and whatever kind of song they had heard before was unpleasant compared to that song". The birds sang from far away "but their song was as clear to them as if they were there with them". Here the song lulls the living feasters into a state of timeless suspension for the seven years of the feast and then for a further eighty years with the head of Bendigeidfran on the island of Gwales. When they return to the world it is as if no time had passed and events continue as if they had just left it, and all of the pain and trouble of the world returns to them. 

So the song of these birds is a song of enchantment, bringing those who hear it into a state of bliss. They are otherworld birds. For Culhwch to have brought them to Ysbaddaden would have been a feat to outdo all the other marvellous tasks that were fulfilled. Yet, we are to suppose, the birds did entertain the wedding feast and lulled Ysbaddaden to sleep when, like Bendigeidfran, his head was struck off and he left the world for an otherworld repose whose time is not yet ended, if it has even yet begun.

For those who dwell apart, 

for those who are passing, 

for those who suffer anguish, 

 may the Birds of Rhiannon sing the song you need to hear.

A March Evening

Dusk fades to dark ¬ a half-moon and Venus ¬ equally bright in an indigo sky ¬ a blackbird singing ¬ the notes ringing ¬ bridging the brightness of day  ¬ and the deeps of the night. 

 Moon, Star and Bird of Rhiannon ¬ demarcations dissolving ¬ out of the air ¬ making otherness thisness ¬ a visiting presence  ¬ containing the darkness  ¬ insistently clear.

---

Picture: detail from ‘Night Flight’ by Sarah Young

CURLEW

A song alive in memory, though long unheard

Ripples across the years to present the past:

The moorland landscape of Mynydd Bach,

Llyn Eiddwen with water lobelia growing

Through the shallows of the lake and the song

Of the curlew bubbling up to crescendo

Over the cotton grass on the bog on the far side

Where a ruined tower, a folly, sinks into the mire.

All this brought back in vivid re-call

But not so clear as the haunting call

Which would wake the dead and lull the living to sleep

As a woven strand in the song of Rhiannon’s Birds.

So past, present and future meet

In a song that is never forgotten, always heard.

~*~

“I want the Birds of Rhiannon, they that wake the dead and lull the living to sleep, to entertain me that night.”

Ysbaddaden Pencawr from Culhwch and Olwen

More about Llyn Eiddwen HERE

Sanderlings

Sanderlings on Borth Beach. Photo: Lyndon Lomax

On this stony beach with its undertow of sand
the outcrops of peat are trees from another time
that the retreating sea reveals. At the tideline
they flock, lined up for a while along the edge
bobbing into and over the breaking waves
then gathering and rising as one into air,
dropping further along the beach to line up again.
Listening for the notes of Rhiannon’s birds, that refrain

far out on the horizon, I catch, closer, the sanderlings’ song,
an intermittent liquid sharpness through the hiss of the sea.
So it’s here that the enchantment is, on this beach
where I stand between worlds of rock and water,
in the half-heard call of birds from far arctic tundra
wintering on a coast where time ebbs under.

~*~

“...far out over the sea, their song was clear as if they were with them” 

The Birds of Rhiannon, from the Second Mabinogi.

On a Welsh Beach

M.C.Escher (Wikiart)

‘... dyuot tri ederyn, a dechreu canu udunt ryw gerd’

“... three birds came and began to sing a song to them, and all the songs they had ever heard before were unpleasing compared to that song. They had to look far out over the waves to see them but they were so clearly present to them as if they were with them.”

                               §

                     Birds of Rhiannon singing, where sea meets sky,

                     A shifting border at the merging of worlds

                     Their littoral music like the tides on the shore

                     Ebbing and flowing onto the land, into the air;

                     Cloudscapes of sound, now drifting, now clear

                     Like the horse she rides: now here, now there;

                     The boundaries of time, of place, don’t cohere

                     On the island of Gwalës on the sea, in the air.

                      The company holds in a vision somewhere,

                      A blissful communion, a binding of hearts,

                      Until a hand reaches out to open the door

                      And the song melts away in a breaking wave

                      So the land and the sea and the sky

                      Take their place in the world once more.

                                       §

“When they looked through the door all the losses they had ever suffered fell upon them ..... as if they were waiting to meet them.”

Quotations from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. The company returning from Ireland with the head of Brân spend eighty years on the Island of Gwalës, though when they return they are no older and no time has passed in the world they left to go to the island.