Taliesin

Taliesin [W tal, brow, forehead; iesin, radiant, beautiful]. Divine or divinely inspired poet of Wales, often thought to be historical (late 6th cent.) and to have flourished in the Old North, i.e. formerly Welsh-speaking regions of the Scottish Lowlands. Classed with Aneirin as one of the two surviving cynfeirdd [oldest poets], Taliesin was ascribed by Sir Ifor Williams (1944) twelve poems of the sixty in the Book of Taliesin, compiled 14th cent. Two highly incompatible versions of Taliesin's life survive. In the older, supported by the ascribed twelve poems from the Book of Taliesin, he is the author of praise poems filled with realistic detail of chieftains like Urien and Owain who warred against the encroaching Angles, 550–600. The second version, developed much later and known chiefly in the Hanes Taliesin [Tale of Taliesin] or Ystoria Taliesin [History of Taliesin], places the poet further south, in Powys, and portrays him as an immortal in the service of a series of princelings.

Highly folkloric but with traces of pre-Christian religious belief, the Hanes Taliesin was compiled by Llywelyn Siôn (1540—c. 1615) and given wide readership by Lady Charlotte Guest in her translation of The Mabinogion (1838–49). In the days of Maelgwn Gwynedd (6th cent.), the shape-shifting goddess Ceridwen lives at the bottom of Bala Lake with her husband Tegid Foel, after whom the lake [W Llyn Tegid] is named. She brews a magic cauldron named Amen whose contents she intends for her own ugly son Morfran [sea crow, also known as Afagddu, utter darkness], so that he may be gifted with poetic talent. Her wishes are thwarted when her servant, Gwion Bach, catches three drops from the cauldron on his thumb and forefingers, which he thrusts into his mouth, giving himself the poetic gift. Enraged, Ceridwen sets after Gwion Bach, after which each of them undergoes a series of metamorphoses: he becomes a hare, and she a greyhound; he a salmon, and she an otter; he a bird, and she a hawk; he a grain of wheat, and she a hen who swallows him. Magically, this grain of wheat impregnates Ceridwen; what had been Gwion Bach is reborn from her womb as a creature of such great beauty that she cannot kill him and so casts him adrift on the sea. The infant drifts to the weir, near Aberystwyth, of Gwyddno Garanhir, whose son Elffin finds him on Calan Mai [May Day], exclaiming as he opens the blanket, ‘Dyma dâl iesin!’ [what a beautiful forehead]. The child, although only three days old, answers with the words, ‘Taliesin bid’ [let it be Taliesin]. When he grows older the boy Taliesin accompanies Elffin to the court of Maelgwn Gwynedd at Degannwy (near the mouth of the Conway river, north Wales), where he successfully overcomes the poets of the king's household by his magic and the demonstration of his superior poetic powers. This victory enhances the fortunes of the feckless Elffin, who fosters Taliesin until he is 13. Emboldened by his changed fortune, Elffin boasts to Maelgwn's court that his wife is the fairest in the kingdom, his horses the swiftest, and his poet (Taliesin) the wisest. For this arrogance Maelgwn imprisons him and sends his son the irresistible seducer, Rhun [grand, awful], to test Elffin's wife's virtue. But Taliesin saves his foster-father on all counts. He substitutes a female servant for Elffin's wife, and although the helpless girl succumbs to Rhun, Elffin is able to prove his wife is innocent. In a magnificent song of his origins from the time of Lucifer's fall, Taliesin sings so wonderfully as to release Elffin from his chains. Finally, Elffin's horses defeat Maelgwn's and a jockey drops his cap, following Taliesin's instructions, revealing a compensatory cauldron of gold.

Abundant references from Welsh tradition partially reconcile the seemingly historical 6th-century Taliesin of the Old North with the magical poet-seer of the Hanes Taliesin. In the second branch of the Mabinogi, for example, Taliesin is one of seven men to escape from Ireland after the death of Bendigeidfran. From the 11th to the 13th centuries a large body of prophetic poems predicting the defeat of the Saxons and the Normans were ascribed to Taliesin. His name was frequently associated with that of Myrddin [Merlin] rather than Aneirin. The two were thought to be in constant exchange of occult and arcane knowledge, as in the 11th-century poem Ymddiddan Myrddin a Thaliesin. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini (c.1149), Merlin, as transformed from Myrddin, discourses with one Telgesinus, a Latinization which had little further life. Tradition has him buried both near Aberystwyth and at Bangor. Taliesin remained little known outside Welsh tradition until the 19th century. Taliesin became a character in Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), partially based on Hanes Taliesin, and was expanded into a more dramatic character in the novels of Anglo-Welsh fantasist Charles Williams (1886–1945). Welsh-American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) made Taliesin a personal culture hero, naming two estates, in Wisconsin and Arizona, for him. See KOADALAN; TUAN MAC CAIRILL.

Bibliography

Texts: Canu Taliesin, ed. Ifor Williams (Cardiff, 1960);
The Poems of Taliesin: English Version by J. E. Caerwyn Williams , ed. Ifor Williams (Dublin, 1975, 1987).
An unreliable version of Hanes Taliesin is found in vol. iii of Lady Charlotte Guest's The Mabinogion (London, 1849), 356 ff. Cf. Patrick K. Ford , ‘A Fragment of the Hanes Taliesin by Llywelyn Siôn’, Études Celtiques, 14 (1975), 449–58.
A late version of the story by Elis Gruffydd is translated by Patrick K. Ford , ‘The Tale of Taliesin’, in The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1977), 164–81;
Ystoria Taliesin, trans. Patrick K. Ford (Cardiff, 1992).
Studies: John Morris-Jones , ‘Taliesin’, Y Cymmrodor [London], 28 (1918), 1–290;
Ifor Williams , Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944);
Rachel Bromwich , ‘The Character of the Early Welsh Tradition’, in Nora K. Chadwick (ed.), Studies in Early British History (Cambridge, 1959), 83–136;
Marged Haycock , ‘Llyfr Taliesin’, dissertation, University of Wales (Cardiff, 1983);
‘Llyfr Taliesin’, National Library of Wales Journal, 25 (1988), 357–86;
A. O. H. Jarman and G. R. Hughes , A Guide to Welsh Literature (Swansea, 1976);
Juliette Wood , ‘The Folklore Background of the Gwion Bach Section of Hanes Taliesin’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 29(4) (May 1982), 621–34

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