Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and the Disney film made from them, gave a generation of readers an Arawn who is a faceless dark lord in a fortress of iron, master of an undead army, the enemy of everything living.
The Arawn of the Mabinogi is a scrupulously courteous king who is owed an apology, offers a reasonable settlement, keeps his side of it exactly, and is so pleased by his substitute's honourable conduct that the two become lifelong friends. The inversion is total, and it is one of the clearest cases in this tradition of modern fiction reversing a medieval character while keeping the name.
What he actually does in the First Branch
He is a king of Annwn with a territorial problem: a rival, Hafgan, whose name means something like summer-song, whom he fights annually and cannot finish. When Pwyll commits a serious breach of hunting etiquette against him, Arawn proposes an exchange of shapes and kingdoms for a year, with the fight against Hafgan as the price.
Everything about his conduct is exact. He gives full instructions, including the crucial condition about striking only once. He rules Dyfed in Pwyll's shape for the year and does it well. He asks no questions on his return until he has established the facts. And when he learns that his substitute slept beside his wife for a year without touching her, his reaction is not suspicion but the recognition of a debt, and the two courts exchange gifts of hounds, horses and hawks from then on.
He appears once more, indirectly. In the Fourth Branch, the pigs that Gwydion steals from Pryderi — the theft that sets off the whole disastrous sequence of that tale — are said to have come to Dyfed as a gift from Arawn, king of Annwn. The friendship established in the First Branch is still generating consequences three branches later.
The white hounds with red ears
His pack is the most durable thing about him. White with red ears is the standard Welsh marker of an otherworld animal, and it is not confined to Wales — Irish literature uses the same colouring for supernatural beasts, and the combination appears too consistently across both traditions to be coincidental. It is one of the small number of genuinely shared Celtic-language motifs that can be pointed to without special pleading.
In later Welsh folklore the Cŵn Annwn become something else: a spectral pack heard at night, whose cry foretells a death, and whose distinctive and much-recorded property is that the sound is loud when the hounds are far away and faint when they are close. That belief is well attested by nineteenth-century collectors across Wales and belongs to the same family as the Wild Hunt traditions of Britain and northern Europe.
Two cautions about that connection. The folkloric death-hounds are not the courteous king's hunting pack in any documented line of descent — they share a name and a colouring, and centuries separate them. And the leader of the hunt in Welsh folk tradition is generally Gwyn ap Nudd, not Arawn. The extremely common modern statement that Arawn leads the Wild Hunt is a twentieth-century tidying of two separate figures into one.
Annwn without the hell
Because Arawn is usually labelled a god of the dead, it is worth stating what the medieval Welsh material actually contains.
- In the First Branch, Annwn is a kingdom: a court, a queen, a rival monarch, a war over territory, hunting, feasting and gifts. Nobody there is dead.
- In Preiddeu Annwfn, a difficult poem in the Book of Taliesin, Arthur sails to a series of otherworld fortresses to seize a cauldron warmed by the breath of nine maidens, and of the three shiploads that went, only seven men returned. That is dangerous, and it is not a description of an afterlife.
- In Culhwch and Olwen, otherworld figures and animals move in and out of the ordinary world with no boundary ritual at all.
Annwn is a very deep and difficult elsewhere, sometimes underground, sometimes across water, sometimes simply further into the woods than anyone has been. Christian Welsh usage eventually pressed the word into service for hell, and modern occult and pagan writing has completed the job. Arawn's supposed portfolio as a death-god, a psychopomp and a lord of souls has no support in the tales.
His name's derivation is unresolved. Proposals have been made and none commands agreement, which is worth noting given how often confident etymologies for him are offered.
Why does the story insist on the year-long substitution?
Because it is testing something Arawn cannot test in himself. He needs Hafgan killed by someone capable of stopping after one blow, and he needs to know what a stranger does with unsupervised access to another man's household. The exchange delivers both, and it also solves the original offence — the compensation for a discourtesy is a year of demonstrating courtesy. Early Welsh and Irish narrative frequently settles injuries this way, by requiring the offender to perform the virtue he failed at.
Is Hafgan meant as a seasonal opponent?
His name invites it — haf is summer, and a pair of kings fighting annually at a ford looks like the summer-and-winter combat that comparative mythologists love. The text supports none of it: there is no seasonal timing beyond the anniversary, no vegetation imagery, and no suggestion that the outcome affects the weather. The reading belongs to the school that found seasonal allegory everywhere in the nineteenth century, and it should be labelled as interpretation.
How did he become a villain?
Through a chain of small steps. Annwn was translated as the underworld; the underworld was read as hell; its king was therefore a devil-figure; and modern fantasy, which needs dark lords, found a ready-made one with an authentically Welsh name. Lloyd Alexander was explicit that he was inventing rather than retelling, and the books are good books. The problem is not the fiction but the reference works that have since absorbed its version — a courteous king turned into a demon by an editorial chain nobody intended.