The First Branch opens with a hunting error and spends the next year of story-time on what it costs to put it right. It contains no battle worth the name, one act of restraint that the narrator clearly regards as heroic, a courtship conducted at walking pace, and a woman punished for seven years for a crime that did not happen. It is also very funny in places, which readers who come to it expecting Celtic mysticism tend not to expect.
The stag at Glyn Cuch
Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, was hunting in the valley of Glyn Cuch and got separated from his companions. He heard another pack running against his own, and came into a clearing where a stag had been brought down by dogs he had never seen before — shining white, with red ears.
The colour scheme is a signal any medieval Welsh audience would have read instantly: those are not dogs from this world. Pwyll drove them off the carcass and set his own dogs on it.
A rider in grey came out of the trees on a large dapple-grey horse and did not raise his voice. He had never, he said, met a man with such bad manners as to drive another pack off a kill and bait his own on it, and although he would not take revenge, he would take the value of a hundred stags out of Pwyll's reputation.
Pwyll asked how to make it right. The whole story follows from the fact that he asked.
A year in another man's body
The rider was Arawn, a king of Annwn, and he had a problem. A rival king, Hafgan, contested his territory and could not be beaten. So he proposed a settlement that is also a trap and also a compliment.
They would exchange shapes and kingdoms for a year. Pwyll would rule Annwn wearing Arawn's face, with nobody in that kingdom aware of the substitution, and Arawn would rule Dyfed as Pwyll. At the end of the year, at a ford, Pwyll would meet Hafgan in single combat — and he must strike one blow only. Hafgan would not survive the first. If a second blow were struck he would get up the next morning as strong as he had ever been.
Pwyll went. He found Annwn better appointed than anywhere he had been: the best-furnished hall, the finest food, the most agreeable company. And at the end of the first evening he went to bed with Arawn's wife, who was the loveliest woman he had ever seen — and he turned his face to the wall and did not touch her and did not speak to her.
He did that every night for a year.
The tale is entirely explicit that nobody would have known. There was no watcher, no test, no supernatural penalty attached. It is a private decision by a man in another man's marriage, and the whole First Branch treats it as the definition of honour.
At the ford, Pwyll struck Hafgan once, split the shield and the armour and threw him a spear's length backwards over the saddle with a mortal wound. Hafgan, on the ground, asked him to finish it. Pwyll refused — whoever wants to do that may do it, but I will not — and Hafgan died, and his nobles came in and did homage, and the two kingdoms became one.
The morning after
They met again at Glyn Cuch, resumed their own shapes, and went home pleased with each other.
Arawn got into bed with his own wife that night and spoke to her and made love to her, and she said nothing at all. In the morning he asked why she was silent, and she said: because for a year I have not had a word out of you in this bed, and last night I did. He told her the truth, and she said that he had certainly found himself a firm friend.
The exchange has no plot function. It exists so that the audience can watch the wife notice, and it is one of the sharpest small scenes in medieval Welsh prose.
Afterwards the two kingdoms exchanged horses, hounds and hawks, and Pwyll was known by a new title: head of Annwn.
The slowest chase in literature
At his court at Arberth there was a mound, and it was said that any nobleman who sat on it would either take a beating or see a marvel. Pwyll, having a large retinue with him, sat on it.
A woman came riding past on a large pale horse in a shining garment of brocaded silk, going at an even walking pace. He sent a man on foot after her; she was further away than when he started. He sent a rider on the fastest horse in the court the next day; the same. The third day Pwyll went himself on his own best horse, spurred it until it was blowing, and the gap never closed by an inch, though she never went faster than a walk.
So at last he called out to her, for the sake of the man she loved best, to wait.
She stopped at once, pushed the veil back off her face, and told him she would have stopped a good while ago if he had thought to ask, and that it would have been a kindness to the horse.
She was Rhiannon, Hyfaidd Hen's daughter. A match had been arranged for her with a man called Gwawl that she had no intention of going through with, and she had gone to some trouble to arrive on that mound, because Pwyll was the husband she had picked for herself. They fixed a date a year ahead at her father's court.
Badger in the bag
At the wedding feast a year later, a tall auburn-haired young man came in and asked a favour, and Pwyll — expansive, well fed, holding a hall — said he could have whatever he asked for.
He asked for Rhiannon, and for the feast.
Rhiannon's reaction is one long, controlled expression of disbelief at how stupid her husband-to-be has just been. But she has already worked out the counter, because she recognised Gwawl the moment he walked in and had reason to expect him. The feast was not Pwyll's to give away, she pointed out, since it was hers; Gwawl would have to come back in a year for the wedding, and she would be waiting.
She gave Pwyll a small bag.
A year later, at Gwawl's wedding, Pwyll came in rags and asked only for as much food as would fit in his bag. Gwawl, feeling generous in front of witnesses, agreed. The servants shovelled food in and it did not fill. Told that nothing would fill it until a nobleman of real property stood in it and trod the food down with both feet and said that enough had been put in, Gwawl got up and did it — and Pwyll pulled the bag up over his head, tied it, and called for his men.
They came in one by one, and each one struck the bag with his foot as he passed, and asked what was in it, and was told: a badger.
Gwawl bought his release with sureties and an oath never to seek revenge for it. And the game the Welsh played afterwards, of kicking a bag and asking what was inside, is what the tale says it left behind.
Rhiannon at the horse-block
Three years of marriage produced no heir, and the men of Dyfed asked Pwyll to take another wife. He asked for one more year, and within it a son was born at Arberth on the night before the first of May.
Six women were set to watch mother and child. All six fell asleep. When they woke, the boy was gone.
What they did next is the ugly heart of the story: they killed a staghound puppy, smeared its blood on Rhiannon's face and hands, scattered the bones beside her, and swore that she had destroyed her own son in the night and that they had not been able to stop her.
She did not contest it in the way the tale would have allowed her to. What she accepted instead was a public penance with three parts and a seven-year term. She was to take up a position outside the gate, beside the stone the riders used for mounting. She was to recite what she was accused of to every visitor who did not already know it. And she was to offer each of them a ride indoors on her own back.
Almost nobody let her.
The colt and the boy
Elsewhere, Teyrnon Twrf Liant had a mare that foaled every year on the night before the first of May, and every year the foal disappeared before anyone saw it.
He brought the mare inside and sat up armed. The colt was born; a claw came through the window and took it by the mane; Teyrnon struck the arm off at the elbow, heard a scream outside, ran out into the dark, found nothing, came back and found a baby boy in swaddling clothes at the door.
He and his wife raised him. The child walked at one year and looked three; at four he was bargaining with the stable boys to let him take the horses to water; and they gave him the colt born the night he arrived, because they belonged together. He grew golden-haired, and they called him after it.
Then Teyrnon heard about Rhiannon and her penance, and looked at the boy, and saw Pwyll's face, and knew.
They took him back to Arberth. Rhiannon, told the news, said that if it were true, her anxiety would be at an end — and the word she used became the boy's name. He is Pryderi, and he goes on through the three remaining Branches, and dies in the fourth.
Where the story lives
The tale is Pwyll Prince of Dyfed, the first of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, preserved in the White Book of Rhydderch of around 1350 and the Red Book of Hergest of around 1400, and composed considerably earlier — the eleventh or twelfth century is the usual placing, on grounds of language and of what the author appears to assume about Welsh political geography.
"The Mabinogion" is not a medieval title. It is Lady Charlotte Guest's, from her nineteenth-century translation, and it covers a collection of Welsh prose tales of which only these four call themselves Branches.
Arguments worth knowing
Rhiannon and the horse. The pale horse she cannot be caught on, the mare that foals when she gives birth, the seven-year penance of carrying visitors on her back — the association is thoroughgoing, and it has led to a long-standing comparison with the Gaulish horse goddess Epona, whose cult is well attested by inscriptions and reliefs across Roman Gaul and Britain. The comparison is suggestive and it is not evidence of descent: nothing links a twelfth-century Welsh prose tale to a Roman-era Continental cult except the animal.
Annwn is not hell. This is the single most common misreading. In the First Branch, Annwn is a kingdom with a court, a queen, hunting, feasting, borders and a rival claimant. It is not a land of the dead and Arawn is not a death-god. The darker Annwn familiar from later Welsh folklore, and the wild hunt attached to a different figure entirely, do not belong to this text.
The calumniated wife. Rhiannon's ordeal belongs to a very widespread folktale pattern in which a mother is accused of eating her own children and is eventually vindicated. The Welsh version is unusual in one respect: it never lets you doubt her, and it makes the penance the subject rather than the suspicion.
Questions this Branch raises
Why does Pwyll owe anything for the stag? Because in Welsh law and custom, driving another man's dogs off a kill they had made is a specific and shaming offence. The insult is technical, and Arawn's calm about it is what makes it land.
Was the year of chastity necessary? Arawn never asked for it. When they meet again he learns of it and it transforms a transaction into a friendship — and the two kingdoms' alliance is the practical result. The tale's ethical argument is that unwitnessed restraint is the only kind that counts.
Why is the boy taken on May eve? Because the night before the first of May is one of the two hinges of the Welsh and Irish year, when the boundary between this world and the other is not reliable. The Branches use that date repeatedly for supernatural intrusion without ever explaining it.
Whose arm did Teyrnon cut off? The tale does not say, and never returns to it. It is one of several loose threads that suggest the author was working with older material he did not feel obliged to tidy.
Continue with Rhiannon, Pwyll, Arawn and Manannán; the Second Branch at Branwen daughter of Llŷr; the Irish Otherworld at the wooing of Étaín; and the Celtic hub.