Gwendydd

The lesser-known Gwendydd, sometimes known as Ganieda, originated in the Welsh poems of King Arthur and his court. Gwendydd was the sister of the mage Merlin and was a powerful seer. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, she is also depicted as the wife of King Rhydderch Hael from the North. In some later versions (more into the 18th and 19th centuries) she is depicted instead as the lover of Merlin.

 

In Monmouth’s tale, Gwendydd is depicted as intelligent and resourceful and most importantly prophetic, like Merlin, which was most unusual for a woman in literature at the time. She was not written without fault, as Gwendydd was an adulteress in the story, with Merlin seeing this from leaves in his sister’s hair.

In the story, Merlin went mad after a battle and ran away to the forest, only for Gwendydd and her Kingly husband to bring him back to their castle. Merlin betrayed his sister and told her husband that she had been in the woods with her lover, which is how the leaves got into her hair.

To protect herself, Gwendydd sought to discredit Merlin by dressing up a single boy in 3 outfits and taking him to Merlin 3 times to get him to prophesize how the different children would die.

Each time Merlin produced a different answer. First that he would die by falling from a rock, then from falling from a tree and finally by drowning in a river.

Rhydderch was convinced that Merlin was a fool and believed his wife. However, the boy later died from falling from a rock, cascading through the branches of a tree and getting caught upside down with his face in the river, and thus he drowned and Merlin’s prophecy had come true.

Merlin then went on more adventures and the next time we see Gwendydd is after her husband had died and she was grieving his loss. She went to the woods to find Merlin and decided to remain secluded from the world, together with her brother.

 

Monmouth wrote this work circa 1150, towards the end of the civil war in England known as the Anarchy, when Empress Matilda was striving to reclaim her stolen crown from her cousin, the usurper King Stephen. It is very noteworthy, then, that not only is Gwendydd depicted as unusually powerful for a woman at the time, but at the end of the story, Gwendydd tells a prophecy which details the events of King Stephen’s reign, before Merlin renounces his own gift of foresight in favour of his sister’s.

When you bear in mind that in medieval England, and through many centuries after, the legend of King Arthur was genuinely believed as true historical fact, the idea that Gwendydd was written as a woman who was not just born into power, as Empress Matilda was as the heir to the English throne, but also allowed to hold that power as her male relative renounced his own hold on that power for her, is very interesting. Especially since Gwendydd foresaw the troubles in Stephen’s reign.

Was Monmouth writing to convince the population to accept the Empress Matilda as the rightful ruler of the country? No one can know for sure, but I like to think so. The facts add up that Matilda did have lovers outside of her unhappy second marriage and she was born to wield power and certainly did a good job, as her first husband (the Holy Roman Emperor) left her as Regent on more than one occasion. In addition, though Stephen was not her brother, he was her cousin and closest male relative.

 

Certainly, writers often wrote their stories in such a way as to teach from them, like how Shakespeare wrote King Lear (from English legend) at a time when James I was mulling over whether to separate the Kingdoms of England and Scotland between his sons or to keep his Kingdom united as one.

 

In later Welsh versions of Arthurian legend, Gwendydd was often still the sister, or twin sister of Merlin, but became less powerful. Though still a seer, she had to have her brother explain her visions to her, unable to interpret them for herself.

 

In more modern prose, the story was updated by Jerry Hunter, who brought her story into the time of the Second World War. The book won a Prose Medal and was referred to as “an important contribution to war literature in Wales.” In the book, Merlin is a soldier suffering with PTSD and escaped his military hospital to reunite with his sister, Gwen, at their home.

 

The tale of Gwendydd may not be told as much as that of Guinevere or Morgana, but it is just as interesting.