two flowers

a transfeminine tale from medieval wales

story time #1: the distant past (high school)

In either Year 8 or Year 9, my RE teacher told me that my ‘spirit animal’ was a skunk. For some reason we’d got onto the subject of spirit animals, and the class had decided she was some kind of authority on the topic, so she was just assigning spirit animals; when she got to me, I guess she chose chaos. (When I reflect on her lessons, which also involved her teaching us a meditation technique and then having us practice it, I realise that she spent very little time actually teaching us about religion.) Amidst the class’s ensuing laughter (hysterical) and my clear humiliation and confusion (extreme), she ‘clarified’ that she actually meant that she meant the skunk from Bambi; you know, the one who says ‘you can call me flower if you want to’ in the clip she went on to show us. I think it’s funniest to imagine that this ‘flower’ bullshit was not pre-planned and represented her spectacularly inept attempt at damage control on realising that she’d just brutally owned an (at most) fourteen year old, but it’s funny either way. ‘No no,’ she basically said to me, ‘I don’t mean a skunk in a bad way, I just mean I think you’re gay.’ One friend called me Flower for a year at least, and honestly who can blame her.

flowers

This gives me a certain affinity, I think, with one of the many figures of transfemininity in the medieval Welsh story known as Math uab Mathonwy or the ‘Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi’, Blodeuedd. Blodeuedd is a woman made with magic out of a pile of various flowers, so she could be the wife of the heroic but cursed Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Her name is a double-plural of the word ‘flower’ (‘flowerses’), though at the end of the tale it gets changed to Blodeuwedd, or ‘flower-face’, as she turns into the apparently-hated owl. Bearing a somewhat unfortunate connection both to flowers and to unpopular animals and an inability to understand social convention, Blodeuedd and I share in a transfemininity which mocks the idea of ‘nature’ or ‘identity’, who relish, as Susan Stryker would have it, in our monstrosity, in having been created.¹ 

Of course, it’s hugely anachronistic to call medieval texts trans or transfeminine. And yet I’ve read huge numbers of writers claiming that the ‘Fourth Branch’ is actually about condemning ‘sexual transgression,’² or attempting to reclaim it as a feminist text depicting a matrilineal society,³ and never once meaningfully interrogating the idea that gender and ‘sex’ are legible concepts in this text. I feel like I have at least as much right to project my gender politics onto the narrative as these critics do, and at least I won’t have to perform the egregious misreadings they do in order to maintain the coherence of a system of gender neither I nor the text have any interest in keeping coherent. I love this story a great deal: it’s not only absurdly fun, but I think there’s a genuine affinity between my transness and its profound suspicion of gender and identity, so I want to offer a transfeminine reading of it. 

But first, the story itself.⁴

story time #2: the distant past (medieval wales)

There is a king of Gwynedd,⁵ Math, who cannot live⁶ during times of peace unless he keeps his feet in the fold⁷ of a virgin. The notable people in his court include: his two nephews, Gwydion (a mage) and Gilfaethwy, their sister Aranrhod, and Goewin, the aforementioned virgin. One day, Gilfaethwy comes to Gwydion with a problem: he really wants to have sex with Goewin, but cannot, because their uncle’s feet are [in/on] her. 

Gwydion is cunning, and comes up with a plan: he gathers some men, steals some pigs from the king of neighbouring Dyfed, Pryderi,⁸ and starts a war. Math leaves his court to lead his troops, and Gilfaethwy gets what he wanted and rapes Goewin.

Math returns from war, and asks Goewin if he can put his feet back in her fold, but she tells him she is no longer a virgin, so he cannot. She explicitly accuses Gwydion and Gilfaethwhy of raping her,⁹ and Math tells her he will get justice for her and for himself — the first by marrying her, and the second by punishing Gwydion and Gilfaethwy.¹⁰ 

After they are eventually forced to return to the court, this is how they are punished: they spend three years in the form of three different creatures of opposite and alternating sex,¹¹ during which time they must mate with one another and have a child. Each year, they return to the court and Math transforms their offspring into human children. The final time, he turns them back too.¹²

This, however, has still not addressed the essential issue: Math doesn’t have anywhere to put his feet, other than I suppose the ground.¹³ Gwydion, now back in his uncle’s favour, suggests Aranrhod; Math asks her if she is a virgin,¹⁴ and she does not deny that she is.¹⁵ Math decides to test this: he bends his wand,¹⁶ places it on the ground, and instructs her to step over it. When she does, a big beautiful blond baby boy drops from her,¹⁷ and, as she runs from the room, so does a ‘small something’.¹⁸ Before anyone else can react, Gwydion wraps the small something in a sheet of brocaded silk and puts it in a chest at the end of his bed.

One day, Gwydion wakes up to hear a cry coming from the chest, and in the folds¹⁹ of the sheet he finds a little boy. He finds a wetnurse for the child, and eventually Gwydion takes him to see Aranrhod. He tells her that the child is hers, and they briefly trade barbs,²⁰ before she curses the child that he will not receive a name unless she gives him one. 

Gwydion comes up with a plan, as he so often does. He disguises himself as a shoemaker and engineers a debate over shoe sizes with Aranrhod which eventually leads her to come outside and show him her feet; then, the child executes a sick trickshot and hits the leg of a bird. She cries out that ‘the fair one strikes it with a skilful hand’, and Gwydion cries out that he now has a name — Lleu Llaw Gyffes.²¹ She curses him again: he will not bear arms unless she herself arms him.

Gwydion, yet again, comes up with a plan. He disguises himself and Lleu as bards²² to get into Aranrhod’s castle and uses his magic to create the illusion that it’s under attack; he convinces Aranrhod to give him and Lleu weapons and to arm Lleu herself in order to fight off the attackers. She does so and, once again, he dispels the illusion and informs her of his trick. She is not thrilled, and curses Lleu a final time: he may not have a wife of a race which is on earth at present.

Gwydion does not come up with a plan; instead, he goes to Math²³ and complains about Aranrhod. ‘Fine,’ says Math, ‘we must endeavour, you and I, to conjure a wife for him out of flowers, using our magic and enchantment.’²⁴ So that’s what they do. They gather the following flowers: the flowers of the oak, the flowers of the broom, and also the flowers of the meadowsweet.²⁵ Then they use their magic to make a wife: Blodeuedd, the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen.²⁶ Also, Math gifts Lleu the best land available. 

All seems well: the curses overcome, Aranrhod disappeared from the narrative, Lleu a prosperous young lord with a hot wife. Then, Blodeuedd meets a man named Gronw and falls in love with him.²⁷ However, Lleu’s continued being alive poses an essential problem here, so the lovers resolve they must kill him.

But Lleu’s hard to kill. Blodeuedd, pretending to be worried about the prospect of his death, asks him to reassure her by describing precisely how he might die.²⁸ These are the conditions of his death: he must be struck by a spear forged over the course of a year and only during mass on Sundays, while — here’s where it gets complicated — standing, under a curved, well-thatched roof, with one foot on the back of a buck, and the other on the side of a bathtub which has been filled for him. 

Gronw goes away and starts to forge the spear, and after a year has passed Blodeuedd asks Lleu to recreate the situation of his death; for whatever reason, he agrees.²⁹ So, she takes him to a bath she’d drawn for him, under a curved, well-thatched roof, and has him stand on the back of an animal and the side of the bath, and oh, wouldn’t you know it, there’s Gronw with a spear he’s only forged on Sundays during mass to kill him with. 

In the aftermath, Lleu flies away from the scene in the form of an eagle.³⁰ Gronw takes over his old lands, while Gwydion sets off in search of him; eventually, he finds a house whose sow goes on mysterious daily travels. The sow leads him to a tree, at the top of which he finds an eagle with worms and rotting flesh dropping to the ground; he guesses that this is Lleu, and thrice sings an englyn³¹ to get him down from the tree, before striking him with his wand and turning him back into his human form.

On coming down from the tree, Lleu’s looking like shit, quite frankly, but Gwydion sends him to the best doctors he knows and he’s better in no time. 

Then they set about getting justice for Lleu; Math and Gwydion raise Gwynedd’s armies and march on Gronw’s castle, chasing Blodeuedd and her maidens until all of them drown in a lake except her. Gwydion punishes her by transforming her into an owl and giving her the name Blodeuwedd, cursing her with an enmity with all other birds.

Lleu challenges Gronw to go to the place Lleu was when he was struck by a spear and let Lleu cast a spear at him. Gronw’s forced to accept, and none of his lads will take the blow for him, so he asks if he can place a stone between him and Lleu to make up for the fact that he was under the influence of feminine wiles³² when he attempted murder. Lleu accepts,³³ but manages to cast the spear directly through the stone and kill Gronw anyway.

Lleu inherits the throne of Gwynedd,³⁴ and they all³⁵ lived happily ever after.

let’s talk about how like 50% of these characters are trans

I hope I am not alone in sensing a certain transfeminine je ne sais quoi running throughout this story, and not just for Blodeuedd. Her model of gender as something you can create and change, not just do or have happen to you, and the way she falls outside the cracks of conventional discourses reflects a constant concern of the text. There is, too, a continual suspicion of bodies as stable signifiers of who people are or even as coherently delimited from the world around them, where individual agency and bodily autonomy become increasingly irrelevant. The body becomes something we create and change and do in concert with others, where what matters to us and who we are can be as simple as a pile of flowers which become a woman.

Take Math, for example: while it’s very possible to read his ‘use’ of Goewin as the assertion of male power over and through the female body,³⁶ once you start to look closer it seems increasingly clear that it’s much weirder than that. Whether or not his feet penetrate her and whether or not he is compelled to do so or simply wants to, it is clear that she becomes, in a sense, part of his body. His masculine authority, potentially confirmed by this position, is simultaneously compromised by a loss of bodily autonomy and a near-total enmeshment with Goewin’s body, and when Goewin is raped it appears to count as an assault on him as well. Her body is in this sense an extension of his,³⁷ but that means his is also an extension of hers and he too becomes marked as (trans)feminine.

Then there are the brothers, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, whose animal transformations are the only explicit examples of sex change in the tale. By taking on an explicitly female form and gaining the ability to give birth, they clearly challenge gender’s stability and offer a literal, though temporary, example of transfemininity. Obviously, therefore, I’m not hugely interested in this aspect — if nothing else, the changes are so temporary that it could easily be claimed that it doesn’t reflect anything about their identity. What I am interested in, however, is what happens next. 

For the third and seemingly final set of transformations, Gwydion is the male animal — but, when they’re returned to what the text calls eu cnawt eu hun (‘their own flesh/form’), he continually plays a maternal role to Lleu. He essentially gives birth to him from a pseudo-womb, the chest; he specifically arranges for a woman in the town to feed Lleu;³⁸ and he is identified as a parent though never the father.³⁹ I think it’s by no means a stretch to claim that Gwydion is transformed back into his own flesh but not his own gender, that he remains transfeminine even after the transformations are finished. This links together his animal body, his human form, and the chest as essential parts of his identity — or perhaps more precisely his identities. Crucially, just like Blodeuedd, this is an intentional transformation as Gwydion is both given this female form by Math and chooses to take on a parental role for Lleu. Gwydion is no less Lleu’s mother for the fact that he didn’t gestate in Gwydion’s body, that Gwydion could not breastfeed him.⁴⁰

What I’m getting at here is that the ‘Fourth Branch’ treats gender in a way which is hugely relevant to how we understand transition today. The body doesn’t belong to nature: it can be changed, added to, even created through magic and human action. I’ve seen a lot of critics attempting to resolve the ambiguities of this text one way or the other — whether Aranrhod was really a virgin, who Lleu’s ‘actual’ parents are — but that always strikes me as wrongheaded. Things in the narrative are strange and different and unclear, just as bodies here are radically permeable and mutable, just as gender doesn’t work as you might expect it to. What the ‘Fourth Branch’ suggests, I think, is that we can choose to change the terms of our embodiment and that doing so doesn’t have to make sense within dominant or really any modes of understanding. We can form connections with whoever and whatever we want, up to and including a medieval Welsh story about incest and making women out of flowers, not to mention those women made out of flowers. Seeing my connection to Blodeuedd allows this wonderful moment of recognition in our alterity and strangeness and in being creations who take our destiny into our own hands. The stories in the ‘Fourth Branch’ tell us of ways we can fall outside of or exceed what gender wants us to be, and how valuable and peculiar what results can be.

1. Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,’ GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237-54.

2. Michael Cichon, ‘Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,’ in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins & Cory James Rushton (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 105-15.

3. Sarah Sheehan, ‘Matrilineal Subjects: Ambiguity, Bodies, and Metamorphosis in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,’ Signs 34, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 319-42.

4. This is my rendering of the tale, because I think it’s fun to write out and because it helps make any of what I have to say about it comprehensible. Footnotes give relevant further information, particularly on ambiguities in the text or subtleties of language. 

Translations from: Will Parker, ‘The Mabinogi of Math’, last updated 2003, https://www.mabinogi.net/math.htm; Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2007). 

Welsh text from: ‘Math uab Mathonwy’, Wikisource, last updated 2/1/2014, https://cy.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Math_uab_Mathonwy&oldid=5106.

Elements of commentary from:  Parker, ‘The Mabinogi of Math’; Sheehan, ‘Matrilineal Subjects’; Roberta Valente, ‘Gwydion and Aranrhod: Crossing the Borders of Gender in Math,’ in The ‘Mabinogi’: A Book of Essays, ed. Charles William Sullivan (New York: Garland), 331-45.

5. Proper noun pronunciation guide (ˈ marks primary stress; please note I do not speak Welsh and these represent my best attempts using reliable sources, but should not be taken as gospel):

Aranrhod: [arˈanr̥ɔd] or [arˈjanr̥ɔd], something like ‘aranhrod’ or ‘ar-yanhrod’ (the rh is a voiceless trilled r sound.)

Blodeuedd: [blɔˈdɛɨɛð], something like ‘blodai-eth’ (with the voiced ‘th’ from ‘though’).

Blodeuwedd: [blɔˈdɛɨwɛð], something like ‘blodaiweth’.

Dôn: [ˈdoːn], something like ‘dawn’.

Gilfaethwy: [ɡɪlˈvɛɨθʊɨ], something like ‘gilvaithui’ (with the unvoiced ‘th’ from ‘through’).

Goewin: [ˈɡɔɨwɪn], something like ‘goiwin’

Gronw: [ˈɡrɔnu], something like ‘gronoo’

Gwynedd: [ˈgʊɨnɛð], something like ‘guineth’.

Gwydion: [ˈgʊɨdjɔn], something like ‘guidyon’.

Lleu Llaw Gyffes: [ˈɬəɨ ˈɬau ˈɡəfɛs], something like ‘hlai hlou gefes’ (the ll has no exact equivalent in English but ‘hl’ is closest).

Mabinogi: [mabɪˈnɔɡi:], essentially as it’s spelt.

Math: [ˈmaːθ], something like ‘math’ (with the ‘a’ from ‘father’).

Mathonwy: [maˈθɔnʊɨ], something like ‘mathonui’ (with the ‘a’ from ‘maths’)

6. The text does not clarify this statement — it could represent the force of either a curse or Math’s desire.

7. plyc, ‘folds, lap, genitalia’; a somewhat distressing amount of scholarship is devoted to the question of whether Math’s feet simply rest on her lap or are penetrating her.

8. The only character to feature in all four branches of the Mabinogi.

9. This is a notably explicit and direct accusation: she tells him that ‘an attack was committed upon my person,’ and notes that it represents ‘an assault on me and an insult upon you’.

10. I think it’s worth noting that, though Gwydion did not himself rape Goewin, he is still punished just the same as Gilfaethwy, who did; Math says he punishes them in this way because they ‘have been in league together’. An argument could be made that Gilfaethwy is punished more severely because he turns into a female animal twice, but this still reflects the text’s ongoing interest in shared agency.

11. Gilfaethwy is transformed into a hind in the first year, into a boar the second, and into a she-wolf the third; Gwydion becomes a stag, a sow, and a (male) wolf.

12. What he says to them here — referring to their ‘great shame’ — suggests that this shame is the punishment, not the animal transformation itself; they have to live with what they have done. This connects to an underlying problem of what exactly happens to their consciousnesses during these transformations.

13. Please don’t ask how he hasn’t died in the three years he’s been punishing his nephews.

14. The text reads: Y uorwyn a doeth ymywn. "A uorwyn," heb ef, "a wyt uorwyn di?" (‘The virgin came in. “Virgin,” he said, “are you a virgin?”’). It’s seemingly trading on uorwyn’s double meaning as both ‘unmarried woman’ and ‘virgin’, though does through some epistemological doubt on the whole affair.

15. She says ny wnn I amgen no'm bot (‘I know no other than that I am’), which doesn’t hugely clarify matters.

16. Some interesting phallic symbolism here!

17. So obviously there’s an important and relevant question over what exactly is going on here. If Aranrhod was a virgin, then how did she give birth? It’s possible the pregnancy is caused by the wand, a phallus she quite literally opens her legs to, but that seems to conflict with the whole test of virginity thing and with the wand being bent beforehand. So was she lying? That would seem to be the implication of her evasive answer to the question of her virginity, but then she obviously wasn’t visibly pregnant, which brings us back to the wand issue. What’s more, there’s no obvious candidate in the text for the child’s father; it could be that in an earlier version of the text, Aranrhod had Goewin’s role and was raped by Gilfaethwy, but this was edited out and the character of Goewin invented. However, there’s no real evidence for this and anyway, the ‘Fourth Branch’ is clearly not squeamish about incest.

18. The relevant passage is ryw bethan ohonei (‘something small [fell] from her’). It’s frequently suggested that the ryw bethan is a foetus, but it’s hugely unspecific — there’s no verb here, and no explicit indication even of where it fell from. Additionally, it’s been claimed that this scene represents an abortion — which, sure, I mean traditionally abortions don’t result in giving birth, but if we either take the abortion as more metaphorical than practical or take the ryw bethan as a foetus it’s possible.

19. That word plyc again: clearly this is supposed to remind us of genitalia, and the chest functions as a pseudo-womb.

20. There’s a play on the word mab (‘boy, son’) in this scene that suggests the important question of Gwydion’s relationship to the boy. Aranrhod first asks pa uab yssyd i'th ol di? (‘Who is that boy following you?’), to which Gwydion responds y mab hwnn, mab y ti yw (‘this boy is a son of yours’); later, she suggests that the child is Gwydion’s son as she asks pa uab yssyd i'th ol di? (‘what is the name of your son?’). The text seems to agree: a bit later, he becomes y uab (‘his [Gwydion’s] boy’). In what sense is Gwydion a parent here? Some have suggested incest, but I’m more convinced that he takes on a maternal role.

21. This means — you guessed it — the fair one with a skilful hand.

22. His favourite move; he also pulled it on Pryderi.

23. Presumably now fully over the whole virgin fiasco.

24. I’ve just given the whole quotation, mostly following Parker’s translation, because I find it hysterically funny.

25. These flowers variously symbolise different aspects of femininity, as if she’s a collection of social signifiers; a fascinating literalisation of the discursive construction of gender.

26. Honestly the parallels between me and her continue to astonish me.

27. Blodeuedd, being as she is a pile of flowers given consciousness, is not well-versed in human etiquette.

28. She just says ‘I am thinking about how what you were talking about with me earlier might be possible. Would you show me?’. I suppose the logic is something like him showing her and not dying will allay her fears, but this is still stupid.

29. Because he’s an idiot.

30. That he doesn’t die might be because Blodeuedd only got a billy-goat, in Welsh bwch gafr (‘buck-goat’), not a bwch (‘buck’).

31. A short poetic form; I should probably confess that there have been a bunch of these throughout which I’ve ignored.

32. Read: horny.

33. Thus proving that Lleu’s an idiot or at least that medieval Welsh law had an allowance for horniness.

34. It might be worth bringing up matrilineality in the text. Math uab Mathonwy, Gwydion uab Dôn, and Gilfaethwy uab Dôn are all seemingly identified with matronymics, against a patronymic convention in most Welsh texts; Sheehan has argued that this suggests Gwynedd is matrilineal, so that Lleu is only a legitimate inheritor if he’s taken as Aranrhod’s unambiguous child, though this is not uncontroversial.

35. To a point.

36. A version of this argument is made in Sheehan, ‘Matrilineal Subjects,’ 323.

37. Katherine Millersdaughter, ‘The Geopolitics of Incest: Sex, Gender and Violence in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,’ Exemplaria 14, no. 2 (2002): 288

38. Although he doesn’t do it himself, that the text notes this detail so explicitly suggests it’s his responsibility.

39. This might be an effective counter against Sheehan’s conception of Lleu as Aranrhod’s child: if Gwydion is his mother, he could inherit through him matrilineally. Millersdaughter has also argued that the inheritance shifts and becomes patrilineal by the end of the tale, although this is unconvincing.

40. This intersects too, of course, with the huge relevance of alternative care networks and non-nuclear families to trans people.