Taliesin's transformation

At a Glance

• Central figures: Gwion Bach, a boy set to stir a cauldron; Ceridwen, an enchantress of great power; and Taliesin, the greatest poet in the Brythonic tradition, who emerged from what Gwion became.
• Setting: Wales, at the shores of Llyn Tegid (Lake Bala) in Penllyn, in the time before the historical bards; the tale survives in the sixteenth-century Hanes Taliesin and fragments attached to the Mabinogion.
• The turn: Three drops of the potion of inspiration - awen - meant for Ceridwen’s ugly son Morfran splash onto Gwion Bach’s thumb, and he puts it to his mouth.
• The outcome: Gwion flees through a chain of animal transformations, is swallowed by Ceridwen, and is reborn as the radiant child who will become Taliesin, chief of bards.
• The legacy: Taliesin’s name became the measure of poetic mastery in Wales; the historical sixth-century poet Taliesin is half-fused with this mythic figure, and the tradition of awen - the divine inspiration of the bards - traces back to those three drops.

Ceridwen had two children. One was Creirwy, the most beautiful girl in the world. The other was Morfran, called Afagddu - utter darkness - because he was so ugly that no company of men would suffer him among them. Ceridwen looked at her son and understood that nothing she could give him would open a door in the world except knowledge. She would brew him the gift of all-seeing inspiration, the three blessed drops of awen, and no one alive would be able to match him in speech or prophecy.

She set a cauldron over a fire at the edge of Llyn Tegid and began to gather herbs according to the books of the astronomers. The brew would take a year and a day to complete, and the fire beneath it could not go out.

The Cauldron at Llyn Tegid

Ceridwen needed someone to stir. She took a blind man named Morda to tend the fire and a small boy named Gwion Bach to turn the ladle. For a year the two of them worked at the lip of the cauldron while Ceridwen came and went, adding herbs she had gathered at the precise hours the stars required. The liquid in the cauldron darkened, thickened, and stank. The fire burned day and night. Morda fed it without seeing what he fed. Gwion stirred without resting.

On the last day of the year and the first hour past it, the cauldron cracked and spat. Three scalding drops flew from the surface and landed on Gwion Bach’s thumb. He jammed the thumb into his mouth without thinking.

The three drops were the whole point of the brew. Everything left in the cauldron was poison. The vessel split apart, and the black liquor ran down toward a stream that fed the river, killing the horses of Gwyddno Garanhir who drank from it downstream.

But Gwion did not see the cauldron break. The moment the drops touched his tongue, he saw everything - past, present, and what was coming. And what was coming was Ceridwen.

The Shape-Flight

He ran. She came after him, and her fury was the fury of a woman who had worked a year and a day only to have a boy’s thumb steal the result. Gwion, knowing now what he had not known before, turned himself into a hare and bolted across the open ground.

Ceridwen became a greyhound. She was faster. She closed the distance. At the edge of a river Gwion threw himself in and became a fish, silver-quick, diving for the deep channel. Ceridwen became an otter, sleek and relentless, cutting the water behind him. He broke the surface and flung himself into the air as a small bird - a wren, some say - and she rose after him as a hawk, her shadow falling over him like a hand.

Each form he took, she matched. Each escape narrowed the next. The chase crossed water, land, and sky, and at every turning Gwion saw - because the awen let him see - that there was no shape fast enough to outrun her. He needed to become something she could not chase.

He dropped to the floor of a barn and made himself a single grain of wheat among thousands scattered on the threshing floor.

Ceridwen landed. She became a black-crested hen. She ate every grain on the floor, one by one, patient and thorough, until she swallowed the one that was Gwion Bach.

Nine Months

She carried him in her belly for nine months, and during that time she knew what she carried. She swore she would kill the child when it came, because the theft could not be forgiven.

When the child was born, she could not do it. He was so beautiful - his face shining, his eyes open and clear - that her hand would not move to the knife. She wrapped him in a leather bag instead and set the bag in the sea on the twenty-ninth of April, the eve of Calan Mai. Let the water decide.

The Weir at Gwyddno’s Shore

The bag drifted. It washed along the coast and came to rest in a salmon weir near the mouth of the river Dyfi, on land belonging to Gwyddno Garanhir - the same lord whose horses the cauldron-poison had killed. The weir was famous for its catch. Every year on Calan Mai the weir yielded an enormous haul of salmon, and the right to draw the first net belonged to Gwyddno’s son, Elffin.

Elffin was an unlucky young man. Everything he touched turned sour. His father gave him the weir that night hoping the salmon might reverse his fortune. Elffin pulled the net and found no fish. What he found was the leather bag, caught in the stakes.

He cut it open. Inside was a child, and the child’s forehead was shining.

Tal iesin, Elffin said - radiant brow.

The child opened his mouth and spoke. He spoke in verse, fully formed, as though he had been composing in the dark of the bag. The poem told Elffin not to grieve for the empty net, that what he held was worth more than three hundred salmon, and that his luck had changed.

Elffin carried the child home. From that day his fortunes reversed, and the boy - Taliesin - grew into the greatest poet Wales had ever heard. He served at the courts of kings. He sang before Maelgwn Gwynedd himself and silenced every bard in the hall, reducing them to stammering the nonsense-sound blerwm blerwm on their lips while Taliesin alone held the room with clear speech. He sang of what he had been - hare, fish, wren, grain, a child in a leather bag on the sea - and what he knew, which was everything the three drops had opened to him.

What the Drops Contained

The knowledge never left him. Taliesin claimed to have been present at the fall of Lucifer, at the building of the Tower of Babel, at the birth of the world. Whether these were the boasts of a shape-shifter who had lived in every form, or the vision granted by the awen, the tradition does not distinguish. The drops of inspiration did not give Gwion Bach cleverness. They gave him the memory of everything that had happened and the sight of everything that would, and the only vessel large enough to hold that was poetry.

The cauldron that held the brew is gone. The poison killed the horses and drained into the earth. What survived was the voice - a boy pulled from a salmon weir, shining, already singing.