The Story
Hunting the Giant’s Daughter is based on Culhwch ac Olwen, the oldest surviving legend from The Mabinogion, a collection of stories based on Welsh narrative traditions. This version of the story was originally commissioned for the 2003 Beyond the Border Storytelling Festival and has since been performed in Wales, Ireland, Holland in addition to the 2009 tour of the piece in England. While faithfully based on an ancient story which was recorded in medieval manuscripts, it is also an original piece of storytelling and music, created and performed by storyteller Michael Harvey, singer Lynne Denman and composer/musician Stacey Blythe.
The origins of this story go into prehistory but are essentially Celtic. Surviving manuscripts are from the White Book of Rhydderch (c1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c1400) both of which collectively make up the stories known as The Mabinogion. Many of the symbols in the story are found across Celtic and Indo-European stories, especially that of the wild boar, primarily a symbol of hunting and warfare. Like much other Welsh oral material the story has an uncannily close connection with the landscape many of the places being clearly identifiable today from Pembrokeshire all the way to Gloucester with the names of rivers, valleys and hills all bearing witness to the events.
The story is much older than the manuscripts in which it is found, inviting us into a fantastic and primitive place where men and beasts are on equal footing, in which shape changing and magic are everywhere. The medieval author employed every possible linguistic trick to fill this world with colour, character and vigour just as Michael, Stacey and Lynne bring it to life in their performance, drawing on a wealth of oral as well as written traditions.
Michael Harvey first developed the idea of performing the story after reading John Layard’s Jungian analysis in his book ‘A Celtic Quest’. He tested the story out as a solo show, at the Scottish International Festival of Storytelling in Edinburgh then revisited it years later as the 10th anniversary of the Beyond the Border Festival approached. Michael had worked with composer and musician Stacey Blythe, enjoying her unique combination of sensitivity and risk-taking. He knew of Stacey’s work with singer Lynne Denman and felt Lynne’s voice, and deep knowledge of traditional song, could help give a voice to the women in the story. These women, notably Olwen and the witch y Widdon Orddu live in what seems to be a very male landscape but on closer inspection turn out to be the emotional and psychic centres around which the men are in orbit. This combination of music, song and storytelling gave each artist a clear role within the creation of the piece. David Ambrose, from the Beyond the Border Festival, commissioned the show, and since then it has toured Ireland, Wales and Holland with Creu Cymru before connecting with Adverse Camber.
As appropriate, for a story which has been told for hundreds of years, by perhaps thousands of different individuals, this version of the tale, too, is continually evolving.
Here’s a short tour of some of the symbolism in the story, taken from an interview with Michael Harvey:
The story is very connected to the land, language and culture of Wales. Does that influence your performance? There is a sense in which the story and its performance summon the places, people and creatures that inhabit it – a way of making the material ‘present ‘. I don’t feel that I am trying to revive anything because the story is still speaking to us today. Our job is to get ourselves onto that archetypal wavelength which we largely ignore these days but has huge potential for embracing life and its paradoxes.
There are frequent mentions of kinship rituals, such as reclothing, feasts, giving gifts and fairly constant references to hair and beards, including the comb and scissors on the Twrch Trwyth. What’s that all about? Comb and scissors are pretty mundane objects for us but they were once culturally significant enough to be carved on Pictish stones. They are gold as well and the Twrch Trwyth wears them on his head as a kind of crown. If you forced me to say what the symbols ‘meant’ it would have something to do with the tools and badges of our most advanced and developed self being inconveniently located between the ears of a huge, hairy, snorting, homicidal beast.
There seems to be a colour symbolism as well, the colours black, white and red recur. Also the description of Olwen with white clover in her footstep. The story loves paradox and nowhere more so than in the name of the witch Y Widdon Orddu merch y Widdon Orwen ‘the very very black witch, daughter of the very very white witch’
Presumably, some of these opposites resolve creating a unity? There is also an implied circular pattern. We start off with a happy marriage between high status equals which is quite an unusual beginning – usually there is some kind of imbalance explicitly stated in stories. Then Goleuddydd goes mad and as a result we have to go on this crazy pig hunt, in order to eventually end up back where we started with a happy marriage of equals.
How significant is hunting as a symbol of Arthur’s leadership? One of the things that has always fascinated me is the way this story juxtaposes the bravura and splendour of hunting and warfare with a more internal world often involving animals. Once the first giant’s head is lopped off we go on a quest to find the oldest animal and once Cai has killed a warrior who once almost defeated Arthur himself we cut to one of his men very unheroically grubbing around in a field looking for seeds and talking to ants. Both these animal episodes involve a lot more listening than doing. Arthur is so taken up with the final hunt that he (and we) forget about the final encounter with the dark female principle Y Widdon Orddu in her cave, which, you could argue, is probably the real aim of the whole quest.
And against the structures or formalism of the court, we have all the forests and madness. Have you beefed that up from the source material? No, I have not exaggerated the mad old henwife - if anything I have toned her down a bit. There are mad people all the way through this story. Culhwch’s mother goes mad, his step-mother goes to see the crazy hen-wife, the gate-keeper at Arthur’s court is clearly off his trolley, and the shepherd, Custennin, and his wife are bonkers too. In one way or another they all signal transitions in the story and challenge Culhwch by refusing to play according to the rules that he has just learnt.
