The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
from Pebidiog to Aber Gwy?
How the dog Toby?a How the flew’da sweet thunder for dewy Ida?1 b
David Jones notes
1 Cf. the names of certain of the megaliths of South Wales: ‘The Stone of the Greyhound Bitch’, ‘The Kennel of the Greyhound Bitch’, ‘The Stone of the Children of Arthur’, ‘The Enclosure of Arthur’, etc.
If the hunt of the boar Trwyth by the men and dogs of Arthur described in the tale of Culhwch is read with one eye on the Ordnance Survey’s map, the Distribution of the Megaliths (sheet 7), the possibility of some connection between the itinerary of this great mythological hunt and the sites of the megaliths may suggest itself. Pebidiog is the south-west extremity of Wales where the hog and his pigs came in from Ireland. Aber Gwy (gooy) means Mouth of the Wye, where the hog escaped into the Severn estuary, to be overtaken in Cornwall and to be driven into the Atlantic. Cf. also Mids. N.D. IV, I.
additional notes
a Perhaps a reference to the children’s story Little Dog Toby by Rachel Field (1938).
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act IV Scene 1 line 91:
THESEUS
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley; let them go:
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
HIPPOLYTA
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem’d all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
THESEUS
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew’d, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee’d, and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never holla’d to, nor cheer’d with horn
b Ida may be a reference to Mount Ida, near Troy. Ovid refers to the ‘dewy vales of Ida’ (madidis in vallibus Idae) in his Amores I, 14.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a flewed: with large cheek folds (flews).
comments