The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
when they stood to brim-warda
of Ongulsey Sound1
the out-mere to wander, untowardb —
they wore their White Houndc
for’ard.
Their quarterly gold and gules
four pard-cats counter-colour’d
at the main2
but aft
a red rampin’ griffin.
Because, if you please
and ‘now-opserve-you-close-nows-cabden’
Caesar from his stern-post
flew the same!3
’T were too much.
Yet, you could not choose but hear, for as parson say of Chrysostom, his tongue could tell! d
David Jones notes
1 Some Northman gave the name Ongulseyjarsund to the Menai Strait, and Ongulsey, later spelt Anglesey, to the island, which spelling gave colour to the association with Angles; hence the false derivation, ‘isle of the English’. An error propagated by William of Malmesbury.
2 The arms of Gruffydd, the father of the last Llywelyn, were: quarterly, gold and gules, four leopards counter-coloured; on which account these arms have in modem times been used to represent the principality of Wales.
3 The dragon as an emblem in this island seems to derive from the draco, the cognizance-flag of a Roman cohort, perhaps through the office of ‘pendragonship’ in post-Roman times; rather as Bede says of the insignia of the English Bretwaldaship that it was imitative of a Roman use.
Rome borrowed the draco from the Dacians in the second century AD and later it became the Royal Standard of the Eastern Emperors, to be again imitated in the West as a symbol of power. West-Saxon kings and others used it. There seems no evidence of its use by the Welsh princes in the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth centuries, but there is documentary evidence that English armies carried it against the Welsh in Plantagenet times. Glyndwr, however, identified it with the Welsh cause and Henry Tudor utilized that tradition and perpetuated it, so that the ‘dragon of Cadwaladr’, the draconteion of the Byzantine Roman Emperors, came to fly over Rugby fields and eisteddfod pavilions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wales.
additional notes
b The Vikings divided their world into four cardinal directions whose names in Old Norse suggest that they originated on the west coast of Norway, which runs northeast-southwest. The word for northeast, translated literally, means ‘landnorth’; northwest is ‘outnorth’, southeast is ‘landsouth’, and southwest is ‘outsouth’.
I take ‘untoward’ as an adjective modifying ‘out-mere’. So: when the Welsh sailors went sailing westward from the sound of Anglesey, into the stubborn and perverse open sea, they flew a white hound flag at the front of the ship, the Welsh leopards flag on the main mast, and a ‘red rampin’ griffin’ at the rear.
c A white hound is associated with Celtic rulers.
d John Chrysostom (c. 349-407) Archbishop of Constantinople, was an important Early Church Father. He is known for his preaching and public speaking, his denunciation of abuse of authority by both ecclesiastical and political leaders, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and his ascetic sensibilities. The epithet Χρυσόστομος (Chrysostomos, anglicised as Chrysostom) means ‘golden-mouthed’ in Greek and was given for his celebrated eloquence.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a brim: sea (Old English).
comments
Elen continues to report what the boatswain swore (on all the names previously invoked) was true, and adds her own comments.