The Anathemata
Mabinog’s Liturgy (continued)
of the Bear of the Island)1 and toward the lighted board; in cloth of Grass of Troy and spun Iberian asbestos,2 and under these ornate wefts the fine-abb’d Eblanaa flax, maid-worked (as bleached as will be her cere-cloth of thirty-fold when they shall intone for her . . . pro anima famulae tuae3 ) and under again the defeasible and defected image of him who alone imagined and ornated us, made fast of flesh her favours, braced bright, sternal and vertibral, to the graced bones bound.
If her gilt, unbound
(for she was consort of a regulus) and falling to below her sacral bone, was pale as standing North-Humber barley-corn, here, held back in the lunula of Doleucothi4 gold, it was
[page 197]paler than under-stalks of barley, held in the sickle’s lunula.
David Jones notes
1 Cf. the thirteenth-century gloss on a MS of Nennius, which reads: ‘Artur, translated into Latin, means ursus horribilis’. There is also the exceedingly obscure passage in Gildas where he calls some ruler Ursus, the Bear. There seems every reason for rejecting the suggestion that Gildas here refers to Arthur; but it may be noted that in Old Celtic the word for bear was artos, modern Welsh, arth.
2 Cf. the stuff called gwellt troia, ‘Grass of Troy’ mentioned by medieval Welsh poets, for example in c. 1450 ‘Grass of Troy like a maiden’s hair, the Son’s countenance in delicate embroidery’, and in the same poem, ystinos, asbestos, is mentioned, ‘A stone we know is spun come from great India to Gwent’. And in 1346 ‘Stockings of thin brilliantly-white asbestos; and this is what asbestos is—a precious brilliantly-white stone which is found in Farthest Spain, which can be spun’. And in 1520 ‘Bi-coloured sheen of Greek embroideries fit for nobles of the Round Table . . . a work of fire’. See F. G. Payne, Guide to the Collection if Samplers and Embroideries, Nat. Mus. of Wales, Cardiff, 1939.
3 Cf. the requiem mass for a woman deceased, ‘ . . . on behalf of the soul of thy handmaid, N. etc.’ and see Malory, Bk. XXI, on the obsequies of Guenever, ‘And than she was wrapped in cered clothe of Raynes from the toppe to the too in thirtyfolde.’
4 Doleucothi (dol-ei-coth-ee, ei as in height, accent on third syllable) in Carmarthenshire, the only place in all Britain where gold was continuously mined in the Romano-British epoch. Many gold ornaments have also been discovered on the site.
additional notes
DJ note 1: Nennius was a 9th-century Welsh monk. He has traditionally been attributed with the authorship of the Historia Brittonum, based on the prologue affixed to that work. This attribution is widely considered a secondary tradition.
St. Gildas was a 6th-century British monk, best known for his scathing religious polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, which recounts the history of the Britons before and during the coming of the Saxons.
a Eblana: Eblana is the name of an ancient Irish settlement which appears in the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), the Greek astronomer and cartographer, around the year 140 CE. It was traditionally believed by scholars to refer to the same site as the modern city of Dublin, though this is now disputed.
abb: among weavers, the yarn for the warp.
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