The Anathemata
Mabinog’s Liturgy (continued)
Dear me, and who learned you in the historias, the cosmologies and topographies, the genealogies and nomina, leaving aside the rhetorics, sister? Very appetitive ar’n’t we?—or was your knowledge infused?
Or was it in the Greatsa you read in the meadows of Tŷ Crist,3 or where are parked the fallow hinds by Pontrhydfodlen;4 or within the oriel’d light under the hung dark sword of the lord Edwart o Segeint,5 at the cattle-ford, where saIlowed Isis abers with Old Father Tamesisb at the Omphalos and true point of centre of the Island, according to the mensural rods and figurings-out of the gromatici of the father of fitz Nut the king in London?c
David Jones notes
3 Tŷ Crist, tee creest, House of Christ.
4 Pontrhydfodlen, pont-rhid-vod-len, accent on penultimate syllable; Bridge of the Ford of (Mary) Magdalen or Maudlin.
5 Edwart o Segeint, ed-wart o seg-eint, ei as in height, accent on first syllable; Edward of Segontium, who, as Edward II, founded Oriel College. A sword purporting to be his hangs above his supposed portrait over the high table in the college hall. My impression on being shown it in 1937 was that it was a very black sword.
additional notes
DJ note 3: Christ Church Meadow is a big expanse of college grassland near the centre of Oxford.
a Greats: the final Honours examination (strictly speaking, in Literae Humaniores or classics) at Oxford.
b The verb ‘aber [with]’ is not in OED. Maybe the speaker means that Isis and Thames are different names for the same river, as is the case at Oxford. Alternatively, if it meant that that the Isis and the Thames meet in confluence, the witch is incorrect; it is, as DJ would have known, the Cherwell and the Thames that meet at Oxford.
c For the final clause, see DJ note 1 to next page. gromatici = Roman land surveyors.
comments
We now have the sarcastic voice of a third witch who clearly doubts Marged’s pretence of learning.