The story.

Culhwch and Olwen is the oldest surviving story involving a ruler called Arthur. It belongs to a ‘native tradition’, which is very different to the Romance tradition that would dominate Arthurian literature through the Middle Ages. It survives in two manuscripts, datable to the 14th century. The story itself is dated on various grounds to the 11th , though some sections may be even older.

The story is straightforward.  The plot summary sounds like something you might find in any folk/fairytale collection.

When Culhwch rejects his stepsister as a potential wife, his stepmother tells him that he will never marry unless he marries Olwen, daughter of Ysbadadden Pencawr. (Ysbaddaden ‘Chief Giant’). Culhwch goes to Arthur’s court to ask for his help. Arthur provides warriors to aid in his search. They find Olwen. Culhwch asks her to run away with him:

‘That I will not,’ she replied,
‘lest sin be imputed to us both.
My father made me promise
I will not leave without consulting him,
for he will die when I go with a man.  

I do have some advice,
if you’re prepared to take it.
Go ask him for my hand.
However much he asks,
agree to his demands
and I will be your wife.’ 

Ysbadadden gives him forty impossible tasks to complete if he wants to marry Olwen. Arthur and his men complete the tasks, and the story ends with Ysbaddaden dead and Culhwch and Olwen married.

Up to the point where Culhwch arrives at Arthur's court, the story works in a way that is familiar to a modern reader who has some knowledge, however vague, of folk or fairy stories. The hero is born in strange circumstance, his dying mother attempts to trick her husband so he won’t remarry, and when the trick fails, there is a stepmother who curses the boy.

 ‘Well, boy,’ she said, ‘it’s good for you
to seek a wife. I have a daughter
fit for any noble in the world.’ 

‘I am not old enough to seek a wife.’
‘Then I will swear a destiny on you.
Your side won’t strike against a woman’s

 unless you get Olwen, daughter of
Ysbaddaden Chief Giant.’ […]

On a first reading you might expect this is a universal story about a young man who must leave the family home to find a suitable wife. He will discover how little he knows, how little he can do, and the story will track his learning until he has earned his new bride.

That’s not how the story works. Attempts to compare the story with others only underline how strange it is. It has been compared to a folk tale type: either ‘the giant’s daughter’ or ‘six go in search of a bride’. But in both those types the young man does something positive, either to earn his helpers’ assistance, or to earn his bride. It has also been compared to the story of Jason and the Argonauts, which contains a long list of helpers and a central character on a quest. But Jason is an active participant in the journey. A leader of heroes, but capable of action himself.

Culhwch bullies Arthur into helping him seek Olwen. He’s rude, long before rudeness was fashionable.

Arthur and his men complete the tasks. It’s possible that Culhwch is present when the tasks are being completed, but in a story which takes such pains to name everyone who does anything, his absence from the text suggests he’s absent from the events in the story between the first and second visit to Ysbaddaden.

Learning nothing, earning nothing, Culhwch marries Olwen and Ysbaddaden is executed.

Plot isn’t everything.

It's a wild, exuberant performance. Whoever put together the surviving version of the story was a genius who was enjoying the possibilities the story offered for a performance. There’s repetition on an almost demented scale, and a list of names that runs for four pages. There are giants, witches, huge boars, people who can talk to animals, animals who can talk to people, people who can change into animals and people who have been changed into animals as punishment for their sins.

 The Characters.

I’ve met Culhwch. Many times. He’s a rich pretty boy, with his shining toys and superb horse and dogs, symbols of inherited wealth and unearned status. He sets out not knowing how much he doesn’t know, or how inadequate his skills, knowledge and experience are for the appointed task. He discovers the world is a stranger place than he imagined. It’s the realistic heart of the story, the process of discovering the world is more various than the limited one he grew up in. 

He is brash and bold and rude, like many privileged adolescents. He threatens all the women in Arthur’s court so he can get his own way. He rudely rides into the hall and then bullies Arthur into helping him. But the Court List makes his lack of skills explicit. Even the six chosen to accompany him have useful specialisations. He seems to think all he has to do is to find Olwen, declare his love for her, and that will be sufficient. Like all those male poets from Petrarch onwards, who thought that telling a woman she was the object of his desire placed her under an obligation to him.

Throughout the story he earns nothing, learns nothing, and his last recorded words suggest there has been no character development during the quest from which he has been noticeably absent. 

Olwen is beautiful. In a fairy tale that’s all that matters. She can be wise or stupid, kind or cruel, she can be a sociopathic sadist; it doesn’t matter as long as she’s beautiful. But this isn’t a fairy tale. She is the only human in the story whose appearance is described in any detail. While her white skin and flashing eyes might belong to another set of cliches, she is also given words to speak. In The Mabinogion[i] the female characters often have the best lines and, like Luned in Owein, can seem far more sensible than the men. Olwen has had suitors before. That’s the way the world worked. But they all died. Perhaps this one might listen to her and survive.

Ironically, neither of them play a major role in their own story.

You’d expect Ysbaddaden the Giant to be the evil protagonist. We never see him with his daughter, so we have no way of knowing their relationship, beyond her insistence that she will keep her promise to him. The shepherd and his wife both describe the actions of an evil character; he’s ruined the shepherd and killed twenty-three of their sons.  But the giant’s first appearance could be pathos or farce or both.

‘Where are those rascal servants?
Where are those ruffians of mine?
Raise up the forks under my eyelids
so I can see my future son in law.

His three attempts to kill Culhwch and his companions are feeble and easily thwarted. Ysbadadden is trapped inside a bargain the story doesn’t explain. He will die when his daughter ‘goes with a man’ but can’t be killed until she does. Suitors must be offered the chance to complete an impossible task before he can kill them for failing.

His death seems excessively brutal even by the story’s standards. The young couple go to bed with her father’s mutilated head visible on a stake. 

[i] A moment’s pedantry: The Mabinogion is the name given to a collection of 11 stories. In the standard English versions, the first four stories, The Four Branches, are usually considered the ‘Mabinogi’ proper. Culhwch ac Olwen belongs in the group Jones and Jones called ‘The Four Independent Native tales’. ‘These stories’ or ‘the stories’ refer to all or any of the 11.