Culhwch

His story opens in madness and swine. His mother Goleuddydd, the daughter of Amlawdd Wledig and sister of Arthur's own mother, was seized while pregnant with a wandering frenzy that drove her from the dwellings of men, and came to her senses only when she reached a swineherd's herd. There, in the narrow run of the pigs, she gave birth to her son and died, and the boy was named for the place: Culhwch, the pig-run. The swineherd carried him to his father, Cilydd son of Celyddon Wledig, and so a prince of Britain grew up with a swineherd's name and a king's blood, cousin to Arthur through the house of Amlawdd.

When Cilydd took a new wife, the queen wished her own daughter on the boy, and when he refused her she laid on him a tynghed, a fated curse: he should have no wife until he won Olwen, the daughter of Ysbaddaden Benkawr, the Chief Giant. The curse worked like a charm of love: the moment the maiden's name was spoken, love of her filled every limb of his body, though he had never seen her. His father gave him the counsel that shapes the tale. Arthur is your cousin, he said; go to his court and ask him to trim your hair, for the cutting of hair is the pledge of a gift. So Culhwch rode to Celliwig in Cornwall in such splendour that the whole tale stops to admire him: a dapple-grey horse of speed, gold on his bridle and his breast, gold-hilted sword, purple cloak, and two white-breasted greyhounds leaping before him like two sea-swallows. The porter Glewlwyd Mighty-grasp barred the gate, for once a feast has begun no man may enter, but the youth's threats and beauty won him through, and Arthur took a gold comb and shears and trimmed his hair, and the gift was claimed. Culhwch asked for Olwen. Arthur confessed he had never heard of the maiden, and sent messengers out; they searched for a year and found nothing.

So Arthur lent him his own companions, and the quest rode out: Cei, the fire-handed, who could go nine days without sleep and kindle light with his hands; Bedwyr of the one hand, swiftest of men; Gwrhyr, who spoke the tongues of birds and beasts; Gwalchmai, the hawk of May; Menw the enchanter; and Cynddylig the guide. They found the shepherd Custennin, Ysbaddaden's brother, whose wife had hidden their four and twentieth son Goreu in a chest because the giant had killed the rest, and through him Culhwch met Olwen, coming to them in a robe of flame-red silk with a torque of red gold, her head more yellow than the flower of the broom, her skin whiter than the foam of the wave, and four white trefoils springing up in her track wherever she trod, so that they called her Olwen, the White Track. She loved him at sight, and warned him: her father's fate was to die on the day she wed, and the giant would set him such demands as no man could fulfil, and he must promise all.

Ysbaddaden received them with eyelids propped open on forks and three poisoned spears of stone, which the companions caught in flight and hurled back into his body, trading wounds with him at the gate and healing by night. Then came the anoethau, the wonders: some forty tasks of nested impossibility, each requiring another. The hill must be ploughed and sown and reaped in one day; the thicket without a path must be opened; the cauldron of Diwrnach the Irishman must be fetched; the blood of the Very Black Witch of the Valley of Grief must be brought to shave the giant, and the bottles of Gwyddneu Garanhir to keep it fresh, and the two birds of Rhiannon, whose song wakes the dead and lulls the living, must be taken; and above all the comb and the shears that lie between the ears of Twrch Trwyth, the king's son whom God had transformed into a boar for his sins, which could be hunted only with the dog Drudwyn, held by the leash of Cors Cant Ewin, on the collar of Canhastyr Canllaw, on the chain of Cilydd Canhastyr, in the hand of Mabon son of Modron, who was stolen from his mother at three days old, and no man knows where he is.

The finding of Mabon is the tale's own treasure: Gwrhyr questioned the oldest creatures of Britain, and each, older than the last, sent him to an elder - the Blackbird of Cilgwri to the Stag of Rhedynfre, the Stag to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, the Owl to the Eagle of Gwernabwy, the Eagle to the Salmon of Llyn Llyw, oldest of all that swim, who had heard grief at the walls of Gloucester and carried the rescuers there on his shoulders. Arthur's men stormed the prison and freed Mabon. Then the wonders fell one by one: Arthur took Diwrnach's cauldron by force in his ship Prydwen, and cut the Black Witch in two with his knife Carnwennan; and the great hunt of Twrch Trwyth ranged from Ireland across Wales to Cornwall, a war that cost many of Arthur's best men, slew the boar's monstrous piglets one by one, sent Menw home from a snatch at the treasures with nothing but a shaking of poison that ailed him ever after, and ended with the comb and the shears won and the boar driven into the deep sea. Culhwch himself does little in the doing, and that is the point. The fellowship does it for him, because the fellowship is what Arthur's court is for.

The end is swift. Ysbaddaden was shaved with the boar's own gear, beard and flesh and ears to the bone, and Goreu son of Custennin, the hidden child, dragged him by the hair to the mound and cut off his head and took his fort, and the giant's fate was fulfilled. Culhwch and Olwen were wed that night, and she was his only wife as long as he lived. The tale that holds him is the earliest full Arthurian prose story we possess, composed around the year 1100 and preserved in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, and it shows the legend in its Welsh springtime: half wonder-tale of the giant's daughter, half heroic roll of the king's men. The later romances of France and England forgot Culhwch, which is their loss, for his is the first story that knows the deepest truth of the Round Table: that no man wins alone, and that the greatest gift a king can give is the strength of his friends.