Juliette Wood | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 5, 1996

The Aids virus is the subject of numerous contemporary legend narratives at the moment and the prevalence of these narratives has caught the interest of folklore researchers. (“Welcome to the World of Aids: Fantasies of Female Revenge” Western Folklore 1987 46, 192–197.) One of the most dramatic of these narratives is the story of a man who has sex with a woman and wakes the next morning to find a message scribbled in lipstick on his mirror welcoming him to the Aids club. Central to this legend is the image of a personified female plague carrier and the moral ambiguity (to say the least) of the actions of the male character. The characterisation of Aids as a modern plague with moral implications for the society which it afflicts has a number of historical precedents. The narrative too, at least as far as it personifies the disease, has earlier parallels.

My concern is solely with a small number of Welsh examples which attached themselves to the figure of an historical sixth-century Welsh king, Maelgwn Gwynedd. Maelgwn is mentioned by the monk Gildas in his De Exidiae Britanniae. The fame of this work rests on the fact that Gildas
and Maelgwn, both unassailably historical figures, would have been contemporaries of King Arthur, a more famous figure by far, but one whose historicity is in doubt. Maelgwn’s legendary persona touches on the development of the legend of King Arthur in Wales and Britain and indeed Maelgwn as hero may have been displaced by the increasing popularity of King Arthur legends. (Juliette Wood, “Maelgwn Gwynedd: A Forgotten Welsh Hero” Trivium Vol. 19 1984, 103–17) Nevertheless, Maelgwn’s death as a result of plague demonstrates an interesting interplay of historical fact and
legendary fiction in which a personified plague figure plays an important role. In the Annales Cambriae Maelgwn’s death from plague is mentioned as occurring in 547 “Mortalitas magna inqua pausat mailcun rex gene dotae” (great mortality in which died Maelgwn king of north Wales). Kingly deaths were important events. As they often died violently, those who died of natural causes or disease were in themselves unusual. The
early manuscripts of Annales Cambriae however, say nothing more than that Maelgwn died of plague. Later sources however develop the circumstances surrounding his death. In a copy of Annales Cambriae made at the end of the thirteenth century, the original entry has been expanded to “Mortalitas magna fuit in Britannia in qua pausat Mailcun rex Genedotae. Unde dicitur ‘Hir hun Mallgun en llis Ros.’ Tunc fuit lallwelen.” (There was great mortality in Britain in which Maelgwn king of north Wales died. Thence it is said ‘the long sleep of Maelgwn in the Court of Rhos’ then there was a yellow plague.) (John Cule “Pestis Flava: Y Fad Felen” pp. 141–155 in Wales and Medicine ed. J. Cule, Gwasg Gomer, 1973)

Maelgwn’s impious and boastful behaviour was castigated by the monk Gildas. His death is not mentioned in Gildas’ writings, although these are close to Maelgwn’s historical floruit. Maelgwn’s choleric reputation followed him into the later body of Welsh saints’ lives. As a symbol of temporal power, he, impiously and unsuccessfully, challenges the miraculous power of the Welsh saints. His death too, begins to attract legendary elements. He is said to have retreated to Deganwy Church, the main church in what was to all intents and purposes his capital city, to escape Y Fad Felen (The Yellow Plague) usually identified as pestis flava (Cule pp. 141-15 5). Maelgwn, in a move consistent with the impiety and daring of his character as depicted by Gildas and the Saints’ Lives, looks through the church keyhole and sees the plague. Catching sight of the creature is suffident to nullify the safety afforded by the Church and Maelgwn dies. The adventures of the magician-poet Taliesin are recorded in the Hanes Taliesin, a work dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, although based on earlier tales. Taliesin tells an arrogant and obstreperous Maelgwn that a supernatural creature will emerge from a marsh, Morfa Rhianedd, and will cause Maelgwn’s death. Iolo Morganwg, the great eighteenth-century inventor of Welsh folklore, links this with Y Fad Felen and as his comments on the subject were published as part of Charlotte Guest’s very influential edition of The Mabinogion in the nineteenth century, the incident became widely known. (Cule pp. 148-49, 150, 154-55) In this instance, however, Iolo’s story is substantiated by references in the work of earlier scholars. Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt in the seventeenth century notes several traditions about Maelgwn including one that he died after seeing Y Fad Felen through a hole in the church door where he had gone to protect himself from the plague. (Cule, 150, 154-55)

Several references to a plague demon, this time even more clearly female, were noted by nineteenth-century Welsh folklorists. Both John Rhys and Jenkins mention a creature called Gwrach Y Rhibyn. (John Rhys, Celtic Folklore (1901) rpr. Wildwood House London, 1985 pp. 81, 463) The accounts do not tally in every detail, but the image is of a preternaturally thin, cadaverous female, associated with blasted marshy areas who brings death, sometimes through ague, sometimes just by her appearance. Long black teeth are mentioned in one account, and Rhys compares her with another banshee-like figure, Y Cirhireath. He also offers a suggestion for the meaning of her epithet, Y Rhibyn which provides a link to the preternatural thinness. The term, he says, is used to describe the stick which is placed over the hayrick as a base for the thatch. Although these figures do not tally in every detail with Maelgwn’s Yellow Plague, the implications arc nevertheless suggestive. Thinness, and images of starvation, in particular when associated with supernatural female figures, arc linked in all these cases to death and in particular death from disease. One might also add that in Pembroke the terms craf sgin or craf sgin starvo are applied to the phantom funeral phenomena. Here again, ideas of cadaverous appearance and wasting are associated with death portents.

The notice of Maelgwn’s death as a result of a plague adds to our knowledge of events in fifth-century Britain. The legend that had crystallised about this event by the thirteenth century and was repeated in stories about the Gwrach Y Rhibyn in the nineteenth suggests a series of links between moral behaviour, gender and disease which are echoed in modern narratives concerning Aids.