Annwn, Otherworlds, and Kingdoms Under the Earth
In the late Middle Ages, the fairy emerges as a distinct, folkloric figure.
This essay is part of a series called On the Origin of Fairies.
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A prince and his men are on a walk in the countryside, when the prince decides to hike to a mound near his castle. A courtier tries to dissuade him:
‘Lord,’ said one of the court, ‘the strange thing about the mound is that whatever nobleman sits on it will not leave there without one of two things happening: either he will be wounded or injured, or else he will see something wonderful.’1
The prince Pwyll doesn’t listen. There are plenty of attendants beside him, he reasons. Shortly after, he indeed sees something astonishing:
He sat on the mound. And as they were sitting, they could see a woman wearing a shining golden garment of brocaded silk on a big, tall, pale-white horse coming along the highway that ran past the mound. Anyone who saw it would think that the horse had a slow, steady pace, and was drawing level with the mound.
‘Men,’ said Pwyll, ‘do any of you recognize the rider?’
‘No, lord,’ they said.
‘Let someone go and meet her to find out who she is,’ he said.
One of them got up, but when he came to the road to meet her, she had gone past. He followed her as fast as he could on foot. But the greater his speed, the further she drew away from him.
There’s no use—the horse is a magical horse, and its rider is Rhiannon, a woman of Annwn. Rhiannon reveals that she is running from an arranged marriage, and after several trials, she and Pwyll can finally marry.
Rhiannon and Pwyll are two of the protagonists of The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh folktales that were written down from roughly 1350 to 1410. The first four tales are known as “The Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” and the other seven stories range from Arthurian legends to fictional interpretations of British history. In the past, it was popular to look at these tales as preservations of pre-Roman Celtic myths, but scholars now reject this notion. After all, these tales were recorded over a thousand years after the Romans arrived in Britain. They are works of literature woven from popular folklore.2
The tales draw on oral storytelling traditions, but the authors, like authors today, are just as capable of shaping tales to suit their creative goals.3 It is possible that certain figures, like Rhiannon, may reflect pre-Christian deities; in Welsh legends, names that end in -on (Mabon, Modron, Rhiannon, etc.) are likely of ancient origin.4 That being said, the preservation of a name itself doesn’t necessarily indicate that the writers of the story had knowledge of the pre-Christian figure who might lie behind it. To use a modern analogy, a woman named Mary in a television show is not necessarily meant to represent the Virgin Mary. In such murky territory, we must be careful about making assumptions.
Setting that aside, there is a concept present in these stories that may sound familiar at this point in our series: that of the Otherworld. In Gaelic and Brittonic myths, the Otherworld is a realm populated by a supernatural race of people—Annwn in Welsh, and Tír na nÓg in Irish. The term Otherworld, or “orbis alius,” was coined by the Roman writer Lucan, but it should be noted that in the stories themselves, like later fairy folklore, the Otherworld isn’t actually in another world like Middle Earth. It is either reached by journeying across water, such as to an enchanted island, or by going underneath the earth via mounds and caves. Centuries later, as we learned while evaluating Victorian fairy folklore, people often believed that fairy courts were hidden under Neolithic mounds and hills.
Could the Otherworld’s “supernatural race” be a precursor to the fairies who would emerge by the end of the Middle Ages?
By the year 1500, the fairy was a distinct, supernatural entity in Britain and Ireland. We know this thanks to the writing of theologians, who in the late medieval period began classifying the fairy as a demonic creature. However, Catholicism was firmly established in Ireland and Britain at this point, and fairies were not worshipped, so they did not pose a particularly large threat to church authorities. Fairies found their footing in a more comfortable period of church history, especially when compared to late antiquity and the early medieval period, in which conversion was an ongoing process, and theologians more aggressively categorized the “small gods” of Roman paganism (the nymphs, the satyrs, etc.) as demons.
There are a few instances of medieval fairy belief linked to folk magic in the historical record, such as the case of Alice Hancock, who was brought before an ecclesiastical court in England in the late 1400s. Her crime? She “professed to heal children touched or harmed by spirits of the air, which the vulgar call ‘feyry.’”5 However, medieval Christians possessed ambivalent, if not lenient views regarding folk magic. It wasn’t until the Reformation, with all its religious conflict and anxiety, that magic, witches, and fairies became targets of widespread fear.
Not only was the fairy a concrete folkloric figure by the late Middle Ages, but so was the concept of a chthonic Fairyland. There are some cultural distinctions—in Ireland, the aos sí were believed to inhabit mounds and hills, but these were distinct territories ruled by different groups of fairies. In Welsh folklore, such geographic locations were access points to a unified Otherworld where, by the 1500s, fairies were believed to reside.6
The Buchedd Collin (1536), which details the life of Saint Collen, reveals how Annwn was by this point equated with Fairyland. Saint Collen receives a summons from Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Annwn and the Fairies:
The saint persistently refused to go day after day, until at last he was threatened with the words, ‘If you don’t come, Collen, it will be the worse for you’. This disconcerted him, and, taking some holy water with him, he went. On reaching the place, Collen beheld there the most beautiful castle that he had ever seen, with the best-appointed troops; a great number of musicians with all manner of instruments; horses with young men riding them; handsome, sprightly maidens, and everything that became the court of a sumptuous king.
Upon entering the castle, Gwyn ap Nudd offers Collen food and drink, but Collen knowns better than to eat fairy food. The king asks Collen if he has ever seen better dressed men than those of his court, who are clothed in red and blue. (During this period, red and blue dyes were quite expensive, indicating the splendor of the fairy court.)
Collen said, ‘Their dress is good enough, for such kind as it is’. ‘What kind is that?’ asked the king. Collen said that the red on the one side meant burning, and the other, cold. Then he sprinkled holy water over them, and they all vanished, leaving behind them nothing but green tumps.7
Welsh and Irish myths about the Otherworld held palpable influence over the emergence of the fairy by the end of the medieval period. But they are not the only ingredients in this cauldron, and we will turn to those other influences in the final essay of this series.
The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies (Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 200-202.
Sioned Davies, “Introduction,” The Mabinogion (Oxford University Press, 2007), xiii.
Young, Twilight of the Godlings, 202.
Young, Twilight of the Godlings, 255.
Young, Twilight of the Godlings, 279.
The Lives of the Saints, edited by Sabine Baring Gould (John Hodges, 1872-1877), volume 16.