Eternal Triangles and the Cycles of Myth

Abstract

When Welsh hanesion deal with magic, it is generally of the most ancient kind. The elements of Nature, Nature herself as the Goddess, the movement of time, the shadows of the past across present reality—these are the kinds of magic with which most Welsh myths are concerned. From magic of this kind come the motifs of several well-known twentieth-century fantasies. Among them are Louise Lawrence’s The Earth Witch, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, Liane Jones’s The Dreamstone, Jay Ashton’s The Door in the Wall, Brian Caswell’s Merryll and the Stones, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Vianet. In this chapter and the next I shall look at the use of Welsh hanesion in these novels and show how they work at once to arouse hiraeth and the yearning to belong, and to evoke a strong sense of the spirit of Welsh place.