We talk a lot in The Grail Code about the Otherworld in ancient Welsh tales—in particular, how it seems to break into our world without warning in a burst of beauty and terror. Here’s an episode from Nennius’ History of the Britons that illustrates perfectly how the Welsh of the Dark Ages treated the Otherworld as part of ordinary life and history.
Nennius is not an elegant writer. He writes as though the writing cost him some effort, and his sentences are thrown together in heaps, just the way he tells us his whole history was thrown together. The well-known J. A. Giles translation renders Nennius in good English style; I’ve stuck more literally to the style of Nennius, because I think a genuine personality of the Dark Ages comes through in this awkward prose.
Bear in mind, though, that I scribbled this translation in a waiting room where several other people were having a loud conversation about The Da Vinci Code and the sacred feminine, which is a distracting environment. Please forgive me if some of the awkwardness comes from me instead of from Nennius.
The episode, like most of these Welsh stories, begins in the ordinary world: it’s a history of the early colonization of Ireland. We get absolutely no warning that the Otherworld is about to burst in on us.
“Finally came the Scots from parts of Spain to Ireland.
“First came Partholomus with a thousand people, men and women, and they grew to four thousand. And a plague came over them, and in one week they all perished and not even one of them remained.
“Second to Ireland came Nimeth, son of a certain Agnomen, who is said to have sailed on the sea a year and a half, and afterward came to a port in Ireland, his ships having been wrecked. And he stayed in the same place for many years, and went back again to Spain with all his people.
“And afterward came three sons of a Spanish soldier with thirty boats among them, and with thirty wives in every boat. And they stayed there for the space of one year.
“And afterward they beheld a tower of glass in the middle of the sea, and they beheld people on top of the tower, and they kept trying to speak to them and they would never answer. And in one year they prepared for an attack on the tower with all their boats and with all their women except one boat, which was wrecked by shipwreck, in which were thirty men and as many women. And the other ships sailed to assault the tower, and while they were all alighting on the shore that was around the tower, the sea overwhelmed them, and they were sunk and not one of them escaped. And from the family of that boat which was left behind because of the shipwreck all Ireland has been populated to this day.” [Historia Brittonum, no. 13.]
It’s hard for a modern reader to hear this story without rationalizing it, and my first thought was that Nennius might preserve, in garbled form, the ancient story of an encounter with a stray iceberg. A quick search found that a few people on slightly crackpot sites had the same impression.
But the thing to notice in Nennius is that there is not a wisp of rationalization. There was suddenly an inhabited tower of glass in the middle of the sea, and approaching it brought sudden death; those are the facts as far as Nennius is concerned, and for him it’s all perfectly consistent with the way the world works.
This wild and lawless Otherworld generated haunting tales, and one of the glories of medieval literature is the way great literary artists like “Walter Map” tamed the Otherworld and made it follow definite laws—the laws of orthodox Christian theology. In the same way that God’s grace does not destroy but rather builds on nature, the writers of the great medieval romances took what was mesmerizingly beautiful from Celtic myth and built it into their own profound Christian allegories.
