Hey. Hi. Hello. Today I learned about the existence of 15th century Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain and that she apparently has a surviving work of erotic poems.
Please. For Christmas. For Yule. Please tell me more because I can't read Welsh.
Heh heh. Oh, Gwerful Mechain is the absolute best.
(Quick housekeeping to keep the post manageable - I previously wrote about things like cynghanedd and cywydds and englyns and such here, so check that if you need an explanation.)
What's fun is that we don't know a ton about her, because not a lot got written down about people in her time. Her surviving work covers a 40ish year span at the end of the 1400s to just into the 1500s, but we don't know when she was born or died or anything like that. We know her parents' names? And that she was from Mechain, hence the bardic name. And that she married a guy and had a daughter, something which actually does mark out her body of work as different from her contemporaries; being a wife and mother, she couldn't do the usual bardic role of travelling the country to spread news and play at courts. This means she doesn't have any of the praise poetry that a lot of male bards produced about the lords that hosted them.
But, there's stuff we can piece together about her. For one thing, she was not just literate (not a universal skill for anyone at that point, but especially for women), but she was astonishingly well-read and had what appears to be a classical education, given her poetic references and traditional Welsh meters. For another, her work often had recurring themes of religion, sex, and women's rights, sometimes all at the same time.
At the point Gwerful was active, Welsh bardic culture heavily featured ymrysonau. An ymryson is like... well, I hesitate to say "sort of like a rap battle" after the way everyone and their dog now thinks that's what the Mari Lwyd does, but they were like a cross between a rap battle and the publication war between two rival academics. A bard would write an englyn and publish it in the local parish newsletter. Another bard would see this, and write their own englyn about how stupid the first bard's englyn was, and publish it in the same newsletter. The first bard would see this and retaliate. The second bard would retaliate to that. And on and on it would go, like a printed tennis match for all the parishioners to enjoy, until someone wrote a conclusive verse OR until someone went "Lol, you got me good there" and bowed out with dignity. Sometimes, these things were fucking vicious; but other times, they were just banter between two bards who knew each other and were enjoying the chance to keep their poetic skills in tip top condition.
Now, Gwerful was an active and enthusiastic participant in ymrysonau. We have many examples of her work from these. There are two of particular note that I'll list here, each against a different bard:
Dafydd Llwyd o Fathafarn. Mathafarn and Mechain are not so distant from one another, so no real surprise that these two locked horns a lot, but the impression I always got from their ymrysonau is that they were good mates, actually. These fell into the 'banter' category more often than not. Dafydd was a Welsh Nationalist who was hoping for a Welshman to rise up and throw off the yoke of English oppression, and most of his work is about that, but he turned up the filthy erotic shit for any ymryson with Gwerful because BOY HOWDY was that her specialty. IIRC she did occasionally poke fun at his Welsh Nash leanings, especially his obsession with Mab Darogan (OLD Welsh idea that translates to the Son of Prophesy - the Arthur-style figure that will one day drive out the English overlords), but mostly their ymrysonau were incredibly beautifully-written odes that could be summed up as "Dafydd, my man, my good friend, I mean this sincerely: suck my entire clit".
Ieuan Dyfi. God, what a fucking asshole. This one was not banter. Gwerful played for blood with this prick.
We actually would know nothing about Ieuan Dyfi if not for Gwerful Mechain, because it was her poetic response to him that meant his only surviving poems made it to the modern day; that, and the record of him being brought before a church court where he admitted adultery with Anni Goch, a married woman. Oh, and the record of him being brought before the law courts at Liverpool, accused of domestic abuse and gambling? If I remember right?
Two things to know that set the scene for what came next:
One of Gwerful Mechain's surviving poems is an englyn considered to be possibly the oldest extant poem about domestic violence written by a woman: I’w gŵr am ei churo (To the husband who beats her)
Dager drwy goler dy galon - ar osgo
I asgwrn dy ddwyfron;
Dy lin a dyr, dy law’n don,
A’th gleddau i’th goluddion.
There are a lot of translations for this one to try to keep its poeticness, but this one is pretty good:
Through your heart’s lining let there be pressed, slanting down,
A dagger to the bone in your chest.
Your knee smashed, your hand crushed, may the rest
Be gutted by the sword you possessed.
She has others, too, that deal with sexual assault, and something scholars often note about Gwerful is her remarkable knowledge of the law as it pertained to women's issues. So she was not, you see, a woman with a high view of a man accused of domestic violence anyway.
But then Ieuan Dyfi wrote five poems about Anni Goch, the married woman he'd fucked, each more "Wow dude, she said no" than the last, culminating in I Anni Goch; a full cywydd of misogynistic Medieval-incel bullshit about how false and evil women are, which listed all the false and evil women of history including classical and mythological figures.
And. Well. Gwerful had some views.
Her responding cywydd - I ateb Ieuan Dyfi am gywydd Anni Goch - basically blasted the guy back into his own impact crater and disintegrated him. What she did with it, essentially, was to mirror his cywydd. Where he'd gone "Isn't it so true how great men throughout history have always been brought low by women, amirite lads? Here's examples", Gwerful went "Isn't it so true how 'great men' throughout history have behaved appallingly and fucked up through their own actions and then somehow managed to blame women, amirite lads? Here's examples." Where his examples had been historical figures, so were hers. Where his had been classical, so were hers. Where he went Biblical, so did she.
And what's so interesting about that last one is how pointed she was with it - for some reason, in his big list of evil women, Ieuan Dyfi did not go for the most obvious and low-hanging of fruit (no pun intended) - he doesn't cite Eve. In response, Gwerful also sidesteps the most obvious and low hanging of fruit - she doesn't cite Mary. In so doing, she makes it clear that she doesn't even need to.
There is no record of him responding to her. IIRC, there is a record of him doing three years in prison.
But! Outside of all of that, the big thing Gwerful was known for was her erotic poetry. You'll be unsurprised to hear that it wasn't written for shits and giggles - much like today, women of the time were told that most of their value was in their looks, and they had plentiful insecurities about their bodies. Gwerful wrote her erotic stuff to confront those insecurities and shine a light on the issue. There are so many examples of this, but far and away the most famous is definitely Cywydd y Cedor - roughly translated, 'Ode to the Vulva'. Though I have also seen it titled Cywydd y Gont - Ode to the Cunt. It's such a shame that the English language is literally, physically not capable of cynghanedd, because it means unless you learn Welsh you will never understand the beauty and the lyricism of the piece, and how it elevates and undercuts the content at the same time; but it's a joyful, masterful, irreverent work that uses the fancy language male poets were forever dedicating to the rest of a woman's body and applies it squarely to the vulva. In fact it basically opens with "Men are cowards, describe more cunts or gtfo" before launching into its main subject matter. The last line is pro-pubic hair, too, like I really must stress how much Gwerful Mechain would have to offer Tumblr if you could speak Welsh. This is probably her most widely translated piece, though, you can definitely find English versions. Although you can tell how blushing and reticent the translator is - and therefore how sanitised their translation is - by whether they've called it Ode to the Vulva/Cunt, or Ode to the Pubic Hair.
Needless to say, the original is not sanitised.
(Actually, I should also say - this one is also a response piece, probably, but in this case to a bard who lived a century earlier - Dafydd ap Gwilym, the absolutely legendary and uncontested king of Welsh romance poetry. He wrote a poem called Cywydd y Gal - Ode to the Penis. I have only just put two and two together on that.)
As a final note, I should say that my personal favourite Gwerful Mechain poem on this subject, mind, is actually I'w morwyn wrth gachu - to the maiden who is shitting. It's an englyn written in Gwerful's customary high poetic form, but it is what it says - it describes a woman taking a shit, and farting as she does. Beautiful and magical and disgusting and banal, all in one go:
Crwciodd lle dihangodd ei dŵr - ’n grychiast
O grochan ei llawdwr;
Ei deudwll oedd yn dadwr’,
Baw a ddaeth, a bwa o ddŵr
Funnily enough, it's hard to find a good translation for this one lol.
She crouched where her water escaped - creased
From the cauldron of her heat;
Her two holes were arguing,
Shit came, and a bow of water
Eh. It's so bland in English. Honestly, if you could read Welsh...
Anyway, if anyone reading this can read Welsh and wants to read some of Gwerful Mechain's stuff - including some of the pieces she was responding to in the ymrysonau - you can find a load here. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed!
