St. David’s Day Special: The Dragon Prophecy
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Welcome to Celtic Month! For the entire month of March, the Spring Vignettes series will be dedicated entirely to Celtic homage vignettes. Non-Celtic pieces will resume in April.
Quick clarification: It’s pronounced Keltic, unless it’s a sports team; and even then, any linguists in the room will cringe if you pronounce it Seltic.
Our first Celtic Month piece celebrates St. David’s Day, on March 1st, the national day of Wales. Have some cheese toast! Pet a dragon! Kiss a Welshman, if you can find one.
Before you read what the piece means to me, share what it means to _you_. I’m just the artist; you’re the beholder.
Leave a comment.
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The Welsh are the survivors of the Celtic Britons, who were the inhabitants of all southern Britain before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded and established what became England. “Welsh” is an Anglo-Saxon term; it means “other people” or “foreigners”, which is ironic, considering the Germanic-speaking peoples were the foreigners in the native lands of the Britons.
There is certainly no more famous Welshman than King Arthur Pendragon, a legendary king of yore who supposedly ruled Britain between the retreat of the Romans and the invasion of the Saxons. His legend, much-developed over the centuries, became well-known throughout Europe in later times.
A notable legend tells of the building of Dinas Emrys, a castle on a hill by the Glaslyn river. By some accounts, it was built by Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur; by other accounts, it was Vortigern, the same foolish king of the Britons who later invited the Saxons into Britain as mercenaries to defend the Britons from the Picts.
After the king had chosen the hill on which the castle would stand, his builders went to work; but every day, they built up the walls, only for them to topple overnight. No progress could be made. At length, the king asked his wisemen to find the cause and the solution to the problem.
His wisemen told him that for the building to succeed, a sacrifice would be necessary; and the sacrifice must be a boy not sired by mortal man. Such a boy existed; a young boy named Merlin, or Ambrosius, the baptized son of a devil, who would go on to be known for his abilities in the magic arts.
(Foundation sacrifices were once an incredibly widespread custom; we know from archaeological evidence that the burying of a human victim under the foundation of an important building was practiced in ancient Ireland. Similar legends are told in Romania, Greece, Japan, and elsewhere. Animals were later buried under foundations after human sacrifices ceased.)
The boy was brought to the hill; and the king’s wisemen told the king to sacrifice him to appease the heathen gods so that the castle could be build. But the boy laughed at their advice, and told the king he knew much better. He told the king that if a hole were dug, there would be found a deep, dark pool; and in that pool, there would be found two dragons, one red, one white; and it was the fighting of these dragons that shook the hill each night and made the walls collapse. The king had a deep hole dug; and indeed, there was found a deep, dark pool; and from that pool indeed emerged two dragons, one red, one white.
Freed from their imprisonment, the dragons fought viciously, until, despite being the lesser of the dragons, the red dragon defeated the white dragon, and drove it out of the land across the sea.
The boy then prophesied that, just as the red dragon triumphed over the white dragon, so the Britons would triumph over the invading Saxons.
And they did; until the death of King Arthur at the hands of his son Mordred, whereafter, the Saxons finally defeated the Britons, and drove them into the western mountains.
The great Welsh sagas, the Mabinogion, tell about how the two dragons originally became trapped under the site of Dinas Emrys, when an ancient Welsh king intoxicated them with a cauldron of ale and buried them to silence their deafening shrieking.
