Mijn interesses in dieren, middeleeuwse verhalen en middeleeuwse Welshe cultuur komen samen in mijn scriptie, waarin ik de verhoudingen tussen mensen en dieren in de Middelwelshe prozateksten van de Mabinogion behandel. Ik heb een catalogus gemaakt van dieren met het framework van The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages met enkele aanpassingen. Deze catalogus vormde de basis voor mijn scriptie. In dit artikel kijk ik terug op het proces van scriptie schrijven. Ik behandel de methoden die ik heb gebruikt om tot mijn conclusies te komen en noem mogelijke andere toepassingen van mijn catalogus en systeem om te categoriseren.
When I was asked to write an article about my thesis, my first thought was: what am I going to talk about? I wanted to discuss not only the results of my research, but also the methods I used to come to my conclusions. For this reason I decided to focus on the process of writing my thesis rather than the subject itself, give a brief summary of the contents of my thesis, and touch on some possibilities I see for future research.
I came to my thesis topic after noticing how frequently animals were mentioned in the Mabinogion. Over the course of my studies I had noticed that these animals were rarely addressed in literature. While I was able to find literature about specific animals, most notably the horse (see for example The Horse in Celtic Culture: Medieval Welsh Perspectives, ed. Sioned Davies and Nerys Ann Jones), I could not find an overview of all animals in the medieval Welsh prose tales.
During my studies, I followed the course ‘Dieren in de Middeleeuwen’, which focused on the relations between humans and animals in the Middle Ages, as described in the book The Beast Within by Joyce Salisbury. During this course I noticed that the Celtic tales were often left out of discussions about animals in the Middle Ages, as most discussions focused only on the European mainland. This gave me the idea to use my knowledge from the course and the framework provided by The Beast Within to write my thesis about the relations between humans and animals in the medieval Welsh prose tales. My personal interest in the supernatural aspects of the stories led me to research whether the relations between humans and ‘normal’ animals differed from the relations between humans and ‘supernatural’ animals in the Mabinogion.
Constructing the catalogue
For the purpose of my thesis, I had to create a list of all animals in the Mabinogion, and the easiest way to do this was to sit down, read the entire Mabinogion (translated by Sioned Davies, 2007 print edition), and write down every single mention of animals in a spreadsheet. I chose to exclude recurring mentions of an animal within the same tale and only write down the first mention of said animal to make it possible to count the number of animals mentioned in the tales and avoid cluttering the list – otherwise, I would have ended up with multiple entries for animals like Pwyll’s horse, Twrch Trwyth, or Owain’s lion.
When I tried to start working on the list, I realised I still had a problem I needed to solve before I could begin: What is an animal? In the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Rhiannon is forced to behave as an animal, but retains her human appearance. Does this make her an animal, or does she remain human? For practical reasons, I only included creatures that were not human-shaped in my list – this meant that I would be excluding giants and humans who behave like animals, but including dragons and talking animals.
Now that I could finally make my list, I first went through the book quickly to note where each animal appears, so that I could easily return to the same page (within the same edition) and find that same animal again. Then, I went through the book again, this time writing down every detail about the animal that was listed on the pages, including information like their name, colour, gender, and whether their owners were mentioned by name. Next, I went over the entire list a third time to finally slot each animal into a category to describe what relation it had to humans – and that was only the preparation. I still had to start writing my thesis.
The categories
At first I tried lifting the categories I intended to use directly from The Beast Within, but this caused some problems. Two categories – ‘property’ and ‘food’ – overlapped, and I noticed that the book provided no way to classify wild animals. I solved this by adapting the framework from the book for my own purposes, creating four distinct categories with two subcategories to accurately classify each individual animal. I explain these in detail in my thesis. Here I will only provide a short explanation.
The first category in The Beast Within is ‘animals as property’. I kept this category the same for my thesis, as the definition from the book was clear enough to use for my own purposes. The book did not provide a way to categorise wild animals, which made it necessary for me to add a ‘wild’ category. I adapted the second category from The Beast Within, ‘animals as food’, to a subcategory under ‘property’ and 'wild’. This subcategory only includes animals that are specifically kept or hunted for food. Occasionally, animals are kept or hunted for prestige rather than food. To categorise these, I added a ‘trophy’ subcategory.
In addition to these mostly self-explanatory categories, The Beast Within discusses two more unusual categories, these being ‘animals as humans’ and ‘humans as animals’. I used both of these categories for my list and adapted them slightly. In my thesis, ‘animals as humans’ refers to companion animals, animals that are treated as humans in a legal context, and animals who can speak to humans (either directly or through a translator) or otherwise act in a human-like manner. The category ‘humans as animals’ only refers to humans who are transformed into animals.
Anecdotes
While sorting the animals into their categories, I encountered a few animals that were either difficult to sort or amusing to note. One of my favourite examples from my notes is the talking ants in Culhwch ac Olwen, who, after their anthill is saved from a fire, thank their rescuer and help him gather seeds from a field. It is implied that these ants can talk – which, interestingly, sets them apart from another group of animals in the same story, who are asked to help locate a missing person but require a human who can speak to animals to translate for them.
Another amusing note is reserved for a horse. I found a line saying ‘Hengroen: is stallion?’ in my notes, referring to a horse who is traditionally listed as Arthur’s stallion. However, in Culhwch ac Olwen, Hengroen is not referred to as a stallion and the text is ambiguous about the name of his owner.
Two animals were interesting enough to earn themselves a mention in the title of my thesis, these being Rhiannon’s horse, who always walks faster than any other horse no matter how fast they gallop, and the lion who helps Owain in The Lady of the Well. This lion is notable for being the only non-supernatural animal in the ‘animals as humans’ category, as it shows grateful behaviour and human-like loyalty after Owain rescues it from a serpent. It provides him with food, protects him, and when it is locked up during a fight it escapes to help him. This type of loyalty is not shown by any other animal in the Mabinogion.
Owain and White Lion. Taken from the 1902 edition of The Mabinogion edited by Owen Morgan Edwards, from the original translation by Charlotte Guest.
Finally, I saved the most interesting note for last: Rhonabwy. Anyone who has read this story will know what I mean, but for those who are not familiar with Rhonabwy’s Dream, this story is known for mentioning horses with many unnatural colours. It is even noted in the text itself that “This is why no one knows the dream – neither poet nor storyteller – without a book, because of the number of colours on the horses…”[1]. The number of horses with unnatural traits in Rhonabwy’s Dream accounts for nearly half of the total number of supernatural animals as property in the entire Mabinogion.
Structure
With all categorisation problems solved and all animals neatly sorted into categories, I could finally start writing my thesis. I already had the information that I wanted to include and only needed to put it into words, which sounded simple enough. It was not. Over the course of the weeks I spent writing my thesis, I changed the structure of the thesis and the order in which I discussed the categories multiple times. This is a normal part of the process, but that does not make it any less time-consuming. I finally ended up structuring the body of my thesis as follows: First, I defined all terms that needed to be defined ahead of time and explained my reasoning. Then, I defined the categories I used and gave an analysis of the information from my spreadsheet for each category. This nicely led to my conclusions.
Reading the data
The large amount of data from my final catalogue needed to be summarised. I solved this by creating tables with relevant information for each section of my thesis. For example, Table 1 lists the total number of normal and supernatural animals in each story of the Mabinogion.
|
Story |
Normal |
Supernatural |
Grand Total |
|
The First Branch |
13 |
4 |
17 |
|
The Second Branch |
4 |
1 |
5 |
|
The Third Branch |
6 |
3 |
9 |
|
The Fourth Branch |
8 |
14 |
22 |
|
Peredur son of Efrog |
43 |
3 |
46 |
|
The Dream of Emperor Maxen |
4 |
0 |
4 |
|
Lludd and Llefelys |
0 |
2 |
2 |
|
The Lady of the Well |
16 |
1 |
17 |
|
Geraint son of Erbin |
24 |
0 |
24 |
|
How Culhwch won Olwen |
23 |
17 |
40 |
|
Rhonabwy's Dream |
7 |
10 |
17 |
| Total |
148 |
55 |
203 |
Table 1. Number of normal and supernatural animals in each story.
With these tables I was able to illustrate the distribution of normal and supernatural animals within each category and compare individual stories or categories to each other.
In my thesis, I attempted to answer the question whether the relations between humans and ‘normal’ animals differed from the relations between humans and ‘supernatural’ animals in the Mabinogion. The short answer turned out to be ‘no’. The long answer is that I found that the distinction between normal and supernatural animals makes little difference. For example, a magical horse can still be someone’s property like any other horse, and a lion does not need to be supernatural to form a strong bond with a human. Instead, the types of relations between humans and animals are far more significant.
Further use of my method
The catalogue I made contains more information than I needed for my thesis. I did this intentionally, as my goal was to create a resource that could be used for further research on animals in the Mabinogion. For example, if one were to research descriptions of appearance in the Mabinogion, they could search the catalogue for animals whose colours and other physical features are described, and if one were to study animal ownership in Celtic literature, they could find all animals with named owners in the catalogue. So long as one has the same print edition of the Mabinogion as the one I used, they can check the catalogue and find the page where a specific animal is first mentioned.
In addition to that, the framework I created to build my catalogue, i.e. the categories and subcategories of human-animal relations and the definitions I used, can be applied to research on animals in any kind of narrative. For example, using this framework would allow one to compare the human-animal relations in narratives from different cultures and/or different time periods to each other. This would likely require some adaptations to the framework, such as the addition of subcategories for divine entities (i.e. a god or goddess transformed into an animal, or an animal that is worshipped as a deity) and human-animal hybrid beings (for example, a sphinx or minotaur), and where these appear in the narrative.
Conclusion
I enjoyed looking back at my own work and thinking about my process again. In hindsight, I liked the process more than I thought I did at the time. The main thing I learned is that data and definitions truly are everything. This may sound obvious but it still bears repeating. Once the data is sorted and everything is clearly defined, half of the work is already done, and getting to that point is the hardest part of the process.
As for the thesis itself, I am proud to have contributed to the research on animals in the Middle Ages, as this is a topic I still find interesting. I believe the catalogue will be a useful resource for future research. I hope that other people will be able to use my thesis and catalogue as a starting point for further research on animals in medieval Celtic literature and human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.
Notes
Bibliography
Davies, Sioned, The Mabinogion (Oxford 2007).
Kranendonk, L. N., From Rhiannon’s Horse to Owain’s Lion: Human-Animal Relationships in the Mabinogion (Scriptie: Universiteit Utrecht 2021). https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/39678
Salisbury, Joyce E., The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 3e ed. (Abingdon 1994 [2016]).
