Notes

GDG 94

This is one of Dafydd's more audacious love poems. He often implies that lovers are blessed with divine favour, but here he goes a step further by calling on Saint Dwynwen to act as love–messenger between himself and Morfudd and by appealing to God to restrain the jealous husband whilst his wife keeps a tryst in the grove. Unusually, therefore, it is a human (but also a heavenly) messenger which he sends in this poem, though a human love–messenger is implied in 'Wooing a Nun' (43), a poem which is equally audacious but less complex in style and content. The kind of devotional appeal which would have been familiar to a medieval audience is subverted to a wholly secular purpose, and as Helen Fulton has remarked, the poem appears to be set 'within the rhetorical framework of the prayer, characterized by eulogy, direct address, and the final emphatic plea' (DGEC 195).

As the opening couplets suggest, Dafydd would have been familiar with Dwynwen's church on Llanddwyn Island since he had close connections with that part of Anglesey; see the poem 'Newborough' (18) and 'Degradation of his Servant' (74) which is set in the same borough. As described at the beginning of the poem, invalids flocked to Llanddwyn hoping to be cured at Dwynwen's sanctuary; compare the poem to 'The Stars' which is attributed to Dafydd, 161.37–8. Such was the popularity of Dwynwen's cult that by the fourteenth century her church was one of the richest in Anglesey. The Anglesey poet Syr Dafydd Trefor (15–16 c.) gives detailed descriptions of the saint's effigy and of pilgrims visiting Llanddwyn, GSDT poem 13.

It was love–sickness that troubled Dafydd, and in calling on Dwynwen to act as messenger to Morfudd he probably regarded her as patron saint of lovers. The fifteenth–century poet Dafydd Llwyd o Fathafarn mentions that many are the heart–broken lovers who have travelled to her shrine at Llanddwyn, GDLl 80.39-42. But it was Iolo Morganwg who first told how Dwynwen became a nun after God had turned her rejected lover Maelon into a block of ice, thereby becoming the patron saint of Welsh lovers; see Taliesin Williams (ed.), Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848), 84. It was said that Dwynwen's well, beside the church, contained fish whose movements presaged the fate of lovers; see F. Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardiff, 1992), 111.

On Dwynwen's cult see LBS ii, 387–92; MWM 281–3; GSDT 180–3; and Jane Cartwright, Y Forwyn Fair, Santesau a Lleianod[:] Agweddau ar Wyryfdod a Diweirdeb yng Nghymru'r Oesoedd Canol (Cardiff, 1999), 127–8 and passim. See also L.C. Stern, 'Davydd ab Gwilyms Gebet zu Dwynwen', ZCP vi (1908), 228–33.

6. Indeg   One of Arthur's three mistresses and paragon of beauty in medieval Welsh poetry, see 9.9n.

20. dyn   Translated as 'girl' but can also mean 'man' in general; the ambiguity may be deliberate. The contrast between dyn and Duw 'God' in lines 33–4 is similarly ambiguous.

23-4. Nid adwna ... / Duw a wnaeth   'God will not undo what he has done'. This is a variant of a proverb found, for instance, in Canu Llywarch Hen and in a twelfth–century poem, CBT V, 13.22.

32. Cwm–y–gro   There is a reference to tyddyn cw[m] y gro in the parish of Llanbadarn Fawr in a sixteenth–century document, see Dafydd Jenkins, Bro Dafydd ap Gwilym (Tal–y–bont, 1992), 39. It is thought to be the same place as Nant–y–glo which is named in the poem 'Journey for Love', see 96.40n.

46. mursen   Translated as 'strumpet', but there may be an ironic play on the original meaning, 'virgin' (the word is derived from Old French virgene, perhaps via Middle English).

54. Brychan Yrth   Literally 'Brychan the Mighty', probably Brychan Brycheiniog, father of Dwynwen according to De Situ Brecheniauc (11 c.), see EWGT 16, TYP 288, GSDT 184.

55. creuol   'Bleeding' or 'bloody', a reference to the blood of the crucified Christ or, as Rachel Bromwich suggests, to the tradition regarding Dwynwen's martyrdom beside her well on Llanddwyn Island, see SPDG 127. Syr Dafydd Trefor's poem to Dwynwen suggests that blood–stained shirts used to be placed by her well, GSDT 13.27 (see n.).