The Mabinogion Tetralogy Quotes

“But after his going his wife walked alone in the court, and was lonely. For so it was with her always; she did not like to be alone. Perhaps her thin being drew in life and warmth through seeing its beauty mirrored in a lover’s eyes. Perhaps otherwise reality was hard to hold to. The air may have seemed too vast, space a gaping maw.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Then we lost consciousness of the Whole in order to get to be individuals?” he asked. “And now that we are individuals it is our business to get back the consciousness of the Whole? That seems like going around in a circle.” “Eternity is a circle,” replied Gwydion, “for only a circle has no end. . . . But before we were conscious only of our own species; that was all we could grasp of the Whole. And when we recover that wider consciousness it too will have widened; and we shall be one with all species, and know all creatures alike for our fellow beings. But millions of ages will pass before all the world has attained to consciousness of the Whole.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Woman’s power wanes, but nothing ever passes except to wax again. . . . And if men become tyrants, they shape for themselves the doom of tyrants, who are always betrayed.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“The King looked keenly at him from under his frosty brows. “Hers are ill deeds; and an unloving mother violates the Ancient Harmonies. Yet you have made her a mother against her will. And that is a thing that has seldom happened in the world before, but will happen often again in the ages that begin. You have done it for love’s sake, in pure longing for a child. But many of those men who are to come will do it for pride’s sake and lust’s; and this breeding of her like a beast will lower the rank and degrade the ancient dignity of woman. Nor will the world go well while that fades, my nephew.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Breathing became a delight and movement a joy, so full was the air of the wine of growing and awakening life. The sun burnt through the veils that had barred him from the world and glowed upon it like a golden smile. The sap ran in the trees; the stags in the forest lifted their heads to sniff the strange glory upon the breezes; and the earth sang her rising-song.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Mâth’s mysterious sap of divinity was not in him, but he was the forerunner of the intellect: the first man of a world that was yet to be. He was an artist, one of the earliest that we have note of in our Western world, for those of Greece and Rome had felt the guiding hands of Egypt and the East. And he loved to use his wits to shape and polish a plan as his brother Govannon, the first of smiths, loved to use his tools to shape and polish a sword.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Spring came at last. Ice and snow melted; under the brown bark of the trees and under the brown breast of the Mother a multitude of tiny lives stirred; they that rise up to make all greenness, leaves and grass and moss.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“She cried aloud to the white evening, “Sorrow that is my sorrow! Woe that ever I was born! For the good of two islands has been destroyed through me.” She moaned once, and her heart broke, and she fell . . . Manawyddan kissed her cheek and closed her eyes. “Sleep may be best for you, beloved, for the world that we grew up in is gone, and you were too tired to help build a new. Sleep and find Gwern again, and our brothers. And maybe even Matholuch can find some new tale to tell, there before Arawn’s face. Maybe it can be your comfort at last, not only your shame, that he was a coward. But it is sad my world will be after you, and the light of you gone out of it.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“And within himself he reeled and gave the cry that erring humanity has given throughout the ages: “I did not mean it! I did not know that it would be like this.” And the inexorable answered him, “Yet so it is, and by your doing.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“I hope I will not be accused of sex bias for saying so; I like penicillin, electric toasters, jet travel, etc., as well as anybody. But when we were superstitious enough to hold the earth sacred and worship her, we did nothing to endanger our future upon her, as we do now. That seems a little ironic.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“So a child sobs in its heartbreak that seems so world filling, yet ends so quickly, though it may leave scars that are not of the flesh: scars that twist the self within.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“If men become tyrants, they shape for themselves the doom of tyrants, who are always betrayed.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy

“Force is an ill broom to sweep anything clean with.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy

“A true king never robs his people of peace.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy

“Yet woman, though she ceased to be a king* and man protected her, was still reverenced as the source of life. Only now when man is learning that she cannot give life without him does he begin to scorn her whom he protects. So she that created property will become property. “So it is already in the Eastern World, so it will be here. And out of that constant injustice will rise continually more evils to breed wars and fresh injustice until men forget that there was ever a world at peace. When humankind lets one half of humankind be enslaved it will be long and long, even when that slavery wanes, before freedom is respected and nation ceases to tear nation; before the world unlearns the habit of force.” He”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy

“Gwydion rode on alone toward Dinodig, going forth, after the fashion of all orthodox gods, to damn the creature that he had fashioned ill. . . .”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“In high ground an oak grows— Rain cannot melt it nor heat blast it. Ninescore the pangs, ninescore the throes, Borne in its branches by Llew Llaw Gyffes.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“And now that he is dead, it hurts me to think that my words may have hurt him, though I was nothing and had lost him, and he was everything.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“It is told in the tales of Erinn that she who was to be the great Cuchulain’s mother drank her son’s soul down as a mayfly, given her in a cup of wine.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“For he believed in the teachings of his Order, that would seem to have held that the departed soul of man might most easily pass into the light and winged things of the air. And that teaching may be evidence of the kinship of the druids with the builders of the pyramids, for the folk of the pharaohs were wont to picture the soul as passing into the form and shape of a bird.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“She was ill-fashioned, ill-destined. Is that her fault, or ours that mis-shaped her? It was too great a risk to draw down such a wanderer from the winds as would be content to enter so light a makeshift form. Such could not have been fit to mate with Llew. Would that the gods had withered my brain before I thought of her fashioning.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Once we were all phantoms in the mind of a God,” said Mâth. “He thought us into being. . . . Our bodies can call souls into the world. Can our minds do less? Now will we test our magic, you and I.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Llaw Gyffes means “Sure Hand.” But the use of lleu is a mystery today. For the word is a dead, ancient one that meant light; and the later scribes rewrote it llew or lion. Yet nobody can say why Arianrhod should have called her little boy either a lion or a light (unless what she really said was that his hand was sure as light); and perhaps the Irish word lu, “little,” was meant; though there is no such form of that word in Welsh today.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Of course,” said Gwydion. “For the inside of a man, which cannot be seen or touched, takes many years to change even a little; while the outside of him that can be seen and touched, and which most people therefore think the more important, can be very easily changed or even destroyed altogether. You must remember that.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“This was the shoemaking for which the Triads name Gwydion the Third Gold-Shoemaker. The first of these was Caswallawn the son of Beli of the Deep, when he went to Gaul to save Flur the daughter of Mynach Gorr from Imperial Caesar and her abductor, King Mwrchan the Thief. And the second was the royal Manawyddan, the son of Llyr Llediaith and brother of Bran the Blessed, in the days when he and his were exiles from Dyved through the charms of Llwyd. It was he whose stepson Pryderi Gwydion had later killed.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“And Gwydion smiled, and the light of his smile seemed to close the dizzying abysses and make the sun shine warm over a solid world. “I wanted you indeed,” he said. “Otherwise I would not have been saving you in a box while your much more promising-looking brother was swimming off. The accident that made her give you birth was my doing, and an awkward enough business, but the best I could do, for it is not easy to deal with an unreasonable woman. You were my plan and my contriving. You are my own, more than you ever have been or can be anyone else’s.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“That which would make the flowers upon the fruit trees slept, unguessed at, under branches that were hung with the white lace the clouds weave, and that we call snow, and were jewelled with sparkling ice. The fields shivered under the wind and the stubble, hiding the emerald treasures that were to be. In the caves the bears laired, and there was no movement in those caverns except where the cubs waxed within the sleeping mother.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“IT WAS WINTER and nearing the time of the solstice, that has been sacred everywhere and in all lands since before man can remember, when Arianrhod at last made herself ready for a journey, and fared eastward with her brothers to the court of Mâth the King.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“Arianrhod herself, whose name meant Silver Wheel, perhaps was worshiped by the common folk as incarnation as well as priestess of the moon, the benevolent silver sky-lady herself, come down from her pale bright chariot in the heavens to watch more closely over the tides she ruled, and make them gentle to the coasts of men. Such mystic, mighty song and incantation to control or invoke the elements may have been the rites practices by all the dwellers on those sacred isles around Britain of which Plutarch tells us; on one of which, he says, the Dethroned Father of the Gods sleeps among his men, since sleep is the fetter forged for Him. But those are things lost in mystery, and sages and historians quarrel over the fringes of them, happy in the seemingly barren strife.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty

“There may have been a sacred well on that isle, as in other parts of Britain, and if so the daughters of Dôn would have been its priestesses and guardians, set to guard that closed Eye of the Deep through which otherwise the greedy water-gods might have risen to swallow more of earth’s surface as once they had swallowed the lost lands of the west that were now Caer Sidi, the Country Undersea.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Mabinogion Tetralogy: The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, The Island of the Mighty