Blodeuwedd

Notes

This song cycle does not seek to tell the Blodeuwedd story programmatically, but rather
reflects upon the themes which surround it and which appear both directly and
obliquely in the poetry of the Middle Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym (arguably,
indeed, one of the greatest medieval poets) and of poetry previously ascribed to
him but now recognised as the work of other (anonymous) poets of the same
tradition. The texts relating to the broom plant, the owl, and Blodeuwedd herself
all appear in the narrative directly, while Robert Graves’s analysis of the text
suggests that Blodeuwedd is directly connected with the moon, her fingers being
“whiter than the ninth wave of the sea”: not only is nine the number associated
with the moon, but Blodeuwedd’s fate is never to see the daylight.