Week 11 Storytelling: One Pulse Pwyll and Rhiannon

Long ago, there was a Chief whose name was Pwyll. His home was grand and sat on huge tracts of land. One day, at a feast, a guest told Pwyll that a mound near his home was magic.

The guest said, “if you sit on it, you might get hurt or you might see an image like a dream.”

The tale made Pwyll want to test the mound at once. So, he and his men went to sit on the mound. Soon, they saw a horse run past them on the road that was near by. A girl of great beauty in gold robes was on the horse.

Pwyll said to one of his men, “Go get on your horse. Catch up to her and bring her here!”

But, while his horse ran as fast as it could, the man could not catch up to the girl in gold. Her speed did not change, but as the man sped up, more and more space split them. For many days, the same girl in gold robes rode down the road near the mound. Each day, the men could not catch her.

At last, Pwyll got up from the mound and got on his horse. He would try to catch the girl on his own. He was sad to find that he met the same woe as his men. Pwyll could not catch the girl on the horse!

In a yell, he said, “please wait!”

To his shock, the girl in gold robes said, “I am glad to wait. You should have said that the first time that your men went to catch up with me!”

The girl in gold robes told Pwyll her name and said that she rode to his home to search for him. She told Pwyll that her kin set her up to wed a strange man but that she knew that it was right to wed Pwyll. Pwyll said he would be glad to have her as his wife.  The two then said that they would meet in a year to be wed and have a great feast.

Author's Note:

For this storytelling, I wanted to try one of the example storytelling styles: one pulse stories! In this style, the writer is challenged to retell their story using only word with a single syllable. It is a great brain exercise to sit and think about all of the synonyms for words that you want to use or various ways that one sentence can be phrased to convey the same meaning! This was a great challenge for me because I am prone to using long sentences and lots of descriptive words to get my point across. Here, I had to try to be concise and brief! My story is a retelling of how Pwyll and Rhiannon met in the first part of The Maginobi.  My story very closely follows that of the original. I only changed little details about time in order to fit my writing style.  Of course, I also called Rhiannon the "girl in gold robes" for this reason as well!

Bibliography:

The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1877).

Pwyll and Rhiannon
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