MELANGELL and the HARE
Many things might go into the mythology of a guardian spirit, a goddess and eventually a saint. Especially if she is also an independent woman, a free being and a wild creature. How can all these things come together?
The valley of Pennant, where the legend is set, is a ‘blind’ valley, running up to a wall of the mountains, enclosed on all sides but one where the stream that becomes the River Tanat runs out of it. Today it is possible to follow that stream up the valley from the village of Llangynog on a ‘pilgrimage’ trail to a small church dedicated to Saint Melangell. Beyond the church the narrow road becomes a footpath leading to a waterfall at the end of the valley. The church contains a shrine to the saint and is enclosed in a ring of ancient yew trees and has apparently been built over a Bronze Age burial site. The church is reputed to be the site of an earlier nunnery set up by Saint Melangell, which is to formulate her story in a Christian context. Near the church is a large area of flat rock known as ‘Gwely Melangell’ (Melangell’s Bed) although it is also known as ‘Gwely y Gawres’ (the Giantess’s Bed), presumably based on an older legend (an earlier version of Melangell’s legend?) of a female giant who lived in the valley.
In her Christian context she is seen as ‘virginal’ and ‘pure’. But consider also that virginity in pre-christian guardians and goddesses was often a symbol of enclosure and protection. The Vestal Virgins at Rome ensured the safety of the city and the goddess Athene protected the city of Athens. Virginity here is not about saintly purity. It is a physical quality embodying protection. It can also represent a state of independence in a woman in that she is not dependent on a man but protects what is hers by her own means. Melangell willfully defies her father’s plans for her marriage. She goes to an enclosed place and becomes its tutelary guardian. But she retains the wildness of her nature, becoming identified with wild animals in general and the hare in particular. She defies the hunter the ‘lord’ of the territory and he defers to her.
She is the older authority, the untamed land and the protector of the wild creatures that still inhabit it. So the hare hides beneath her skirt. The hare also, in folklore was seen as a symbol of female sexuality. What resides beneath her skirt, then, is what she has to give, or not to give, to the man who would rule her. He considers if he should take her, but realizes she has the greater authority, and he retreats, leaving her unviolated, her valley still a haven of protection.
Seen in this way, there is no contradiction between different possible views of Melangell: as a goddess of sovereignty of the wild land, a tutelary deity of wild creatures, a woman asserting her own nature, and a saintly virgin. She is potentially all of these things, and more. She has much in common with Brigid, both in her transition from Pagan goddess to Christian saint and in the resonances of protective guardianship. But her legend also presents her as a spirited young woman, sure of her status and expressing the will of all women who desire to make their own way in the world, to live according to their own nature.
#LEGEND
Melangell grew up in Ireland. She was happy. Until one day her father began to speak of arranging a marriage for her. Then she was unhappy. So she left. She was her own woman, no longer a girl now, and she knew that marriage to a man she did not choose was not for her. Where should she go? She went to the coast and found a boat that was crossing to Wales. Once there she traveled inland, guided by a vision of a hidden valley in the mountains. It was as if her path was set and she was being guided to follow it. One day she turned onto a track which led her along the side of a wide stream rushing down from a valley enclosed by high cliffs on either side. As she followed the track upstream the wide valley began to narrow and she felt herself enclosed by the place. She paused to rest and gathered some blackberries. She had passed the last farm some way back. It seemed like she had come home, and she would stay.
The next day she explored further up the valley, where the walls of the cliffs on either side came even closer together. Then there were cliffs in front of her too. The valley ended. The mountains rose in every direction from here except back the way she had come. No-one could pass through this valley. She should not be disturbed. So she lived with the animals and the trees and the rushing stream – listened to the call of the peregrine falcon on the cliff tops, the whistle of the wind along the valley walls, the rustle of the leaves of the willows and the alders along the stream and the tinkle of the flowing waters over the stones. And she was happy.
One day she heard the shouts of men and the sounds of horses coming towards her up the valley. Then a hare bounded into view. She stood and welcomed the hare and the hare came to her. The shouts of the men were closer now and the hare looked ready to run. So she lifted her skirt for the hare to take refuge. As she let her skirt fall again, hiding the hare, a horseman rode up to her with others a little behind.
The hunter stopped as his dogs seemed reluctant to go forward. “Has a hare come this way?”, he asked. “You cannot hunt here” she replied, “I keep this place as a sanctuary”. “I am the lord of all these lands and I hunt where I please”.
She stood her ground, feeling the hare sitting quietly between her legs. The lord sat on his horse and watched her while his men looked on. But Melangell did not move. “You cannot hunt here”, she said again.
The lord, Brochfael, was impressed. He was not used to being defied in this way. There was something about this woman, he thought, that set her apart.
The hare fidgeted and Melangell adjusted her skirts. Brochfael glanced down, realising now where the hare was hiding. Should he take this woman, and the hare, home with him? He considered.
“Keep the hare then” he heard himself saying, “and this place of sanctuary too. It is yours not because you say so, but as a gift from me, and you will be safer here because of that”.
He turned his horse and rode away from her. But he was as good as his word, and he sent other young women of spirit who would not be married to join her and allowed her to build a community. She became known as the protector of hares, keeping them safe in the folds of the skirts of the valley.
#ANALYSIS
All the documentary evidence we have about Melangell revolves around the legend and is from the late Middle Ages. Although other evidence, such as the depiction of her on the rood screen in the church, allows us to take the provenance of her story back a little further than the manuscript sources, there is little to confirm the existence of an historical person in the sixth or the seventh century when she is supposed to have lived.
It has been suggested that the story of the saint as we have it may have been used to legitimate claims for the church as a place of special sanctuary. So might the saint's legend have been developed out of remnant folk memories of a hare goddess in the pennant valley?
In his scholarly edition of the *Historia Divae Monacellae * Huw Pryce comments:
"... the legend of the hare taking refuge with the saint almost certainly derives from local folklore".
This local folkore includes accounts of miracles performed by hares themselves rather than by the saint.
So given that there is no definite evidence of the actual existence of an historical person called Melangell or Monacella, and that we can only take the cult of her as a saint back to the twelfth century or a little earlier, there is at least a possibility that her story is based on earlier accounts of a legendary female.
Her cult as a saint was very much localised to the area around the Pennant valley and could have grown out of survivals of an earlier hare goddess to whom the valley was sacred. The case for this is strengthened by the fact that the church is far from any other habitation but is built on a Bronze Age site where a ring of yew trees predating the church mark the place as having special significance.
Hares continued to be a feature of the folklore of the valley after the Reformation when the cult of the saint would have gone into abeyance. A seventeenth century account tells of hares not being hunted there and being known as 'Melangell's Lambs'. This is repeated in the eighteenth century.
Finally there is an independent folkore account of the flat rock where Melangell is said to have slept also being known as the bed of a giantess.This is recorded in a book about the giants of Wales and suggests stories of an aboriginal being or chthonic spirit of some sort inhabiting the valley.
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The original manuscript of Historia Divae Monacellae has not survived, but later copies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exist and are the main source of the story today.
The effigy of Saint Melangell in the church is datable to c.1400 which takes her story back before the manuscript sources.
A scholarly edition of the text of the Historia with discussion by Huw Pryce appeared in Montgomeryshire Collections 82 (1994) pp. 23-40. This volume also contains articles about the church and older historical deposits in the valley.
Huw Pryce concludes that the unknown author of the Historia was "familiar with medieval texts in both Latin and Welsh and had access to local traditions, and perhaps even documents, at Pennant Melangell." He is of the opinion that it was composed in the area.
Melangell is also listed in later versions of *Bonedd y Saint *(thirteenth century).
There are references to Melangell in the poems of Lewys Glyn Cothi and Guto'r Glyn (poets writing in Welsh in the fifteenth century).
References to hares as 'Melangell's Lambs' and the fact that they were not hunted in the valley occur in a letter of Thomas Price in the seventeenth century and in Thomas Pennant's Tours Through Wales in the eighteenth century.
*Cewri Cymru */Welsh Giants ed. Chris grooms (1993) includes the valley of Pennant Melangell as a location of a giantess and the flat rock on which Melangell slept as the the giantess's bed.