Cŵn Annwn

The Cŵn Annwn first appear in the First Branch of the Mabinogi, and they appear causing trouble. Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, rides out hunting and finds a pack that is not his own pulling down a stag: dogs of a gleaming white, with red ears, the pair of colours by which insular tradition marks everything that comes from the Otherworld. Pwyll drives them off and sets his own hounds on the kill, and with that gesture commits the discourtesy that sets the story in motion. The dogs belonged to Arawn, king of Annwn, who appears to reproach him. The reparation Arawn demands (that they exchange shapes and kingdoms for a year, and that Pwyll kill his rival Hafgan in his stead) is the whole plot of the branch.

It is worth holding on to what the medieval text says and what it does not. It says the pack belongs to Arawn's court and that its colouring marks it as supernatural. It nowhere says that the hounds foretell anyone's death: that comes later, from oral folklore, and it is a separate layer that should not be projected backwards.

In Welsh oral tradition the Cŵn Annwn no longer hunt stags but souls, and hearing them is the warning. Their baying comes at night, from overhead, carried on the wind, and whoever hears it understands that someone in the household is about to die. The belief is anchored in specific hunting grounds: the most often cited is Cadair Idris, where the howling of these hounds was said to foretell death to anyone who heard it.

What sets them apart from the other prophetic dogs of Europe is acoustic, and it works backwards. Wirt Sikes records it in «British Goblins»: the bark sounds louder the further off the pack is, and fades as it draws near. The practical consequence is cruel, and it is the whole point of the motif: whoever hears them loud has time, and whoever can barely make them out already has them overhead. There is no fleeing them by ear.

There is also a natural explanation that the folklore itself half concedes. In Wales the pack was associated with flights of migrating geese: their honking at night, moving across the sky in formation, sounds a great deal like dogs baying far above.

The Cŵn Annwn do not hunt alone: they have a master, and the master changes with the period. In the First Branch of the Mabinogi he is Arawn, king of Annwn. In later medieval tradition and in folklore he is Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the Otherworld and king of the tylwyth teg, the Welsh fair folk, and it is he who leads the hunt. Both names coexist in the sources without any of them bothering to reconcile them, and that duplication is not a transmission error: it is the trace of two superimposed layers of the same tradition.

With Christianisation the hunt changes meaning. The pack stops pursuing stags or souls at large and starts harrying the damned, and Annwn, which in the older material is an Otherworld neither good nor evil, comes to be read as hell. John Rhys records in «Celtic Folklore» already Christianised versions in which the hounds chase souls in torment. It is the same piece reinterpreted: the colours are still the Celtic ones, white with red ears, but the motif has turned moral and the hunt has become a punishment.

Hence the being reads today in two registers at once. It is the royal pack of an Otherworld king, and it is the infernal hunt that drags souls away. Neither reading is the false one; they are two moments of a single figure that folklore never got round to deciding between.