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Thought y'all might find this an interesting coincidence. Here is Robert Graves discussing the poetic inspiration for his book The White Goddess:
"...I was re-reading Lady Charlotte Guest's The Mabinogion, a book of ancient Welsh legends, and came across a hitherto despised minstrel poem called The Song of Taliesin. I suddenly knew ... that the lines of the poem ... formed a series of early mediaeval riddles ... I knew also ... that the answer must in some way be linked with an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of a 'Battle of Trees' ... which was occasioned by a certain god who guessed the name of his divine opponent to be Vron, or 'Alder.'
"To cut a long story short, my answer to the riddle, namely the letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-nonsensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and the Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of describing a struggle between rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain for the control of national learning. You see, I had found that the word 'trees' means 'learning' in all the Celtic languages; and since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I remembered from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain--indeed, its eighteen letter-names were not divulged for nearly a thousand years--well, the possession of the secret must have been something worth struggling about. I also found out that the alphabet in Caesar's day was called the Boibel-Loth because it began with the letters B.L.; and that as a result of the Battle of the Trees, the Boibel-Loth had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained as references to a sequence of wild trees--including the Alder." |
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