Cŵn Annwn (Spectral Hounds)

Join Mags in extending Spooky Season as she explores the mystery of the Cŵn Annwn in Welsh folklore.

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Sources

Pembrokeshire Folk Tales Christine Willison

Ceredigion Folk Tales Peter Stevenson

Myths from Wales Louisa Tarver (2024)

https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/tag/cwn-annwn/

https://mysterioustimes.co.uk/2024/07/21/the-cwn-annwn/

https://www.pucaprinthouse.com/post/mythical-beasts-of-wales

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/PucaPrinthouse?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1292082397

https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/51995

https://cmrosens.com/2019/12/19/welsh-gothic-tropes-iv-the-cwn-annwn/

https://stephraemoran.com/cwn-annwn/

https://monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Cwn_Annwn

Transcript

Hello and croeso, welcome to this week’s episode of Welsh Mysteries and Histories. If you are a returning listener, welcome back, and if you are a new listener, welcome in! I am Mags, the non-Welsh one, and Kay’s co-host! I hope you all found Kay’s episode last week as interesting as I did! Now, on to this week’s episode.

I hope you have all been enjoying this most wonderful time of year (I am fully a Samhain baby, as much as I love Yule!) and because I am not ready for spooky season to end yet (you know that if the Mari is out, it still counts as spooky time!), let me paint this scene for you:

It is a crisp autumn evening in the Black Mountains, and you’re sitting by the fire in the little Welsh farmhouse you’ve rented for the weekend, cosy and warm, a glass of chwisgi in hand. It’s already getting dark outside, but you arrived early enough to know that you don’t have any neighbours nearby – you chose this place specifically for its remoteness.  As you watch the sky fade to inky black, the fire happily burning away across the room, you jump at a sudden sound. You look accusingly at the fire, the logs must have cracked or something. But then you hear the sound again, and as it reverberates through the silence, a chill creeps in to the warmth of the room, running up in to you through the tips of your fingers, and settling in your chest. What is that noise? All other sound has faded as you peer through the window in to the darkness, as the sound echoes all around the valley, and see flashes of red and white running across the unmoving, darkened hills. Surely there aren’t any wolves in Wales, you think.

And you’d be right. Because what you’re hearing is not a wolf, but the call of the Cŵn Annwn, the howls echoing hauntingly through the valley are the call of the Hounds of the Otherworld.

Intro music

Now, when I first read about them, I am not going to lie, I pictured them kind of weird and creaky, like the dark spirits in the movie Ghost that come for the bad guy. Full shivers, because those have always creeped me out. But then I read a little deeper (and actually paid attention to the description), and became fully fascinated with the lore behind them – and not just because any hint of a dog in a tale makes me instantly obsessed!

The Cŵn Annwn (Cŵn =  Hounds/dogs Annwn = Otherworld), varyingly translated in to English as Hell Hounds, Dogs of the Abyss (which I love) are threaded through Welsh stories and legends, and are not to be confused with cŵn cyrff(corpse dogs) or even Gwyllgi and they are even mentioned in my favourite source of Welsh stories, the Mabinogion. The story we are told in the Mabinogion is as follows: Pwyll, the Lord of Dyved went hunting one day, and his own hounds interrupted the hunt of another pack, a pack unlike anything he had ever seen before, for the hounds all had fur of shining white, and red ears. The owner of the pack approached him, and made known his displeasure at his pack being chased of by Pwyll’s. The owner of this most unusual pack was Arawn, King of Annwn, and in order to win his friendship, he set Pwyll a task; rid Arawn’s land of the oppression of his neighbour, Havgan. Pwyll was to do this in a very specific way; y swapping places with Arawn for a year and then striking Havgan with one blow, and then not finishing him off, no matter how much Havgan might beg. Spoiler alert: Pwyll completes the task successfully, and meets again with Arawn, who swaps them back, and they go back to their respective kingdoms and remain friends.

Louisa Tarver’s excellent book “Myths from Wales” tells us that Annwn is the otherworld in Welsh mythology, and that Arawn’s hunt is occasionally accompanied by Mallt-y-Nos, who is a fearsome hag in her own right (she and I could definitely be friends!). In researching this episode, sadly, I noticed that a lot of the information on the Cŵn Annwn tends to focus on Arawn and the mythology of Annwn, rather than the hounds themselves.

The tales told of the Cŵn Annwn bears a lot of similarities to that of the Wild Hunt of Norse mythology, Odin leads his own pack of hounds on a Wild Hunt, and links belief systems across Europe.  The silence of the hounds was a harbinger of death, so if you heard the baying loud and clear, sounding close by, the hounds were actually far away from you. But if you heard the hounds growling, they were very close by (maybe keep a note of that if you are wandering the wilds of Wales!). Their howling is actually considered a death omen, and it is believed that if you hear them, a death will soon occur. Weirdly, they are also associated with geese, because apparently geese honking in the night sounds rather like the barking of dogs. As someone who lives on a narrowboat, and is frequently woken up by geese (and bullied in to feeding them, because I am a sucker for animals), I’m not too sure about that… There is also another Welsh myth, that of the Cŵn Wybir (the dogs of the sky) that is related to the Cŵn Annwn, as they are also believed to be a premonition of death, more specifically that of the person who sees them, or someone known to the person that see them, but the Cŵn Wybir are more often seen as fire trailing across the sky (not unlike a comet).

The description of the hounds is usually as I mentioned earlier, glowing white, with red ears. The colour white, as I mentioned back in our Mari Lwyd episode, is a colour associated in Celtic mythology with death and the otherworld, but interestingly, red is also associated with the supernatural -  even in mythology outside of Wales. There are, however, other descriptions of the hounds, with some being ‘liver-coloured”, ‘black and very ugly with huge red spots’, or even blood red in colour with eyes like balls of liquid fire. The most common description of them is, however, the glowing white one.

The Cŵn Annwn are believed to be most active in autumn and winter, which may link back to the Celtic calendar and winter being most associated with the otherworld, and also with the association of autumn and winter with deaths, historically. They are also supposed to have preferred nights for hunting, those being St. John’s, St. Martin’s, St Michael the Archangel’s, All Saints, Christmas, New Year, St Agnes, St David and Good Friday, although some beliefs have them only hunting from Christmas until Twelfth Night, which is a strange little link to my beloved Mari.

Even more interesting is that their prey was the not just any random soul they came across, but the evildoers (which is probably where my notion of them as the slinking, dark creatures from the movie “Ghost” comes from!), and Louisa Tarver refers to them as ‘ghostly sheepdogs’, rounding up the spirits of the recently departed and guiding them on their final journey, as a lover of dogs, this honestly sounds like an excellent way to make the journey to the otherworld and this even links the hounds to ancient Egypt, with Anubis – the jackal-headed god – guiding souls to the afterlife. They can also be linked to the Cu Sith of the Scottish Highlands, or the Gabriel Hounds or Wisht Hounds in England. As Christianity made its way across Wales, the nature of the Cŵn Annwn changed, with some coming to view them as ‘hell hounds’, rather than the scary, but helpful hounds of older belief systems. I personally find it fascinating how many older belief systems were overwritten by Christianity, turning things that were not necessarily good or bad in to things that were viewed as downright evil.

There are specific areas linked to the Cŵn Annwn; you might have noticed that I set the intro in the Black Mountains, but Aberystwyth (my beloved) is also famed for having links to the Cŵn Annwn, althought the sighting reported in 1897-98 referred to them as the cŵn y bendith y mammau (faery dogs), and Cadair Idris is also believed to be one of their preferred hunting grounds and there is also the Bwlch y Cŵn in Eryri which is not necessarily linked to the Cŵn Annwn as opposed to other, worldly hounds, but let me have my beliefs!

In more recent times, they have been featured in songs, and stories, and even by Puca Printhouse on their ‘Mythical Beasts of Wales’ print, which you can find on Etsy (not a paid advert, just a wishlist item for myself!), and they even feature in a Paranormal Romance novel published in 2020.

And so, as you settle back to your evening in the little Welsh farmhouse you rented, wrapped warmly in a blanket, and listen to the hounds howling, you make a note to remember that if you are wandering about Wales, and you see glowing white hounds with blood red ears, you’ll make sure you pay attention to how loudly they are howling, because they might be passing you by… or they might just be looking… for you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Welsh Mysteries and Histories and learning about Cŵn Annwn with me, and that you’ll join Kay and myself on another episode! Special thanks to the London Welsh Centre for my amazing Welsh classes. Hwyl Fawr, and see you next time!