Cŵn Annwn

In this week's episode, we're going over to the gorgeous Wales for the hounds of the wild hunt, the Cŵn Annwn! How do these monsters link to Arthurian legend? How can you tell them apart from other hellhounds? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

Blimey, the summer weather is really coming in and kicking butt over here in the UK and I hope it's not too hot wherever you’re listening in from but unfortunately, it’s that time of year where I become a hermit and live in the dark for 3 months. But I will note that I love shorts, and it being warm enough to wear them is great.

DESCRIPTION:

ANYWAY, sorry I naturally fall into talking about the weather - it’s a terribly British trait and this week we’re staying in my home zone and travelling over to, probably the most unsung hero of the four British countries, Wales, for a haunting creature, the Cŵn Annwn.

Now before we start, I need to make something very clear - I do not speak Welsh and it’s quite a hard language to follow if you’ve never learnt it - so my pronunciations might not be the best, but I promise I have tried and researched and this is my attempt. Big thanks to Iwan and Charlotte Williams this week for recommending the Welsh monsters too - I think it’s about time I covered one!

So the Cŵn Annwn, they are typically described as spirit hounds or spectral hounds, sometimes even described as fairy hounds. Of course, they are large dogs but stand out with sheer white fur, glowing white eyes like moonbeams and bright red ears. In some parts of Wales, they are described as smaller dogs with patches of white and red on their fur, or sometimes fully purple, other times entirely flame coloured. 

There were variants that were more sinister to look at, described as black and very ugly, with huge red spots, or red in body with large black patches like splashes of ink. Or the worst one which was blood red, dripping with gore with eyes like balls of liquid fire - so you could basically get a cute white doggy or a stereotypical hellhound. 

Technically though, they were hellhounds and that’s what they’re most commonly described as within Welsh folklore. They came from the Welsh underworld of Annwn, hence the name, where they were the hunting dogs for the King of the underworld, Arawn. Much like the Norse pantheon, with Odin leading the charge, Arawn would lead a wild hunt around Cadair Idris, a mountain range in Wales and with his hounds that only answered to him, looking for wrongdoers to take back with him. 

They only hunted in certain circumstances though, which were the evenings of St. John’s Day, St. Martin’s Day, Saint Michael the Archangel’s Day, All Saints Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, Saint Agnes’s Day, Saint David’s Day, and Good Friday, or just in the autumn and winter. Some experts say that Arawn only hunts from Christmas to the Twelfth Night, but it sounds like they hunt all the time honestly.

The hounds were seen as a death omen and as escorts of souls to the Underworld, if you were to see the hunt in full swing and go and look out of curiosity, you would be torn to pieces by the dogs and I have a quote here about it;

“blood falls in showers like rain, human bodies are torn to pieces, and death soon follows the victim of the nocturnal expedition.” 

However, it was more than likely that the hunt came to you, and you didn’t realise that you were in fact, a wrongdoer. It was said that a Cŵn Annwn's goal in the Wild Hunt is to hunt wrongdoers into the ground until they can run no longer, just as the criminals did to their victims.

If you saw the hunt and were not tempted to have a look, it was said that you would be haunted by death and soon it will come to you or someone around you. The hounds could be spotted on their own or with the hunt themselves, but either way, it’s not a good thing to see, bar how cool that would be. You could also be cursed with the omen if you heard the hounds, their growling is loudest when they are at a distance, and as they draw nearer, it grows softer and softer.

They don’t have any specific powers, bar that they were able to tear apart humans, but I think any large dog could probably do that if they wanted to and they have in history. Their powers are more probably to do with the fact that they can move in and out of the underworld and are technically spirits, so are completely invulnerable and immortal, so if you did find yourself face to face with one, you WOULD be going back to the underworld with them. 

Because they’re spirits, we don’t know what they eat or how they reproduce, but we assume that there is a dog criteria for hellhounds and they are either underworld born or spirits of dogs who have died in our reality, warped for the wild hunt.

ORIGIN:

Now moving onto etymology, Cŵn Annwn is Welsh of course and it literally means Hounds of Annwn or Hounds of the Underworld. They were sometimes known as the Cŵn Mamau, meaning Hounds of the Mothers, and I’ll get into why later. 

For this monster's history, we have to go back to Celtic Britain. The Celts came to the British Isles in the Iron Age, around 750 BC, and ran the island until the Romans invaded in 1 AD. Their religion was mostly druidic and pagan, and they believed more in the spiritual and natural world with a group of pantheon gods much like Ancient Greek, Roman, Norse or Egyptian. When the Romans took over, the Celts were mostly wiped out but the ones who survived went to Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and Cumbria - the latter two here being English counties in the North and South if you’re not familiar. 

The Celtic language is really the only thing that lives on in the modern day within the Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric and Breton languages - which is why it’s difficult for anyone outside of those regions to pick up as it’s not massively taught anywhere else.

Anyway, that’s all important because Welsh folklore was born from the Celtic traditions and beliefs, meaning that the underworld was a place and king who ruled it, loved a hunt - another British tradition unfortunately, so the hellhounds of Annwn were born, and most likely before we have written record of them existing too within the Iron Age. The Celts also believed that red was associated with death and white with the supernatural, so white animals were often owned by gods or lived in the Underworld.

Our first written record of them though was in a book called The Mabinogion from the 12th or 13th century. These were a bunch of prose stories from the earliest Welsh people and included a story about the Cŵn Annwn. It tells a story of the Prince of Dyved seeing the Cŵn Annwn whilst hunting with his own dogs and he describes them as so;

“Then looked he at the colour of the dogs, staying not to look at the stag, and of all the hounds that he had seen in the world, he had never seen any that were like unto these. For their hair was of a brilliant shining white, and their ears were red; and as the whiteness of their bodies shone, so did the redness of their ears glisten.”

Funnily enough though, the term hellhound for these dogs came in around the same time when Christians dubbed them the Hounds of Hell and believed that they were not owned by Arawn, but by Satan and are connected to the fiery depths of hell in Christian belief. However, in Welsh folklore, Annwn was a place of plenty and eternal youth, not some fiery chasm, which is similar to many other ancient religious beliefs too.

I do have some stories about the Hunt and Arawn, and one goes back to that excerpt I read a moment ago about the Prince. Prince Pwyll actually meets Arawn in this story, as the hounds attempt to take down a stag that was the princes target, he sends his own hounds to scare off the Cŵn Annwn and in repentance is asked to defeat Arawn’s greatest enemy, Hafgan, the other king of Annwn. In a later story, the prince does indeed defeat Hafgan and everyone celebrates Arawn as the true king.

This is not Arawn’s only story though, as in Arthurian legend, he was dethroned by another man, Gwyn ap Nudd, the fairy king. He took the throne from him as well as the hounds, and took over as master of the hunt too. Eventually, the hero Culhwch claims two of the hellhounds to ride with him to King Arthur’s court after completing his own Heracles’ labours.

Lastly, I mentioned that they were also considered Hounds of the Mothers earlier, this is because sometimes instead of Arawn, they were accompanied by a super powerful hag called Mallt-y-Nos or Matilda of the Night. She would help chase sorrowful and lost souls to the hunt, and would drive the hounds with her own shrieks and wails. She was once a beautiful woman who loved hunting so much that she exclaimed that “If there is no hunting in heaven, then I would rather not go” and so, she was cursed to stay and now cries out in misery as she hunts for eternity with the dogs.

Now in reality, what could these hounds be? Well there’s actually a thought out answer here and it’s geese. Yep, you heard me right, geese. This is because when geese migrate, they honk over the sky, and sometimes this honking can sound like growls, especially depending on the distance they are away from you. 

For mythical comparisons, we have a load from other countries that are similar from across the UK, such as the Gabriel Hounds, Ratchets, Yell-Hounds and everything about Herne the Hunter, a mythical hunting ghost that one day I’ll make sure to cover as he’s super interesting.

As well as that, of course we have the Wild Hunt from Norse mythology too, which I have covered in another episode if you want to know more about the Hunt in general. But there is also the Cu-Sith, which I think is the most like the Cŵn Annwn in Scottish and Irish mythology, a mythical hound that haunts the highlands and would only let out three barks, anyone who heard it would have to find safety before the third bark or they would be overcome with terror and die. All fun!

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Now onto modern media, there’s not very much as you can imagine specifically for the Cŵn Annwn today. But I’ve filled this in with a load of hellhound media, so you might remember some of these from our other hellhound-esque episodes. 

For art, I really love Dog Head by Julie de Graag for this one and Cwn Wybr by Katy Jones but we don’t have any portrait art of these I’m afraid, so have a look at independent work like these ones I’ve mentioned for a great and accurate depiction of them.

In movies, we have; All Dogs Go to Heaven, Hercules, Scoob!, Where the Dead Go To Die, The Lost Boys, Scooby-Doo, Wishmaster, The Neverending Story, Jonah Hex, Hellboy, The Chronicles of Riddick, The Bye Bye Man, Ghostbusters, Dark Angel: The Ascent, Predators, Never Cry Werewolf, Black Dog & An American Haunting.

For TV, we have; Mystery Science Theater 3000, 2 Stupid Dogs, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, The Owl House, Phineas & Ferb, League of Super Evil, Fangbone!, Mr Pickles, Helluva Boss, Hazbin Hotel, Teen Wolf, What We Do in the Shadows, Rescue Me, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Reaper, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ultraman Nexus, Supernatural, Chrono Crusade, Black Butler, Digimon, One Piece, Naruto, Hellsing & Berserk.

In video games, we have ones such as; Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Apocalypse, Total War: Warhammer, Smite, Runescape, Quest 64, Penumbra, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Devil May Cry, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Nightmare Creatures, Monster Hunter, Dungeon Keeper, Shadowgate, League of Legends, Deadly Premonition, Kingdom Hearts 2, Heroes of Might and Magic, Odin Sphere, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Pokemon, The Elder Scrolls, Dragon’s Crown, Shadow Hearts, Doom Eternal, Fallout 4, Secret of Mana, Bounty of One & Age of Wonders.

My book recommendation this week is British Goblins: Welsh Folk-Lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes who has written about most Welsh monsters here as well as our hellhounds this week. Or you can look at Welsh Monsters & Mythical Beasts: A Guide to the Legendary Creatures from Celtic-Welsh Myth and Legend by Rowynn Ellis and Stephanie Law, Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends by Claire Fayers or Welsh Folk Tales by Peter Stevenson for some more Welsh monsters and fairytales.

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

I really don’t know in all honesty. My reasons are that they only come around so often, there could totally be a dog-like carrier to the underworld in my eyes, especially if they’re ghost dogs, people see Black Dog symbols all the time and it’s ghosty, so naturally I’m pulled to a maybe here. 

The other side of that argument is do you believe there is a ghostly hunt roaming the mountains of Wales, well maybe is my answer there too - so maybe I’m leaning more towards yes? They’re a fascinating monster older than so many other mythological monsters we’ve covered and are yet to cover in just the British isles, that I’m pretty sure they’ll stick around either way I decide. 

I generally love the idea of the Wild Hunt, be that in Norse mythology or this one, the idea of this massive hunting party in the sky scooping up all the bad people destined to die that day? Love it and I’m all for a street cleanup, now we just need one that goes across the whole world like Santa picking them up to take them to the bad place. 

I also really like hellhounds as a mythical beast, I think they’re pretty cool and I think this one is no exception, and I like that they’re these different, white and red dogs rather than the stereotypical demon dog, it’s a nice change, ya know.

But what do you think? Did the Cŵn Annwn roam the Welsh countryside? Let me know on social media!

OUTRO: 

What a fun one to cover - again, please excuse the terrible Welsh pronunciations, I tried my best with the resources I had! I love a hellhound though, so I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did, and enjoyed going over to a much more understated mythos from the beautiful Wales this week.

I’m off from now until June because I am going to Disneyworld for two weeks, catching the opening of the new Epic Universe at Universal and I’m very excited. Anything mythical or monstrous will be captured on film and sent out via my social media I assure you, but there will be no episodes during the next two weeks.

When we’re back, we’re heading over to the US for a horrifying armless cryptid, the Fresno Nightcrawlers! Come debunk this alien phenomenon with me when we’re back on the 5th June!

For now, thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got loads of social media for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, and twitter is mythmonsterspod and I’m now also on BlueSky under mythmonsters. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk, and you can also find us on Goodpods, Buymeacoffee and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast too.

Come join the fun though and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.