Two things arrived together in a package from Amazon: a new Bluetooth mouse, currently in use, and leading Welsh poet Gillian Clarke’s new version of Y Gododdin, titled The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen.

I first encountered the poem in my early twenties — was it while shelving books in the college library, being puzzled by the Welsh title, and taking it off the shelf? Or a little later?

I had read some of the classics of heroic literature: the Iliad of course, Beowulf in my Old English class, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” and other Irish tales, the Arthurian stories — this was different.

There was no narrative. Something had happened, something heroic but disastrous. A force of three hundred or so post-Roman British cavalry (armor, flowing cloaks, no stirrups, Christian), probably accompanied by foot soldiers — maybe PIctish allies — attacked a larger Saxon/English force (Heathen) at a river ford in what is now northern Yorkshire. Almost all them died in three (four?) days of fighting, even while cutting deep into the larger force.

This happened in the late sixth century, when what is now Britain was a patchwork of kingdoms. “Gododdin” is the name of a tribe, with the “dd” pronounced as “th.”

The work is attributed to the famous Celtic British poet Aneirin, written with a “strict pattern of alliteration, syllabic stress and rhyme . . . an aide-memoir for listeners to hold the poem, recite and pass it on” (viii). It’s impossible to replicate that in English, hence the challenge for translators. Think of it as a garland of flowers, each one named for an individual warrior, a pair, or a trio.¹ Here is one:

Cadfannan

Before the cattle rose in the east, he raced to war,
his soldiers drilled, shield-shatterer.
Weapons rang before the bellowing herd,
belligerent Beli, border guard,

gold-torqued ox, mounted, grizzled warrior,
bone-headed boar at the dangerous border;
‘Lord save us who calls us to heaven,’
he roared, raising his javelin,

Cadfannan, praised soldier,
no doubting he trod armies under.

Or of one of the survivors, Cibno, the poet says

Cibno, wordless when war was done,
took communion on his return.

More than shields were shattered. Yet why do we care?

In 2007, I wrote a post titled “Mars and Venus Are in Love.” It was partly a response to a then-new book, A Terrible Love of War, by James Hillman (1926–2011), a psychologist in the lineage of Carl Jung, famous for titling another of his books We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse. Hillman’s “archtypal psychology” is far-reaching, and it spurns a lot of pop psychology clichés, like the whole idea of “growth“:

Hillman, with his profound intellect, disarming charm and a suffer-no-fools-gladly attitude has shaken up all that they were sure about (note-taking, diagnosing, medicating, dream work, the importance of cure) and takes on politics, architecture, soul-making and other topics that therapists thought were outside of their purview.

For all his often cap-A Archaic attitudes, however, Hillman was a man of Modernity, of the World War II generation, and like many he no doubt asked, “Why do we still have wars?” His book on war tries to answer the question, yet I felt in reading it that he was frustrated that there was no easy answer. In the end — back to polytheism — it more or less comes down to “We have war because Aphrodite desires Ares.”

As another of his readers asked, “What if Aphrodite were akin to Pan? What if she valued, not war, but Ares himself, a man-god, a relationship, a lover, yes, a lover, not a warrior?“

I have enormous respect for Hillman, although his path is arduous. Like some Witches, he suggests that a “soul” is not something you are born with, but something that you build through your life and works.

But sometimes I wonder if the answer to the war question is even more chthonic than “Venus Loves Mars.” Maybe it is simply that Earth needs blood. Humans need blood poetry, “a rousing rhyme for a bright-clad band.”