Episode 8: The Virgin, the Swine, and the Hobbit

"There is no glory in pitting oneself against any but a worthy foe." – Gwydion, from Evangeline Walton’s The Virgin and the Swine, aka The Island of the Mighty, 4th Branch of the Mabinogion.

Cover of "The Island of the Mighty" by Evangeline Walton, published 1970. Note the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series unicorn logo (upper right) and the double-B Ballantine Books logo (upper left).

Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 8 of Something About Dragons, “The Virgin, the Swine, and the Hobbit.” Content note before we get started. There’s some discussion about halfway through of sexual assault related to the plot of The Virgin and the Swine. It's toward the end of today's post. Take care.

Today’s stories harken somewhat back to earlier episodes of the podcast, examining a popular and well-known children’s book – i.e., The Hobbit, Or There and Back Again, published in 1937 – and a more obscure but influential piece represented by Evangeline Walton’s The Virgin and the Swine, originally published in 1936, Walton's book was also known as The Island of the Mighty when it was republished in 1970 as part of our favorite Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. So, on a surface level, you might see The Hobbit as a successor to something like The Wind in the Willows or Oz, with Evangeline Walton’s book as a successor to someone like Dunsany or Eddison.

Of course, that’s not quite right. The Hobbit is, well, The Hobbit. It’s the prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It’s why Tolkien wrote the sequel that became The Lord of the Rings. It’s also our first fiction entry from Mr. Tolkien himself in this history. The Hobbit established Middle-Earth, gave us the fantasy default “quest” plot, solidly established the medieval-ish secondary world as the “appropriate” setting for fantasy books, gave us the everyman viewpoint character, included dragons, elves, dwarves, and basically set the stage for the fantasy genre as we know it today.

Then again, that’s a bit of a teleological way of looking at it, isn’t it? It’s looking back, from our current vantage point, rather than addressing the literature as it existed in its context at the time of its publication. I’ve said it before, there are plenty of other authors and stories that could have become fantasy’s foundational text. In our timeline of genre history, we’re in the mid-late 1930’s right now. The Virgin and the Swine was published (originally) in 1936. Tolkien first published The Hobbit in 1937. No one knew what a massive cultural influence the sequel to a relatively obscure children’s book – well-selling but not Depression Era Harry Potter or anything – would eventually have. For the possibly dozens of novel-length fantasy literature fans in mid-Great Depression England, I doubt any of them would have identified either book as the progenitor of the most influential popular literary work of the 20th century.

And I think it’s important to remember that, at its core, The Hobbit is a children’s book. Is it a very good one? Yes. Is it of “literary quality”, to use an annoying phrasing. Absolutely. Newbery Medal material, unquestionably.

Sadly, The Hobbit lost in 1937 to Ruth Sawyer's Roller Skates, still a classic to this day.

But The Hobbit, in its time, was considered, marketed, and read as a children’s book. That’s not only a judgement of the book as it was marketed, either. Tolkien famously wrote it for his own children. My seven year old and I are currently reading it together. It has a style and a diction that are kid-friendly and aimed at a younger (tweenage-ish) audience. Were it published now, it would absolutely be marketed as YA. And probably optioned by the CW.

It’s also coming out of the tradition of other children’s literature that we have discussed – The Wind in the Willows, Oz – as well as other fantastical Victorian children’s literature we haven’t specifically covered, like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Rabbit. That’s where fantasy or fairy stories “lived” in the early 20th century. As a society, we were still drunk on modernism and The World of Tomorrow! At least higher society was. The plebs were mainlining Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and Burroughs. But most fantasy stories – if they had talking animals, magic, whatever – were considered children’s literature, and The Hobbit sits firmly within that tradition.

If you’re curious for an example, go give Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit a close read. You’ll see A LOT of overlap in the style and “voice” of the Potter and Tolkien.

A tale about a diminutive creature stealing from a miserly hoarder and then returning home.

Anyway, the interesting aspect of The Hobbit is that Tolkien melds this Victorian children’s literature with the late 19th century and early 20th century “romances”, things like Dunsany, George MacDonald, or Sarah Coleridge. This is what makes The Hobbit an influential work in its own right and NOT just an interesting precursor to The Lord of the Rings.

In addition, while he’s populating Middle-Earth with working class trolls and musically inclined goblins, Tolkien is also smuggling in real Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology into the plot and characters. The theft of the cup from Smaug’s lair by Bilbo, just to take one example, is famously lifted straight from Beowulf. The Hobbit melds fantastical children’s literature with something more literary, all while ransacking mythology for inspiration and ideas. It’s where truly “medieval” mythology or Medievalism makes its way into fantasy’s DNA.

Which is interesting to contrast it with The Virgin and the Swine, a book that is literally a retelling/adaptation of The Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh mythological cycle. It’s the Welsh Prose Edda or Kalevala or Iliad, if you want some more well-known parallels. Specifically, Walton adapted the fourth and last “Branch” of the Mabinogion, which she entitled The Virgin and the Swine, and which I personally think is far superior to the eventual Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series re-title, The Island of the Mighty. Walton’s title much more accurately captures how Gwydion sees his relationship with Arianrhod.  

Now, this podcast is mostly a literary history and analysis of the stories themselves, their historical context, influence, and contents. But it’s also a genre history, which means a history of publication, so let’s talk a little bit about Evangeline Walton and the publication history of her adaptation of the Mabinogion.

First things first, the Mabinogion is a likely mid-12th century narrative of Welsh folklore, based on a longer oral tradition. There are apparently scholarly debates over basically every word in that last sentence, but this is a modern fantasy genre podcast, not an academic mythology podcast, so we’re just going to leave it there. The Mabinogion: Probably written down first during the “High” Middle Ages, mostly likely from an oral tradition. Walton uses it as source text. Moving on.

The Mabinogion consists of four “branches”; Walton’s The Virgin and the Swine is an adaptation of the last one and mainly covers the exploits of Gwydion and his… “son” for lack of a better term, Llew. Walton’s retelling of the fourth branch of the Mabinogion was originally published in 1936 to minor acclaim. At the time, she also wrote narrative versions of the 2nd and 3rd branches of the Mabinogion, but they were never published due to paper shortages in 1940 related to the second world war and the sheer size of the books. These were called “epics” for a reason and paper shortages are something we’ll come back to in LOTR actually.

FYI, I only have one source for the "paper shortage" explanation of why Walton’s other adaptations of the Mabinogion weren’t published at the time. It’s an unsourced blog post from 2018, but from a usually accurate source. It rings true and makes sense, but I haven’t been able to track down confirmation or a secondary source for that information. Just a heads up.

Anyway, The Virgin and The Swine was moderately popular, but no publisher picked up the follow-up – which Walton titled The Brothers of Branwen. So, another thirty years passed until Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series republished The Virgin and the Swine as The Island of the Mighty in 1970 as part of their attempt to capitalize on the Tolkien craze.

Which worked! The Island of the Mighty was popular enough that Evangeline Walton got a new lease on life as an author, and Ballantine published The Children of Llyr and The Song of Rhiannon as part of the adult fantasy series as well, in 1971 and 1972 respectively. The Prince of Annwn, Walton’s adaptation of the earliest 1st branch of the Mabinogion, was published in 1974, after the completion of the Adult Fantasy Series proper, so without a Lin Carter introduction. On a personal note, The Prince of Annwn happened to be the only one of the tetralogy that I had read prior to this project.

Anyway, Betty Ballantine and Lin Carter were actually under the impression that Walton might be dead when they tried to find her for reprint rights. But she was alive and went on to a pretty interesting career and died in 1996 at the age of 88, a rather celebrated fantasy author.

Now, what I really want to talk about today, after several thousand words of set-up, is the influence of mythology on the fantasy genre. A cursory investigation of the literature would say, “yeah, fantasy is the continuation of thousands of years of supernatural storytelling, and obviously the genre is directly influenced by things like Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Mabinogion.” In a way, yes, but in a much more honest way, no. Not at all.

Where it all started. Kinda.

I think this complex intersection of ancient mythology and modern genre fiction is really well illuminated by The Virgin and the Swine and The Hobbit. Evangeline Walton is very obviously directly taking the mythology of the Mabinogion and rewriting it into a novel-like piece of modern literature, while retaining the characters and plot points. There is a direct influence, and you can also see future authors such as Marion Zimmer Bradley take inspiration from Walton’s approach in stories like the Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the tales of King Arthur from a feminist point of view. Mists of Avalon is another story we’re going to review in this podcast, probably a couple of weeks before the heat death of the universe.

We'll get here. Eventually.

So, yes, The Virgin and the Swine attempts to directly update a mythological text and directly inspired later authors to do the same. Direct link, but less a straightforward evolution of the epic format, and more of an adaptation.

However, much more frequently, you find in the fantasy genre something like The Hobbit, where mythological influences and pieces are woven into what is a very modern (small-“m”) story to give it a sense of depth and mythical connection. Robert E. Howard’s Kull is very obviously riffing on aspects of Beowulf. So are many Conan stories, for that matter. Zelazny does this as we’ll see in books like Lord of Light. Robert Jordan sprinkles little mythological easter eggs throughout The Wheel of Time. Modern urban fantasy – authors like Butcher, Hearne, Sean McGuire, Harrison, Hamilton – basically ransacks mythology worldwide for monsters of the…week? Sequel? Installment?

My broader point is that, even accounting for examples like Walton, the fantasy genre – the commercial product that really came into its own in the pulp era and later as genre “literature” the 1970’s and 80’s – isn’t really “descended” from earlier mythological stories in any real way. Fantasy literature isn’t the same thing as the oral folk traditions of earlier civilizations, even though superficial connections like supernatural creatures, quests, and larger-than-life heroes are obvious parallels. Instead, there’s a mining for inspiration and adaptations of earlier mythologies, using them to add gravitas and a sense of depth to modern adventure stories. As well as allowing safe metaphorical examinations of “real life” situations, but we’ll talk more about that in future episodes.

And I think one of the best ways to internalize this difference is to read Evangeline Walton’s The Virgin and the Swine, along with the rest of the Mabinogion tetralogy. Because real ancient mythology is F***ING WEIRD. The past is a foreign country, folks. The beginning of Walton’s book starts off with a quest to beg, borrow, buy, or steal (but mostly steal) pigs. Potentially supernatural pigs, but an epic quest of pig theft, nonetheless. Which is funny to ponder now, but honestly probably hugely important to post-Roman Welsh folks, who were so heavily dependent on agriculture, etc. To them, the Dark Lord probably really was recent migrants who hoarded swine.

It gets weirder.

Examples of the true ineffable weirdness from The Virgin and the Swine abound. For instance, following the sexual assault of Goewin, as punishment (because, hey, at least they were punished), Gwydion and Gilfaethwy – two brothers and nephews of the King – are turned into a breeding pair of, in order: deer, then pigs (poetically appropriate), and finally wolves. The first year Math (their uncle and the Welsh king) turns them into a stag and a hind, then a boar and a sow, and then…whatever word means opposite gender wolves. The magically transformed brothers also produce offspring each year, which Math turns into human children. Who are also demigods. Kind of.

There’s something here about the flexibility of gender and the nature of procreation that’s really interesting, but I can’t quite put my finger on. Anyway, these children go on to be part of the Welsh pantheon, as I understand it. So, magically transformed bestial incest demigods. Something you obviously see all over the modern fantasy genre today.

And there’s more! Gwydion’s sister-lover (Arianhrod) also magically produces a baby and an embryo (sort of…) after she steps over a magical stick. Gwydion then magically incubates said pseudo-fetus in a box at the end of his bed until it turns into a child. However, the first full-fledged child that fell out of Arianhrod when she stepped over the stick needed no incubation. That child hops up, runs into the ocean, and becomes a sea god. All this is leaving aside the curses that Arianhrod puts on Llew, her pseudo-child, or the magically supine uber-wizard Math. (Math is Gwydion’s uncle. Gwydion is the main character for lack of a better term. Dads don’t exist at first.)

Short version: true mythology is utterly, almost incomprehensibly WEIRD. I really enjoy Walton – especially the very lyrical writing style and the feminist(-ish) outlook – but it follows the “original” version of the Mabinogion very closely, including all the weird, borderline incomprehensible-to-modern-readers plot points. It really emphasizes to the reader how wildly different ancient Welsh culture is, compared to contemporary society (circa 1936, anyway).

It is inarguable that modern genre fantasy borrows, mines, lifts, rips off, nicks, appropriates, and steals earlier mythology. But the modern fantasy genre does not represent a continuation of that tradition. Mythology was mostly an oral – and later codified written – tradition. Beowulf, for example, is known from exactly ONE existing written copy, from around the year 1000, purportedly relating to 6th century Danish events. It was written down almost 500 years after the events it describes. That's an awfully long game of telephone.

Other mythological collections have similar histories. The stories within the four branches of the Mabinogion come from two texts, written down in the mid/late 14th century, give or take a couple decades. Both are, presumably, based on earlier oral poems and epic traditions. Even the Prose Eddas, written down by that Icelandic precursor to the Brothers Grim Snorri Sturluson and the basis for much of our collective knowledge of the Norse Gods, contains more obscure tales of the Gods specifically because Sturluson thought that everyone would already be familiar with more popular tales.

What we have now in the early 21st century, are mythological remnants, the fragmentary remains of a culture of storytelling that only barely survives because of happenstance and luck. What got written down? Why? Of what was written down, what made it through the centuries? Everything that survived was probably recopied dozens of times, before it was “discovered” and included as part of some mythological canon.

What geographic version of the story was chosen as the “official” one by later recorders? Which is a subtweet of the Brothers Grimm and hundreds of other folklorists.

How did the introduction of Christianity (within Western Europe, anyway) affect what was written down and when? Looking at you, Snorri Sturluson. And when Sturluson explicitly included many more obscure tales in the Prose Edda because he feared that his contemporaries would already know all the more popular stories, that means our modern-day Norse corpus consists mostly of B-sides. It’s like knowing Nirvana existed but only having access to Incesticide. 

Hell, the Iliad and the Odyssey are just what survives of a much larger Greek Epic Cycle which contained at least six other epic poems describing just the Trojan War.

Genre authors are, at best, reconstructing fragments and mixing the pieces in for flavor. Mythology is material. It’s ingredients. We are so divorced from the cultures that created the mythologies, that it’s baffling sometimes just to follow the weirdness. Ancient epics and mythology are not the direct ancestor to the modern fantasy genre in any meaningful sense.

I think that's a good place to take a break and pick back up with The Hobbit more specifically in the next post. There, we will discuss fantasemes, story structure, and how giants are mentioned half a dozen times in The Hobbit but play no role in The Lord of the Rings.