Mari Lwyd
I first encountered the Mari Lwyd in Susan Cooper’s children’s fantasy series, The Dark Is Rising. The Mari Lwyd is a ribbon-covered horse’s skull with the jaw attached to a stick so that the jaw can be snapped open and closed. It takes part in a ceremony at the end of the year where the Mari Lwyd party go from house to house (or pub to pub) demanding entry. The inhabitants of the houses deny the Mari Lwyd entry and a rhyming contest then takes place, until the Mari Lwyd is finally admitted and the party members are given food and drink. It seems to back to some pagan custom. Vernon Watkins, the poet from Swansea, wrote a long poem, The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, full of dark imagery, concerned with the living keeping the dead and the outer darkness at bay. Watkins wrote in a note to the Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, first published in 1941, “The carriers were usually a a party of singers, wits and impromptu poets, who, on the pretext of blessing, boasted of the sanctity of what they carried, tried to gain entrance to a house for the sake of obtaining food and drink. The method they used was to challenge those within to a rhyming contest. The inmates could keep them out so long as they were not in want of a rhyme, but when they failed to reply to the challenger the right of entry was gained. The signers would then being their horse’s head in, lay it on the table, and eat and drink with the losers of the contest.
This ancient custom, traceable perhaps to the White Horse of Asia, is still prevalent in many parts of Wales. The singers came every year to my father’s house; and listening to them at midnight, I found myself imagining a skull, a horse’s skull decked with ribbons, followed and surrounded by all sorts of drunken claims and holy deceptions.”
I have never seen a genuine new year Mari Lwyd ceremony myself, but I do remember one being enacted at the National Eisteddfod in Builth Wells a decade or so ago.
Here are two soundclips from the Alan Lomax recordings, one a brief reenactment of a Mari Lwyd ritual, the other a description. Be warned, they're about a megabyte each:-
Excerpt from a Mari Lwyd ceremony with David thomas
Margaretta Thomas describing the Mari Lwyd ceremony and singing some verses
The ritual is still celebrated in parts of south Wales, in some cases with a seemingly unbroken continuity, while in others it has been revived. The sinister aspects of the Mari Lwyd are usually represented in literature, but I’m sure that it was mostly a lot of fun for the participants.
Links:-
A good description of the ritual:-
http://fp.millennas.f9.co.uk/wmarilwy.htm
The Llantrisant Mari Lwyd
http://www.folkwales.org.uk/mari.html
General Description
http://artinwales.250x.com/MariLwyd.htm
Mari Lwyd in Google Images
http://images.google.com/images?q=mari%20lwyd&hl=en