Rhonabwy

Rhonabwy is a searcher for the fugitive Iorwerth whose accidental sleep on a yellow calf-skin opens into the dream at the center of The Dream of Rhonabwy. He does not shape the vision through heroic feats: he travels through it as an observer, asking questions that expose a remembered cause of Camlan and receiving from Arthur’s ring the means to retain what he has seen. His movement from a miserable lodging into a richly colored, tumultuous past makes him both the dream’s witness and the condition of its survival.

Identity and Circumstances

Rhonabwy is among the men sent to search for Iorwerth, whose resentment at his brother Madawc’s greater rank and power had led him to refuse an offer of household office and make destructive raids into Loegria. Rhonabwy joins Kynwrig Vrychgoch and Cadwgan Vras on the search. Their commission places him in a practical, unsettled world of pursuit, far from the heroic court that will occupy his dream.

The three men arrive at the house of Heilyn Goch and find little comfort there. Its old hall is blackened with smoke, the floor is muddy with cattle’s water and dirt, and holly branches lie browsed underfoot. The hosts offer barley bread, cheese, and milk and water; the storm outside makes travel unsafe. Their sleeping place is coarse straw full of dust and vermin, under a ragged rug and a torn sheet. Rhonabwy’s companions eventually fall into a heavy sleep, but he cannot rest on the bedding. He moves to the yellow calf-skin stretched on the floor, and there he sleeps. The humble hide, prized as a privilege in the hall, becomes the threshold to the extraordinary scene.

The Dream and Its Witness

In sleep, Rhonabwy imagines himself travelling with his companions across the plain of Argyngroeg toward Rhyd y Groes on the Severn. A rider overtakes them on a chestnut horse, his yellow satin and green silk clothing matched to the horse’s green and yellow trappings. The rider’s horse seems to draw the travellers close whenever it breathes in and send them far away when it breathes out. Rhonabwy first flees in fear, then asks who the rider is. He learns that the man is Iddawc son of Mynyo, better known by the nickname Iddawc Cordd Prydain.

Rhonabwy’s questions turn the vision from spectacle toward explanation. Iddawc tells him that he had been a messenger between Arthur and Arthur’s nephew Medrawd before Camlan. Arthur had charged him to speak conciliatory words and seek peace; Iddawc instead delivered the harshest words he could devise, because he wanted battle. He says that this distortion stirred up anger and brought about the battle. He also recounts leaving three nights before its end, doing penance at Llech Las in North Britain for seven years, and then gaining pardon. Rhonabwy thus encounters not merely the pageantry of the past but a participant’s confession of responsibility and punishment.

The dream carries Rhonabwy and his companions onward to Arthur’s encampment by the ford. Arthur sits on a flat island with Bedwini the Bishop and Gwarthegyd son of Kaw beside him; a tall, dark-clad youth stands before him. Rhonabwy is present when Iddawc introduces the little men, and Arthur smiles at the contrast between their stature and that of the men who guarded the island in former days. Rhonabwy then learns from Iddawc about the stone in Arthur’s ring: its virtue enables him to remember what he sees, whereas without it he would remember nothing. In a dream crowded with vivid sights, this detail makes memory itself part of the action.

A Vision of Pageantry and Tumult

Rhonabwy’s role is to look, listen, and ask for bearings as the vision unfolds. He asks about the companies approaching the ford. Iddawc identifies one as the followers of Rhuvawn Pebyr, distinguished by their blood-red appearance and their record of serving in both the front and rear of danger. The next troop has riders whose bodies appear white above their horses’ chests and black below; one charges into the ford and drenches Arthur and those advising him. The scene’s precise colors and disruptive gestures place Rhonabwy among the witnesses to a world where ceremony and conflict stand side by side.

The dream’s action eventually rises into a tumult so great that Rhonabwy awakens. Kai has called on those who will follow Arthur to join him in Cornwall that night and challenged those who will not to oppose Arthur even during the truce. Rhonabwy finds himself again on the calf-skin, after having slept three nights and three days. His return is abrupt: the legendary gathering gives way to the same lodging from which he entered it, while the extraordinary duration of the sleep makes the vision seem to have occupied a world of its own.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The tale’s conclusion makes Rhonabwy’s experience central to its form. It is called The Dream of Rhonabwy, and the narrator says that no one can know the dream without a book, whether bard or gifted seer. The reason given is its profusion of colors: those of the horses, arms, panoply, precious scarfs, and virtue-bearing stones. The ring explains how Rhonabwy can retain what he witnesses within the dream; the book, in turn, preserves the account for others. His vision therefore depends on a chain of memory, from Arthur’s stone to the sleeping witness and onward to written telling.

Rhonabwy is less a conventional adventurer than a frame-bound witness whose questions disclose what the spectacle alone could leave obscure. His passage from the muddy floor and verminous bedding into Arthur’s crowded encampment puts shabby present circumstances beside an intensely visual heroic past. Yet that past is not presented as uncomplicated glory: through Iddawc’s account, the dream also reveals how a messenger’s calculated change of tone could help turn a peace mission into the road to Camlan. Rhonabwy’s significance lies in bearing both images—the splendor of the host and the remembered act that helped precipitate its catastrophe—back into a tale whose survival, the text insists, requires a book.