The dragons of Dinas Emrys

The dragons of Dinas Emrys are the hidden cause of one of the three plagues afflicting the Island of Britain: a shriek that returns every May-eve and leaves people and the natural world barren. Llevelys explains that the cry comes from two dragons fighting beneath the island’s surface; Lludd’s careful capture and burial of them ends the terror and gives the place where they are concealed its new name.

The May-eve Plague and Its Cause

The second of the three plagues is a shriek that sounds over every hearth in the Island of Britain on May-eve. Its effects reach beyond fear: it drains men of their color and strength, causes women to lose their children, and makes young men and maidens lose their senses. Animals, trees, earth, and waters are left barren. The recurring cry is therefore presented as a calamity that reaches through the whole community and its landscape.

Seeking counsel from his brother Llevelys, King Lludd learns that the shriek is produced by a dragon native to the island fighting a dragon of foreign origin. The island’s dragon is making the fearful outcry as it struggles against its opponent. This explanation turns an apparently indiscriminate plague into the audible sign of a specific, ongoing conflict.

Llevelys’s Test and Instructions

Llevelys tells Lludd to have the Island of Britain measured in length and breadth and to dig at its exact center. There, Lludd is to place a cauldron filled with the finest mead and cover it with satin, then keep watch in person. The dragons will first appear as terrifying animals, then take dragon form in the air as they fight. Exhausted by their struggle, they will finally become pigs and fall onto the satin, pulling it and themselves into the cauldron.

The trap depends on the dragons’ own actions: they drink all the mead and fall asleep. Llevelys instructs Lludd to wrap the satin around them at once and bury them, still confined, in a stone chamber at the strongest place in his dominions. As long as they remain secured there, he says, no plague will come to the island from elsewhere. The plan converts the combat that produces the plague into the means of containing it.

Lludd Captures the Dragons

Lludd follows the directions and discovers that the measured center of the island lies at Oxford. He has the ground dug there, sets the cauldron in the pit, fills it with the best mead available, and lays the satin over it. Keeping watch himself, he sees the dragons fight, grow weary, descend onto the covering, and sink with it to the bottom of the cauldron. After they drink the mead and sleep, Lludd folds the satin around them.

He carries out the final step by hiding the bound dragons in a stone chamber at the most secure place in Snowdon. With the dragons buried, the fierce outcry ceases in Lludd’s dominions. The account thus gives the solution a concrete sequence: measurement locates the trap, mead lures the combatants into sleep, and the covering becomes both snare and binding.

Dinas Emrys and the Resolution

The place where Lludd conceals the dragons is thereafter called Dinas Emrys; before this, it was called Dinas Ffaraon. The change of name marks the site through the event that gives it its narrative importance: the capture of the creatures whose struggle had afflicted the island. The ending resolves the plague not by defeating one dragon in battle, but by enclosing both rivals together and removing their conflict from the living world.