Storytelling Starters ~ Message of love
Saturday, January 24th, 2015
Unless you’re Welsh, you probably don’t know what special day it is tomorrow, 25th of January. Nor would you be likely to work out why on earth I’ve associated it with the birds I photographed in my local park this week.
The link:
Birds are messengers of love in mediaeval Welsh poems and many Welsh folk-songs. The messages they carry are known as llatai. And the 25th January is the day of Santes Dwynwen, Saint Dwynwen. It’s the Welsh equivalent of St Valentine’s Day. So it’s a day for perhaps commandeering a bird to deliver a love-letter for you.
But I have to admit that the story of Dwynwen is all a bit odd as that of someone who symbolises love. Love in her story is unrequited, it leads to terrible things and Dwynwen herself ends her life, by choice, alone in a nunnery of her own making on an uninhabited piece of land which gets cut off from the mainland whenever there is a high tide. (more…)