One of the Oldest Stories in the World

In the 13th century, a remarkable manuscript was penned in Wales. Within the book, a very unusual story managed to escape the fate of almost all other historical texts and was successfully preserved all the way to the present day. While anything surviving over 700 years is an achievement, such as my homunculus that the government recently told me to destroy, this is nothing compared to where this story may have come from. In this tale from medieval Wales, we're told about the exploits of a About halfway through the story, he and his men go across the Irish Sea to rescue his sister from an abusive marriage, and while we wouldn't expect a man the size of a mountain to have much difficulty swimming across the water, we're told it was particularly easy back then, because the sea was much narrower. Instead of a wide, deep body of water, we're told that at this time, the Irish Sea was instead significantly shallower and composed of only two rivers. Several historians have looked at this and made a suggestion that, if true, would be incredibly remarkable. That the story of Bran the Blessed, the ancient king of Britain, may contain a memory dating all the way back to the last Ice Age. The only question is, how ancient is this really? Did the medieval Welsh genuinely preserve a memory from thousands of years prior? And is this the only occurrence of such a story? The tale we're interested in is found in a collection known today as the Mabinogion. In this story, Bran's sister married the king of Ireland. However, their relationship soon soured because the king's men would not stop bringing up the insult he faced when he was in Wales. Apparently, if one of your brother's-in-law removes the eyelids from your horses, you just can't let it go. Despite being given compensation, the king decided the insult was too great and punished his wife, who had nothing to do with it instead. Upon finally hearing word of this, King Bran assembled an army from all across Britain and sailed for Ireland. On the opposite shore, some of the Irish king's swineherds were looking out to sea and soon rushed back to report a spectacular sight. My lord, they cried, we've seen a most extraordinary sight. There is a forest in the ocean where there were no forests before. Certainly a strange sight to see, but that wasn't everything, as we're also told there was a mountain accompanying it, with a high ridge and two lakes, one on each side. And to top it all off, this new landscape was not stationary, but instead moving straight towards them. The king of Ireland assumed, rightfully to be fair, that his wife would know what was going on, and she revealed the meaning behind this new, frightening sight. She told them that there was no forest, that the trees were instead thousands of masts belonging to the ships carrying the army from the whole of Great Britain, and that there was no mountain. The rock face instead belonged to her brother, the giant king Bran. The ridge was his nose, the lakes were his eyes, and he was furiously staring right at the shores of Ireland. I won't go into the entire story in this video, but to sum it up, Bran's army manages to defeat the Irish in a pretty typical medieval way. Can you guess what it was? Was it A, through chivalrous acts of bravery and daring? Was it B, through cunning tactics and superior military planning? Or was it C, by finding out that the Irish are raising an army of resurrected mute soldiers by throwing their dead into a small cauldron so the man that mutilated the horses and caused this whole mess in the first place throws himself in the cauldron and stretches out his arms and legs so that the cauldron explodes and now the Welsh can defeat the Irish and rescue Bran's sister? Yes, it's C. But while I think this story is brilliant, what we're really interested in today is the description of the giant king crossing the Irish sea. Due to his size, he wasn't able to fit in any boat, but that's okay as we're told, quote, Bran and his army sailed towards Ireland and the sea was not wide then. Bran waded across. There were only two rivers called the Lhi and the Archan. Later, the sea spread out when it flooded the kingdoms. Bran apparently, fascinatingly, had no trouble simply walking across. Of course, if he was the size of a mountain, we wouldn't expect it to be very hard, but the story shares with us the incredible detail of the sea being narrower and shallower back then and that it only later expanded. And what's so fascinating about a 13th century manuscript containing this detail is that it's true. 12,000 years ago, the earth looked very different. Australia had grown to be even bigger, Florida had actually begun to fight back against the ocean, the north was covered in sheets of ice, and according to this map, the USSR still existed. This was the Pleistocene, also known as the Ice Age, although looking at this map now, that actually seems to be inappropriate. Regardless, a key fact makes itself known to us. The sea levels were indeed lower back then than they are now, as the popular chemical hydrogen oxide took its parents' advice and left its preferred liquid role to take on a new, more solid career. But as the earth began to warm and the ice began to melt, humanity would have witnessed what we now call the Holocene Marine Transgression, making it sound like the ocean itself was fighting us. Plenty of land was lost during this transgression. The Island of Man was once connected to Great Britain and was presumably just called The Man back then, but about 9,000 years ago, the ocean finally decided to give it its namesake. About 8,000 years ago, probably one of the most famous examples of this occurred, as we lost the And finally, we can see this damage off the western coast of Wales. The historians Hasselt and Willis, analysing underwater maps of this area, note that south of the town of Aberystwyth, the sea seems to randomly deepen in a long, narrow channel, indicating that at some point, one of the rivers that empty out at Aberystwyth today would have once instead travelled southwards, along the now submerged soil. And to the north of this underwater riverbed, we can also see three unusual structures known as the Sarni. Sarnbadrig, Sarnybuch and Sarncumvellan are three long stone scars across the ocean, left behind by glacial deposits. They're mostly submerged nowadays, but you can still see them at low tide, and I find their construction oddly unsettling. Silent stone walls, not built by man, but by colossal sheets of ice, rapidly descending into the water and stretching for miles underneath. So then, we can now see why historians such as John Davis are excited over the mention of Brown crossing a sea that was shallower in the past, because the Irish Sea really was shallower in the past. As he puts it, these stories, quote, may represent very ancient folk memories of these changes. Of course, we don't know exactly when this story was supposed to take place, or when these memories could potentially be from. All the tale tells us is that the Irish Sea was which were presumably connected since you could apparently sail across them, and that that body of water was narrower than today. We don't know how ancient these folk memories could be, but as we've seen from the examples of Doggerland and the Isle of Man, if this story does indeed have roots on this era, then it would be thousands of years old. Now of course, I know what you're thinking, Mr Chronicles, who's that at my window? And while of course, no one can answer that, I can answer a different question. Are there any more examples of this? Is this story of Brown really the only memory surviving this long, turbulent time? Well, do you remember the rest of that quote, after the part about the sea being narrower and composed of two rivers? Later, the sea spread out when it flooded the kingdoms. I wonder what that's about? Before we start the video, I would like to thank today's sponsor, you. As we speak, 200,000 American dollars are being transferred out of your account and this is the goth map, the earliest map we have of just the island of Great Britain. Quite a specific qualifier, but interesting nonetheless. Gone were the days of Ptolemy butchering Scotland. Instead, these map makers had full access to England and their newly conquered Wales, giving us a remarkable historical insight into the landscape at the time. Of course, in standing with tradition, Scotland wasn't quite drawn as good as the rest of the island, but at least it's upright this time. But what's really amazing about the goth map is something that I often find is the case with historical topics. Sure, the broad picture can be interesting, but the truly fascinating aspects are always in the tiniest details. Single poems preserving the memory of long-destroyed kingdoms, paragraphs accidentally becoming the only record of churches that once dominated the landscape, and in this case, a colossal map, a massive undertaking, the first of its kind, that accidentally preserved the existence of two small, featureless islands in Ceredigion Bay. Islands today that no longer exist. Islands that, seemingly by the 16th century, no longer existed. Ceredigion Bay is a large, oddly shallow stretch of the Irish Sea. If you were really tall, you'd be able to stand up straight and touch the floor, although technically that could be true for any body of water on earth. But this bay really is surprisingly shallow. Around the Sarnai, there are broad tracts of sand that only reach a depth of about 10 meters, and for several miles out to sea, the depth only reaches a measly 20. So it's perhaps not surprising then that Wales, and particularly this region, are home to several stories of ancient kingdoms being lost beneath the waves. I made a whole video tracing the origins, millennia of cross-referencing and mistakes that came with these stories, so for now I'll keep it straightforward. The most famous of these tales is Cantraer Gwaelod, the lowland or deep Cantraer, the medieval Welsh equivalent of a county. Once ruled by a man named Gwyddno, this low-lying tract was one day overrun by the waves after a woman named Mererid released the fury of the sea after a feast, with the implication being it was her job to keep the waters at bay. Various versions of this story penned throughout the history of Wales tell us different details, but the broad strokes remain the same. Gwyddno ruled the kingdom vulnerable to the sea, and one day the raging waves rolled over and sank his lands. Poets and antiquarians would then pass this story down to us, with some blaming the wave on divine intervention and others simply acknowledging the tale. John Leyland in the 16th century remarked that this Cantraer Gwaelod had been cleanly devoured by the ocean, and Robert Vaughan in the 17th century mentions the large plain between the counties of Carnarvon, Cardigan and Pembroke, long since swallowed by the sea, and that Sarn Badrig was the remnant of its long flooded wall. My favourite mention of this sunken kingdom by far though has to be in the 16th century, when a poet named Lois mentions the sinking of Gwyddno's land and castle during an elegy for some reason, I guess to try and lighten the mood? But while Gwyddno was associated with the flooding of seemingly most of Ceredigion Bay, other kings would be given much smaller territories in their stories. One example is Teithí Hen, ruler of Annis Teithí Hen. This self-centred island was said to have been destroyed by the sea too, but in this case it sounds a lot more sudden and violent. We're told that no one, man or animal, escaped except for Teithí Hen and his horse, and that the whole experience left the old king traumatised for the rest of his life. He briefly appears in a medieval Arthurian tale known as Ceolach ac Olwen, where we're told that another curse has befallen him. Every time he tried to use a knife, the handle would fall off, resulting in him slowly starving to death. This guy really couldn't catch a break or just use a spoon. In the longer video I made about these kingdoms, I hypothesised that one of these lost islands could have been Annis Teithí Hen as they fit the admittedly very narrow criteria, but we really can't be certain about that. Moving north slightly, we have a king named Helig ap Glannog. His story has been extremely mixed up to the point that we basically have stories giving this same tract of land two different names and two different kings, but by the 15th and 16th centuries he was firmly associated with lands lost to the sea in North Wales. Specifically, an area known as Traith Helig off the coast of Annis Môn and Annis Glannog, making him the second king to seemingly have an island named after him, although unlike Teithí Hen, Helig's island actually still exists, albeit under a different name. Take that Teithí Hen, I bet Helig could use cutlery too. In the triads, we're told that his land was good, fertile and level, an excellent bit of foreshadowing in a triad about the kingdoms that the sea destroyed, and that it was also ultimately lost to the waves. Even further north, out of Wales entirely, we have the enigmatic lands of Rhedboi ap Rheged. While this name and Helig's mean they were the sons of a man named Rheged or Glannog, it also could potentially suggest a location. As we saw with Helig, his story soon became associated around the island that bore his alleged father's name, so could this be the case for Rhedboi too? Rheged was a Brythonic kingdom around modern day Cumbria, which could suggest that he lost lands to the sea in this region. As I mentioned earlier, about 9,000 years ago the Isle of Man was connected to Great Britain, giving us a very large area to potentially place the lost lands of Rhedboi. Finally, as I've already mentioned, we also have stories from the Isle of Man. These tales include the island once being larger, of lands appearing and disappearing off the coast, of fishermen hearing the sounds of sheep and bells under the waves, and my personal favourite, of the southern tip of Scotland once being only a stone's throw away from the island. As the historian Patrick Nunn points out, the distance between these two points is 40 kilometres, a little less than 25 miles today, so that story either involves the people of the Isle of Man being extremely good at throwing stones, or of the sea levels once being much lower, allowing the two landmasses to be closer together. In all, these stories seem to preserve a tantalisingly old memory, of a time when these lands were inhabited by men instead of fish. Some of these lands were lost to the waves slowly, others violently, some seem to actively hold back the water for a time, while others have had nothing survive except their alleged ruler's name. So, in the end, what does this all mean? The stories surrounding the Sumerian figure of Gilgamesh are considered by some to be the oldest recorded tales in the world. It is for that reason that I think the very lengthily titled Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld is one of the most fascinating ancient stories of all time, because it begins like this. In those days, in those ancient days, in those nights, in those remote nights, in those years, in those distant years. One of the oldest recorded stories in all of human history starts off with a callback to an even older time. A time when heaven and earth were separated from each other, a time before their people had tasted bread, two apparently equally ancient concepts. So next time someone says that something is the best thing since sliced bread, tell them to try saying the best thing since the separation of heaven and earth instead. It is impossible to know if the story of Bran the Blessed really did preserve an ancient memory that would be thousands of years old. You might think that it's downright impossible for that to even be the case, but it's not the only example. As we've seen, there are several stories in Wales about lands being lost to the waves, but they aren't the only ones. We've seen tales from the time when the island was larger and closer to Scotland. If Redvoy was connected to Ragged, then we have a lost story about the land around Cumbria being sunk beneath the ocean. This isn't even mentioning the tales from outside of Britain entirely. Haslet and Willis, for example, mention stories from the Aboriginal people of Australia, recalling a time where two land masses separated by water were once joined, or when people once waded and swam across water that would be too distant to swim across today. I don't want to portray this as a foregone conclusion, however, because not everyone agrees. Even Haslet and Willis, who support the idea of Bran's story containing elements of this ancient folk memory, don't believe Cantraer Gwaiilod contains the same elements. They suggest that the sudden destructive wave sounds less like a thousands of years long process and perhaps more of a sudden storm or tsunami. Ultimately speaking, we cannot know the origins of these stories. We can't know if Bran the Blessed crossing the sea thousands of years ago before it expanded and flooded the kingdoms when it was shallower and narrower than before really does recall a time when that was indeed true, or if this is all just a coincidence, a lucky guess, or just a plot device a bard once thought of, not knowing that thousands of years prior the sea really would have looked like how they imagined it. I think the historian John Davis said it best, that these stories may represent very ancient folk memories of these changes. But if that's correct, then this corner of Britain may have just barely preserved a really ancient and important piece of human history. This detail barely takes up a paragraph in the Mabinogion. Cantraer Gwaiilod's oldest incarnations are similarly short, Heligab Glanog's tale is regularly confused with the and that's to say nothing of the memories that have been forgotten entirely. Were there once stories of a land lost off the eastern coast of England? Were there once memories of men and women who slowly witnessed the land they walked across sink further and further below the waves? I think we can safely say that these stories probably did exist once, but like Doggerland, have sunk out of history. In 2023, scientists from the UK managed to map several ancient sunken rivers in this area and figured out whether they drain towards the North Sea or towards the newly forming English Channel. We can actually map these lands that fell beneath the waves thousands and thousands of years ago, we can chart the courses of the rivers that flow through here, we can see whether they drain to the north or the south, we can see that about 14,000 years ago peat began to form here and that about 4,000 years later the now narrow low land bridge had turned into a salt marsh. Scientists can and have calculated all of this, but we can never bring back what is lost. We call this place Doggerland because that's the best name we have for it, we don't have an equivalent of Cantraer Gwaelod, Traith Helig, the Sea or the Archan, that's gone. Whatever the people who lived here, who walked across here called it, is gone and it's never coming back. Whatever stories they may have told about this place or its ultimate destruction are gone and we have seemingly no hope of ever hearing them again. I hope you can see why then people are excited over the Mabinogion possibly preserving a piece of history from this time, because so much of it has been lost and will continue to stay lost forever. We can look below the waves, we can chart the rivers, map the lakes, study the soil, but we cannot look into the past. Time and time again, almost everything is lost. Unless an anonymous monk in the 13th century writes down a story, one that had been passed down an untold number of generations, one that may be just possibly accidentally preserved in a single tiny paragraph, what has the potential to be one of the oldest stories in the world? Thank you for watching.