Rhiannon’s Birds whose enchanted song could
“wake the dead and make the living forget everything.”
The Christmas of 1956, I was five, my Irish-born grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly (b. 1893), broke with tradition and dragged home a bare madrone tree from up the hill instead of an evergreen Christmas tree, and decorated it with stuffed birds. The previous New Year’s Eve, my grandfather died, we left 131 Third Ave., San Francisco, and moved to the summer home in Forest Knolls, Marin Co., Ca.,
When we moved, it broke up our large three-generation family. Grandma said that my parents were divorcing, and I knew both my uncle Myles and my grandpa were dead of cancer.
I remember my grandpa standing at the front door, suitcase in hand, saying goodbye. I wanted to know where he was going. Uncle Myles went away and never returned. I was not ready for the answer of “heaven,” so I asked where else it was beside in the painted dome of the Star of the Sea church on Geary St. where I was baptized. He pointed up to the clouds in the blue sky and said something about angels. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me along with him.
Our first Christmas on our own, I wasn’t ready to let go of the idea of a real evergreen Christmas tree, so I trudged up the ridge in the rain and dragged home my own tree—a Douglas fir, more sprout than tree. We made another cross for the base and the two trees stood tied side by side, my tree was too weak to hold ornaments or lights, and the one angel we had placed on the tip, kept doing swan-dives off the top.
But the red-skinned madrone tree, with its lights, silver glass balls and songbirds, was strong enough to hold up the Christmas angel. So I climbed up the ladder and placed her at the crown of Grandma’s skeletal madrone tree. Her madrone tree was beautiful, with its bare branches, but it just didn’t feel right.
I remember she told me the reason why she used the stuffed birds on the tree, with a Welsh story of the queen-goddess Rhiannon’s Birds, and how their enchanted song could “wake the dead and make the living forget everything.” She said we were building a new life, starting with the bones of the tree. And the red-skinned madrone, peeling from the heat of the fireplace, showed us the heartwood under it—green with the promise of life to come in spring.
I believe my grandmother, out of grief, was acting unconsciously, and was unaware of the metaphoric significance of her actions in choosing the birds, but I was so upset, she had to come up with something to appease me. She believed that wild birds entering the house were a sure sing of death, but since death had already visited the house, perhaps it was projected inversion of sorts.
I was fiercely attached to tradition, even at five, I knew there were patterns for everything, and I must’ve thought bad things happened (death) because we’d broken a taboo of sorts and were being punished. Ann Ross in “Pagan Celtic Britain” (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1967), writes: “The birds of Rhiannon are associated with...the blissful Otherworld...where there is no death...or decay.” (p 288).
UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes
No comments:
Post a Comment