Description Poem by the fourteenth century poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. Dafydd seems to combine the Tawny and Barn Owls in one bird. In reality, the Tawny Owl hoots, and two conversing owls produce the responsive sequence transliterated by Dafydd as ?Hw-ddy-hw? and by modern tradition as ?To-wit-to-woo?. The Barn Owl, by contrast, screeches. The line ?And taunt the hounds of the wild hunt? is literally, ?by Anna?s grandson,/ She incites the hounds of night? (Bromwich). Dafydd is referring to the otherworldly hounds of Gwyn ap Nudd, mentioned in ?Culhwch and Olwen?. These are comparable to the red-eared hounds of Annwn, the underworld of the Mabinogion, who watch for souls about to die, and lead the hunt for Arawn, King of Annwn. I have identified these with the hounds of the Wild Hunt, or furious horde, a ghostly phenomenon of folkloric significance throughout Europe, undoubtedly of ancient origin. Owls were almost universally maligned in British mediaeval culture, and their comparative inability to see by day was compared in the Bestiaries with the supposed spiritual blindness of the Jews. Dafydd, unusually, draws attention to the owl?s forward-facing eyes, which not only give it bifocal vision, but lend it a humanoid aspect. It is possible that Dafydd also had Blodeuwedd in mind, since he seems conversant with all the tales of the Mabinogion. Magically conjured out of flowers by Math and Gwydion, so that she can become the wife of Lleu Llau Gyffes, Blodeuwedd rebels and conspires to have him murdered, and is transformed into an owl for her pains. Philomel is the nightingale. Its distribution no longer spreads this far west, but as Dafydd is normally such an accurate observer, it is likely that it did so in the fourteenth century. For all of my paraphrases of the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym, see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/29424634/Dafydd-ap-Gwilym-Paraphrases-and-Palimpsests
