She was made from flowers to love a man she never chose. When she chose another, they turned her into an owl.
In the medieval Welsh Mabinogi, two magicians gather the blossom of oak, broom and meadowsweet and conjure a woman: the loveliest bride ever seen, made for a hero his own mother had cursed to have no earthly wife. They give her no kin, no childhood, no choice. And when she loves a man of her own, her punishment is not death but something worse. She is turned into an owl, driven from the daylight and made to carry her disgrace in her name forever.
For eight hundred years she has been dismissed as a faithless wife who got what she deserved. This book tells a different story. Following her from the Fourth Branch to her afterlife in poetry, fiction and goddess worship, E.L. Hunter reads Blodeuwedd as one of literature's oldest made women, sister to Pandora and Frankenstein's creature, and asks what the tale never dared to: what do you owe a person you built to be a thing?
This is the defence she was never allowed to make.
