The Hounds of the Otherworld

On a winter night in the Welsh hills, when the wind has dropped and the sky is clear and hard with stars, you may hear hounds hunting.

It is a lovely sound at first. A pack in full cry, far off across the valley, the voices rising and falling as they find the scent and lose it and find it again. You might stop on the road to listen. You might wonder who is out hunting at this hour, and in this cold.

Then you notice that the sound is coming from above you.

These are the Cŵn Annwn: the hounds of Annwn, the Otherworld of Welsh tradition. Annwn is not quite Hell and not quite Heaven. It is the other place, close beside our own, ruled by its own lords, entered by the dead and, very occasionally, by the living who stumble through its doors.

The hounds belong to its king.

They are very old. They run through the first branch of the Mabinogi, the great medieval collection of Welsh tales. There, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is out hunting in the forest when he sees a strange pack bring down a stag in a clearing. He has never seen dogs like them. They are a brilliant, shining white, and their ears are red.

Pwyll drives them off the kill and sets his own hounds on it, which is a bad mistake. The pack belongs to Arawn, King of Annwn, and Pwyll must spend a year and a day in the Otherworld to make amends.

That is where the hounds begin. Over the centuries that followed, as the old tales were told and retold by firesides across Wales, they changed. They left the forest clearing and took to the air. They ceased to hunt stags. And they began to hunt something else.

In the folklore of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Cŵn Annwn are heard most often in winter, around the turning of the year, and most often on the high ground: on the mountains, over the moors, along the lonely roads between valleys. Some called them Cŵn Wybir, the sky dogs. Some said they followed the paths that funerals would take. Some said they were the hounds of Gwyn ap Nudd, another lord of the Otherworld, who rides out on stormy nights to gather souls.

For that is what they hunt. The souls of the dying, on their way out of the world. To hear them was an omen. Someone close by would not see the spring.

There is one more thing the old people knew about the hounds, and it is the thing that turns the blood cold.

When they are far away, their cry is loud: deep and full, like great hounds baying across a valley. As they draw nearer, the sound grows fainter. Softer. Quieter, the closer they come, until it is little more than the yapping of small dogs, then a whimper, then almost nothing at all.

So if you are out on the hills on a winter night, and you hear the hunt in full cry, loud and wild and far away, you are safe. It is somebody else’s night.

It is when the sound becomes faint that you should worry.

And when you can hardly hear them at all, they are already beside you.