Yoshitaka Amano and the Animals of Annwyn
This article was inspired by the concept drawings for the ninja character in Final Fantasy Six.
If you’ve never played the game before, this article might not hold much interest for you. Perhaps we could get you stoked to play it? Final Fantasy Six is a renaissance masterpiece in 16 bits.
(And if you don’t know who Yoshitaka Amano is, we have an article on that, too.)
So, in the story-telling tradition of ancient Wales, the appearance of red and white animals is a sign that someone has crossed the threshold into Annwyn, the Otherworld. At least, that’s what happens in the first branch of the Mabinogi.
Specifically, the character in the poem encounters red and white hounds—
which is how Yoshitaka Amano depicted Shadow’s dog, Interceptor:
Did Amano read the Mabinogi poems? And if he did, what might it mean for our interpretation of his drawing? What might it mean for our interpretation of Shadow’s character or, taking it a step further, our interpretation of Final Fantasy Six overall?
Follow me as we walk in the Shadows of Annwyn to find traces of ancient Welsh poetry in Final Fantasy:
The Hart and The Hound
The Mabinogi is a collection of 11 poems that is thought to preserve what remains of the tribal memories of the early Welsh and Britonic Celts. The oldest layers of the Mabinogi are divided into four ‘braches’ because that’s what the original redactor called them within the text.
In the Mabinogi, Annwyn is the name of the ‘otherworld’.
Unlike the Elysium and Tartaros of the Greeks, the entrance to Annwyn isn’t to be found under the earth. Nor can it be found atop a mountain like Olympos, or beyond the rainbow bridge of Bifrost (the Northern Lights) like the Valhalla of the Norse.
Rather, it would appear the entrance to Annwyn is everywhere and nowhere, all at once. While this theme is reflected in the Grail Quest of later European medieval literature, the Shambhala of Tibetan Buddhism seems like a closer parallel.
Annwyn is a world that exists alongside our own as a mist-shrouded mirror and a shadow. It is a land of the blessed whose entrance is stumbled upon only by the worthy, and always by accident. Annwyn eludes those who seek it and seeks those who are destined to find it, exercising a magical influence over the affairs of mortal man that only poets and seers can grapple with.
The Otherworld also has its own animals.
Here is translator Patrick K. Ford addressing the animals of Annwyn in his introduction to the first branch of the Mabinogi:
‘In our tale, Pwyll is [] hunting when he becomes separated from his companions. No other territorial markers signal the entry into the Otherworld, nor is the return from the Otherworld indicated by any precise demarcation. The only indication for the audience that the Otherworld is at hand is the color of the other hunter’s hounds, for red and white are the colors of the animals of the Otherworld in Celtic tradition.’
As harbingers of the Otherworld, red and white animals are associated with another order of being. This association was so strong that it was still ringing through the literature of Britain and France long after the heroes and gods of the Mabinogi had faded from popular memory; probably because living people could sometimes spot the red and white animals of the Otherworld at the edge of the forest in their own time:
Sir Thomas Mallory’s iconic 15th-century prose collection L’morte D’Arthur is considered by many the definitive ‘Arthurian Romance’. In it, the appearance of a pure white stag at the wedding feast of Arthur and Guenevere becomes the pretext for a great hunt -and an even greater adventure. The disastrous results of the hunt could be read as a dark omen foreshadowing the fate of the entire company of the Round Table.
As a staple of the medieval Arthurian tradition, the hunt of the white stag is read as an allegory for the spiritual quest. The animal is a messenger, an initiator; but it always frustrates its most ardent pursuers. The quest for Shambhala, the Otherworld, and the Holy Grail are the same; like water, it always slips from grasping hands.
But the red and white animals we encounter in the first branch of the Mabinogi are not deer at all. Instead, they are hounds- animals that have a long and rich association with ideas of the underworld and the afterlife in other traditions (Cerberus, the hellhounds of Papa Legba and Robert Johnson, the jackal-headed Anubis):
‘Toward the middle of the clearing, the pack chasing the stag overtook it and bore it to the ground. [Pwyll] looked at the color of the hounds, not bothering to look at the stag, and of all the hunting dogs he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs the color of these. Glittering bright white was their color, and their ears red: the redness of the ears glittered as brightly as the whiteness of their bodies. Thereupon, he came to the dogs and drove off the pack that had killed the stag, feeding his own pack on it.
As he was feeding the dogs, he saw a horseman coming up behind the pack on a large dapple-grey horse, a hunting horn about his neck, wearing a pale grey garment for hunting gear. The horseman came to him, saying the following… ‘
The Lord of the Otherworld is attended by his red and white hounds, and that’s how Shadow, the ninja assassin in 1994’s Final Fantasy Six, is presented in Yoshitaka Amano’s original concept sketches for his character.
There’s his dog Interceptor, striped like a candy-cane and looking every bit like a psychedelic goth-pop Hound of Annwyn.
Yoshitaka Amano’s art has this unsettling, almost Luciferian vibe to it that comes through stronger in some places than others. For that reason, I find this presentation of Shadow astride the Hound of the Otherworld somewhat jarring. Are those horns, bro? Here Shadow looks like a spirit-man transgressing the boundaries between dimensions.
If you’ve made it this far and never played the game, Shadow is a ninja mercenary with a chip on his shoulder. The first time you see him, he’s sitting with his Doberman at a bar in Niccea. Edgar pulls you aside to issue this dire warning:
As I delve deeper into the lore behind Shadow and Annwyn, each using the other as a frame of reference, the ‘otherworld’ and the underworld began to look functionally identical— it’s a big idea, so we’ll have to handle it in pieces.
Our first step is to pull Shadow out from the ‘shadows’ cast by his brooding demeanor. To do this, we’ll apply the psychoanalytic method of dream analysis.
Prepare to enter the mind of a ninja assassin, a stone-cold killer.
The Five Dreams of Shadow
Because men would rather walk the earth in silence cosplaying a ninja assassin than go to therapy,
the larger story looming over the daunting figure of Shadow begins to unfold through no volition of his own.
it’s only through a series of dream sequences that only trigger if Shadow is in your party and you sleep in the right beds that Shadow’s mask begins to slip, and we catch a glimpse of the man behind it.
There is a rumor that there are seven dreams, but everyone I’ve talked to has only ever seen five of them.
The dreams don’t occur in any chronological order; and, again, they only happen if and when you trigger them. It’s all very puzzling, and only serves to deepen the enigma of Shadow until you’ve gathered all of them. When all the pieces are in place, we are left with few questions and a lot of sadness.
Dream #1: Train Robbers
Linearizing the dreams into a narrative with an end and a beginning, we first learn that in a past life Shadow was called Clyde, and Clyde had a friend named Baram. After their first successful train robbery, Baram comes up with ‘Shadow’ as a name for their two-man criminal organization:
Right away, we notice a few things.
The environment this takes place in is identical to the Haunted Forest environment, and the trail that leads to the Ghost Train. The Ghost Train scenario is the first major adventure where Shadow is featured as a party member.
After criss-crossing the map in our airship, something else stands out: there are no trains to rob anywhere in the world. Besides the mine cart ride in the Imperial Capital, the Ghost Train that ferries the souls of the dead to the Other Side is the only train anywhere in the game.
Did Shadow’s troubles begin when he and his partner made an illegal trespass into Annwyn?
Dream #2: The Death of Baram
Their life of crime has backfired. Baram is dying, bleeding out like a punk. Baram demands that Clyde put him out of his misery before their pursuers find him and do worse but Clyde can’t go through with it.
The background environment here is the same one we saw when Cyan and Sabin washed up in the Veldt after leaping off the waterfall at the end of the Ghost Train scenario. Interestingly, the waterfalls edge is exactly where Shadow first leaves our party. Perhaps he doesn’t want to revisit another painful memory.
What could he and Baram have been trying to steal that got Baram killed? And why does everything seem to tie back to the Ghost Train, a vessel bound for the other side of reality?
It was probably a bit of laziness on the part of the developers (why create whole new backgrounds when we could just repurpose old ones?) but the recursivity leaves a surreal impression.
Dream #3: Interceptor
After Baram’s death, Clyde seems to have gone into a fugue state. He wakes up in Thamassa, the City of the Mage Warriors, unsure of who he is or how he got there. Beneath the tree at the center of the town square he is ‘intercepted’ by a dog; the Doberman later known as Interceptor.
The dog fetches its owner:
Dream #4: Leaving Thamassa
I think Clyde and the Thamassan woman that found him started dating.
But Clyde couldn’t settle into the domestic life. He would rather leave than see his violent past catch up with those he loves. It would appear the dog left with him.
Shadow is in our party the first time we visit Thamassa.
Here we meet Relm, a 10-year old girl who likes to draw that is being raised by her grandfather. According to an NPC in town Grandfather Strago is not related to Relm at all; instead, he is a good man who stepped in to raise an orphan.
Interceptor is usually as standoffish as his master but runs to Relm the first time they are in the same room together. Shadow keeps his distance; still, the player can’t help but suspect something is going on here.
The relic ‘Memento Ring’ drops a tantalizing hint. The Memento Ring imparts ‘the love of a departed mother’, and only Shadow and Relm can equip it.
In a later interview, the developers confirm what fans had long suspected; Shadow is Relm’s father.
Dream #5: Baram Returned
In a din of anxiety-inducing 16-bit klaxons, Clyde is isolated against a solid black background and confronted by the ghost of Baram. The face of Clyde’s dead partner haunts the darkest corners of his darkest dreams, and the ghostly figure beckons him to join him in death:
Arranged in this sequence, Clyde’s dreams begin with a scene that implies the Ghost Train and end with the summons of the restless dead.
The former Clyde is ‘shadowed’ by profound guilt and the fear of being an albatross to those close to him. He got his best friend killed, and in consequence developed an aversion to companionship.
In a dark satori, he has cultivated the virtues of non-attachment we observe in those with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Leaving a broken family in his wake, he drifts off to cope in his own way— by becoming a mercenary and leaving behind him a trail of bodies. It’s as if Baram’s dying breath carved into his psyche a wound so deep that seeking death became his only comfort.
After the world ends, we must gather our friends from the far corners of a blasted realm. We find Shadow fighting in the Collessium; he’s got one foot in the world and one foot in the grave, existing in a half-life between states. He is, as ever, a chronic loner and a battle addict.
This isn’t like the Annwyn of Pwyll— the Otherworld Shadow belongs to sounds closer to hell. He is a shadow of himself: a broken man in a world of inextricable pain. But wait a minute. What if it isn’t as simple as that?
He has become de-personalized, and his entire life is a disguise. It is never revealed who is he trying to run from— think about it, Baram was absolutely terrified of something, someone— and Shadow blacks out his old identity, the person he was is functionally dead and gone. There is no hint anywhere in the game that Clyde will ever be recovered. Gone is Clyde, here is Shadow.
What is Shadow running from?
What is it he says when you meet him outside the Old Man’s house on the Veldt…?
The combined weight of the symbolism surrounding Shadow suggests that the Hound of Annwyn is indeed the Hound of Hell, at least in Yoshitaka Amano’s estimation. Extrapolating, Shadow becomes the grim hunter who rules in the land of the dead.
On close inspection, the Celtic Otherworld is closely linked to ideas of the afterlife. It’s just not an association the Mabinogi wears at the surface. Well, it does, but it’s easy to miss without some context.
Deeper Into Annwyn: Ambrose, Vortigern, and the Dragons of Dinas Emrys
The collected Mabinogi exists in whole form in only two manuscripts:
The White Book of Rhydderch (Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch) dating from about 1350, and
The Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest) dating from about 1382–1410.
(Red and white again…)
The material preserved in the Mabinogi is older than either manuscript. How old exactly is a matter of ongoing debate; the earliest scholarly estimates reach back to the 1100s. But we can trace the red and white animals of the Welsh Otherworld at least as far back as the Historia Brittonum.
Attributed to an unknown scribe called Ninnias (who may or may not have existed), Historia Brittonum is a fascinating work that synthesizes fact and legend to lay down the early history of the settlement of Britain. It’s contents date to about 828, making it several hundred years older than our copies of the Mabinogi.
Ninnias’ book is the first to describe the exploits of a leader named Arthur; rather than being a king, the Arthur of the Historia Brittonum is portrayed as an influential soldier. Historia Brittonum is also the first work to describe the Dragons of Dinas Emrys, another staple feature of Arthurian legend.
King Vortigern has taken Saxons exiled from their homelands into his confidence, going so far as to exchange the kingdom of Kent for one of their daughters (unbeknownst to the British leader in Kent, of course). Vortigern further reveals his vile nature when he fathers a child by his own daughter. The bishop St. Germanicus comes to chastise him for his uncleanliness, and Vortigern is humiliated.
Taking council, Vortigern is advised to retreat to some remote providence and build a citadel to defend himself; both from the wily Saxons and the Britons he has alienated. A suitable location for Vortigern’s stronghold is scouted in the mountains of Hemerus, but construction is halted by an uncanny happening- the walls keep falling down.
Vortigern turns again to his wise men. They say a child with no father must be sacrificed, and his blood sprinkled on this spot. When such a child is found and taken up to the construction site of Vortigerns Mountain Fortress, the child humiliates Vortigerns councelors:
"I desire to question your wise men, and wish them to disclose to you what is hidden under this pavement:"
they acknowledged their ignorance.
"there is," said he, "a pool; come and dig:" they did so, and found the pool.
"Now," continued he, "tell me what is in it;" but they were ashamed, and made no reply.
"I," said the boy, "can discover it to you. there are two vases in the pool;" they examined, and found it so.:
Continuing his questions,
"What is in the vases?" they were silent: "there is a tent in them," said the boy. "separate them, and you shall find it so;"
This being done by the king's command, there was found in them a folded tent.
The boy, going on with his questions, asked the wise men what was in it?
But they not knowing what to reply, "There are," said he, "two serpents, one white and the other red. unfold the tent;"
they obeyed, and two sleeping serpents were discovered; "consider attentively," said the boy, "what they are doing."
The serpents began to struggle with each other; and the white one, raising himself up, threw down the other into the middle of the tent, and sometimes drove him to the edge of it. and this was repeated thrice.
At length the red one, apparently the weaker of the two, recovering his strength, expelled the white one from the tent; and the latter being pursued through the pool by the red one, disappeared.
Then the boy, asking the wise men what was signified by this wonderful omen, and they expressing their ignorance,he said to the king, "I will now unfold to you the meaning of this mystery. The pool is the emblem of this world, and the tent that of your kingdom: the two serpents are two dragons; the red serpent is your dragon, but the white serpent is the dragon of the people who occupy several provinces and districts of Britain, even almost from sea to sea: at length, however, our people shall rise and drive away the Saxon race from beyond the sea…
The child then claims the spot as his own, sending Vortigern away. Amazed, Vortigern asks the child’s name. He says he is Ambrose, son of a Roman Consul.
I wanted to render the passage to you in full because of how often it’s often misrepresented. If I had moved forward working from secondary sources, I would have told you Merlin saw some dragons wrestling.
It is likely what Ambrose unearthed was a hibernacula of European vipers.
These animals winter in frost-free locations, often underground, and their mating could be construed as a wrestling match.
European vipers, which can be found in northwestern Wales and the region of Gwynedd, where Vortigern tried to build his citadel, exhibit sexual dimorphism. Males are often white, and females are often red:
Once again, the braiding of red and white emerges as an emblem of contact with another realm.
Nennius’ story of Ambrose and Vortigern connects the red and white of the Otherworld to the subterranean realm and the art of prophecy, demonstrating that Greco-Roman ideas of the underworld (think Odysseus sacrificing lambs at the mouth of the Underworld to evoke the spirit of the prophet Tiresias) may have hybridized with the Welsh notion of the Otherworld with the merging of classical and Celtic tradition under the banner of Christianity.
But there are clues that these ideas had always been there, long before the Latin scribes came to England bearing copies of Virgil’s Aeneid.
I suspect that the body of myths compiled in our current form of the Mabinogi is far more ancient than linguistic analysis will allow us to establish. In the Mabinogi material, prehistoric tumulus burial mounds frequently act as bridges between this world and the other.
The Mound of Arberth
When Pwyll first meets his future wife Rhiannon, the living avatar of continental horse goddess Epona, he sits atop the ‘throne mound’, or gorsedd, called Arberth.
It is well-established that the prehistoric Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Britonic Celts interned their dead in burial mounds. Several of these are famous tourist sites, such as Bryn Celli Ddu on the Welsh island of Anglesey, or the Grey Cairns at Camster. This burial tradition continued into the era of the Anglo-Saxons, and tumulus mounds are such a prominent feature of the English landscape that they are referenced in the barrow downs of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, as no mythology of the region would be complete without them.
The ‘throne mound’, or gorsedd, called Arberth plays a prominent role in the unfolding of the action of the Mabinogi poems: it acts repeatedly as a gateway to the Otherworld.
Atop Gorsedd Arberth is where Pwyll meets his future wife Rhiannon (yes, that Rhiannon), the living avatar of the continental horse goddess Epona, in the first branch of the Mabinogi.
Pwyll dies after a long and full life at the end of the first branch, and Pwyll’s son Pyderi takes center stage in the second one.
The second branch deals with a war of attrition between the Irish and the Welsh that destroys all but two people in Ireland, and only seven of the Welshmen return home.
But before returning to Wales, the heroes have an eighty-seven year layover in the Otherworld.
The dying warrior Bedigeidfran instructs his friends to decapitate his body and bury his head in the White Mound of London facing south, which somehow permits the seven returned Welshmen access to a seven-year feast of unending plenty at Harlech where they are treated to the finest bird-songs, and an eighty year stay in Pembroke where they entered paradise while still in the body:
‘ of all the grief they had witnessed and experienced, they had no memory of it or of any sorrow in the world. And there they spent eighty years; they were not aware of spending a more pleasurable nor lovelier time than that ever. None could tell by the others that any time had passed since they came, nor was the presence of the head any less comfort to them than when Benigeidfran had been living with them.’
This sounds a lot like the Greek Elysium; the realm of the blessed where virtuous souls congregate after death.
Inexplicably, our heroes return to their kingdom after almost a century and find that their realm is still in tact, and their rulership is still respected. No one even mentions how strange it is that Pyderi’s mother Rhiannon is still alive. In fact, the third branch opens with Pyderi negotiating a marriage between Mandawyn and Rhiannon. This accomplished, Pyderi and his wife Cigfa ascend the Gosedd Arberth with Mandawyn and Rhiannon to enjoy a royal picnic. An uncanny mist settles over them, and the couples find they are the only people left in all the land.
After a string of mysterious incidents that could only be described as the highest sorcery, it turns out that an Emissary of the Otherworld, Llwyd son of Cil Coed, has placed this enchantment on their lands. Once again the primacy of the Otherworld is shown; it’s denizens have the power to contravene the most fundamental laws of the world we know.
Because the mounds from which the Welsh heroes most frequently interacted with the Otherworld were grave sites, there is an implicit link between the Welsh Otherworld and the afterlife.
Officially, no one knows where the Mound of Arberth is located, or if it ever really existed.
Greg Hill at Rigatona.net (Rigatona is another name for the horse goddess represented by Rhiannon) gives two possible locations: Crug Mawr near the river Teifi or, more likely, Camp Hill near the Welsh hamlet of Narberth.
The mound at Camp Hill is on private property with no public access, but here’s a lovely picture of Crug Mawr:
Bonus Level: The River Clyde
I lured you here with nerd lore about everyone’s favorite ninja and then dropped you face-first into a niche body of medieval literature that even hardened mythologists have a hard time giving a shit about (Tolkien himself described the mythology of England as ‘very poor’).
If you made it this far and are wondering how it all fits together, welcome to the Dungeon— I don’t call it a labyrinth for nothing! Sometimes we hit dead ends; but how’s this for an interesting coincidence?
The name ‘Clyde’ occurs in the Mabinogi, albeit in an ancient dialect.
A certain ‘Kingdom of Gwawl Fub Clud’ is mentioned in the first branch.
From www.nantlle.com,
‘‘Gwawl”, according to the University of Wales Dictionary means:
1.The Vallum (Roman wall) between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde - the Antonine Wall, not Hadrian’s Wall
2.Man
3.Light
But his last name more than likely refers to the River Clyde in Scotland. Therefore he was one of the people of the Old North, that is to say, they were Britons, like the Welsh.’
In the first branch of the Mabinogi, Pwyell wanders into the precincts of the Lord of the Otherworld and helps the King of Annwyn conduct a successful campaign against his enemies, earning the mortal and human Pwyell the title ‘Head of Annwyn’.
There is a true Otherworld in Final Fantasy Six: the realm of the Espers.
The espers are magical beings. In order for a human to have inherent magical powers, they must be genetically related to the espers. All of the magic-users in Thamassa are descended from human-esper pairings. This includes Relm; because her father Clyde is an outsider, we can assume her esper strain comes from her mother. This is not unlike the avatar of Rigatona mating with Pwyell to produce Prince Pyderi, but Pyderi wasn’t couched in tragedy with a dead mother on one side and a deadbeat father on the other.
If there’s a deep cut in all this regarding the ancient history of the Scottish and the Welsh, I don’t know enough about the subject to see it. I wanted to raise the issue in case you might be able to draw an inference.
Did you know?
It makes makes your research look more respectable when you include citations!!
http://www.nantlle.com/mabinogi-saesneg-places-mentioned-in-the-first-branch.htm
http://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2018/01/red-and-white-otherworld-animals-in.html
https://gorsedd-arberth.blogspot.com/2014/07/crug-mawr.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum
Gorsedd Arberth
The Long Barrow Mystery
