GWIBER & Y DDRAIG GOCH, a tale of two dragons

SOME FOLKS SAY that the red dragon on the Welsh flag is a depiction of the dragon Y Draig Goch from this popular local legend. In the folklore of Wales, there are two versions of this story of two great dragons, Gwiber and Y Ddraig Goch. This one is the later, more popular, version dating from 1147 in the "Historia Regnum Britanniae" by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

During the fifth century AD, the pagan tyrant Vortigern and his Saxon hordes were fervent about conquering and claiming the whole of the British Isles. Upon arriving in Snowdonia in the Welsh mountains, Vortigern decided to build a castle fortress on a hill overlooking the Llyn Dinas River. But every morning, the stones that had been erected the day before were knocked down. Again, Vortigern would order his men to lay the foundations to build the fortress. Daily, the men would work hard to erect the proposed towers. Yet every morning, their work would lie in rubble.

Merlin, the sorcerer of King Arthur legends, then just a young boy, told Vortigern that the difficulty came from the two dragons that dwelt in a pool of water hidden within a cave beneath the site. Vortigern's men dug and found the cave with a pool, exactly as Merlin had said, and two dragons locked in combat within. One dragon, named Gwiber, was a white dragon and the other was a red dragon, named Y Ddraig Goch. As the men watched, the red dragon defeated the white dragon and drove him from the cavern through the hole that had just been broken into the underground cave.

According to Merlin, the white dragon represented the invading forces of Vortigern and the Saxons, and the red dragon symbolized the guardian of Wales and the cave itself corresponded to the British Isles. The prophecy of the dragons was that the invading Saxons would ultimately be defeated and driven from Britain (which never happened). It is not a great stretch of the imagination to understand why the Red Dragon of Wales, Y Ddraig Goch, would become the guardian symbol of Wales, popular in the local folklore and prominently displayed on the Welsh flag.

Interestingly, archeological excavations in the region during the mid-1950s found a castle fortress as described in the Historia Regnum Britanniae, including a pool inside a cave within the thick walls of the mighty stone structure.

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