Elen of the Ways: The Welsh Roads Behind the Antlered Goddess

Elen of the Ways with branching antlers and a flowing cloak, looking back along a winding stone path through rocky hills.

Elen of the Ways is an antlered goddess of paths and the living land in modern Pagan practice. Her Welsh counterpart is Elen Luyddog, the woman who has roads built across Britain in The Dream of Macsen Wledig. The roads have a medieval pedigree. The antlers do not. Their modern form is documented in the 1980s work of Caroline Wise and Chesca Potter, as Wise describes in her own account.

It is easy to see why the two figures have merged. A woman waiting at the end of a dream, an emperor who must cross the sea to reach her, and old roads still carrying her name give the imagination plenty to work with. The sources make her more interesting than that, because the medieval Elen has more to do than stand among trees wearing antlers.

Elen Luyddog Elen of the Ways
Source The Dream of Macsen Wledig, a medieval Welsh tale Caroline Wise's modern account; monograph published in 1986
Appearance White silk, red gold, a jeweled frontlet Antlers, often pictured among trees
What she does Marries an emperor, claims strongholds, has roads built Guards trackways, leys, and reindeer migration routes
Animal None Female reindeer

Who is Elen in Welsh legend?

In The Dream of Macsen Wledig, one of the tales collected as the Mabinogion, the emperor of Rome falls asleep while hunting and dreams of a woman on a golden chair in a castle far away. His messengers find her at Aber Saint, the castle at the river mouth at Caernarfon. She is Elen, daughter of Eudaf.

They offer to take her to Rome. She answers that if the emperor loves her, he can come and find her himself. He does. The morning after the wedding she names her maiden portion: Britain for her father, and three strongholds for herself, at Caernarfon, Caerleon, and Carmarthen. Then she has roads built from one stronghold to the next. The tale says the men of Britain would not have made those roads for anyone but her, which is why the roads carry her name.

That name, Elen Luyddog, means "Elen of the Hosts", and the hosts are armies. A Welsh triad remembers her and her brother Cynan leading one of three levies that left the island and never came back. The medieval Elen commands men and territory.

Her appearance in the tale matches that. She wears white silk with clasps of red gold, a surcoat of gold tissue, and a frontlet of red gold set with rubies and pearls. There are no antlers, and nothing in the tale links her with deer.

What connects Elen with Sarn Helen?

The roads left a more solid trace than the dream. Peter C. Bartrum's A Welsh Classical Dictionary notes that Roman roads and some old mountain tracks in Wales are still called Sarn Elen, Ffordd Elen, or Llwybr Elen: Elen's causeway, road, or path.

Some of those roads survive. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales records a 3.5-kilometer stretch of Sarn Helen on common land northeast of Llan Ffestiniog, part of the Roman road between the forts of Canovium and Tomen y Mur. It stayed in use through the medieval and post-medieval periods and was probably only demoted to a footpath in the later nineteenth century. Centuries of resurfacing mean no Roman road surface is visible, though one undisturbed 600-meter section survives near the hillfort at Bryn-y-Castell, because the road was later rerouted around the other side of the fort.

The details are pleasingly ordinary. The road bends between rocky hillocks, crosses a stream at a ford called Rhyd Helen, and at the north end of the common becomes a ledge four meters wide across open moor, now under moss and grass. Two small quarries beside the road date from the same period.

None of this shows that Elen ordered the road. The survey records a Roman route. The tale explains road-building through Elen's authority. Those are different kinds of evidence that happen to meet on the same ground.

Was Elen a goddess or a saint?

The sources do not support a tidy biography in which an ancient antlered goddess becomes a Roman empress and then a Christian saint.

Bartrum's entry collects what the Welsh tradition actually says. A genealogy of the saints names Elen as the mother of Saint Peblig by Macsen. A chapel at Caernarfon was called Capel Elen, with a well nearby called Ffynnon Elen, and two places are called Llanelen. Bartrum also records the standing confusion with Helena, mother of Constantine, and a tradition at Trier, where Maximus held court, that credits an empress Helena with giving up her palace to the church. He suggests the empress meant may originally have been Elen. His conclusion is blunt: churches dedicated to Elen or Helena may be to either.

So a dedication or a well name cannot be handed straight to the heroine of Macsen's dream, and calling all these women one goddess would settle the question by assumption. Each record has to be read where it stands.

Where do Elen's antlers come from?

Caroline Wise answers this herself in "Elen, the Green Lady", an essay published in Mirror of Isis in 2007. She says she met the figure in 1983, when the editor of The Ley Hunter magazine passed her a pamphlet titled "Helen" that had come in for review. She gave her the title "Elen of the Ways" the same year. Her 1986 monograph Elen of the Shimmering Ways, published by Spiral Press, carried illustrations by Chesca Potter.

The antlers came through Potter. Wise writes that her friend "kept seeing impressions of Elen as an antlered woman" and painted what she saw. Potter showed her a small statue of an antlered woman in the British Museum, and Wise found that elain is Welsh for a fawn. Her own link between Elen, reindeer tracks, and shamanic practice came later, in 1989 and 1990. She also points to an earlier writer, the antiquarian Harold Bayley, who had already called Elen a deity of ancient Britain associated with deer.

This is a practitioner explaining her own work, and it is a clear account. It gives the antlers a traceable modern context. It does not give them a medieval one.

Why a female reindeer?

The animal fits better than it might seem. Female reindeer grow antlers. The National Park Service's caribou notes record that both sexes carry them, that males shed theirs after the rut in late fall, and that females can keep theirs all winter. An antlered doe is a real animal, and a winter wood with antlered females in it is a plausible picture.

What the biology cannot do is connect that animal to Elen. The link needs a person, an object, or a text, and the texts that make it are modern.

What does Elen of the Ways represent?

In Wise's account, Elen guards the ancient trackways, the leys, and what she calls the kundalini currents in nature. As a horned goddess she leads back to the first tracks of all, the migration routes of the reindeer. These are religious meanings. A reader can take them as such without mistaking them for archaeology.

For an artist, a path vanishing into woodland is a ready image for not knowing the way and wanting to. Antlers put the animal world into the same frame. Those are choices made now, not instructions recovered from a medieval text.

Readers who arrive at Elen through contemporary art can follow the roads back into the Welsh story. The woman waiting there sends an emperor across the sea, claims an island for her father, picks the sites of three strongholds, and puts her name on the roads between them. She was worth finding before anyone gave her antlers.

From the archive

Elen of the Ways: The Old Straight Track carries her name across the chest, with a stag standing further along the path. The Round Seal cuts the figure down to something that would still read stamped into wax, and The Sacred Grove Stag leaves the woman out and keeps only the animal between two carved stones. The rest are in Folklore.

For other figures met on paths and at the edges of the wood, read our articles on Hecate and the crossroads, Cernunnos, the antlered god named only once, and the Leshy of Slavic forest folklore.

Sources

Filed under: Folklore