Having confessed a few posts back that I once watched an entire season of Smallville, I must now admit to a further collapse into the abyss of popular culture: I have now seen most of Season One of BBC One’s Merlin. My viewing of the last few episodes coincided with the end of term and the winter solstice. All this had an unhappy impact on my state of mind.

From the title sequence of Merlin

A few days ago I was as usual walking to work in the half-light before dawn through the old Whelan the Wrecker tip, now a park. Before Whelan took over this location, it had been the Wales bluestone quarry. My local historian friend, AD, remembers that as a schoolgirl, she sometimes leaned over the edge and peered into the pit, which by then, not long before the bluestone ran out, was more than one hundred metres deep. Before Wales had begun its mining operations, this site in its turn had been the territory of the Wurundjeri-willam clan and the realm of their creator spirit, Bunjil. And it still is.

Nimueh (Michelle Ryan) from BBC One's Merlin

Caught up in this swelter of competing—or perhaps complementary–histories and mythologies, I was overcome with the sudden compulsion to text a close friend in Chinese, to tell her that I thought I had seen an afanc, but was mistaken. Fans of Season One of Merlin may remember the appearance of this Welsh mythological creature in Episode 3. It was summoned up out of a boiled egg by one of the series’ more interesting characters, the striking, raven-haired sorceress, Nimueh. The monster, which can only be destroyed by the supernatural application of fire and wind, had poisoned Camelot’s water supply, causing the outbreak of disease.  After European settlement, the pollution of the  once-pristine waters of the Merri Creek had also gone on apace, but it didn’t take an afanc to do it—it was human agency all the way. However, I digress.

The afanc from Episode 3: it's vaguely humanoid, but I thought of it as an animal.

I quickly texted ‘Wo yi wei kan dao…’, and came to a halt. What was the measure word for an afanc? I was sure there were dragons and other Chinese traditional supernatural monsters that might have the same measure word, but the later perusal of a fat dictionary of measure words left me feeling uncertain. The following day, while everyone else at the Park was listening agog for the announcement of the name of our new director, I was quizzing my friend EW, ‘What’s the measure word for an afanc? It’s a Welsh mythological monster.’

‘An animal monster, or a human monster?’ asked EW.

Although the creature from Episode 3 had clearly been played by a human in a monster suit, I thought of it as a kind of swamp creature, hatched from an element of Nimueh’s breakfast.

‘An animal monster,’ I rejoined.

‘It could be zhi or tou,’ she said.

The next day while walking through the old Whelan site, I confidently texted, ‘Wo yi wei  kan dao yi zhi afanc zai yanshi shangmian’ (我以为看到一只afanc在岩石上面): I thought I saw an afanc on top of a rock, but I was mistaken…

In our globalised world, where cosmologies, languages and dreams collide and overlap and mesh, this could be a useful thing to know how to text.

Image credits: here and here and here.

Merlin official site: here. Wikipedia article on afancs in popular culture: here.