The Mari Lwyd: the Welsh winter folk tradition that should be in more children's books
A horse skull on a pole, draped in white cloth, calling at the door at midwinter. The Mari Lwyd is one of the most visually striking surviving folk traditions in Europe — and almost entirely absent from contemporary children's illustration.
In southern Wales, between Christmas and Twelfth Night, a small group of people — three or four, usually — walks from house to house, knocking at each door. The leader of the group carries a tall pole. Mounted on the pole is the bleached skull of a horse, its jaw articulated by a cord. The skull is draped in a white sheet that extends to the ground, hiding the carrier. The eyes of the skull are lit, traditionally, with broken glass or, in modern revivals, with a small electric bulb.
When the householder answers the knock, the Mari Lwyd’s group sings a verse, in Welsh, asking to be let in. The householder is expected to sing a verse in return, refusing them, and the back-and-forth — a sung debate called pwnco — continues until either the householder runs out of verses (in which case the Mari Lwyd enters and is given drink and food) or the Mari Lwyd’s group does (in which case they move on to the next house).
This tradition is somewhere between 200 and 800 years old. It survived the medieval period, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Methodist temperance movement, and the 20th century. It is currently undergoing a quiet revival, with documented Mari Lwyd parties active in at least eleven Welsh villages as of 2024.
It is also, we want to argue, one of the most striking surviving visual traditions in European folk culture, and one that has been almost completely ignored by contemporary children’s-book illustrators outside Wales.
What the figure looks like
Photographs and ethnographic drawings of the Mari Lwyd from the 19th and 20th centuries are remarkably consistent. The skull is real — usually obtained from a knacker’s yard. The cloth is plain white or off-white, with hand-stitched red and dark accents. The skull is sometimes decorated with ribbons in red, dark green, and gold. The overall figure is tall (most carriers are bearing the skull at about 7 feet), white, slowly-moving, and viscerally strange.
If you came to your front door and found this object on your stoop singing at you, you would, as one ethnographer put it, “feel a particular tightness in the part of your chest that does not normally tighten.”
Why this isn’t in more picture books
We’ve thought about this a lot. The answer is, we think, that the figure is too strange for the contemporary children’s-book market’s instinct for the gentle and the marketable. The Mari Lwyd does not look like a friendly bear. It does not look like a chubby cat. It does not look like anything the modern picture-book editor’s intuition says will reassure parents at the bookstore.
But this misreads what the figure is doing. The Mari Lwyd is, in its native tradition, not frightening. It is strange. The children who encounter the Mari Lwyd in Welsh villages do not, by most accounts, find it traumatic. They find it thrilling. They find it the strangest and most exciting thing that happens in the winter. They wait for it every year.
The contemporary American/British children’s-book market has, in our view, lost the ability to distinguish strange from frightening. The Mari Lwyd is strange. It is also one of the warmest figures in surviving European folk practice — the entire ritual is about being invited in, sharing food, exchanging songs. The figure carries a community across the threshold of winter.
A specific recommendation
We would like to see a contemporary picture book on the Mari Lwyd. We would like it to be illustrated by someone who takes the figure seriously — perhaps Pam Smy, perhaps Levi Pinfold, perhaps a Welsh illustrator we don’t know yet. We would like the text to be in both Welsh and English. We would like the publisher to be small enough to take risks.
We are aware that this book may not be commercially viable. We are willing to argue that this is exactly the kind of book that demonstrates whether contemporary children’s publishing has a soul or not.
If you know of someone working on this — even adjacent to this — please write to [email protected]. We would like to know.
— Sasha Lim. Sources: Owen, T., Welsh Folk Customs, National Museum Wales, 1968; current Mari Lwyd documentation at the St Fagans National Museum of History.