What does CLUD mean in Irish?

The character Clud is mentioned as the father of Gwawl in the First Branch of the Mabinogi. The legends known as “The Four Branches of the Mabinogi” originated in Ireland and, though heavily redacted and translated to Middle Welsh, they still retain many names which are two or more Irish words written phonetically by a listening scribe and fused together as a single Middle Welsh word– e.g. Arawn, Annwfyn, Mabinogi, Rhiannon, etc. Little is known of Clud other that he was father of a very rich, big, brown-haired, silken-dressed, swaggering, impressive trickster called Gwawl to whom the beautiful maiden Rhiannon was to be forcibly married. The relationship of Clud to Gwawl was seemingly more than that of father to son. It also was the relationship of rags to riches in one generation. ‘Clud’ is the phonetic spelling of the Irish word ‘clúid’ meaning rags; (singular form: ‘clúd’). We can therefore suspect that Gwawl’s father was a poor man – or dressed poorly. ‘Gwawl’ is the phonetic

The Middle Welsh legends known as “The Four Branches of the Mabinogi” originated in the west of Ireland and were taken by raiding Welsh Normans from an abbey in manuscript form in the last quarter of the 12th century, and transported to Wales where they were then redacted, translated to Middle Welsh and embedded into the Welsh landscape for the enhancement of the principality of Wales and its princes. The medieval poem Preiddeu Annwn in the Book of Taliesin is an account of the raid, as given by a gaelic poet who accompanied the raiders into the abbey, to which they were led by the disaffected son of king Rory O’Conor, called ‘the chief of Annwfyn’ in the poem. The abbey site is now known. In the poem the abbey, seemingly a newly founded Cistercian monastery with much glass, is given several names, some to be understood only when the reader knows the abbey site history, it being a huge circular pre-historic royal fortress the location of which corresponds to Regia Altera in Ptolemy’s map of Hibernia.

Regional » Irish