THE TEXT OF 'PEN URIEN' FROM CANU LLYWARCH HEN

Celtic Head From Burgh-By-Sands, Cumbria

https://archive.org/details/canullywarchhen00llyw/page/12

The only truly good modern translation is in Jenny Rowland's EARLY WELSH SAGA POETRY.  Alas, I've not been able to obtain a copy of this book.  Early translations, like those of Skene, are woefully inadequate.  I did find this one online, but cannot vouch for its accuracy:

http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/hen/HeadUrien.html

Again, it is my opinion that Uther Pen was originally the Dreadful Head of Urien Rheged, speaking its own elegy.  The word gorlassar is used only three times in early Welsh literature - twice of Urien and once of Uther.  Etc. As the Elegy of Uther Pen contains the following line -

neu vi a ledeis cant pen,
it was I who cut off a hundred heads,

- it would be extremely ironic if the speaker of the poem were the head of Urien. 

To summarize, I'm here supplying a passage written by Professor John Koch in CELTIC CULTURE: A HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA:

"One possibility is that the strange and strangely named
yspyªawt urªawl benn (feast of the stately head) around
Brân’s living severed head in the Mabinogi represents
a garbling of a more appropriate ‘feast of the uncanny
head’ (uthr benn); the marwnad [of Uther Pen] would make
sense as the words of the living-dead Brân mourning himself.
For Geoffrey, the epithet Pendragon is ‘dragon’s head’,
an explanation of a celestial wonder by Merlin (see
Myrddin)."

On Urien's head, P.C. Bartram has this:

"It appears that Urien's head was cut off to save it from insult. Compare the case of Edwin after the battle of Haethfelth (Bede, Hist.Eccles., II.20). At any rate Llywarch Hen is represented carrying Urien's head by his side in the poem (Ifor Williams, ‘The Poems of Llywarch Hen’, Proc.Brit.Academy, 18 (1932) p.23)."

In my last post, I proposed that Gorlassar (the later romance Gorlois) was for the comet, metaphorically identified as Uther himself (see https://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-transformation-of-uther-pendragon.html).