Mari Lwyd: The Skeleton Horse's Deep Past with Christmas Tradition | Monstrum 

So basically, it's like trick or treating. But instead of kids dressed up in spooky attire getting candy and other sweets, it's a bunch of grown-ups (some of them probably very drunk) guiding a rapping ghostly horse skull from door-to-door asking people if they can raid their fridges and liquor cabinets. The Welsh are creative people, ain't they

* slamming hands on the table, foaming at the mouth * I LOVE IT WHEN THE SPOOKY IS FRIENDLY!

You did miss out one key aspect of it however; Mari Lwyd is meant to be an equaliser. They'd generally lead the entourage of poorer villagers to the manors and halls of the rich, and essentially (jovially) threaten them until they shared their wealth (in the form of food, drink and hospitality).

Thank you so much for covering the Mari Llwyd! Lovely to see a tradition from my culture given recognition!

My Dad's boss was Welsh, and he always had a Mari Llwyd in the import shop he ran after he retired. I remember asking him about it once, and he said 'Oh, she's what you youngin's would call a beer guzzlin', snack eatin' rap battle horse' and I've never forgotten that description.

FINALLY! A totally creepy yet rather benevolent and joyful Christmas monster! I can see Mari Lwyd as the Ernie to the Krampus' Burt!

I'm a member of the Krewe of Krampus in New Orleans. We include Mari Lwyd in our entourage during our Krampus Run/ Parade, NOLAuf. It's one of our most popular Yule characters.

I'd definitely surrender a few verses in. "Please don't enter my house, I have nothing to even feed a mouse. Don't look over there, The pantry is bare. Dang it I've been found out, Now I can't keep you out. I now have nothing to hide, So please come inside."

La Befana is not evil at all, she is an old lady who brings candies or little toys inside of socks to good children and coal to the bad ones during the night between 5th and 6th of january. This traditional character is older than Christmas itself, since la Befana was already known during the Roman Empire. She appears as a fairytale witch, old (and maybe ugly) but she is completely harmless and she travel on a flying broomstick.

I believe this also still persists in Newfoundland Canada, where it was explained to me as needing to rap battle a horse in order to keep your liquor😂 which is about as Newfie As It Gets

This reminds me of the pantomime dragons of Asia who also mess with people. I have a personal experience with it. My husband a couple of friends and I were in the Chinese pavilion at Epcot Center a long time ago. The dragon was about patrolling his territory and we wanted to get a picture with it but my husband demured, saying he didn't want his picture taken. The dragon was on my side, however, and chased him around until he was laughing so hard he had stop for breath. Then the dragon lovingly put his head against my husband's, and I have a great picture of my husband barely able to stand up, defeated by a dragon.💋

I usually prefer Halloween over Christmas, but creatures like this skully guy makes me like it more. While Mari Lwyd isn't a mean entity like Krampus or Grylla, I feel like they are needed to encourage difference and activity for folks all over the world. It's such a fascinating thing of what lurks in the end of the year in every culture. Also, Europe may be more sociated with Christmas, but I kinda also want to mention Namahage from Japan. Krampus japan-ised. (In a tradition way, not the anime way)

For anyone interested, there's some lovely old clips from the BBC here on RU-vid of the Mari Lwyd singing in practise.

Thanks for showcasing Welsh culture. I know a few people have mentioned the off pronunciation but don’t be discouraged. Welsh is a difficult language with unusual pronunciations that are really hard to master, especially if you’ve not heard them spoken aloud before. You could easily have shied away from discussing the topic completely due to the difficult names like the town Aberystwyth (pronounced Aber-wrist-with), but you didn’t. So I appreciate the effort nonetheless.

Strange that no one has connected this to the Púca, the equine trickster monsters common throughout Celtic folklore: especially given the motif of the Mari Llwyd chasing people, and the fact that it is led around by a well-dressed man. The Púca is a warning to not trust strangers that you meet at night, particularly aimed at young women. Sort of seems like the Mari Llwyd fits into that very well, imo.

I could see this as being made into a movie that takes the audience by surprise. Most of the time, and how it behaves, the focus characters perceive the Mari Lwyd as some sinister monster that wants entrance to their home to harm them. Only to find that, once the creature is finally inside, it's actually benevolent, or at least benign.

It's so nice to see other people exploring my culture glory to Wales! Hehe If I had one critique I would say your pronunciation of Mari Lywd wasn't great, but I understand the Welsh Language is a mine field and appreciate anyone who attempts it. Nadolig Llawen ❤

I don't know why I found the sequence of the Mari Lwyd chasing the kids around funny and heart warming.

Its nice that instead of being a creepy monster, it just wants to have fun. Thanks for talking about its history

Ever since Sam O Nella Academy mentioned this creature in a video, I've always wanted to learn more! Thanks for covering it :D

I’ve been obsessed with Mari since I learned about her as a kid. I couldnt find info on her (save the wiki page) and I had no idea of the specifics. I’m obsessed with her all over again !

In Welsh, the colour “grey” (llwyd) is pronounced “choyd”, but with a little breath on the “ch”. It’s hard to approximate the Welsh “LL” sound in English! It’s between a “ch” and an “sh”, but not quite either.

The tradition reminds me of Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather" story.

This one really spoke to me. I love winter and snow, but it’s also a time that is personally very difficult to get through from an emotional standpoint. It’s comforting to know that historically others have also had complicated feelings about this time of year.

When i lived in Malaysia as a little kid, our Japanese neighbor invited us for a little New Year's Eve party, just my family and hers. She instructed us not to drop the bowl of beans on the table and went outside with a bag, but her baby son did it anyway. And immediately someone dressed as an oni barged into the room, and all of us kids grabbed the beans and started tossing them at her. So yeah i think the popularity behind party monsters are because of our love for the (artificial) thrill and danger, which might be why Mari Lwyd also chases little kids for fun

I love the videos that cover mythology outside standard UK influence. I mean, a skeletal horse wearing ribbons and parties hard? That's awesome!

Once you learn lots of stuff like this, carols like we wish you a merry christmas make a lot more sense.

In South America, Central America & even Mexico, the is a tale of a Horse-headed Woman known as La Siguanaba/Sihuanaba, I hope you can eventually do a video on her.

I'd like to point out that "L" and "LL" are pronounced completely differently in Welsh.

@7:10 Silver on the Tree is the fifth and final book in the pentalogy "The Dark is Rising Sequence." The reason it has not been a movie yet is because they DID try to make the series into movies in 2007, hoping to capitalize on the fantasy-adventure magic that propelled Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, and Narnia to box office gold. However, they completely butchered and bungled it. They rushed it into production, changed a lot of plot elements (including the main character's age, which is an important plot point in the books), mashed events from several early books together or jettisoned whole swathes of the book's narrative, and then tried to "action" the whole thing up since the books are often more intellectual than physical and they didn't trust that to play on screen. And clumsy branding and marketing generated confusion over which character "the seeker" even was. The result was a SUPER flop. I looked it up and to date it has made less than $32M on a $45M budget. It was a wide release in over 3,100 theaters, but backed by a relatively anemic marketing campaign--leading to it becoming the second biggest flop of ALL TIME to have opened in at least 3,000 theaters. In fact, it cost more just to print the film copies for the 3,200 theaters than the film made in it's first weekend of release. It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 14%. I LOVED the books growing up, and was super excited when the movie was announced, but what they did with the first one killed any chance of the rest getting made. I'm hoping now it can be rediscovered as a well-funded Amazon TV series type thing. I think that format would serve the material much better anyway.

Send Llwyds! (j/k) I was introduced to the Mari Llwyd, as were so many outsiders, by Susan Cooper, who also tried her best to teach us Welsh pronunciation (she's half Welsh). nowadays, I expect her tales of rural English life are just as important as that of Wales, since younger generations raised in suburbia or cities don't have the experience of being embedded in the weather and daylight-defined cycles of nature and farmland. One thing I didn't fully appreciate when I read those books when I was younger is just how much the Welsh traditions are "original" Britain, so to speak, although again Cooper did her best to get it across: as waves of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and my ancestors the Vikings/Danes invaded, Britain's indigenous people were pushed west and north, hanging on longest in Wales. So the Mari Lywd may be a little remnant of that very old strata when horses first came to Britain and were immensely special. I'm also reminded of some even older, curious finds at Must Farm, that amazing Bronze Age site that gives us a very different idea of how people could live in a sort of watery fenland, in stilt roundhouses. They shaped skulls of red deer (I think) to be used in some ritual manner. Early hobby horses, even before the horse came to the British Isles? Who knows. The idea of the Mary Llwyd once frightened me, but now I love the idea that it may be an echo of traditions stretching far, far back, to when the glaciers pulled back and Doggerland first foundered. We have so little left in the modern world from those times, even though really, in the lifespan of Earth ot even humankind, it wasn't that long ago.

Krampus, Yule Cat, and this guy. There seems to be a lot of creepy Santa variants across the world. At least this one is friendly.

Has the Mari Lwyd ever actually been in D&D? I know it isn't in 5e, even the image they showed was homebrew. But 3e had an insane number of monsters, so did it appear there?

Yes. There has never been a film adaptation of The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Ever.

Fekin love Mari Lwyd, my fav winter tradition

I first heard of this tradition through a Mercedes Lackey novel, "Home from the Sea" (one of her Elemental Masters series, which threads historical fantasy, folk tales, and magic all together into quite fun narratives). In that novel the action all takes place on the coast of Wales, across autumn and winter, and the Mari Lwyd makes not one but two appearances - one is merry and full of laughter and quite "kid friendly," but the second visitation is a LOT darker. I had wondered which one was closer to accurate, especially as Mrs Lackey usually does quite a lot of research for this series of novels... Including some of the stranger twists and turns of folk-lore and old customs. I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to see a longer treatment of winter solstice traditions - if not from Monstrum then from Fate & Fabled perhaps? It would be so wonderful to hear more about the many cultures across the whole world - especially the ones we DON'T find as familiar, like what the Maya might've done, or the indigenous peoples of Australia (who would be holding such observances in "spring" by the global calendar, right?). Coming from a family with a lot of roots in Germany and Poland I'm really interested in the Norse/Germanic traditions of course but - it's always so great to learn about the not so familiar, and y'all handle these topics SO damn well!

Another great holiday video! These have become a tradition in their own right. I would LOVE to see you do a video on the Yule Lads next year. I've become fascinated with them since watching the Drawfee videos where they tried to draw what they thought they should look like. (Coincidentally, judging from the bloopers, you might also be interested in Drawfee's video on drawing mascots for the most ridiculously named towns in the UK.)

As much as I enjoyed this episode the only thing I had a problem with was the thing I expected to… the pronunciation. Mari as Mary, that’s fine but the Lwyd is supposed to sound more like “l-oid” or with a slightly different spelling Llwyd but both sounding like the name Lloyd with a slight lisp sound on the “Ll”. Slight lisp being the easiest way to explain how to pronounce a Welsh letter.

In my area of rural North Dakota, the custom of Norwegian julbukking was popular up until the 80s although it’s not done anymore probably because it is much easier to travel from the remote farmhouses to group gatherings than it once was. Culturally we have drifted from visiting homes unannounced (still done in rural areas of you live in a farmstead though!)

Wow this is an interesting monster. While I am familiar with many of the creatures featured on Monstrum I am not familiar with this one. While I understand that we have holidays like Halloween it’s really hard for me to imagine a creature like this to bring merriment and cheer. If I saw this outside my door wishing to come in I would lock the doors and hide. lol Thanks Dr. Z and monstrum staff for teaching me about the Mari Lwyd.

"There'll be *scary ghost stories* and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago."

Bobs Burgers Halloween Episode actually featured a version of them

Short answer: It's cold, dark, and depressing...let's party!! Yes I know what this tradition is, I'm glad Dungeons & Dragons do it justice!

Dr Z and the team at Storied, I wish you all a Scary Solstice! ❤

This sounds awesome. I love learning about the rich and spooky history of things most people take for granted

Diolch! I appreciate you covering this, it's my favorite holiday.

Very informative! Thank you!

I'm glad you finally did this. We brought this to our neighborhood here in the states about 10 years ago.

I love hearing about all these old traditions, and I'm glad people are trying to bring some back.

They did make a movie out of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising books, but it was barely a pathetic shadow of the story and is definitely best forgotten. I can’t even recall what it’s called. I was so excited to stumble across it, then immediately disappointed that I’d bought the dvd. I’d love to see them give it a real try. I loved those books, and still think of them regularly.

Fantastic! I've wanted this monster for a while now. Great job as always.

I was completly unaware of this mythology. Thank you so much for covering it. Its a wonderful feeling that takes me back to childhood when i learn new things.

*scrolls through her subscriptions* *sees new Monstrum episode* *gasps quite loudly* AND IT'S ABOUT A CHRISTMAS MONSTER I NEVER HEARD OF!! *enjoys every second like always*

I absolutely love these christmas themed videos! Ill save this for now and watch it on christmas eve

It's not Christmas until Dr. Z comes bearing gifts of monstrous creatures. 🎄

Absolutely love storied and monstrum 😊

Thanks for the video

This is so fascinating! I remember seeing the Mary Llwd from social media posts a few years ago and left me confused but interested. After learning about this beast, this is amazing. You're basically doing trick-or-treating in December, and it sounds like SO much fun. I might try it someday.😂

What a very spooky Christmas tradition. Definitely not something my mom would want us to do for Christmas. That said, what an awesome video! I can't wait for the next one!

That was really cool, thank you for the tales.

Season's Screamin's!

Can you please do a video about the history of the bad reputation given to bats through stories of vampires, the public prospective of bats, and reports of vampire bats killing humans through rabies? I also think everyone is waiting to see an episode about dinosaurs in cinema and the impact Jurassic Park had on the planet. Lastly, I think we need to learn about the history of King Kong.

I can picture my great great granny smiling broadly as this video makes it's presence known to her. She was the last Welsh-born member of my family, from a village in Anglesey

I love your videos and I find your videos very interesting. Have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

it's curious, I didn't know this "Christmas monster", a real "night-Mary of Christmas", already at Halloween there is a joyful connection with the fear of death and the night. perhaps one day we could make a hybrid holiday (which might be called: Christ-oween or Hal-mas) with trees illuminated by pumpkins or pumpkins with Christmas symbols.

4:12 it's quite possible. In Bulgaria we have something very similar to wassailing. Perhaps there's a very ancient common tradition as a predecessor to both.

I learned about the Mari Lwyd by pure chance in 2015 from a web comic. The more I learned, the more I was delighted by how ominous looking, yet festive and light-hearted it was. It inspired me to make a red horse skull costume for Halloween (since I live in Texas).

I have seen The Mari several times in productions from The Isles, but did not realize it was an actual tradition! I mean when I saw Monty Python (as one example) doing their looney skits with an actor in robes and wearing a decorated horse skull, I thought '...it's what you do with a non-existent costume budgest and half baked idea😅 But Terry Jones (God rest his soul) was a proud Welshman🤔🤔 Thanks Dr. Z and everybody we don't see for Storied!!❤

I have been wassailling, and mumming which is very similar but taking a small play to perform around in the same way, many times. Its a really fun tradition and we always combined it with collecting for charity by singing and playing to drive out evil spirits to ensure abundance and prosperity in return for a donation to our pot. All round a lovely Christmas or solstice tradition to maintain and experience. ❤😊

AHHHHHH I didn't know Epona was a mythological horse in the real world! That's so cool!

Love the Susan Cooper books! The one time they tried to make a movie it was an abomination (The Seeker--The Dark Is Rising). Come on, Netflix, do the right thing!

Great video. A very scary solstice to all!

Hey, happy holidays! I really like what your doing here. It is fun to learn about new traditions and rituals .It makes you more curious to learn about monsters you never heard of.I live in sri lanka so I grew up on fearing the Sri Lankan demon ' Mahasona' and the Sri Lankan witch ' Kuwani' .

Thank you

Thank you! Now I'm inspired for creating a special Xmas D&D one-shot!

Amazing video!

I would love to see a video on goblins. keep up the good work

A spooky skull-headed creature that is actually playful and jolly - makes a nice change! 😊

Its basically a Christmas rap with a talking horse skull somit doesn’t take your Christmas treats too and it’s sounds like a lot of fun

This was an interesting one. I first learned about the Mary Lwyd playing AC Valhalla[You Dress up as her to get candy during one mission] so hearing more background on the legend is really interesting

I had no idea this was part of wassailing ! This was positively fascinating!

new monstrum just dropped; today is a good day

Who knew that Death was such a party animal when he was on his break for Christmas!

So happy to see Mari Llwyd and wales (my home from Powys) some attention! One of the reasons culturally it is not well know was that in 19th century “Welsh-ness” was being discouraged by the English. The English churches and education system discouraging old traditions and the Welsh language (Welsh knot)

My best friends are working a local Yuletide festival as Mari Lwyd and Krampus. So cool.

Y is pronounced as a U in Welsh. That was one of the things I took away from reading Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series. And yes, Susan Cooper’s books have been made into really bad films. They were horrible adaptations.

Okay, this is insane, I love it

This reminds me of the Siguanaba legend from Guatemala and central America

You find these during celebration days in Cornwall too, as well as other hobby horses, like the famous Padstow Obby Oss

I'm playing in a Christmas themed dnd oneshot where I'm playing as a manifestation of the tradition, this was very helpful

Love his show!!! ❤❤❤

These are my favourite episodes, monsters that I have never even heard of before😄

Don't be lwyd, that's rwyd!

Leave it to the Welsh to come up with something creepy and weird for Christmas.

Oh! Kekri-goat (or Nuuti-goat ) from Finland is very similar to Mari Lwyd

I always thought that the Mari Lwyd was a faery akin to the kelpie as the krampus is. Great video, I love Christmas monsters ❤

It fascinates me that somehow things boiled down from something in the past to a person in a horse skull mask and a robe with a group of friends drinking and merry making around the village. Humans are an odd bunch.

I love that this tradition is basically a drunken rap battle and I want that.

Imagine a terrifying SCP that just comes to your house for a mug of ale and a good time.

*I made a Mari Lwyd last year and then I got Covid and was unable to go out and show her off.* *But this year she is ready to GO!*