Elen of the Ways: Between Medieval Story and Modern Practice
Elen is often encountered today as a figure of ancient roads, deer, landscape and spiritual journeying. Returning to the medieval Welsh story reveals a picture that is narrower in some ways, richer in others, and worth knowing in its own right.
For many people meeting Elen today, the road comes first.
She is Elen of the Ways: an antlered or deer-associated figure connected with old tracks, pilgrimage, thresholds and journeys through both landscape and life. She may be encountered as a goddess, a guardian of paths, or a presence beside those moments when one road ends and another begins.
It is a compelling image, and one that has become meaningful within modern spiritual practice.
But when we return to the surviving medieval Welsh tradition, we meet someone rather different.
The roads are there. The deer are not. The antlers are not. Even the familiar title Elen of the Ways is not the name given to her in the medieval tale.
Instead, we find Elen Luyddog: a woman whose story is woven through sovereignty, kinship, strongholds, armies and the memory of Roman Britain.
Knowing the difference does not require us to discard the Elen encountered in modern practice. It gives us an opportunity to understand the road by which she reached us.
Elen Luyddog and the Dream of Macsen Wledig
Elen appears most famously in Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig — The Dream of Macsen Wledig — a medieval Welsh tale preserved in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest.
Its Macsen is a legendary rendering of the historical Magnus Maximus, the Roman commander proclaimed emperor by troops in Britain in 383. The historical Maximus crossed into Gaul, established control over substantial parts of the western Empire, and was eventually defeated and executed in 388.
The Welsh Macsen belongs to a different kind of history.
His tale begins not with military rebellion, but with a dream.
While hunting, Macsen sleeps and dreams of travelling across an immense landscape. His journey carries him over mountains, rivers and sea until he reaches a magnificent hall. There he sees a maiden so beautiful that the story compares looking upon her with looking upon the sun at its brightest.
Then he wakes.
Unable to forget her, Macsen sends messengers to search for the woman and landscape of his dream. Eventually they find both in Wales, at Aber Saint in Arfon, associated with Caernarfon and the Roman fort of Segontium.
The woman is Elen, daughter of Eudaf.
When Macsen's messengers greet her as Empress of Rome and tell her that the emperor wishes to make her his wife, Elen does not simply follow them back to him. She is offered a choice: travel to Rome herself, or have Macsen come to her.
She chooses that he should come.
Macsen travels to Wales and finds the woman he saw in his dream. They marry, and Elen asks for her maiden fee.
What she asks for matters.
Three strongholds and the roads between them
Elen asks for Britain to be given to her father, together with three adjacent islands, and for three chief strongholds to be made for her in places of her choosing.
She chooses one in Arfon, with the others at Caerleon and Carmarthen.
Then comes the passage that would become central to her later identity.
Elen causes great roads to be made across Britain, running from one of her strongholds to another. The tale explains that these are therefore called Ffyrdd Elen Luyddog — the Roads of Elen Luyddog.
The roads are not a small decorative detail added to her story. They connect the places Elen has chosen and reshape the landscape around them.
Yet the context is important.
The medieval Elen is not described wandering ancient tracks as a goddess of spiritual journeying. The roads exist alongside strongholds, territory, political power and hosts of people. They belong to a story deeply interested in Britain's relationship with Rome and in imagining a Welsh place within that past.
Even her epithet points us in that direction.
Luyddog is usually translated as “of the Hosts”, with senses connected to having an army or being martial. It does not mean “of the Ways”.
That distinction is easily lost because the roads have become so closely associated with her.
There are still stretches of Roman road in Wales known by the name Sarn Helen, and traditions surrounding Elen and Roman roads have proved remarkably persistent. Medieval Welsh tradition itself also remembered Elen beyond The Dream of Macsen Wledig, including her association with a host that departed Britain.
There is therefore a genuine old connection between Elen and roads.
What changes is what those roads come to mean.
A woman between history and story
It is tempting to look behind Elen Luyddog for a single historical woman and ask whether we can find the “real Elen”.
The surviving material does not make that simple.
Macsen has a clear historical counterpart in Magnus Maximus, but The Dream of Macsen Wledig was written centuries after his lifetime. It is not a fourth-century biography preserved intact. It is medieval Welsh literature drawing upon the remembered Roman past.
Elen, meanwhile, became entangled with other Helen traditions.
Welsh material could associate or confuse her with Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, whose Christian legend centred upon the discovery of the True Cross. Medieval traditions did not always preserve the neat distinctions modern readers might prefer between one Elen or Helena and another.
That makes certainty difficult.
It also makes Elen more interesting.
She stands at a meeting point between remembered history, medieval storytelling, landscape and later tradition. The Roman roads were already ancient when the medieval tale was written, yet the story gives them a Welsh woman and a reason for their making.
Landscape becomes memory.
A road can survive long after the people who built it are forgotten. A story can then explain why it is there, who travelled it, or whose name it carries. Whether that explanation belongs to history, legend or some mingling of both, it changes how later generations see the land beneath their feet.
Elen's roads have continued to gather meanings in much the same way.
From Elen Luyddog to Elen of the Ways
The Elen encountered in contemporary Pagan and spiritual practice is considerably broader than the woman described in the medieval tale.
She is frequently associated with deer and reindeer, antlers, ancient trackways, ley lines, pilgrimage, sovereignty, shamanic journeying and the movement of animals and people across the land.
These associations are sometimes presented as though they form an unbroken ancient tradition.
The surviving medieval Welsh sources do not allow us to say that.
The modern figure can, however, be traced much more clearly.
An important influence has been the work of Caroline Wise, who began exploring Elen in the early 1980s alongside visionary artist Chesca Potter. Wise later described visions, dreams, landscape research and spiritual experiences through which an image of Elen developed around roads, deer and eventually reindeer.
She published Elen of the Shimmering Ways in 1986. During further work around 1989 and 1990, the deer and reindeer associations became increasingly important to her interpretation, alongside ideas about ancient tracks, ley lines and spiritual journeying.
Decades later, these strands were gathered with contributions from several writers in Finding Elen: The Quest for Elen of the Ways.
This history matters because it gives us a much more useful description than simply calling modern Elen “ancient” or dismissing her as “made up”.
There are older threads.
There is Elen Luyddog. There are the roads. There are Welsh place-names and traditions associated with Elen or Helen. There are medieval traditions in which different Elens and Helenas sometimes overlap. There is a landscape marked by roads whose origins reach back into Roman Britain.
Then there are newer threads: deer, antlers, reindeer, shamanic pathways and the particular spiritual figure now widely called Elen of the Ways.
Modern practitioners have woven these things together.
Recognising the weaving allows us to see both the inherited material and the hands that have worked with it since.
Does a modern tradition matter less?
For me, no.
Tradition does not have to remain motionless in order to deserve respect.
Stories are read again because each generation approaches them from somewhere different. Landscapes acquire new associations. Images that were once political can become contemplative; a road built between strongholds can become an image through which someone thinks about choice, departure or belonging.
The difficulty begins when later interpretation is presented as something we can confidently attribute to people who lived centuries or millennia before us.
There is a difference between saying Elen is encountered as a deer-associated goddess in modern practice and saying the ancient Welsh worshipped Elen as an antlered deer goddess.
The first describes a living tradition.
The second makes a historical claim for which we do not have the same evidence.
That distinction does not impoverish spiritual practice. I think it can deepen it.
When we know which parts of a tradition have reached us through medieval literature, which are preserved in landscape and place-name, and which have emerged through modern interpretation, we can approach each of them on their own terms.
We no longer need every meaningful thing to be ancient before we allow it to matter.
Walking Elen's road today
Perhaps this is one reason Elen continues to hold my attention.
The medieval story gives us roads, but it does not prescribe what they must mean to us.
A road connects places while also separating the place left behind from the place ahead. To travel one is to make a choice, even when that choice is simply to continue. Roads carry departures and returns, certainty and uncertainty, familiar ground and the point at which familiar ground runs out.
Those are modern reflections. I would not place them into the mouths of medieval Welsh storytellers.
But they begin with something those storytellers did give us: Elen looking across a landscape and causing roads to be made from one place to another.
That is enough.
When I work with Elen now, I can honour the figure I have encountered through contemporary practice while remembering Elen Luyddog beneath her: the woman of the medieval Welsh tale, her strongholds, her hosts and the roads bearing her name.
Neither needs to erase the other.
Instead, knowing the difference allows a relationship with tradition that is both more careful and more spacious. We can inherit an old story without pretending nothing has happened to it since. We can allow modern practice to grow while remaining honest about where that growth has taken place.
Perhaps that is particularly fitting for Elen.
A road is shaped by where it begins, but it exists because it goes somewhere.
The old story gives us somewhere to begin. It does not have to tell us where the road ends.
Sources & Further Reading
Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press. A modern English translation of The Dream of Macsen Wledig and the other medieval Welsh tales.
Brynley F. Roberts (ed.), Breudwyt Maxen Wledic. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2005. A scholarly edition of the Welsh text.
Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain. University of Wales Press. An essential scholarly edition and discussion of the Welsh Triads, including traditions concerning Elen Luyddog.
Sian Echard, “Magnus Maximus and the Welsh Helena”. A study of Maximus, Elen and the development and intermingling of Helena traditions in medieval Welsh material.
Caroline Wise (ed.), Finding Elen: The Quest for Elen of the Ways. 2015. Useful for understanding the development and character of Elen within modern spiritual practice. Its visionary and speculative material should be read as part of that modern tradition rather than as direct evidence for medieval Welsh belief.