Annwn

Ruled by Arawn[1][2] (or, in Arthurian literature, by Gwyn ap Nudd[3]), it is a world of delights and eternal youth where disease is absent and food is ever-abundant.

[6] The appearance of a form antumnos on an ancient Gaulish curse tablet, which means an ('other') + tumnos ('world'), however, suggests that the original term may have been *ande-dubnos, a common Gallo-Brittonic word that literally meant "underworld".

It was also named: Annwn plays a reasonably prominent role in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a set of four interlinked mythological tales dating from the early medieval period.

In the Fourth Branch, Arawn is mentioned but does not appear; it is revealed that he sent a gift of otherworldly pigs to Pwyll's son and successor, Pryderi, which ultimately leads to war between Dyfed and Gwynedd.

The denizens of Annwn are depicted as bizarre and hellish creatures; these include a "wide-mawed" beast with a hundred heads and bearing a host beneath the root of its tongue and another under its neck, a hundred-clawed black-groined toad, and a "mottled ridged serpent, with a thousand souls, by their sins, tortured in the holds of its flesh".

In Culhwch and Olwen, an early Welsh Arthurian tale, it is said that God gave Gwyn ap Nudd control over the demons lest "this world be destroyed."

Angelika Rüdiger's Doctoral Thesis, 'Y Tylwyth Teg: an analysis of a literary motif' (Bangor University, 2021) is a detailed study of supernatural characters connected with Annwn (including Gwyn ap Nudd), covering a period from the earliest sources to the 19th and 20th centuries.

[15] J. R. R. Tolkien used the word annún in his Middle-earth mythology as a term in the Elvish language Sindarin (phonologically inspired by Welsh) meaning "west" or "sunset" (cognate with the Quenya Andúnë), often referring figuratively to the "True West", i.e. the blessed land of Aman beyond the Sea, the Lonely Island Tol Eressëa, or (in the later mannish usage) to the drowned island of Númenor.

[16] The name was also previously used by an unrelated Celtic Rock trio in Berkeley, California, from 1991 until the death of lead singer Leigh Ann Hussey on 16 May 2006.