In the great early Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, the hero Culhwch is set forty impossible tasks to win the hand of Olwen, daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden. The hardest of them all is the hunt for Twrch Trwyth — a monstrous boar who was once a king, transformed by God for his sins, and who now thunders across the British landscape with a comb, a razor and a pair of shears tucked between his ears.
Culhwch cannot do it alone. He calls on his cousin, King Arthur, and the warriors of Arthur's court — and the hunt that follows is one of the longest and bloodiest sequences in early Welsh literature. They chase the boar from Ireland, across the Severn Sea, through Pembrokeshire, over the Preseli mountains, into the rivers of South Wales, and finally down into Cornwall.
Twrch Trwyth is not an ordinary beast. He is fast, cunning, and lethal. He kills warriors by the dozen. Each of the seven young pigs that travel with him is dangerous in its own right. Whole districts of Wales bear scars in the landscape said to have been left by the hunt — Twrch Trwyth's tracks across the Preselis, the place where he plunged into the Severn, the rivers turned red by the slaughter.
In the end, the comb and the razor are wrested from between his ears in the rivers of Cornwall, and the boar is driven into the sea, never to be seen again. The objects are brought back to shave Ysbaddaden, the impossible task is complete, and Culhwch wins Olwen.
But the wonder of the tale is not the wedding. It is the hunt itself — a story written down in the 11th century that takes Arthur out of the gilded courts of later romance and puts him back where he belongs: chasing a magical boar across the muddy hills of Wales, surrounded by warriors with strange names, doing impossible work because someone he loves asked him to.
Twrch Trwyth is a reminder that the oldest Welsh stories are wilder, stranger and more rooted in this landscape than the polished Arthur the rest of the world later inherited.