The ironic pig's value
The pig is ironically valuable. In the fairytale genre, pigs are a symbol for base animal nature, but here we see that basic animal symbolism elevated to a place akin to the quest for the holy grail. Instead of finding what he was looking for, the hero's journey leads the hero to become like the pig himself, accessing insights through his harmony with instinct and his obedience to his own intuition. The pig is a symbol for the irony of human potential, which is at the same time heroic and animal.
Authority and evil
One naturally expects that good will reign because everyone knows how goodness is powerful and most people know that objective truth is socially expedient. However, that is not the case, because the evil that corrupts the community's order is hidden in ancient castles, the authority of which is demanded by their dark and insidious appearance, as if the castle is reaching its spires into heaven and dragging authority down into its chambers. The ironic convergence of power and evil is part of the symbology of the story.
The escape of the death bird
The escape of the death bird is an ironic consequence of the heroic plot of the novel. This means that death is an ironic consequence of good and evil lives; the Ecclesiastical wisdom also points at deep considerations of guilt and shame, because the hero is made to feel responsible for the introduction of evil into the universe. This is Adamic and archetypal, urging the reader strongly to consider the nature of redemption and forgiveness. This is religious language, but the facts of the symbols are quite clear; part of this hero's quest of becoming is to consider divine reckoning and death.
Gwydion's death
Turns out, Gwydion didn't actually die even when it was suggested in the plot that he did die. This combines death and dramatic irony in the famously messianic way that medieval folklore is want to do. The hero is concealed from the story and assumed to be dead, but the death is only a narrative chrysalis through which a sacred transformation occurs. The citizen becomes the hero by a divinizing death, and upon his transformation, we learn that Gwydion inherited a powerful use of words.
The death of the king
Time is signified as an ironic deposition of the king in death. That is a suitable symbolism for time because it accurately captures the amazing way that everything on earth goes toward the same end. The death of the king shows what irony and time converges to withhold from everyday civilians; the revelation of death is an awareness that befits heroes and kings, because it takes an epic person to survive the weight of life with death so clearly before them, and yet when the king dies, the whole kingdom is pressed to respond to death. Change and time are obviously permanent aspects of the novel's landscape.
