Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry 090128226X, 9780901282262

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LECTURES

EARLY WELSH POETRY

IFOR WILLIAMS

DUBLIN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES 64-6g Maaacioor Sosana DUBLIN

P R I C E : T w O SHILLINGS

LECTURES O N

EARLY WELSH P O E T RY BY

SIR IFOR WILLIAMS

AYSTINTS

D U B L I N I N S T I T U T E FOR A D VA N C E D S T U D I E S

6 4 - 6 5 MERRION SQUARE D U B L I N 1954

N o v

PREFACE.

THESE three lectures were delivered last March in University College, Dublin, under the auspices of the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. They are printed as spoken. My aim was to sketch lightly such discoveries as I had

been able to make in the field of Early Welsh Poetry, in particular those which I hoped might be of some interest to Celtic scholars in Ireland.

Since we share a common

heritage, there is good reason why we should collaborate in For the solution the effort to understand and explain it. of many outstanding problems in connexion with Old Welsh a knowledge of Old Irish and the literature it enshrines is essential.For the student of Old Irish, too, a comparison with Welsh material may occasionally be helpful. The main th loosely called

of the poetry in a lecture bef

repeat here, wi now developed When I look

to express at a shown to me:

March Ist, 194 FIRST PRINTED 1944 BY A . THOM & CO., LTD., DUBLIN A N D R E P R I N T E D L I T H O G R A P H I C A L LY IN G R E AT B R I T A I N1 9 5 4

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY CHARLES BATEY

2 82 2 3 7

w e re d o n

LECTURE .I

ToNIGHT I should like to discuss briefly certain aspects of Early Welsh Poetry, or rather of the few fragments of it t h a t have survived to our own day. You are no doubt well aware of the close and striking resemblances between

your early poems and ours:

they are many and obvious.

If I can describe to you some of the essential features and characteristics of the work of the Old Welsh bardd, you are much better equipped than I am to quote the corresponding

page ni the history of Early Irish literature.

Perhaps I should be going too far if I said that the

Welsh and Irish bards in the early centuries belonged to one and the same school -the word school is too set- but I think it would be right to say that they both belong to one

and the same civilisation: the same cultural conditions created both. Once upon a time, Goidel and Briton were

one people, Celts or Galats, or whatever name they called themselves, and bards were an institution amongst them.

. The Celtic bard was the father of twins. These twins were brought up in two different environments for a while. Here, I think I can use the word school. For four hundred years the British twin lived under the rod and discipline

of the Roman Empire, ni a pretty strict school, while his

brother enjoyed himself mightily outside that school. Then both twins were admitted to the same great University of the Christian Church, and were kept in order--or partly in o r d e r - b y their dread of the same pastoral staff.

From

this period onwards. their congenital likeness to one another had superimposed on ti another one, that between members of the same University who had been taught the same In subjects in the same language by the same tutors.

Wales, at any rate, we haveonly the literary products of what may be called the post-graduate period.

6

EARLY

E A R LY W E L S H

WELSH POETRY

From the sixth century onwards men speaking the British dialect of Celtic produced an enormous amount of what they called poetry, and some of it has survived in For a just and fair appreciation of early manuscripts.

what their these poems, we must have a fairly clear idea of authors were trying to do, what their standards were, what

they meant bypoetry.

It is futile to judge their work by

W e m u s t m a k e an modern standards (if there are any). effort to put ourselves in their place and gauge their success or failure by the standards acknowledged t o be authoritative in their period.

Here I should like to quote from Gosse's Eighteenth Century Literature where he is dealing with the hostile critics

This is what he says: " If we of Pope and his school. persist in applying to classical and rhetorical poetry the tests framed t o measure romantic and naturalistic poetry,

the result will simply be to exclude ourselves from all possibility of just appreciation of the former." This seems to me to be a very sensible remark, and I hope you will agree. So we too, in assessing the value of early Irish and

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7

also an art, and there went with it the noble pride of craftsmanship.

The craftsman was also an artist.

The Irish fili (genitive,filed), connects with Welsh gweled

'to see': gweledydd ' a seer,' and there is a strong proba-

bility that the second element in derwydd, the Welsh for a druid, is connected with the vid- in Latin video ' I see,' cf.

the Greek olda ' I have seen,' then ' I know,' and the Welsh gwyddbod, gwybod ' to know,' literally ' be in a state of having seen." The poet was the man who saw. Over and over again in our early poetry the bard sings ' gwelais ' _ ' I have seen.' The poet was a seer. From the same root comes the English wit, and the wise man is so called because he has seen and knows.

The second suggestive title for a poet is the Welsh prydydd, connected with pryd ' shape, form,' cf. Irish cruth f o r m . ' and creth ' poetry.'

He sees and then sings, and his

song has form, shape, the beauty of the shaped thing: it is not a formless, shapeless chunk of wood, b u ta carving, a piece of sculpture. The Welsh bards called themselves the carpenters of song, seiri gwawd or seiri cerdd, and claimed as t h e i rown all the tools and technical terms of the craftsman

Welsh poetry, must endeavour to fashion for ourselvesas

ni wood, e.g. the axe, knife, square.When a rival imitated

What did a poet amongst them they mean by poetry? claim to be when he called himself a poet?

prydydd ' the shaper' is close enough to the original meaning

well as we can the poetic code of our ancestors.

What did

T h e We l s h p o e t Perhaps the old names may help us. called his work cerdd dafod, the craft of the tongue, tonguecraft. Cerdd in Welsh is the cognate of Irish cerdd; the

poetry,' latter meant, according to Meyer, 'skill, art, craft, T h e Greek

.? also 'craftsman, artisan, goldsmith, poet régdos preserves a still earlier meaning, ' gain, profit,

desire

of gain,' with derivatives meaning ' cunning, craft,shrewd-

ness': while repdo ' the wily one' was used of the fox.

It is well to know that there was a touch of the fox in the He had his eye on composition of the primitive bard!

gain, on the main chance, on the rewards and emoluments of his craft--to some extent at any rate! He had to please

his patron, for he earned his living by his craft.

c r a f to ft h elongue C e r a dd a l o d

But it was

their themes or methods they told him bluntly to take his axe to the forest and cut his own timber. This title of

o fpoet ' the maker.'

The Welsh gwawd ' song, poetry'

from wöt- goes with

Latin vates ' foreteller, soothsayer, prophet, poet'; vaticinor "to foretell, predict, . . to sing, to rave, rant, talk foolish

stuff.' The Irish faith ' poet, prophet ' is, of course, another cognate: so is Anglo-Saxon wóp ' sound, melody' craft ' a r t of poetry'; and wod ' mad, frenzied' 'madness.'

:wóbwódnes

Please note these meanings.

The Muse in Welsh was and is called Awen, with awenydd I

'poet' as a derivative.

The awen si the divine afflatus, the

heavenly inspiration which raises the poet above himself,

his ordinary self, not to mention above everybody else, a kind of elation or ecstasy. This meaning is well attested

8

E A R LY

о

WELSH P O E T RY

E A R LY W E L S H

in the old literature, and a compound, gor-awen, with gorintensive, was used for joy and supreme delight by the prose writers.

Here you must allow me to quote Giraldus Cambrensis, though he is not over popular in Ireland. Writing at the

end of the twelfth century in his Description of Wales he gives a striking picture of the Welsh avenydd of his own day. " There are certain persons in Cambria, whom you will find nowhere else, called Awenydion, or people inspired; when

P O E T RY

9

inspired moments. It is no wonder to me that the bystanders " violently shook " these entranced epileptics to make them return to their proper senses. I should have been delighted to join in the shaking, for whatever else may be true of their poems, they can by no means be described as composed The translations given in Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales of these Taliesin poems, are

in a c o h e r e n t m a n n e r.

even more " nugatory and incoherent " than the originalw h a t e v e r e x c u s e s o n e m a y m a k e for the t r a n s l a t o r s .

For

consulted upon any doubtful event, they roar out violently,

the latter I have the utmost sympathy, but very little

are rendered beside themselves, and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit. They do not deliver the answer to

respect.

what is required in a connected m a n n e r ;

but the person

who skilfully observes them, will find, after many preambles,

and many nugatory and incoherent, though ornamented speeches, the desired explanation conveyed in some turn of

The last

title I shall m e n t i o n is t h a t of b a r d :

it w a s

in use amongst the Celts on the Continent, in Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, and has come to be used in English as a general term for the Celtic poet. What the derivation of the word is, I do not know, but there is sufficient evidence

w o r d ; they are then roused from their ecstasy, as from a

to show that the Bardo at the beginning of the Christian

deep sleep, and, as it were, by violence compelled to return After having answered the question to their proper senses. they do not recover till violently shaken by other people; nor can they remember the replies they have given. If consulted a second or third time upon the same point, they will make use of expressions totally different; perhaps they These speak by means of fanatic and ignorant spirits.

Era were held ni honour by the Celts, side by side with the

gifts are usually conferred upon them in dreams:

some seem

to have sweet milk or honey poured on their lips; others fancy that a written schedule is applied to their mouths,

Druids and Vates.

The Bardo are described as song-makers

and poets: Diodorus says that they used musical instru-

ments similar to the lyre, evidently to accompany the vocal recitation or chanting of their songs. According to him

they praised some and censured or defamed others : their theme was eulogy or satire. An early writer tells us that bardus in Gaulish meant cantor, a musician, singer or poet, and that he sang the praises of brave men (qui virorum

fortium laudes canit).?

So the old bard composed songs in

and on awaking they publicly declare t h a t they have received

honour of brave men, a n d declaimed them to the strains

this gift. . . . They invoke, during their prophecies, the

of the lvre or h a r p or crwth.

true and living God, and the Holy Trinity, and p r a y that they may not by their sins be prevented from finding the truth." 1 I n all s e r i o u s n e s s I s h o u l d like

to s a y t h a t

there are

several passages in the Welsh manuscript, called The Book

of Taliesin, to which the above description may well be

applied;

" Many nugatory and incoherent, though orna-

mented speeches."

They a p p e a r t o b e v e r b a t i m r e p o r t s

of w h a t one of these awenvddion said in some of his less

For a change he used to revile

But cowards and, I suppose, the miser and the niggardly. his proper function was to honour the brave, to sing praises of heroes. In the Welsh poem called the Gododdin the poet gives us a clear echo of the ancient idea:

Beird byt barnant wyr o gallon, "the bards of the world judge (or assess) the men of valour." It was their business to award the prize of fame for valorous deeds.

EARLY WELSH POETRY

E A R I Y W E L S H P O E T RY

Now, if we make a composite picture of all the features suggested by the titles I have mentioned, it may help us

are pure propaganda, some are incoherent ravings, rivalling the Sibylline oracles in their intentional obscurity; in

I 0.

to understand the old Welsh poet. He combines in himself the functions, or parts of the functions of several professions

or orders in the Celtic world.

He is a craftsman and feels

no shame in asking bluntly for payment in the midst of his

r h e t o r i c .H i s hand is stretched out for a gift, even before his song is finished: that is why he is called eirchiad, one who asks, a suppliant. He is a seer, and has a good eye; he has the gift of vision: when he looks at a warrior in

splendid armour, or gazes upon a landscape, or the life of

society, he can frame or shape his vision in fitting words, Unforin metre and assonance, measure and adornment. tunately we cannot hear his voice or his harp, but we may be sure that he employed both to enhance the effect;

he

And further, there is that element was in part a minstrel. of frenzy, of the supernatural or the demonic, which is akin

to mania and madness, and may go with genius or charlatanism suggested by the account already given of the

raving, ranting awenydd, and the group of words associated

with gwawd and vates, as well as the Anglo-Saxon word wód.

It is from this obscure source t h a t we m a y derive all t h a t mass of early poetry which is grouped under the heading

of the craftsman who sang conventional stanzas for payment. So much for the poet: now for his work. Our early poems belong to well-defined types, or are blended of various types.

The simplest perhaps is what is

usually called nature poetry; it consists of descriptions of

a landscape, the view on a certain day, a scene ni Spring or Winter, followed usually by lyrical passages, or sage reflections, sometimes connected with the particular scene, It never forms a complete poem, but is sometimes not.

always introductory, a sort of prologue to another type of poem. The prologue at first was relevant: later it deteriorated into mere padding. Of the early type the best example

is a poem ni the twelfth century Black Book of Carmarthen,

beginning with a line which wil eb familiar to all of you Kintevin keinhaw amsser. Dyar adar; glas callet. Ereidir in rich; ich rguet. Guirt mor ; brithottor tiret.

of darogan or vaticination. The bard puts on the mantle of the prophet and foretells the future of his people with tremendous authority, fervour and conviction. Merlin and

Ban ganhont coger ar blaen guil guir

progeny multiplied exceedingly and spread over the land and

Kan ethint uy kereint in attwet.

the Sibyl most certainly " had issue" in Wales: their

down the ages from the ninth century to the fifteenth. If I had time I should like to deal at length with this extraordinary literature. Its importance for the political history of Wales has not yet been fully realised ; how these glowing visions of the f u t u r eo f their race cheered the hearts of

generations of the Cymry in the midst of disaster, oppression and national humiliation, and inspired them, after many defeats, to valiant efforts to win back their heritage, until at long last a Welsh nobleman ascended the throne of

Britain, and called his son Arthur.

Some of these poems

II

others the fervent faith of the prophet inspires him to climb to poetic heights, utterly beyond and above the range

Handit muy vy lauuridet.

Tost muc;

amluc anhunet.

Ym brin, in tyno, in inysset

Mor, im pop fort it elher,

Rac Crist Guin nid oes inialet.

Rec a archawe r i m naccer,

Y rof a Duv dagnouet. A m b of o r t hy porth viet.

Crist, ny bu(i)ve trist yth orsset.

I 2

EARLY

EARLY

WELSH POETRY

Maytime, fairest season, Loud are the birds, green the groves, Ploughs in furrow, ox under yoke, Green is the sea, lands are many-coloured. When cuckoos sing on the tops of fine trees, Greater grows my gloom.

Smoke smarts, sorrow cannot be hidden For my kinsmen have passed away. On hill, in hollow, on isles Of the sea, wherever one may go, From Holy Christ there is no escape.

A gift I ask which will not be denied me, Peace between me and God.

May there be for me a way to the Gate of Glory, Christ, may I not be sad before Thy Throne! Kuno Meyer years ago edited four Irish songs, which he dates in the ninth (or early tenth) century, songs of Summer and Winter. The first begins with Céttemain cain vé: its céttemarn is an exact parallel to our cyntefin, used in Old

Welsh for the month of May, the first month of Summer : cain corresponds in meaning and also very closely in sound to our c a n 'fair, beautiful,' the adjective which in its superlative form occurs in the Welsh song. Then r é in Irish and amser in Welsh both mean ' time, season.' The correspondence is thus very striking in the first line, not so later. Both poets bring in the song of birds, the green of the trees, the oxen ploughing, the smooth sea; but the Irishman sustains, the same joyous note for fourteen stanzas without a break, while the Welshman changes to the minor key in the fifth line, immediately the cuckoos are mentioned. It is a very And so in other poems in the early period.

curious thing that the song of the cuckoo invariably brings about this change of mood.

For instance, in one of the

WELSH

POETRY

13

_3 Llywarch Hen poems of the ninth century At Aber Cuawg cuckoos are singing. Sad is it to my mind That he who once heard them will hear them no more.

The poet then listens to the cuckoo on the ivy clad tree,

and confesses " Still greater is my longing for those I loved."

On the hill, on a mighty oak, the birds are singing, and

His comment is Cof amongst them loud is the cuckoo. he loves." gan bawb a gâr, 'Everyone remembers the one He describesthe cuckoo as the 'songster of constant song,' and adds hiraethawe y lef, 'its cry, its call brings hiraeth'

(longing for those who are gone).The blackbird,the thrush, the lark and the nightingale- all these find a place in his songs of love and pleasure, but the cuckoo is always a killjoy.

Not so in modern Welsh poetry, nor in Old

Irish, nor in mediaeval English poetry.

That fi r s t m e r r y

lay set the fashionSumer is icumen in. Lhude sing, cuccu!

Why then the difference ni our ancient poetry? The answer is very simple, though I am ashamed to say that it took

me years to find it.

It is because the cuckoo sang in Old

Welsh ! In Old Welsh the interrogative of place, 'where?'

Men everywhere was c (pronounced like English coo). hear t h e cuckoo's call as cr-cr, and so it was when the

Leper of Aber Cuawg heard it, or the author of the Black

The But these men gave it a meaning. Book poem. Where ? where? ' monotonous, persistent question cw-c-'

rang in their ears, and saddened their hearts, "For," as one of them said. " my kinsmen have passed away." Where are they? The White Christ found them on hill and dale, and in the isles of the sea:

from him there is no escape, " Quo

e v e n in t h e most d e s o l a t e w i l d e r n e s s c f . P s . 139. 7.

ibo a spiritu tuo? et quo a face tua fugiam? " - " Whither shall I go from thy spirit or whither shall I flee from thy presence? ")

E A R LY

14

WELSH

The Palace that to Heaven his pillars threw, And Kings the forehead on his threshold drew,

I saw the solitary ringdove there,

And ' Coo, coo, coo ' she cried, and 'Coo, coo, coo.' So Fitzgerald;

the literal translation of the last line by

H e r o n - A l l e n is

" Uttered its cry

E A R LY W E L S H P O E T RY

P O E T RY

I think you will find a parallel in Omar Khayyam

'Where, where, where, where? ' "

for k u i n Persian signifies " Where? " or " Where are they? "

No wonder, then, that Binning found this quatrain upon a s t o n e in t h e r u i n s of P e r s e p o l i s !

To go back now to Meyer's second poem, after this digression':-

My tidings for you : the stag bells. Winter snoweth. Summer is gone.

Wind high and cold, low the sun, Short his course, sea running high.

White cloaked i s t h eridge.

h e r el i k e a mountain brook making its way through and under reeds and heather, now in full view, then disappearing

for a while, but sure to emerge further on, so there runs a trickle of dialogue right through the 38 stanzas./

of the weather.

One voice dwells on the severity

" Warriors will not go to war. Idle is the

shield on the old man's shoulder."

The other voice counters

with "Fine is the shield on the shoulder of the brave,"

and so on alternatively, though sometimes several lines of

padding separate their remarks.

" I will not go: my wound prevents me." " A coward breeds many excuses."

" Cold and hard is the country side "Long is the night.

short (is) his course; deep red (is) the bracken; and curt snappy sentences of verb and subject, like Stag bells : Winter snoweth: Summer is gone. With this we can compare the other well-known poem in the Black Book, which begins : -

Llym awel; lum brin; anhawt caffael clid. Llicrid rid;

reuhid Uin.

Ryserw gur a r un c o n n .

" Keen is the wind, bare the hill. Hard it is to find shelter. Lake freezes. A man can stand on The ford gets worse. a single stalk."

The theme

si cowardice.Omitting all the nature poetry, I shall give you only the relevant lines.

Cold has caught the wings of birds: Season of ice--these are my tidings!

Here you find Meyer trying to turn into English Irish

Long is Rivers in

Bare the headland, gray the slope. the night. f o o d . Meagre is the stag, &c. But there is something else

Deep red the bracken, shapes are hidden. The wild goose has raised his wonted cry.

nominal clauses, w h i c ha r e identical in form with those used in the Welsh, e.g. W i n dhigh and cold: low (rs) the sun;

15

And so on. Withered are the reeds. Snow falls. White

si the fringe of the mountain. Bare are the trees. Weak

the songs of birds.

" Cowardice is an evil possession."

fall today."

"The wind is dry.

The sea is rough.

Rain will

Fine weather si coming."

" Storm on the mountain; rivers in flood.

The land

is like a sea."

"Thou art not a cleric; thou art not a grey beard, Chief. Thou wilt not be called on in the stress o fbattle.

Ah Cynddylig ! why wert thou not born a woman ?"

"The day is short."

Wi t h shield on shoulder, a good horse under thee, Brave fearlesscomrades by thy side,

Fine is night to rout the enemy.

The debate is over, and from this stanza to the end the

dialogue is open and obvious.

The raid is on, and the talk

EARLY WELSH POETRY

E A R LY

now is between warriors riding by night through driving snow to what is evidently death and disaster. The nature p o e t r y in this instance serves as an i n t r o d u c t i o n to a d r a m a t i c

Nevertheless in both these Welsh poems the dialogue. nature poetry is relevant. In the first, a lovely day in May; the cuckoo's song; then brooding over the loss of beloved friends.

Death is inevitable: a plea for God's mercy.

In

the second poem, though there is a heavy overlay of nature

poetry in the first half, almost burying the dialogue, at last

Yet every scrap of the drama, as it were, breaks loose. description is relevant to Act ,I Scene I, portrayingthe

unwilling warrior, wounded and dispirited by a presentiment of death, goaded on by his counsellor. Once heis convinced

of his duty, the weather does not count any more, and we

have pure dramatic dialogue to the end. It seems worthy of mention that Meyer's third and

fourth nature poems have a similar setting. Mac Lesc, or The Lazy Boy, was sent by Finn to fetch water; as an excuse for not going he sings this lay : " Cold till Doom!

The storm is greater than ever.

Each shining furrow is a river, A n d a full lake each f o r d . "

Finn said it was a lie, and began to praise the weather and t h e season : -

"Summer has come, healthy and free, &c." and we have seven stanzas of the conventional type in

praise of summer, birds, cuckoos, deer, green leaves, blackbirds, calm sea all the ingredients are there. Then Finn is said to have bound Mac Les stark naked to a standing stone till morning -after compelling him to fetch the water. And he was a good boy ever after ! The unwilling fetcher-

of-water is the opposite number to our unwilling warrior, Cynddylig, one of the sons of Llywarch Hen (or the Old)

these expatiate Cumhaill in the Welsh take the by Meyer just reference to the

850 A.D.,

WELSH

P O E T RY

I 7

on the rigours of the weather. Finn mac Irish, and Llywarch Hen (I think) in the opposite view. The Irish songs are dated before or after 900 A.D. Without any Irish parallel, I had dated the Welsh about

working on metrical and linguistic peculiarities

only. Meyer printed in the Revue Celtique XI, 125, another

Finn story, The Hiding on the Hill of Howth: a part of the

poem "Cold till Doom " occurs there ni another setting.

This time it is used by the Hag of Howth to deceive Diarmuid about the state of the weather, to keep him in the cave till Finn can capture both him and Grainne. Meyerdoubted the possibility of deciding to which of the two stories the p o e m o r i g i n a l l y b e l o n g e d . " Probably to neither," he says. He takes the Lazy Lad story as merely a frame for the two

poems; and further, in his opinion the first poemdoes not fit the Howth story very well. So he concludes, " These

facts r a t h e r seem t o show t h a t the tale was i n v e n t e d for t h e

sake of the poem, revealing an interesting feature of folklore. A poem exists in connection with some story. The poem, or at any rate, part of it is remembered, while the context is forgotten, or no longer considered interesting. A new story is invented, to which the poem is suited, and

ni which it is inserted." The first point he makes is that the poem existed in connection with some story; that is very important, or so it seems to me, for it explains much.

Accepting this as a basis we can go on to make certain

deductions.

If the poem fits into the frame of the story

without any bother, then it is fairly safe to assume that

we have it in its original frame.

If not, if the fit is loose

here and there, then the frame is a later addition or substitute. The Irish problem is one for you to settle. I am tempted to favour the Lazy Lad setting, for it provides a double frame, and takes in both poems. So does the Llym

awel version in Welsh: there is room and reason for the two contrasting descriptions of weather and scene. And the juxtaposition of contrasts was one aim of the Welsh

E A R LY W E L S H

'I8

E A R LY W E L S H P O E T R Y

P O E T RY

Nature | poets, and an essential part of their technique. poetry may thus form an integral part of a dramatic tale o r saga.

As for the invention of new stories as frames for old

of a l l :

" Three trees, the holly, the ivy and the yew, Put forth leaves all the year round.

poems, may I refer to what happened to the Welsh Tristan

a n d Iseult story ? This, as you know, closely resembles the Diarmuid and Grinne tale in Irish, and the story of what happened to the text is illuminating.

I learnt more

about what I call Welsh saga from this tale than from any

19

are no leaves, and Esyllt exultantly cries out the last englyn

So Trystan will have me as long as he lives." That is the complete version. In two other MSS. the only prose is a short and hopelessly unsuitable prologue of half

a dozen lines, which could only have been invented by one

other: that is why I am inflicting these dry details on you

who had never heard or seen the full version.

In the now.A l l the copies known are later than 1550. fullest version there is a short prose preface, telling how Trystan eloped with Esyllt to the Forest of Celyddon, or Scotland: her husband, March ab Meirchion, appeals to Arthur for justice, and Arthur with his army surrounds the

type of text omits the first stanzas and all the other prose

wood.

Esyllt hears the din of warriors and trembles in

Trystan's arms.

All this takes fourteen lines of prose.

Trystan tells her in an englyn (a short stanza of three or four lines) to be of good cheer, then, sword in hand, he passes safely through the host.

Cai, Arthur's steward,

being in love with Esyllt's handmaiden, Golwg Hafddydd,

informs Esyllt in an englyn that Trystan has escaped. She answers in another englyn. Eight lines of prose follow, leading up to a longer colloquy in fifteen stanzas between Gwalchmai, as peace-maker, and Trystan. Then he conducts the lover to Arthur's presence, and introduces him in an englyn to his lord.

Arthur welcomes Trystan in three

englynion without eliciting any reply. A fourth englyn, stressing their blood relationship, is more successful. Trystan replies in an englyn, and submits. In a short prose passage, we are told that Arthur makes peace between the husband

and lover: his decision seems fair enough, one is to have Esyllt while there are leaves on the trees, the other when

the trees are bare, and the husband is to have the first choice.

March promptly chooses the season when there

passages.

This second

I have lately seen a third version, just the title

and the englynion (22 of them) : no prose at all, only a very corrupt text of the poetry quite unintelligible in many passages, but still an echo of the early englynion, as if someone were writing down in bad Welsh an old song, badly heard and badly remembered. Even this late version

has its importance, for it proves that the story lived on for centuries, and was continually being modernised and remodernised.

Taking the complete version I found that the prose was much younger than the verse.

O t h e r facts became

obvious, too, which helped me considerably later on--for instance, the function of the prose is to tell the story, explain the circumstances, while t h eenglynion in e v e r ycase

are used to express personal emotion, or for dramatic The speakers are addressed by name, or else dialogue. In the three line stanza, the first they name themselves. line is a greeting, the second a description, and the third carries on the conversation; or else, the first two lines contain gnomic poetry, or tags of nature poetry, and as before, the sting comes in the tail. Occasionally, even as in modern verse, the whole stanza makes sense, though this is somewhat rare.

My concern at the moment is to emphasise the source of this padding: it is our old friend Nature poetry, together

with its sister type, Proverbial poetry, consistingof gnomes,

E A R LY

20

WELSH

P O E T RY

E A R LY

B o t h are maxims, sententious observations, proverbs. chips of the same block, or shavings from t h e same workshop. Aseertrained to look at a landscape on a spring day, or a winter's day, and see its individual elements, what features are essential to make up that particular picture, and then

paint just those parts required to suggest the whole in a

few curt phrases, he is just the man to look at a crowd, at society, at life, and see these too in their essential elements, note their general characteristics, and express them in terse, crisp, proverbial phrases, which may or may not become

proverbs on the lips of the folk.

It is t h e s a m e c r a f t s m a n

at work.

These sage remarks can be grouped into poems of considerable length, if you can find enough rhymes. We have in Welsh one or two long lists linked together not by subject but by rhyme. Or else they can be sorted into groups, with rhymes or without, under various headings, e.g. one's likes or dislikes, what ought to be, what is usual,

duties, customs, and so on. One poet,° not without humour, invented a new method, making use of the popular three

line englyn.

He began each stanza with " Hast thou heard

t h e r e m a r k of

" and then inserted the name of a

saint, or a warrior in the old sagas; the second line is usually

a description of the saint or warrior, and the third line is a proverb which happens to rhyme with his name! The author had 73 proverbs ready but not enough saints or

heroes, for when he came to Trech fydd anian nag addysg, " Nature (i.e. what is inborn, innate) is stronger than teaching (what one is taught to do)," he had no saintly rhyme for addysg, so he scratched his head, thought of

pysg ' fish,' and began

Hast thou heard the remark of the fish As he floundered in the bush?

'Nature is stronger than teaching.' This is funny enough, but it is even more so that Baring Gould and Fisher in their Lives of British Saints should

WELSH P O E T R Y

2I

have quoted the relevant stanza from this poem in every Saint's biography, as if it shed light on his personality!

In Ireland you have done better, The Instructions of Cormac is a much more sensible plan of sorting out sage comments on men and things.

Professor O'Rahilly in his Miscellany

of Irish Proverbs mentions this, and also three other "collections," as he calls them, " of precepts and wise sayings attributed to certain characters of history or legend who had obtained a reputation

for wisdom."

Hebrew

Wisdom Literature (perhaps also the ribald Latin parody on Solomon, Salomon et Marcolfus?) and the popularity of works like the Catonis Disticha,8 may have helped to foster

this type of literature in Wales, but in its primitive form it may also show vestiges not so much of druidism as of the

function of the druids as philosophers, teachers of wisdom,

instructors of youth.

Whatever the source may have been, proverbial poetry was cultivated from early times in Wales as in Ireland.

Rhymed proverbs in the earliest MSS. are ascribed to Aneirin and Taliesin- -which suggests at least that our

early poets were traditionally held to be proverb makers. The Old Welsh gwarchan meant " s o n g " : in Old Irish the corresponding verb forcun is used to gloss doceo " I teach."9

On the other h a n d Old Welsh cusyl usually meant

" counsel," butit occurs also as the title of a song containing

moral and religious advice.10 Mediaeval Welsh poets never had any qualms about.giving advice in their odes to their lords and masters.

How did these kindred forms of poetry, Nature poetry,

and Proverbial poetry, come to be employed so freely ni

Welsh saga ? A simple explanation is usually the best, and I am tempted to offer a very simple one. In these dramatic tales, dialogue was regularly put into verse form, and their authors found considerable difficulty in fitting

question and answer, the thrust and parry o f lively talk, into a metric frame.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

three-line stanza is too long for a neat reply;

ample in most cases.

Even a

one line is

So they framed their dialogues in

22

E A R LY W E L S H

EARLY WELSH POETRY

nature poetry and proverbs, which provided them with just.

the material required to fill up what was left of the line or englyn or poem.

There was no chance of their listeners

mistaking the frame for the picture, for this padding had no relevance whatsoever to the dialogue.

It was like the

The scroll work decorating initial letters in manuscripts. more irrelevant it was, the less likely it was to mislead. So if the poet is in any difficulty, he introduces a proverb,

or a nature tag, anything that will rhyme with the remark his hero has to make just then. To his hand was the whole

corpus of sententious poetry in which he had probably been well trained as a bardic pupil: choice.

he had only to make his

But when the higher class bard, the pencerdd, sets him down to compose an ode to his warrior-chief, this sort of It never occurs spurious ornament is studiously avoided. in Aneirin, or in the historical songs of Taliesin, whatever

later poets may have done. Compared with the great wealth of early saga you have

in Ireland, we ni Wales have only scraps. You are gloriously rich where we are miserably poor. And we badly need

Our your help to elucidate the fragments we have got. oldest manuscript written wholly in Welsh is the Black Book of Carmarther of the late twelfth century- -if it really

is one manuscript and not two bound together.

From page

Si to page 108 it contains for the most part what I take to be a collection of songs from our earliest sagas; amongst them are priceless fragments of the earliest Arthurian

romances, pre-Norman, pre-Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the Red Book of Hergest also (a MS. of about I400) there are many similar groups of poems, just strings of stanzas, usually with no prose passages at all, not even a title.

They run on, column after column, with occasional gaps between series. A group may begin with a big initial letter, or may not, and so the sorting process is rather difficult. A close examination reveals that stanzas beginning with the they form same word or words are to be taken together:

a unit in a larger scheme.

Now this inter-linking of stanzas

P O E T RY

23

bv means of identical first lines or initial phrases is characteristic of the verse passages in-set in the prose of the Trystan

and Esyllt story, as also of the Mabinogi englynion.

And

it struck me that this was a clue to the original function of this bardic device: it was meant to help the minstrel to memorise in their proper groups the stanzas of each

Ivric monologue or dialogue in a saga. In the early stages of the tradition the story teller X

knew the story by heart, at any rate the main lines of it. There was no need for him to be able to repeat it word for word, provided that he followed the original faithfully

enoughto bring in the stanzas, the englynion, at the right These however, had to be committed carefully moment.

identical initial to memory; metre, alliteration, rhymes, in his mind phrases, all these helped him to store them exactiv as he first heard them. If he distrusted his memory

he could write them down on vellum, and by so doing would make it certain that these verse elements of the saga would

be preserved intact for centuries, and that ni their earliest

and most primitive form.

Later copyists might bungle

their job, mis-copying through carelessness, or might deliberately and of choice change the orthography and

substitute more modern words and forms for t h o s e which

had become obsolete or obscure in the course of time.

Metre and alliteration would be a valuable check on this

modernising process.

You can modernise a prose story to

your heart's content, but alliterative verse is not so easy Poetic form to handle without spoiling the poetic form. preserved the old grammatical form, the old phrase or word. That is why the prose of the Trystan and Esyllt story and of the Mabinogi is much later than the language of the

englynion contained ni them. 1

So I have been led to the conclusion that the englynzon

now jumbled together in these two old MSS.

must be

regarded as a collection of the verse element in the oldest Before we can really understand them we Welsh sagas.

must discover the old prose setting of each group, or else

invent one of our own, as best we may, by giving a free

24

E A R LY

WELSH

P O E T RY

E A R LY

rein to our imagination, a very risky thing to do where

Welshmen are concerned! You come in as a curb, a check, in this way. . You have preserved m a n y old tales which we

have lost, tales which once ni the old, old days were common property to all the Celts. Amongst them we may be able to find suitable settings for some of these early Welsh

poems, which in the Old Welsh period were the gems of such tales.

We have the gem, polished in the Welsh way, but have lost the setting. One of your settings may fit.

More than that, contacts between the two nations in the

early centuries of our era, down to the twelfth century were many and close. Irish tales were borrowed and retold in

Welsh, with minor modifications: parts of the Branwen story in the Mabinogi are sufficient proof. s t r i k i n g instance of

Taliesin (c.

" l e a s e - l e n d " is that

1275), we have

An even more in

the Book of

a fragment ot Welsh verse

called the Death Song of Corroi m .Dayry (Cúroí mac Dáire). 21 Many critics have wondered at its presence here. It seems to prove that there was an old Welsh story of this Irish hero a- saga embellished with verse as werethe others I If Irish tales were imported and adapted have mentioned. in this manner, we need not wonder t h a t in the story of Culhwch and O w e n a group of Irish saga heroes are coolly

registered as knights of King Arthur's court. In order to enhance the glory of Arthur, the narrator forced Welsh heroes of many centuries to make their way to his court, and become his men: they belonged to saga literature, and so they had to belong to the Arthurian circle.

We can

therefore confidently infer that he found these Irish names

also in Welsh heroic tales, adaptations of Irish sagas; and

he enlisted the Irish heroes too with the others. The name of the son of Daire is amongst them. The Colloquy of the Ancients (Agallamh na Senórach) in Irish is more topographical than the Culhwch story. 31 Its plot is magnificent in its simplicity, and most effective for its purpose. St. Patrick and his clerics see approaching them nine huge warriors, the remnant of Finn's Fianna, led by Caoilte, and the Colloquy begins between the Saint and

WELSH

P O E T RY

25

This the representative warrior of the pagan heroic age. is the dream of an antiquarian come true! What a glorious chance for a man who had devoted a lifetime to the study

of Irish place-names ! Scores of names are associated with the Fianna in folk tales. Others are just intriguing problems.*

W h a t a joy it would be to have in the flesh before him one who could speak as an eye witness of the battles, of the

romantic complications and tragedies of long ago, and explain them all with the authority of one who can say « I was there at the t i m e ! " The Saint and others, as they move from place to place, ply Caoilte with questions; why

is this hill, funeral mound, ford, beach, called

particular name?

by

its

That is theframe-work, the setting.

The nearest parallel in Welsh is Breuddwyd Rhonabwy, the Vision of Rhonabwy, 41 a warrior of Powys in the middle While sleeping on the skin of a of the twelfth Century. vellow heifer he has a dream, a vision: he sees himself and his comrades on the Welsh border, near the Severn. Suddenly a huge warrior comes straight for them on a still bigger war-horse, and they try to flee. As the horse expels its breath they are blown forward on their path; every time it breathes in they are sucked back by the draught It was " some " horse! They to the horse's very breast. ask for. quarter and are taken to Arthur's.presence, for their captor was one of his Knights. Arthur asks him where he

got these little men.

On hearing that they were caught

"Lord," said the Knight, close by, he smiles bleakly. "why dost thou laugh? " And Arthur answered, " I do not laughbut grieve that the defence of this island has been entrusted to such weaklings, after the mighty men who once held it! " Here we have the same contrast as in the The difference in size between modern and Then Rhonabwy mediaeval men and the heroes of old. goes on to describe the men of Arthur's host, their weapons

Colloqu y.

and armour, until the tumult of the army wakes him up

out of his sleep, and he finds himself o n the skin of the yellow heifer.

The Welshman called up from the dead an eyewitness

EARLY WELSH POETRY

26

EARLY

WELSH

POETRY

of the past because he wanted to describe the Knights of Arthur in their glory. The Irish story teller calls up Caoilte to tell him the forgotten tales of the past in order to explain the place names of Ireland. One was a warrior, or a student of heraldry; the other, one of the Antiquaries of Ireland, preparing an Onomasticon, and a Gossiping Guide. Both are very entertaining, but I personally am very much

I have been where Bran was slain,

interested in place n a m e s ! In the Black Books there is a collection of Stanzas of

two stanzas : The series e n d s with these

the Graves, seventy-three in number. The Graves are those in the open, the graves wetted by the rain on the open countryside, the graves of legendary heroes, not those in There are indications that these Abbeys and Churches. stanzas have been collected from tales of warriors' d e a t h s ;

t h e tales a n d the warriors are in m o s t cases quite u n k n o w n

to us now. Some of them were graves of unknown warriors even in the twelfth century, and so you get a stanza of this form :

.

Piev y bet hun. Bet hun a hun.

Gowin ymi, mi ae gun.

"Whose grave is t h i s ? This grave, and this? me, I know them." Does not this formula suggest another Caoilte?

this

Ask

Or take

Elffin has brought me to test my bardic skill, Above a chieftain, first of all.

This is the grave of Rhufawn; he became dust too young.

Did Taliesin play a similar part to that of Caoilte in a Welsh saga ? He is the only bard who had Elffin for his patron. Here his patron tests. his bardic lore above the grave of an unknown warrior. Further on in the same MS. there is a dialogue in englynion where Gwyn son of Nudd is one s p e a k e r. 1 6

T h e n follows in w h a t m a y be a new p o e m :

I have been where Gwenddoleu was slain,

Son of Ceidiaw, patron of poets,

When ravens were croaking above blood.

27

Son of Iwerydd, far famed,

When the ravens of battle were croaking.

I have been where Llachau was slain, Son of Arthur, honoured in songs,

When ravens were croaking above gore.

I have been where the warriors of Britain were slain, From the East to the North. I am (alive) but they in grave. I have been where the warriors of Britain were slain, From the East to the South I am (alive but they in death.

The warriors mentioned belong to the sixth century.

Who

was present when is this survivor from the heroic age, who

him nicely into the frame o f your

I could fit make him a Welsh Colloquy of the Ancients, or I could they fell?

of a yellow frame, if I were lucky enough to find the skin Perhaps I may heifer to sleep on, perchance to dream.

find one in Ireland!

E A R LY

WELSH

P O E T RY

29

I tried myself ten years ago, but had to confess myself beaten by the first line and the last. Today, I should like to have another shot.

Only one word remains doubtful.

This is what I make of them now : LECTURE

II.

In the previous lecture I tried to give you my idea of the Old Welsh Saga. In it prose was employed for narrative

and description; verse, usually of the englynion type, was used for monologues and dialogues. Later the verse

elements were discarded almost completely, and the whole

story was told in prose.

One reason for the change may

have been that the old stanzas, the old englynion, by this

period had become too difficult; their language was now

obscure;

many words and forms had become obsolete,

unintelligible, and so these charming lyrics had to be

sacrificed.

However beautiful they may have been in their

classical terseness, and strict metrical form, once they

became unintelligible to the warriors and courtiers in the

halls of the chieftains, or in the apartments where the bard* entertained the chieftain's wife and her handmaidens, then they had to go. Their place was taken by a more intelligible

paraphrase.

Providentially a few have been preserved in

our earliest manuscripts, though even here the text has often been tampered with, and partly modernised. Three stanzas luckily survive on the upper margins of

the Juvencus metrical version of the Gospels, 71 now in the

University Library, Cambridge. These three were written

downin the first half of the ninth century, as the lettering and orthography prove, and, as you can imagine, they are of the utmost importance and value for all Welsh scholars.

Elsewhere in the same MS. nine englynion have been written

in a similar hand, and in the same metre: but these form a complete religious poem, and are not, like the other three, a piece of saga torn from its context, for that is the best description I can give you of these nine lines of Old Welsh verse.

Many attempts have been made to translate them.

1. I shall not talk even for one hour tonight, My retinue is not very large, I and my Frank, round our cauldron.

not jest 2. I shall not sing, I shall not laugh, I shall tonight,

Though we drank clear mead, I and my Frank, round our bowl.

e for merriment tonight, .3 Let no one ask m Mean is my c o m p a n y .

one speaks.

Two lords can talk:

The speaker is evidently a chief; very much on his dignity, He has lost all his war-band, or or else very low spirited. retinue, in battle probably, except one foreign mercenary,

His hall this night is empty, w h o m he calls his Frank. Instead of a merry host of noble youths to share desolate.

the feast, there are left only the Chief himself and this one

hireling. His heart is bitter withinh i m . He cannot sing,

the clear mead. laugh, jest, however much he may drink of H i smood is far from merriment of any sort. He looks at his sole companion, this hired soldier--and loathesthe sight of him. The word he uses to describe his " present company" used is not at all polite; it is the Irish discir, an adjective It glosses words like to describe the rabble host of hell.

parasitus, scurra, vilis, what is common, mean, vile, low,

" Mean, the scum of society. explains the difficult last line.

vile is my company."

This

How can he condescend to

converse with such a one, this foreign mercenary? Two noble lords can talk freely together; they meet on equal terms, especially at table.

But what can one noble lord Dou nam riceus, two

do with none of h i speers available?

30

E A R LY

WELSH

P O E T RY

lords can converse. Un guetid, one speaks. The verb here, guetid, is cognate with Irish fethid, explained by Thurnevsen as " directs his attention to something or other: observes."18 In Welsh the verb developed a secondary meaning of "making observations, remarks," and so dyedyd came to mean " to remark, to say." The solitary chief can make

observations, remarks.

He can lay down the law, but free

and pleasant conversation is impossible. There is none who dares answer back! To make matters worse in this

story, the only other person present is a foreigner, a Frank.

Now this use of Frank in the Juvencus englynion has caused a deal of trouble. According to some critics its mere presence here proves that they cannot be earlier than the

Norman Conquest.

To that I should like to r e p l y, Bradshaw

was no mean scholar, and he dated them ni the ninth century. Professor W. M. Lindsay, the expert palaeographist, accepted

this dating.

Stokes and Loth agree.

Is it likely that these

eminent scholars can have blundered so badly that they are three or four centuries out in their estimate? I have spent weeks in fierce scrutiny of every letter in these lines. both

in the MS. itself,and in facsimiles large and small, and I

must testify that I have failed to detect any sign of lateness in any of them. The lettering is all in order. The orthography can be compared with that of Oxoniensis Prior, a MS. written in 8 2 0 - I mean, of course, with the Welsh

sentences and glosses in that MS., or with the Martianus

Capella glosses, which may belong to the same, or even to

an earlier period. And further, even fi we date the poem in the twelfth century in order to get rid of the Frankish trouble, we are faced with even more formidable difficulties; for instance, the difficulty of explaining why this supposed twelfth century poem is written in the same letters, and in the very same orthography as the Oxford MS. of 820, in an ortho-

graphy centuries earlier t h a n anything to be seen in the.

Black Book of Carmarthen, circa 1200. Again, is it likely that a Welsh chieftain in the twelfth century, when the fight against the Normans was most

E A R LY W E L S H

P O E T RY

3I

fierce and bitter, would have hired a Frank, one of the

hated enemy to be one of his teulu or war-band ? believe it. One other point.

The

I cannot

I r i s h amos19 o r a m h a s

means

« mercenary soldier." Stokes printed in the Revue Celtique xiv. 396, a story called The Violent Deaths of Goll and Garb. When Cuchulainn breaks into the fortress, Conor calls out

"Whereare the francamais of my house? " In his glossary Stokes suggests that this franc may be a borrowing of our

franc, and refers tothe Juvencus example, or from the prehistoric form of Old Norse, frakk ' fortis.' Thurneysen,

however, in his book on the Irish Heroic Saga? translates francamais as " French soldiers"; in his view this reference

favours the twelfth century date, for which he argues; he

stresses too the bombastic style of the story in support of Its bombast may be a sign of lateness, such a dating. ce. b u t I a m l o a t h t o a c c e p t f r a n c a m a s a s c o r r o b o r a t i v ee v i d e n

The Normans were new arrivals in Ireland in the twelfth

century. It does not seem very likely that an Irish storyteller would immediately plant some of them in Conor's ancient court, without being conscious of the anachronism.

Since the Welsh franc was a mercenary soldier, and the Irish amhas also a mercenary soldier, it seems to me that

franc-amhas may well be a compound of synonyms (like

Welsh bwystfil), or else that franc in the name may be used like Gall- i n the sense of foreign. In Ireland and in Wales the term Frank was well known long before the Normans

landed in these islands.21 I cannot see any flagrant impossibility in the supposition that exiled or wandering Frankish warriors m a y h a v e occasionally crossed the seas a n d enlisted

in the service of Welsh and Irish chiefs, even as early as t h e n i n t h c e n t u r y.

So much for the Frank.

I had to take up some of your

time to deal with him though I had to omit several points I hope, nevertheless, that I should like to have made.

enough has been said to show t h a t the Frank need not prevent us from taking the three Juvencus englynion as

genuine ninth century work.

EARLY WELSH POETRY

32

E A R LY

Taking them as a sample of our early saga poetry, their

metre, assonance or alliteration,

forms of expression or

ornament, everything pertaining to them calls for close

study. You will be spared these; but I am sure that you have noted the use of tonight as the last word in the first line of each stanza (henoeth, your anocht).

Its function is

twofold. The saga was usually told in the evening, but there is more to it than that. The emphasis on tonight serves to stress the contrast between this night and other and happier nights. So in Welsh and Irish, for instance S u i b h n e Geilt 22

Gloomy is my night tonight

Without serving man, without camp.

Not so was my night at Drum Damh I and Faolchú and Congal.

So his Welsh counterpart Myrddin Wyllt23:-

Little does Rhydderch Hael know tonight at his feast, What discomfort I endured last night, Snow up to my thigh, with wolves for company.

WELSH

P O E T RY

33

thing occurs in Irish tales also,21 and so the critics like to

quote these passages to prove the fondness of Celts for bright colours.

contrasts

To me they suggest rather a love of striking

a fondness for similes, balanced by a delight in

opposites ! In the Urien story, the bard bears away from the battle field his lord's head, the head of Urien:Pen Uryen, Wary Uywyei Un, Ac ar y v o n n wenn vran dd)u.

The body was left behind, and the horrid scene is pictured in one perfect line: And on his w h i t e b r e a s t a b l a c k r a v e n .

This i snot a love of black and white, but a love of contrast : not real pathos, perhaps, but good rhetoric.

The contrast need not be between colours: it may be

between states of mind or body, between moods, between

starvation in the woods and feasting in the hall, between the company of brave men and fair women in the king's

court, and a pack of snarling wolves in a snowclad forest

The contrast is the main thing. Suibhne and Myrddin, one of them Geilt and the other Gwyllt, both wild men of the woods, contrast their present state with their previous

- a s already quoted. is implied, not stated.

This fondness for strong contrasts is universal in Welsh poetry. It is foundtoo in prose as well. Take the well known story of Peredur, standing stock-still, entranced with what he saw when he left the hermit's cell; namely, a newly slain bird lying on the snow. On it alights a crow, or rather a raven. So Peredur in poetic mood likens the

contrast expressed tersely in the Cynfeirdd style, " Two lords can talk: one speaks." That line is what the bard was aiming at all along. I said the other day that we had

luxurious lot, or t h a t of their former comrades.

whiteness of the snow to the white skin of his lady love, the blackness of the raven to her jet black hair, the red drops

of blood on the snow to t h e two r e d spots on her cheeks.

And feels himself a very great poet indeed. He will allow no one to disturb him with impunity. The same sort of

In the Juvencus poem the contrast It is between the chieftain's mood

this particular night and on 'other nights when he delighted in singing, laughing, merry talk over his mead and ale-

until the last line of all is reached, where you get a new

t o fi n d o u t w h a t

the

primitive

bards meant

This is one of the main elements in it,

b y p o e t r y.

studied contrasts.

Hundreds of instances could be quoted. Now this element of contrast is of the substance of the

old poetry. What of the form? The Juvencus poem is typical in this respect also, for it shows that repetition of an idea is the method used for emphasis. The wording is varied just enough to enable the bard to change the rhyme.

34

E A R LY

WELSH

P O E T RY

E A R LY W E L S H

We are told three times in three short stanzas that the company was a very small one, only two, and in this case the proverb " Two's company " did not apply.

not the right two.

These were

So, contrast in substance, and repetition

in form are part of the formula. To offset the redundancy of these repeated phrases, another virtue was practised, that

of the utmost conciseness in expression, terseness in statement, as somebody or other has said, a classic parsimony

of words.

Add metre and assonance to taste, and you have

described most early Welsh poems. After these general remarks, I think I had better settle

down to the study of what used to be known as the songs.

of Llywarch. Hen, for in these we can find material to

illustrate the main rules outlined above. These poems are found in MSS. of various dates, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, with a few fragments in sixteenth

century MSS. The majority, however, are contained in the RedBook of Hergest (I400) as copied from the White Book

of Rhydderch (1325). A longish poem has been preserved ni the Black Book of Carmarthen (1200). T h e earliest

pedigrees prove that Llywarch Hen belonged to the sixth century, and that he was the cousin of Urien Rheged who

ledthe Britons of the North ni their fight against the sons

of Ida of Northumbria in the last quarter of the century.

Urien was the patron of Taliesin, a bard whose reputed

works were collected about I275 in a manuscript now known

as the Book of Taliesin: several of his poems are in praise

of Urien Rheged and his son Owain ab Urien.

When the Ossianic controversy was raging in England

ni the eighteenth century, English scholars turned to Wales for the means to demolish utterly Macpherson and all his

works, or else to establish beyond dispute the authenticity

They appealed for help to Welsh of early Celtic poetry. antiquarians, the unworthy successors of the great Edward LIwyd, and from them they heard a good deal about Taliesin, Aneirin and Llywarch Hen, for, as a result of LIwyd's labours, there had started what may be called a new Revival of Learning in Wales. A group of enthusiasts

P O E T RY

35

were engaged in collecting and studying Welsh MSS. Later on, Welsh texts were edited and published, and so the movement developed in importance and on the whole in

efficiency. For these pioneers Llywarch Hen, the sixthcentury prince, was the author of the Red Book englynion. They had no d o u b t of their authenticity and a n t i q u i t y, and

according to their lights they toiled hard to understand them, and explain them to their own people and to foreign

scholars. So

uncritical,

however,

were

they,

and

so

enthusiastic in their claims that critics like Wright and Nash

in the following century, though they knew little Welsh themselves, were able to score heavily against them. Thomas

Wright maintained t h a t the Llywarch Hen stanzas were

actually propaganda produced by the bards during the rebellion of Owain Glyndwr about I400 : he was very As I have found copies of some of them written down in 1325, I250, I200, I have never

emphatic on this point.

thought it worth while to discuss his theories; it would

be sheer waste of time. These poems do not belong to the war of 1400-I410. On the other hand they do not go back to the close of the sixth century as his Welsh opponents asserted. Their background is not Britain in 600 but Wales

in 850 to goo, probably 850.

The fighting is not for Lichfield,

Lincoln and York, but for the Welsh border, the fringes of Cheshire and Shropshire and Hereford, the Shrewsbury

district in particular.

Their author was not the Llywarch

Hen of history: he is merely the chief character ni a play. I have stated my case in full elsewhere. 25

Before Irish

scholars I need say very little, you will understand my point without my having to labour it or repeat the whole argument.

I hold that these poems are the remnants of a lost saga,

produced about 850 in Powys, the Welsh province facing The prose has gone, these are Shropshire and Cheshire. the verse elements in that saga. Welsh scholars failed to identify

them as such, because all the Welsh Mediaeval

In romances they knew were almost wholly in prose. Ireland it is very different: you have plenty of real saga in prose and verse and no Irish scholar could have failed

E A R LY

36

WELSH

E A R LY

P O E T RY

to identify the Llywarch Hen poetry as this type of verse, for they have all the characteristics of their class.

Tackling the Red Book englynion first,26 I found 69 of them in a long string with no title, or break of any kind, and so I attempted to sort them out in groups, on the analogy of the Trystan-Esyllt story, and that of Irish tales. The first 21 formed a coherent whole, a monologue by Llywarch Hen, which could well be called the Lament of an Old Man: the next 13 to my great delight turned out to be a Dialogue between Gwên, son of Llywarch, and his mother or father, or both. Then follows a Dirge on the

death of Gwên, by his father, in 14 englynion.

These 24

stanzas can be taken together as belonging to the story of

Gwên.

An englyn on his grave has been interpolated in

the middle of the Dirgei t was probably first written on the margin in an earlier copy, and thence slipped into the text. The remaining 20 are a Dirge on the Death of Pyll,

son of Llywarch, I r stanzas, and 5 stanzas on the graves

of I4 of his sons, with

them.

4 stray stanzas to 3 more of

I m a y as well break the news gently to you n o w :

Llywarch had 24 sons, exactly two dozen.

If a tale was told

of each of t h e m there m u s t h a v e been once a full Llywarch

Hen cycle, to rival the Arthurian cycle of a later period. The Lament of the Old Man can be placed at the very end, and so our first task is to devise a setting for the Colloquy of Gwen and his parent, or parents, leading on to the Death-song of Gwen and the others. The beginning follows the old convention: two lines of

wooden frame, slightly gilded.

No relevance at all.

WELSH

P O E T RY

37

This meant adding the initial N to the line, and changing

one letter besides, but it seemed to me to make sense. But the next verse was really hopeless in Skene's translation

Do I not recognise by my Awen, My descent, sway and kindred: Three themes of the harmonious Awen? and

Awen of course means elation of spirit, or the Muse: therefore one finds the word occurring rather

in verse.

frequently

Here, however, it is too evident, rhyming in two

lines out of three.

So I divided the second Awen into A

Wen, that is, the interjection A, and Wen, the mutation of

Gwên, the name of one of Llywarch Hen's sons.

Without

changing a word the rest of the stanza now made sense:

The thrill, the elation in my heart tells me That we are of the same blood.

Long hast thou stayed away, O Gwên! The obvious conclusion was that this group of englynion formed a Dialogue between Gwên and his Mother. A n d Of late, that is how I took them, and printed them. Is however, I have become more and more dissatisfied. that emendation in the first phrase of the dialogue absolutely necessary? I mean, the change of Amgyhudd fy man into

Na'm cyhudd, fy mam, " Accuse me not, my mother."

At

long last I have been forced, though with regret, to conclude that the second speaker is not Gwên's Mother, but Old

Ilvwarch himself. The fierce Spartan mother, whom I had

Arm not after the evening meal. Be not sad of heart, Keen is the wind; bitter is poison.

created, must go! I must say that I miss her. My reasons are these: two instances of am cyhudd in

Then comes the significant line: thus translated in Skene's'

obscure, the other two are fairly straightforward. In these the context demands a verb of declaring, asserting, saying

F o u r A n c i e n t Books :

"Accuse me not, my mother

I am thy s o n !

old poetry have cropped up, as well as am ceudd.

One is

publicly, without the slightest flavour of accusing' though that is the regular meaning of chuddo in Modern and

E A R LY

EARLY WELSH POETRY

38

Mediaeval Welsh. 2. The only textual change required now is to read am c h u d d in the englyn, and the translation is

simple, "My mother declares that I am thy son."

reading does away with all the ingenious explanations I had

to invent to account for the mother's failure to recognise her own son. For a father to be in such a predicament

is not unprecedented, both in real life and in legend. In the latter it is almost a stock incident. Why Gwên had

stayed away so long I am not going to make any more

guesses.

All I am certain of is that he had spent some time

with Urien, his uncle, the most renownedwarrior of the

WELSH

P O E T RY

39

He means " Bring no discredit on thy warrior father " as Gwên's reply proves:

Such a

I will not shame thy honour, thou giver of battles,

When the brave arms for the fray,

I will endure hardship ere I budge from my post. From this point on the Old Man begins to taunt his son,

to goad him on, provoking him by suggesting doubts of

This is m y second reason for s u b s t i t u t i n g his courage. L i v w a r c h h e r e for G w ê n ' s m o t h e r , for in e v e r y dialogue,

or fragment of dialogue, from this saga, this si the part And so, when-

sixth century, and from him he had received a horn, with

he plays: it is his most characteristic role.

greeting can be explained by a later reference. While hw e was away, his brothers, twenty-three in number, had all been killed in the incessant fighting: at last there is no.

now that I am listening to Llywarch Hen's signature tune-

Llawen, on the very borders of Wales, only Llywarch Hen So

talkative warrior is wont to flee."

a golden baldric.

The touch of reproach in his father's

champion left to guard the Ford of Morlas, on the River himself.

the old warrior begins to put on his armour,

insisting that he is fit for the task, ni spite of his age. stray englyn can. be introduced here: it gives the position just before Gwên arrived.

Worn thin is my shield over my heart.

Though I am old, I can do it.

On Morlas Ford I shall keep watch.

Gwen, who had heard the news, hurries home, tells the old man who he is, and takes the venture on himself. The dialogue is fairly straightforward. Gwên begins :

Keen is my spear, flashing in the fight: I intend to guard the ford. Though I may not return; God be with thee! Llywarch replies:

Shouldst thou survive, I shall see thee again. Shouldst thou be slain, I shall weep for thee.

Lose not the honour of a warrior.

ever I hear this taunting note ni the old englynion I know if you will tolerate such a modernism.

Omitting all padding, I shall give you merely theA He replies to Gwên with a proverb " significant lines.

The boy retorts-

At least I can say this: Spears will be shattered where I am.

I d o not say that I shall not flee. Llywarch: A promise not kept comes to nought. Gwên :

This is my purpose:

Gwên :

However hard pressed I may be before the men

My shield will be shattered before I retreat. Llywarch: The horn that Urien gave thee With its golden baldric, Sound it if hard pressed. of England

I shall not thus degrade myself.

I shallnot rouse the maidens from their sleep! Llywarch: When I was of the age of that boy yonder Who wears spurs of gold,

I used to rush swiftly against spears. Gwên :

In sooth a safe assertion!

T h o u art alive, thy witness is slain.

No old man ever was a weakling ni his youth!

EARLY WELSH POETRY

E A R LY

Then without any break in the MS. comes a chain of mournful englynion, Llywarch's lament for Gwên. It

Then come two remarkable englynion :

here in the old saga, a description of Gwên as he rode forth to battle at the fatal ford. Then a full account of the fight, and of the hero's death: and how a messenger brought

O f b r a v e fi e r c e warriors.

40

seems to me that there must have been a prose interlude

the news next day to the old man who had taunted the boy as he sets out, and who now raises his voice and chants the Death Song of the last and best of his warrior sons. Gwên by the Llawen kept watch last night, In the fight he fled not ; Sad is the tale on Gorlas Dyke. Gwen by the Llawen kept watch last night. With shield on shoulder,

Since he was a son of mine, bold was he.

Gwên, I knew thy nature, Thy rush was like the swoop of a sea-eagle,

Had I been fortunate, thou wouldst haveescaped.

When warriors set out to battle,

Gwên, woe to the old man who longs for thee. When warriors go forth on a raid, Gwên, woe to the old man who has lost thee. My son was a man stubborn in conflict,

41

Too great fame is bad.

They have been lost!

This is a most feeble and ineffective attempt to give you the substance of these two stanzas. Packed into six lines they The old man is contain the kernel of the whole drama.

Once he had twenty-four brooding on his mistortunes. He was proud noble sons: all warriors, peerless in battle.

of them--too proud:

they brought him fame, much fame.

His pride became immoderate, excessive, arrogant, and. arrogance is the one unpardonable sin. His tongue uttered boastful words, and for these no forgiveness is possible. They brought upon his sons the wrath of Heaven, or rather the sullen anger of Fate, and Fate is implacable. Pride must be brought low. Too much fame is bad; a little, good. He thinks of the way he had gloried in his boys, how he had spurred them on to win more renown. And now? He ends the Death Song of all his hopes with one

word, standing apart, one word complete with the finality of utter despair, Colledeint.

They have all been lost.

have perished, every one of them.

early Greek Tragedies.

Four and twenty sons had I, With collar of gold, leader of a host, Gwên was the best of them all

utterly bereaved

Compared with Gwên the others were mere striplings.

P O E T RY

Four and twenty sons, the offspring of my body, By my tongue they have been slain A little (fame) is good.

He was Urien's nephew, At the Ford of Morlas, Gwên fell.

Four and twenty sons had I, With collar of gold, leader of chieftains,

WELSH

Four and twenty sons' in Llywarch's household

They

It r e m i n d s one of t h e

As a kind of Epilogue, I should like to quote now from the Song of the Old Man, Llywarch Hen, destitute and alone, Before iny back was bent, comely was I My spear led the attack.

Now my back si bowed. I am heavy.

I am sad.

Then he turns to his crutch or walking stick,his sole

42

EARLY WELSH POETRY

companion all the year round, and addresses it: Little staff of wood, it is Autumn,

Brown is the bracken, the stubble yellow. I have given up what I love.

Little staff of wood, it is Winter,

Men talk much over their drink.

No one comes near my bedside.

Little staff of wood, it is Springtime, Brown are the cuckoos. No m a i d e n l o v e s me.

There is light at a feast.

Little staff of wood, it is May-time, Red is the furrow, curly is the young corn.

It s a d d e n s me to look a t t h y crook (beak).

(So he struggles out of doors, leaning on his staff). Little staff of wood, O kind branch!

Support a sorrowful old man, Llywarch, the babbler. • Little staff of wood, be kind And support me still more,

I am Llywarch, long babbling.

(He sees a dead leaf, and sympathises). This leaf, the wind is chasing it,

A l a s for its f a t e !

Old already, born this year.

What I loved in my youth, now I hate,

A woman, a stranger, a young horse.

It m u s t be t h a t I a m not suited for them.

The four things I have always hated most

Have come upon me at t h e same time,

Coughing, old age, sickness, sorrow.

E A R LY

WELSH

POETRY

43

I am old, I am lonely, mis-shapen and cold, After a n h o n o u r e d bed,

I am wretched, I am bent double. I am bent double, old, peevish, perverse, I am foolish, I am irritable, They that loved me, love me not. Maidens love me not; no one visits me. • I cannot move about.

O Death! Why does it not come to me? Neither sleep nor joy comes to me After the death of Llawr and Gwên.

The next line is difficult to translate, though the meaning is clear,

Wyf anwar abar, wyf hen. The difficulty lies in combining anwar 'irritable,' and abar a contemptuous word for a dead body, just like carcass. The suggestion is that his withered enfeebled body is as good as dead, except that there is still in it enough life to

complain and grouse.

Then comes Wyf hen "I am old."

The last englyn then follows : Sad was the fate ordained for Llywarch (

From the night he was born:

Long toil, weariness without relief. That was his fate, and there was no possibility of avoiding it. Now, for comparison, a scrap from the remnants of another Llywarch story, this time dealing with the adventures of another of his sons, called Maen with the epithet gwyn " fair," Maen Wyn. What t h ecircumstances were, you must infer for yourselves from the eight englynion,

but there is no mistaking the first speaker. He can be no one else but Llywarch in his usual role, as irritating and

provocative as ever

Maen Wyn, when I was of thy age No one trod on my mantle, No one without bloodshed ploughed my land.

EARLY WELSH POETRY

44

EARLY WELSH POETRY

He is at his old game, trying to make trouble. He revelled in war, and wanted this son too to win martial glory. Maen

Wyn is much too patient to suit his taste.

So he starts.

off with the same phrase that maddened Gwên in the other

That opening gambit

picture is not quite so unrelieved as all that: there are many touches of real tenderness, true pathos, and gleams His poetic creator really liked the Old Man, of humour.

Old Man is very positive_" In my young days I never

allowed that sort of thing," and goes on to say in three

stanzas what a terrible fellow he was long ago. Then comes this englyn, when, I suppose, Maen had decided to go to war

I love t o see a w a r r i o r

Then a chuckle and a pun in the last l i n e : -

This is as good an instance as in Welsh means a stone, just like Peter in

Greek, and the temptation to play on the name is not one I twas not a vain task for me

to try and sharpen Maen." The verb hogi means to sharpen a weapon by rubbing it on or with a stone, whetting. I n

this case, it was the stone that was sharpened, the boy Maen, and the whetstone was his father's rough tongue. The whole scene reminds one of

the talks between

Llywarch and Gwên, another instance of the taunting

process; compare also the rasping voice in the Black Book

dialogue, imputing cowardice to Cynddylig in the Llym

Awel poem, trying to make him t o o" as keen as a thorn." Who else could it have been but Llywarch?

But

the

but he himself, I am sure, was quite young, and so could

not refrain from a little jeering a t the Ancient and his foibles. He had seen and studied so many representatives of the type in the halls of Powys. The same artist- so I think -drew a companion picture

the chief character here is a woman, not an old man, and

Nyt ouer gnif ym hogi Maen.

By the way, I ought to have mentioned before how fond

the bards were of punning. Maen So here"

alone, utterly overwhelmed by cruel Destiny.

in another saga, that of Heledd, sister to Cynddylan, Lord T h e t h e m e of t h i s d r a m a of Pengwern, or Shrewsbury. too is arrogance and pride bringing disaster and ruin, but

In full armour, keen as a thorn.

to be resisted.

45

The portrayal is consistent in

the rasping, taunting voice, his

The last line makes the position clear,

story, " When I was of thy age."

the enemy was ploughing land belonging to Maen, and the

a n y.

first

irony, then the senile boasting of his youthful feats of valour,

his greed of fame in war to enhance the glory of his house, his querulous babbling in adversity, his woeful lamentations for his fallen sons, and at the last, his desolate old age, all

in a Father-and-Son talk always makes trouble. Then the second line, " No one trod onm y mantle" who was the first Celt, I wonder, to trail his coat behind him when he wanted a fight?

Man of Welsh literature.

all these stories;

In short,

some bard or other, out of his epithet Hen " old" in the early pedigrees, created Llywarch Hen as the classic Old

her reaction is more emotional. Here again we have no explanation in prose, only the chains of englynion, but the main features of the story are fairly obvious. Heledd w i t h her maidens is standing on a hill-top overlooking Shrewsbury.

The enemy is attacking, and they have fled to this height for safety. Then comes the first englyn: Stand forth, maidens, and look On the land of Cynddylan, The Court of Pengwern is a raging fire.

So her brother must have fallen, and she chants his Death Song. in fifteen stanzas. When night falls, the group of women make their way to the ruins of the royalcourt, and Heledd sings :

The Hall of Cynddylan is dark tonight, Without fire, without a bed. I weep a while: then fall silent.

46

E A R LY

EARLY WELSH P O E T RY

P O E T RY

WELSH

The Hall of Cynddylan is dark tonight,

Without fire, without candle. Who but God keeps me sane?

her one cow to safety!

The Hall of Cynddylan is dark tonight, Without fire, without song. Tears wear away my cheeks. After the loss of its lord.

Merciful God, what shall I do?

vellow plumes ! Her couch now is of goatskins, rough and No fine linen any m o r e : hardship on hardship. hard. follow

individual

or

detached

stanzas

to

various

places, as though Heledd at last became mad through grief and remorse, and wandered distraught all over the border

country, from hill to hill and grave to grave: As they draw near

the battle field they hear the screaming eagles

The Eagle of Eli is screaming loudly tonight, He has feasted on blood

The heart's blood of Cynddylan the Fair.

i tonight, The Eagle of Eli, I hear hm Bloodstained is he.

In the

In a string of englynion she calls

to mind the happy luxurious days of old, her trained horses, red robes, and- of all things in the world her feathers, big Then

The Hall of Cynddylan is quiet tonight,

Then they seek for the King's body.

47

Here there must have been a prose interlude.

next stanza she is on a mountain side, scantily clad, driving

I dare not go near him.

The eagle of Pengwern echoes the scream of the otherGreedy for the flesh of one I loved. Greedy for the flesh of Cynddvlan.

The Eagle of Pengwern, grey, with tufted head, With one talon held high,

Greedy for the flesh of one I love. When the body is found at last they bear it to Eglwyssau But the churches there are glowing Bassa, for burial.

I have gazed long on a lovely land, From the mound of Gorwynion.

The sun goes far: my memories go further. A place called Gyrthmwl, probably a caer or fortress: If Gyrthmwl were a woman, weak would she be today,

Loud would be her wailing. I t stands : its men have fallen.

Or take this to Ercal, a district in Shropshire: T h e sod of E r c a l c o v e r s fierce w a r r i o r s Of t h e r a c e of M o r i a l .

A gwedy rys mac rys mal. 82

I cannot get the alliteration, but the contrast is between

magu " to nourish," "to feed, to make big and strong" and malu " to grind small, to turn into dust." First the rich soil of Ercal made mighty men of them, then it turned

these great warriors into dust.

on them.

It fed them and now feeds

It made them grow, and then ground t h e msmall.

embers, and Heledd like Llywarch Hen cries out, "My"

The poet loves this epigrammatic cleverness: and many of

cause of all the ruin.

the sheer simplicity of others, where the choice of words thrills the reader with the perfection of this quality. May

tongue has made them s o ! "

Her proud words are the

She remembers how she boasted

when her brothers were alive, that no harm could touch her a n d her sisters.

his lines are very effective indeed. I quote another example?

But I like even better

Heledd speaks of her brothers,

EARLY WELSH POETRY

48

how they grew up together like hazel saplings.

Then

0 un i un 'eddvnt oll.

"One by one they all went."

These sad tales and sad songs belong to Powys on the bordersof Wales, facing Mercia: the period is somewhere

round 850, that is the most likely dating I can make. Cyngen ruled over Powys from 808 to 854, he died at Rome, the last of his dynasty, in the latter year. During his reign

the realm of Powys was reduced to sore straits, for in 822 it was overrun by the English. 29 Offa's Dyke, in the

previous century, had already cut off a big portion of the old Powys, leaving little to the Welsh save moor and The new frontier ran close to Llangollen, and

mountain.

it is worth noting that the graves of three of Llywarch Hen's

sons are close by.

All the places mentioned in the Heledd

poems are on orjust beyond Offa's Dyke, in Montgomery-

shire, Denbighshire and Shropshire.

The mood of the poet

or author of these two sagas tallies very well with what onewould expect in such a period of national calamity and humiliation. He had seen the enemy over-running extensive

districts of his beloved Powys, " the Paradise of Wales " as he called it, not because of any lack of valour in her warriors

- h e is convinced of that.

For him the defeat of Powys

can only be explained by two things; Fate, tynged, has so

decided, that is the first. p r i d e m u s t b e punished.

The second is that overweening

My excuse for staying so long with the Llywarch poems

LECTURE

III.

In this last lecture, I should like to give you some account of the poetry usually ascribed to Aneirin and Taliesin.

If

you agree with me in dating the Llywarch, Hen poems in the ninth century, these two are the only candidates left for sixth

century honours.

We l s h

tradition

has alwavs

supported their claim, at any rate down to the latter half The majority of foreign critics have of the last century.

been hostile, a fact which has favoured the growth of a

certain doubt in the minds of modern Welsh scholars, who

appreciate the strength of the case brought against the

authenticity of this early poetry, and are conscious of the

weakness of the extravagant claims made on its behalf.

I started working on the Aneirin poems in 1906, over 36 years ago, and have been hard at it ever since. I can that the less claim to have discovered one thing, at least: a man knows of Old Welsh, the more assured he is in his criticism of the old poems. That, I think, is a fair statement.

To begin this discussion, it may be helpful to attempt some sort of analysis of the Taliesin poetry. We can discard

at the outset practically every scrap of poetry ascribed to

Taliesin outside the manuscript known as the Book of

is t h a t they are the nearest thing to great drama that Wales has ever produced. That is the impression they made on

Taliesin, and one poem in the Book of Aneirin.

have liked to quote much more, although a literal prose translation, or, in fact, any kind of translation, is woefully inadequate to do justice to the beauty of some of these

tion, faked prophecy. A bard writes to cheer his countrymen in a national emergency by foretelling victory, success, a

me at. any rate.

I have quoted rather freely, and would

stanzas. And in any case we are dealing with fragments, mere fragments of two masterpieces of Welsh literature

that in t h e i r c o m p l e t e f o r m would have rivalled t h e c h a r m

of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.

I can say no more.

All else

is d e m o n s t r a b l y l a t e - - b y t h a t I m e a n much later t h a n t h e

sixth century:

a good deal ot this spurious stuff is vaticina-

glorious future, and in order to win their belief, he ascribes his own splendid vision to Taliesin. References to contem-

porary events, very slightly veiled,are of course included,

leading up naturally to the events of tomorrow, as wishfully thought. When this concoction is skilfully published, an D

E A R LY

50

WELSH

P O E T RY

E A R LY W E L S H

excellent impression is made; Taliesin si obviously a true

prophet in the one case, why not in the o t h e r ?

You date

this type of poem by the joint where sober fact merges into

blissful fi c t i o n .

What about the Book of Ta l i e s i n ? Its date is around 1275. Five hundred years earlier, about 796 a Welshman,

called Nennius or Nemnivus, collected a medley of extracts

in Latin dealing with the History of the Britons.

One of

POETRY

51

The second question is, where could Nennius in 796 get the Welsh tradition? Further on,13 he quotes two bishops as his authority for a statement referring to Rhun, son of Urien, one of them Elfoddw the North Wales Bishop who brought the Welsh Church into line with the Roman in the

Paschal controversy that was in 768;

according to Annales Cambriae.

he died in 809,

E v i d e n t l y Elfoddw c l a i m e d

to have some knowledge of the Urien family;

he might

his documents was a Genealogy of the Saxon. kings, dated by

also have known of the bards of Urien, by hearsay or by

section, short notes have been inserted, e.g. the Welsh

If Taliesin did really celebrate Urien in written records. s o n ga b o u t 575, these very songs may have been part of

Zimmer in 685 or 686; here and there in the Northumbrian

nicknames for their enemies.

After a reference to Ida,

king of Northumbria, 547-559, comes the most important interpolation of all:-

Later on it is stated that four kings, Urien, Rhydderch, Gwallawg and Morgan fought against Hussa, son of Ida;

and that Urien and his sons fought bravely against Deodric, Urien besieged the enemy for three

another son of Ida.

days and three nights in the Island of Metcaud (now Lindis-

farne), but was slain through the wiles of Morgan who envied. him his renown as the most successful of the British kings in waging war. Who added these notes? It seems to me For

the history of the War in the North, this Northumbrian

document in his eves would be of the utmost value. Here are the leaders of the Angles in the last half of the sixth

century, when they carved Northumbria out of British

territory, here they are, arranged in order of succession. For his Welsh readers such a list would be twice as interesting if the British section of the tally could be fitted to the other. Nennius had attempted such a task in his handling of the Roman history, and it is reasonable to suppose that

he attempted it here also.

two hundred years later, for his

statement about Urien.

There is no need to carry the

matter further at this point

At that time Talhaern Tat Aguen was distinguished in poetry. And Neirin, Taliessin, Bluchbard and. Cian, who is called Gueinth Guaut, together at the same time were renowned in British poetry.30

that the most reasonable guess is Nennius himself.

Nennius's authority,

Granting a l l that, we have to face a m u c hmore difficult problem. What guarantee is there that this early poetry

has survived intact down the centuries from 575 or so to

I275?

Seven hundred years is a considerable gap between

the living poet and the oldest extant copy of his songs. It may be possible to prove to everybody's complete satisfaction that there was a poet called Taliesin in 575, while failing, with equal completeness, to prove that we have preserved a line of his poetry.

So we must now tackle the Book of Taliesin, and study the evidence as fairly and judicially as our several prejudices

allow. There are 58 poems in the MS.; of these seven are on religious or Biblical subjects, and can be laid aside forthwith.

The monks who w r o t eo u r MSS. liked to insert

such poems in the midst of secular stuff--perhaps as a salve to their consciences for wasting precious time and vellum

on mundane affairs.

Gildas, writing before 547, in his book

on the Ruin of Britain (c.66) censures severely the Welsh clergy in these words,, " Towards the precepts of the saints.

if indeed they have at any time heard these things, which

ought to be very frequently heard by them, they are listless and dull; while for public games and the scandalous tales of men 'of the world, they are active and attentive." I am quoting Professor Hugh Williams's translation: in

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his scholarly note he discusses the aversion to Pagan literature which from the fourth c e n t u r y o n w a r d s led even men of the highest e q u i p m e n t to disparage the great writers

Man, and Pictland; the men of Cornwall, Strathclyde and the North will be on our side. Myrddin (Merlin) says so! The men of Wessex, the Gewissi, will b edisastrously defeated by the Welsh, and driven back to Winchester in rout and

I take leave to doubt whether the Welsh priests of 540 were strongly addicted to the classics. They were much

confusion.

of Greece and Rome, Homer, Horace, Vergil, Cicero. 23

more likely to be tempted by the jolly tales told by Welsh bards, the far off originals of our Mabinogion and heroic

romances.

To Gildassuch things would be ineptae fabulae,

silly stories, for he had little sympathy with the Celtic world. I wish he had lived long enough to read what the angels said to St. Patrick in the Colloquy of the Ancients it would have done him good. 3 Perhaps the scribe of the Book of Taliesin, too, was not He quite happy in his mind as to where his duty lay. starts his book with a Taliesin song, but the next is in praise of the saints of Britain and Ireland, with the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem thrown in. Two secular songs follow. Then comes Armes Dydd Brawd, foretelling the events leading up to the Day of Judgment. This is balanced by Armes

Prydein, a long prophecy of the fate of Britain. More Taliesin poems, and then a very dry account in verse of

the Plagues of Egypt, probably an antidote to C a n y Medd

and C a n y Cwrwf, songs to Mead and Ale, which show

considerable knowledge of the subject, and some enthusiasm. That is the kind of medley we have on our hands. Without inflicting more details upon you, I think it is safe to assert

that the religious songs in this MS. cannot possibly belong

to the sixth century:

they were introduced for edification

o r j u s t i fi c a t i o n .

Then we must reject another group, the Vaticination group of ten poems.

One example must suffice, the Armes

Prydern already mentioned. It begins in the usual way, intentionally obscure: the Muse says that they are coming with powerful armies, and that after war there will be peace. Who they are, we are not told just vet. They will rout the foreigners as far as Durham. The Welsh will be reconciled

with t h e men of Dublin, the Irish of Ireland, the Isle of

of St.

David:

T h e m e n of S o u t h Wa l e s will raise the b a n n e r

to this will flock the Irish, and the tribes of

This is repeated further on. Fierce warriors with Dublin. long hair, skilled in fighting, will come from Ireland to fight the Saxons. From Alclyde (Dumbarton) and from At last we Brittany other warriors will come to our aid.

are told who they are, Cynan and Cadwaladr, the mighty kings of old, who will one day return and win the whole of Britain again for our race. The druids foretell that they

will conquer from Edinburgh to Brittany, from Pembroke to the Isle of Thanet, and that the Saxons will take ship once m o r e f r o m S a n d w i c h (in K e n t ) a n d will n e v e r r e t u r n .

Seek not for light ni books, listen not to greedy poets: this

is the only true prophecy of the fate of Britain. Let us praise the Lord, and may St. David lead the warriors to victory. 34

So runs this stirring poem of some 200 lines, full of

But--it graphic descriptions of the slaughter and rout. cannot be by Taliesin. You noticed, probably, that the m e n of D u b l i n a n d t h e t r i b e s ot D u b l i n a r e t w i c e m e n t i o n e d

as distinct from the Irish of Ireland. So I maintain that this poem cannot be earlier than about 900, to give the Scandinavian settlers in Dublin half a century to establish themselves. I t cannot be later t h a n 1066; in the 200 lines

the only enemy is the Saxon, more specifically the West Saxon, here called Iwis. There is no mention at all of the Normans. A prophecy that left them out- or rather that

left them in Britain, would have received little welcome in

Wales after 1066. There are indications too which point to a date round The stewards of the High King are represented as 930.

coming from Cirencester to collect tribute from the Welsh, which the latter are determined to refuse. There will be battle cries to answer battle cries on the banks of the W y e ;

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in the press of battle

the dead will be so numerous that they will have no room to fall; only a fraction of the invaders will be able to escape back

to Winches ter. Now quotation from Lloyd's take this History of Wales (p. is the new king 335) ; Athelstan of Wessex. " I t would 926 or 927 he summon appear ed the leading Welsh that about Hereford, imposed princes to a tribute upon them cattle, hunting dogs and hawks, and fixed of gold, silver, boundary between the Wye as the the two races in that part of the country Ten years later the ." against Wessex, which tributary peoples formed a league the Strathcl yde Britonsincluded the Scots, the Danes and ; only the Souther n Britons held aloof, being kept back by Hywel

vaticination would Dda, lord of Dyfed. fit i n just here.

Our

I suggest that a Welsh bard is doing his utmost into this league, in spite to get the men of South Wales the help of the Scandin of Hywel Dda. He promises them avians Strathclyde Britons, Cornishmof Dublin, of the Irish, the en, Bretons, and certain victory in the end . In the battle of Brunanburgh, 937, Athelstan defeated the allies, and the bard had held up to h i s country men was dazzling hope the utterly extinguished. I think we can date Armes Prydein circa hesita tion whats 930, without any oever. This means that though the poem is not is nevertheless a historic by document, and most Taliesin it the student of Welsh valuable to literatur e. We can now use evidence of Welsh it as poetic diction and prosody about 900 930. With it we can to poetry, the Llywarc compare the slightly earlier Juvencus h Hen poetry, and the rest of the poetry last, ascribed to Taliesin but not least, That is what I have and Aneirin. a t t e m p t e d to do. vaticin ations in There are ten the Book of Ta l e s i n ; they are opinion, later than 900. all, A poem to Tenby in South in my and to Aeddon, an Wales, 35 Anglesey chieftain, 36 also belong to the tenth c e n t u r y - - a s shown by certain historical reference s contained in them. Three riddle poems period- -may be imitativ may be e of Anglo Saxon of the same riddles, suggested by them. or As for the proverb ial poems-well,

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they are dateless: an old proverb may survive for centuries and be included in modern collections.

Professor O'Rahilly

in his Miscellany of Irish Proverbs (p. 130), mentions a list in Irish of 45 different things which it would be vain or foolish to attempt.

There is a short list in the Book of

Taliesin too--for instance, trying to catch the air with a hook;

showing a light to a blind m a n ;

spreading foam

on the sea-shore; feeding fish on milk; and the like. Elsewhere in the Book of Taliesin, a poem containing a long list of delightful things makes pleasant reading until you are asked to date it.

I n the. Book o f A n e i r i n a

Taliesin

poem is added at the very end: it is mostly proverbs of the most obscure breed and type, and is extremely difficult to interpret. The poet's patron, Maeldderw, so I gather, was generous to the poor. I think the last line but one means t h a t he is n o w in h e a v e n :

a n d t h e last line of all s e e m s

to say that there was no fault in him of the size of a gwre. This rare word was evidently a standard of littleness.

I

turned to Irish for help, and changed gwve according to rule to frigh.

To my huge delight, Dinneen taught me that

there was an Irish w o r dfrigh, and that it meant a tetter-

worm, a mite, the nearest thing to nothing. This too describes very well how much ot that poem I have been able to understand. I have now disposed very roughly of about one half of

What remains? Leaving minor the Book of Taliesin. fragments and strays aside, I find first of all a hard core of twelve historical poems.

The whole twelve deal with

late sixth century personages and events; nine being in praise ot Urien and his son Owain; two to another of the kings mentioned by Nennius, viz., Gwallawg: and the last -which may be by another poet--to Cynan, father of the Welsh king who fell at Chester in 613. If we have any sixth century poetry at all by Taliesin, we will find it

somewhere in this group of a dozen songs. As for the rest, the only way I can account for most of them is by postulating a Taliesin saga, probably composed in the ninth century at the earliest.

In one poem37 there

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is a very complimentar y reference to the Venerable Bedewho died. in 735.

Nyt wy dyweit geu Uyfreu Beda.

" The books of Bede tell no lies."

The Welshman who composed that line must have lived after 768, when the Roman date for Easter was accepted

in Wales, for Bede was rather fond o f castigating the Welsh for their obstinate adherence to the Celtic rite, as well as for other things! To appreciate the sound scholarship of Bede the author of this poem must have been able to read Latin, and therefore was probably a cleric. It struck me that this point was well worth investigating. How did the historical poems compare with the saga poems in this respect ? Did one group show ampler traces of clerical or Christian influence than the o t h e r ?

This is what I found.

In the twelve poems to Urien and his sixth century contemporaries Dure " God" si mentioned twice: the

Lord of Heaven, twice: bedydd " baptism Lord, once: " is used for Christendom; and there is one doubtful reference to Pasc, E a s t e r. .

In the Taliesin saga, on the other hand, Christian terms abound, i.e. sin, forgiveness, prayer, confession, saints, monks, penance, judgment day Jesus, Mary's Son, Christ, and, whatas well as God, Trinity, is still more remarkable, these Christian terms are found in an essentially pagan or heathen setting. Their context may be described as scraps of Celtic mythology and folk lore.

This curious

phenomenon may confirm the suggestion made earlier in this lecture. The author or editor is conscious, uncomfortab ly conscious ot the clash between his theology and these mythological fancies. So he blends with them as much of the Christian faith and practice as he can. These interpolations ot his are often very much out of place; for example as introductio n to a list of the metamorph oses of Taliesin, an the poet boasts that his words will be sung in Hebrew and in Greek, and then breaks

forth into Latin, " Laudate Jesu!"

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In Cat Godeu, Gwydion son of Don is hard pressed by the enemy, so he calls on Christ for help, and the trees and

bushes, great and small, are immediately changed to " men of war." You see them dashing into battle. Thor trees, pines, ash, elms, hazel, the holly, and, of course, the oak. Heaven and earth

trembled

a d v a n c e d t o the a t t a c k !

when

The

the Oak

Grenadiers

birch w a s r a t h e r late

in

joining up, not through any cowardice, but because of its

sense of d i g n i t y - - a very nice touch!

There is a gracious

dignity, or dignified grace, about a well-grown birch tree, which helps one to forget early impressions in connexion

with its branches.

That a son of Don, one of the Tribes

of the Goddess Danu, should have invoked the aid of Christ is rather strange, but it is even more out of place for somebody or other to insert here, in the middle of this

pleasant phantasy, " The

three greatest tumults in the

world are the Deluge, the Crucifixion, and Judgment day." I have wandered a bit from the point, which is to show that the saga poems are obviously the work of another poet than the author of the Urien poem.

If the latter are

by Taliesin, a King's bard, a court bard, just before A.D. 600, the others, or some of them, are by a cleric, centuries later, who delights in, the old traditions and legends of his

people.

He was not the author, strictly speaking, but an

editor who adapted them for his own generation.

By this

time Taliesin had become legendary, and you do not become

a legend in one generation.

This cleric-poet was not the only one to discover that Taliesin could be made the hero of apleasant tale. I should

like to mention another, a bard of the Llywarch Hen school, who made Taliesin talk in three line englynion, not in long poems. You will find a fragment of his version in the Dialogue of Ugnach and Taliesin in the Black Book of Carmarthen, enough to show that his treatment of the story was radically different from that of the Book of Taliesin poet.

It is on the latter that I must try to concen-

trate in this lecture, for his work is the real crux of the

Taliesin problem.

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My time is short, but I think I ought to give you a

sample of his peculiar genius, if that is possible. I shall take the poem called Angar Kyfyndawt, and boil it down. 83 It begins like this, with pompous boasting:

A bard here present, I have sung what he will sing, Let him sing when the wise one has finished:

A lord who refuses me will n e v e r a f t e r w a r d s have

anything to give.

So on to line 120;

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59

then-

I have been a blue salmon,

I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain,

A stock, a spade, an axe in the hand,

A stallion, a bull, a buck, A grain which grew on a hill,

I was reaped, and placed in an oven, I fell to the ground when I was being roasted A n d a hen s w a l l o w e d m e .

Imagine now that you have heard 27 lines Then, three, or less.

and understood

I am Taliesin. I sing perfect metre, Which will last to the end (of the world). My patron is Elphin.

After that another obscure patch, leading up to I know. Of a long list I select a fewI know why there is an echo in a hollow; why breath is black; why liver is bloody; Why a cow has horns; why a woman is affectionate; Why milk is white; why holly is green; Why a kid is bearded; why the cow-parsnip is

Why silver gleams;

hollow:

Why brine is salt; why ale is bitter; Why the linnet is green and berries red; Why a cuckoo complains; why it sings;

I know where the cuckoos of s u m m e r are in winter. I know what beasts there are at the bottom of the sea;

How many spears in battle; how many drops in a shower:

Why a river drowned Pharaoh's people

Why fishes have scales,

W h y a white swan has black feet.

For nine nights was I in her crop. I have been dead, I have been alive, I am Taliesin.

What do you make ot it all?

Scholars have held various

opinions on what t h e y took to be this primeval

Welsh

poetry; they have declared them at length and fought The latest and sanest critic, speaking for them with fury.

of this very poem said that " it contains a good deal of

mysticism, or semi-mysticism, in the form of a profession of knowledge of the secrets of nature," ending "with a

Alfred N u t t in t h e s e c o n d transformation passage."39 volume of his Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, gives a full account of the Taliesin Legend and the Irish parallels, and then harks back to Pythagoras, the transmigration of souls, and other interesting things. I should be wasting your time and mine, if I. tried to follow him. I do not see any mysticism, or semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism in this and other poems in the Book of Taliesin. W i t h vour permission I shall now offer another theory for your consideration,

omitting all criticisms of earlier ones.

On the available evidence I assume that there was in

early times a folk tale in North Wales with Taliesin as its hero. The origins of its various components are a matter

of profound interest to the anthropologists, and the folklorist, and I am more than willing to leave the investigation My concern is with the Book of wholly in their hands. Taliesin poems. In my view they represent a part of one

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of two sagas formed out of this folk tale, probably in the ninth century, so far as the language tests help one to reach a d e fi n i t e conclusion. But, and I want to emphasise this but, they are not intended as the portrait of a typical Welsh bard. What they do portray is the Taliesin of the folktale, most certainly not the Taliesin of the sixth century. Every characteristic of these poems can be accounted for

with ease, fi that fundamental fact be kept ni mind.

Every

one of them is intended to portray Taliesin, and Taliesin only. He is the main character in a drama. Just as in the old Cornish D r a m a s every a c t o r as he walks on to the

stage begins by telling the audience who and what he is, " I am the Duke of Brittany, or the Devil, or the Archangel

Michael," and then as the stage direction runs, " So and so pompabit." So also Taliesin walks on to the stage, and

declares " I am Taliesin " ; then he too pompat.

Everything

he says is in character. In the case of Llywarch Hen I had to guess the story

6I

should persist in using Iolo's faked MSS. to support any theory or thesis, he does so at his own risk and peril.

You

h a v e been w a r n e d !

The Hanes Taliesin, in the oldest fragment now extant, 01 says that Cyrridwen, wife of Tegid, h a da son called Afagddu, and he was the ugliest man in the world. His mother was grieved at this and thought that the only way he could

secure a welcome amongst noblemen would be fi he excelled

in knowledge.

Following the instructions of Vergil's books

e v i d e n t l y the poet had developed into the mediaeval

magician she put on the fire the cauldron of Inspiration and Knowledge, which had to be kept on the boil for a year Gwion Bach was ordered to and a day without a break. keep on stirring it for the whole period, Cyrridwen in the

kinds to meantime collecting herbs and plants of various p u t in it, according to the recipe. A t the end of the vear

in

it happened that three drops of the hot liquid splashed over on to Gwion's finger, which he naturally stuck ni his These three precious drops happened to be the mouth. essence of all the magical ingredients in the cauldron. Though intended for Afagddu, unfortunately they were

Taliesin has been preserved to us, and is available as a check. We know it as Hanes Taliesin. Now this Hanes is I a prose account of Taliesin's adventures, with verse elements inserted, these include the Book of Taliesin poems, and

past, present, and future. 14 He saw at once that Cyrridwen was his mortal enemy, and fled for his life. She pursued him. He changed into a hare, and ran like a hare. Cyrridwen

from the poetry.

You can, to a certain extent, do likewise

with the Taliesin poems.

Here, however, we have outside

help, which si a great comfort-and a safeguard:

I sixteenth century MSS. the essenceo fthe folk tale about

others, which are obviously very much later.

The prose

is definitely mediaeval, with the orthography modernised, but still retainingolder forms here and there. The additional poems are, on the other hand, proved late by the rhymes,

and subject matter.

The story is a fine example of a genuine

folk tale, told by an artist, and is well worth study. I must, however, warn you not to accept the full version

printed by Lady Charlotte Guest, for a considerable part

of her text comes from a MS. belonging to Iolo Morganwg, the greatest forger of Welsh documentsthat Wales has ever known.

The mischief t h a t that man has d o n e !

he was mad-

let us be charitable.

Perhaps

Any way, fi any one

now in Gwion's mouth, and when he swallowed them he

became the greatest sage on earth, knowing everything,

turned herself into a greyhound and chased him to a river. He jumped in and turned into a fish, she became an otter. He became a bird, she followed as a hawk; and when she was on the point of overtaking him he saw a heap of

winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, alighted on it, and changed into one of the g r a i n s . S h e t h e n t u r n e d i n t o a

black hen, scattered the grain with her feet until she found Nine months later she was him, and swallowed him.

delivered of him, and because of his beauty she could not

bear to kill him herself.

So, she put the babe in a skin

bag and threw him into the sea.

This bag was found in

a weir by a certain young prince named Elphin, who picked

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him up, and with great

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Because of his lovely forehead (tal), he called him Tal-iesin

If we had the his display of wisdom secured his release. full story I am sure that it ended with a remark by Elffin,

browed infant began to talk with the wisdom of a patriarch,

also m e a n s p a y m e n t ) .

gentleness carried him home.

" beautiful brow," and was astounded when the beautiful

not only in ordinary prose, but ni flowing rhyme sa well.

Poems s t r e a m e d o u t of his mouth. Gwyddno, Elphin's father, when he came in, asked about the catch at the weir. " I got something better than fish," his son replied. " What was that? " " A poet." " Alas" said the father, " what is a thing like that worth ? " -using another Welsh word tal, meaning worth, value. The child immediatelv answered back, " He is worth more than you ever got out

o fthe weir," punning on Tal-iesin, as if it meant " fine value." "Canst thou speak, though so small? " asked the other.

canst a s k . "

" I can say more " ,

s a i d Ta l i e s i n " t h a n t h o u

Taliesin, after a series of metamorphoses which a good

story teller could vary and amplify to his heart's content,-

thisinfantprodigy--he is the key to all the saga poems

in the Book of Talesin. In all of them he boasts of his eminence in knowledge. The long silly lists of questions on all sorts of topics are now intelligible. Taliesin is just

showing off; like the kangaroo in Kipling's story- he had to! That was the role he had to play. Llywarch Hen had to say now and then " I am old." Ta l i e s i n for his part had to pretend omniscience- e.g. he knows everything

about nature, everything about the old mythological tales.

Like Caoilte he can say " I was there at the time," when this or that happened. And, further, one of those drops,

or the three combined enabled him to foretell the future.

He is thus cut out t o be chief vaticinator and prophet of

himself into any object, bird or animal.

That is the theory I should like to submit consideration: the folk tale solves these poems.

And to will, turn

Naturally, this gifted foundling, when his benefactor

Elffin was imprisoned by King Maelgwn at Degannwy, by

to your Ta l i e s i n

plays the same part in every one of them, and in every section of each of them.

Turning at last to the historical poems, we are in a Elffin is not mentioned at all. different world altogether. Instead of The poet's patron is Urien or his son Owain.

boasting about his knowledge, his magic powers and gifts for shape-shifting, the bard praises insplendid metre the

glorious achievements of a warrior king, fighting the invaders ot North Britain.

The shape-shifting Gwion, who swallowed the three

precious drops of Inspiration and Knowledge, reborn as

his people, the bard who can foretell the future. finish his list of accomplishments, he can, at

" T h i s is in truth Tal-iesin (" a fine repayment " _ f o r tal

That is why the battles mentioned are

for places we in Wales have never heard of. The language is simple in construction, restrained, direct, though some words are quite unknown to us. The songs are very short,

Take this one as an example of the 25 to 30 lines each. style and substance- as literal a translation as I can make i t 4 2 :

On the morning of Saturday there was a great battle From the rising of the sun to its setting.

Fflamddwyn advanced in four hosts, While the army of Goddau and Rheged was gathering To Dyfwy, from Argoed as far as Arfynydd. Not a strip (of land) would they get even for a day.

Fflamddwyn shouted, with great bluster,

Are they ready? " " H a v e my hostages come? To him answered Owain, the ravager of the east (lands), " They have not come. They were not, they are not ready.

A whelp of Coel's breed would be sorely afflieted

Before he gave a single hostage." Urien, thelord of Erechwydd, shouted again,

" If there be talk of peace

EARLY WELSH POETRY

64

Let us raise (a war cry?

or our banners ?) on the

And kill both him a n d his companions.

By the edge of the Elm Wood T h e r e were m a n y corpses.

Ravens reddened before the warriors, And men rushed forward with their chief.

For a year will I sing a song to their victory!

And when I have grown old,

And death presses hard upon me, I shall not be happy

Unless I am praising Urien. That is all.

Very simple, but vivid.

There is no detailed

Just a few salient facts--as ni description of the battle. the old nature poetry. It was Saturday; the invaders in four columns; the men of the country hastening from all

parts to join their king; the arrogant insolence of the enemy

leader, the Flame-bearer; the reply by Owain; the fierce

call to join battle by Urien. ravens.

Then dead men and red And the bard's song of victory. Compare this

little song with the pompous boastful tirades of self-

glorification by the (henpecked) infant prodigy, who centuries later, called himself Taliesin, and I thinkyou will admit that there is some reason for labelling this a historical poem, while rejecting the claim of the other to be anything

more than play-acting, or folk-drama. I shall give you just one more of the real Taliesin songs,

the Death Song of Owain, son of Urien 43: The soul of Owain ab Urien,

May the Lord consider its need.

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Like the wings of dawn. were his sharpened spears! For the e q u a l will never be found

mountain.

Let us lift our faces above the rim (of shields ?), Let us raise our spears above men's heads, Let us charge Fflamddwyn in the midst of his host

The Prince of Rheged lies under a heavy green sod(It was no dishonour to sing to him) In a narrow cell, the warrior famed in song.

Of the prince of glorious LIwyfenydd. Reaper of enemies, strong of grip, Like his father and grand-father. When Owain 'killed Fflamddwyn

It was no more (to him) than falling asleep. The great host of Lloegr sleeps With eyes open to the light, A n d t h o s e t h a t were l o t h to flee We r e bolder t h a n t h e r e w a s need.

Owain punished them fiercely Like a pack of wolves worrying sheep. A fine warrior in his many coloured coat of mail, Who used to give horses to minstrels.

Though he gathered (wealth) like a miser He gave it away for his soul's sake. The soul of Owain ab Urien, &c. With this example I must end my discussion of the Taliesin poems.

What remains is the task of giving you in a very short compass some idea of the Gododdin poems of his contemI have dealt very fully with his work porary, Aneirin. elsewhere, 14 but this sketch would not be complete without a word or two about this British bard.

He w a s not a

Welshman, but a North Briton, one of the British tribe called Gododdin, who held in the sixth century abroad strip of the East coast, from Edinburgh and the Firth ot Forth, down to the Tyne or the Tees. It was their territory that later on became the northern portion of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. The Welsh called it Berneich and the The southern part down to the H u m b e r English Bernicia. was called in Old Welsh Dewr, later Deif: in English These are the usual names in the Aneirin poems Deira.

for the enemy, though Eingl, " Angles," and Saeson, " Saxons," occur. In a small MS. called the Book of Aneirin, written about I250, there are 1,41 lines of poetry E

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ascribed to Aneirin:

leaving out the repetitions, say 1,200,

the Book of Taliesin.

The main part of the Aneirin poems

a b o u t double the n u m b e r of lines in t h e historical poems in

is called The Gododdin; it consists of 103 stanzas, a fifth

of which shows unmistakable traces o direct copying from a ninth century original in the orthography and script of the Juvencus and Oxford glosses of that period. The first scribe e v i d e n t l y c o p i e s t h e s t a n d a r d v e r s i o n of t h e G o d o d d i n

in the form current between A.D. I200 and I250.

Another

scribe discovered the much earlier version, and added this at the end of the MS., making sporadic attempts at modernising the spelling where he understood the text. Elsewhere,

he contented himself with reproducing the ninth century

copy, luckily for us.

The result, in brief, is this: we have

four fifths of these poems in their 1250 form and one fifth

practically as they were in 850, together with their 1250 variants.

By comparing these together we learn a good

deal about the degree and manner in which the rest have been modified by generations of scribes. But we know now that the poems were in a written form four hundred years The gap between the earlier than the Book of Aneirin. poet and the earliest copy of his work is two h u n d r e d and

fifty years, not seven hundred. also know

that

That is a great gain.

We

the standard text, though fairly reliable

for the main lines of a stanza, has been modernised to some extent in detail.

Even the rhyme has not saved old forms

of words from change, or prevented the substitution here

and there of Mediaeval Welsh for Old Welsh. We can be confident that we have the substance of the Old Welsh

songs without being quite so certain of the details. Earlier in this lecture I tried to show t hat the vaticina-

tion, called Armes Prydein, can be dated about 930, from

internal

evidence.

In

the

second

Llywarch Hen englynion about 850.

lecture I

dated

the

The language of the

Gododdin and its metrical technique, prove that it belongs

to an earlier period than either. In 796 Nennius added a note to the Northumbrian Genealogy, which gave the kings of Deira and Bernicia in the late sixth century, "' At t h a t

WELSH

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67

time Neirin and Taliesin were renowned in British poetry." It seems reasonable to suppose that Nennius had seen or heard songs ascribed to these two in the eighth century.

Were these our songs? When he wrote these words the Gododdin was about two hundred years old, and the Taliesin poems a trifle older, but the Llywarch Hen englynion had not yet been written.

Nennius had never heard of

him as a poet, but he had heard of (A)neirin, Taliesin and t h r e e o t h e r s- o f w h o s e w o r k we h a v e n o t e v e n a f a k e d

specimen! He had never heard of Taliesin as the poet of Elffin, the North Walian chief, in the first half of the sixth century--for Elffin, according to the story, was imprisoned But he had heard that by Maelgwn who died in 547. Taliesin was a contemporary of Urien at the end of the

sixth century.

So t h eTaliesin-Elffin saga, and the Llywarch

Hen saga are both later than 796 I cannot prove that the Gododdin as we have it is earlier

than Nennius, except on internal evidence; nor can I, in one lecture, make a complete statement of that evidence. I must content myself with saying that the core of the seems to me to be the authentic work of Aneirin, A few stanzas are later accretions; one is

Gododdin circa 600.

certainly a Strathclyde song, on the death of Domnall Brecc, king of the Scots of Dalriada, slain in battle against

Owain, King of the Britons of Strath Clyde, in 642.

The

metre is the same as one used in the Gododdin, which

may be taken as corroborative evidence that such a metre

was popular in the early seventh century. belongs to the Llywarch

Hen saga.

Another stanza Another mentions

Aneirin's lamented death, and how since then song has left the Gododdin.

reasons.

A few others must be scrapped for various

From the rest one can piece together a sort of

background to the whole poem.

Mynyddawg, lord of Dineiddyn, or Dunedin (Edinburgh, afterwards) collected a retinue of young warriors, the picked

fighting men of the Britons, 300 in number. they feasted at his expense.

For a year

A warrior's pay in those days

was plenty of mead and ale and wine.

These were well

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paid, and then he set them the task of riding to Catterick in Yorkshire (Catraeth).

They drank mead, yellow, sweet, ensnaring, For a year, while many a minstrel made merry.

60

Warriors rose up: they gathered together, All with one accord charged forward.

This is the b u r d e n of the song-

Short was their life:

T h e y p a i d with t h e i r lives for t h a t f e a s t of m e a d .

The first stanza of all describes one of the War-band, setting forth to battle. The poet uses curt, sudden little phrases,

linked by alliteration, and aims at strong contrastsMan in might, youth in years, Famed for valour.

Steeds swift, long maned,

long their kinsmen longed

for them.

Seven times their number of the men of Lloegr they slew.

There were tears on the eyelids of many mothers. The War-band of Gododdin on shaggy-maned horses

Of the colour of swans; their armour drawn tight. They fell on the foe, on the front of his host, Fighting for . . . . . and mead of Eiddyn.

Under the handsome boy.

Shields were shattered, Swords flashed down on pale faces,

Shield light, broad,

On the crupper of a swift horse, Swords blue and bright, Fringes of fine gold. Before his wedding feast His blood streamed to the ground. Before we could bury him He was food for ravens.

It was not shame they won, these intrepid warriors. Three hundred wearing gold torques set forth T o d e f e n d their land s a d w a s t h e i r fate.

Though they were slain, they slew.

Honoured they shall be till the end of the world,

Of the band of kinsmen that set out,

Wearing a diadem; always in the van of battle; B r e a t h l e s s b e f o r e a m a i d e n - - h e d e s e r v e d his m e a d .

Pierced was the face of his shield.

WELSH POETRY

Three hundred by command in order of battle, And after the joyous shouting there was silence. Though they went to churches to do penance, Their meeting with death'5 could not be avoided.

When he heard the

battle-cry

He spared none of those he pursued. He never withdrew from a fight until blood flowed. Like rushes he hewed down men who fled not.

A stanza sometimes praises the noble three-hundred ; somet i m e s o n l y one:-

Warriors went to Catraeth; ready were they. Fresh mead their feast: poison it proved.

Woe's me, only one returned. Stanzas to individual warriors are m u c h commoner, each

stanza stressing some characteristic quality or outstanding achievement.

One fought a wolf with bare hands.

always rode bay horses.

Another

One was generous to churches

and to minstrels. As for another, though his father was not a king, yet his words were always listened to at every council. One was the poet's staunch friend. Another was

courteous and kind, loved by everybody. virtue in common, loyalty to their lord:

their mead.

But all had one they deserved

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70

P O E T RY

Their lord ordered them to ride to Catraeth, probably

Catterick in Yorkshire.

Close b y there is an ideal spot

for a tribal fortress (rivalling Dumbarton in natural strength), I mean the high rock on which Richmond Castle stands. One side drops sheer down into the foaming cataracts of

the Swale River.

NOTES.

As Catraeth, and Catterick, seem to

derive from the Latin word for cataract, and the Roman fort close by, Catarractonium, can well be described as a fort on the Cataract River, the identification seems certain. And, further, Catterick is a key-point; whoever held this stronghold and Roman station would be master

of

The translation is t h a t of Sir R i c h a r d Colt Hoare.

the

Yorkshire plain, for three Roman roads met here, two running north and one south. An attempt to capture such an important objective was worth the making. Urien once held it, according to Taliesin. Urien is now dead, and the men of Deira are in possession.

I. The Itinerary through Wales and the Description of Wales,

by Giraldus Cambrensis (Everyman Series), Chapter xvi. p. 179.

So the Gododdin War-band

.2 References are given in full by Holder, Alt-Celtischer The last is from Pauli Festus, p. 34, Sprachschats, vol. .i 347. an abridgment by the eighth century Paulus Diaconus of the epitome made by Sext. Pomp. Festus (late second century) of

the De Verborum Significatione by the Augustan writer, Verrius

Flaccus.

is ordered to retake it. They ride down the Roman road on their white horses, joking and laughing, so the poet says. Clad in heavy Roman armour, fighting from horseback

in the Roman way, with javelins, heavy spears, swords, they were not afraid to tackle much superior

forces of

3. Canu Llywarch Hen, p. 23-4.

4. Kuno Meyer, Four Old-Irish Songs of Summer and Winter, 1903, p. 14.

Saxon infantry.

In the event they were overwhelmed by the hosts of their enemies, " three hundred," according to the poet, " against a hundred thousand " a slight exaggeration no doubt, but suggestive nevertheless. They came upon the enemy in great strength, charged them with impetuous fury, and all perished, except one, who fought his way through. That is the story so far as I can gather it from the poem, an incident of heroic quality like the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, which a

I. Scel lem duib:

snigid gaim,

3. Rorüad raith, rogab gnath

t h a n t h i r t e e n h u n d r e d y e a r s ago.

rochelt cruth, giugrand guth.

4. Rogab üacht etti en, è mo scel. aigre re:

poet immortalised ni song, Tennyson in one case, Aneirin

in t h e other. Beirdd byd barnant wyr o galon. I know that the Welsh song was written on vellum that has been proved to the eleven hundred years ago: I am growing more and more certain that the heart hilt. of it was sung by a proud and sorrowful British bard more

dordaid dam, rofäith sam.

2. Gäeth ard hüar, isel grian, ruirthech rian. gair ar-rith,

5. The Poems of Llywarch Hen, Proc. of the British Academy, vol. xviii, I932, pp. Io-I2. Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, vol.

v.

II5-29.

6. Red Book of Talgarth, c. 1400: Celtic Studies, vol. in. 4-15

Bulletin of the Board of

E A R LY

72

WELSH

E A R LY

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7. B.B.C.S. vol. ili. 161-76: 272-85 : vi. 314-23. 8. B.B.C.S. vol. ii. 16-36.

9. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, vol. .i 558, gl. 10.

I3.

Kyssul Adaon, B.B.C.S. vol. i . 120-I.

I1. The Poems of Llywarch Hen, II-I2.

WELSH

P O E T RY

73

20. Die irische Helden- und Königsage, 485, ' " König Conchobor hat französische Söldner (franc-amais). 21. Cf. Annales Cambriac, s.a.

7I4, pipinus maior rex fran-

corum: Nennius, Historia Britonum, c. 17, Hessitio autem habuit filios quattuor; hi sunt Francus, Romanus, Britto, Van Hamel, Lebor Bretnach, p. 7, Ceitri meic la Albanus: Hisicon i. Frangcus - Romanus y Britus 4 Albanus; also pp. 8, I8, 24, etc.: Ancodota fr. Irish MSS. vol. iv. Sanas Cormaic, 683, Gaill .i. Frainc.

Gaill dano ainm do sainchlandaib no do

12. J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Book of Taliesin, 66-7: Cecile O'Rahilly, Ireland and Wales, 127-9

saerchlandaib Franc .i. tribus Gallie: B.B.C.S. vii. 366-8, a to M.r Melville note needing correction and amplification. I owe

13. O'Grady, Silva Gadelica, i. 94-233 : ii. 101-265 : Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, 383-5.

from a note on franc-amus by Kuno Meyer ni Miscellanea He translates Hibernica, Univ. of Illinois Studies, Nov. 196.

14. Rhys-Evans, The Text of the Mabinogion (Red Book of Hergest), 144-161.

15. The Black Book of Carmarthen, 63-9. 16.

B.B.C. 97-100.

17. B.B.C.S. vol. vi.

Richards, University College, Swansea, a most helpful quotation

itas " a Gaulish mercenary":

franc si the national name, " a

Frank " ; after the conquest of France by that people it took the place of the earlier Gall in Irish terminology: on mercenaries

from Gaul ni the service of Irish kings, he refers to his note in Eriu. iv. 208: Laws, iv. 340; Ir. T. ii. gI § 128; Learning in Ireland, p. 24, n. 25.

101-10.

I. niguordosam nemheunaur henoid

mitelu nit gurmaur mi amfranc dam ancalaur.

2. nicana niguardam nicusam henoid cet iben m e d nouel

mi a m f r a n c d a m anpatel.

.3 namercit mi nep leguenid henoid isdiscirr micoueidid

dou nam riceus unguetid.

18. Zeitschrift f. Celtische Philologie, vol. xii. 303. 19. Meyer, Contributions, 87, amos ' a hireling soldier' with i t we find deorad (cf. ibid. p. 614), 'an exile, outlaw, stranger, a foreign mercenary ' (m'amais ymo deoraid) : Windisch, Wörterbuch, 363, amos ' satelles, a hireling soldier.

22. O'Keeffe, Buile Suibhne, p. 37, cf. also p. II9, I am in 125, Mournful am I tonight. I am sad and great grief tonight: wretched, my side is naked. 23.

Black Book of Carmarthen, p. 56.

24. Nutt,

Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, p. I37,

quoting Zimmer, Keltische Studien, i. 200, on Deirdre's love for Noíse.

25. The Poems of Llywarch Hen, Hen, 1935.

1932:

C a n Llywarch

26. J. Gwenogvryn Evans, The Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest, pp. II-17:

Skene, Four Ancient Books, vol. .i 326-35 :

vol. ii. 259-66.

before 27. Llawysgrif Hendregadredd (in poems by Gwalchmai 1170)

E A R LY

74

WELSH

E A R LY

P O E T RY

P. I4.

A m kyhut am ut yawn essillit idwal Nyd el heb dial mal galanas.

P. 21.

Neu dreitysy tra lliw lleudinyawn dreuyt. n e u d r e m y r t h e u r a w c caer

ar

dervt.

Ac wrthyf kyuerchyt o deyrnet prydein. pa vronn heilin haelaf y ssyt. a minheu ym kyhut heb gewilyt. ef ytoet ywein hir hywystyl bedyt. The bard says that he has travelled to the Lothians (near

Edinburgh), and Arthuret (near Carlisle), and men asked him, who of the kings of Britain is the most generous of all ? " A n d I declared (ym kyhut) boldly, that it was Owain (the lord of Gwynedd)." With this one can compare his words in a later poem to Owain's son, Rhodri, p. 30, Dymkyueirch pawb ym pob lleoet

pwy goreu gwledic yny gwladoet dysgwrtheb gwrthrawd gwrthrod y honni h w n n w yw rodri.

The idea is the same: people ask him who is the best prince. To correspond with um kyhut And the reply now is Rodri.

we have dysgwrtheb, cf. ateb ' answer.' Another example can be given from the Book of Taliesin, p. 4I, 1. I4 : am keud yar (? yor) teithiawc. mi hun am gwarawt

Here again am keud must be a verb of saying o rdeclaring, like amcawa, amceudant in the story of Culhwch and Olwen, passim, for it is followed by a statement in Direct Speech.

Perhaps I ought to explain here that the orthography varies

with the manuscripts:

in the first, t stands for the modern

sound da, in the other d has the same value.

28. In the Red Book of Hergest the reading si macrysmal;

Skene's translation of the whole line runs thus, " And after Rys He failed to see that wys here is not the great lamentation."

proper name, Rhys, but the perfective particle vy (Irish ro) with

an infixed object, .s

see B.B.C.S. vi. 130.

On the contrast between mac and mal,

For the reading in t h e text, I am indebted

to Professor .J Lloyd-Jones.

WELSH

P O E T RY

75

29. Sir John Lloyd, History of Wales, i. 244. 30. The first poet, Talhaern or Talhaearn is here called Tat Aguen, the Old Welsh orthography of tad-awen in Modern

Welsh, 'father of the muse.' Neirin is the early form of Medi-

Bluchbard is quite unknown. Early critics tried aeval Aneirin. to twist the word into Llywarch, a hopeless effort. Cian's epithet,

Gueinth Guaut obviously contains gwawd ' song':

the first

element has been emended to guenith ' wheat,' and the compound translated " wheat of song."

There are, however, several other

possibilities, e.g. gwenid, sweinid, or gweinydd, if the -n-be

retained; gweirydd, or gwerth fi we read r. A facsimile of this passage is given in Y Cymmrodor, vol. xxvii, facing the titlepage; for the whole section, see Mommsen, Historia Brittonum, c. 61, p. 205.

3I.

Historia Brittonum, Mommsen's Ed. p. 207.

32. Hugh Williams, Gildas (Cymmrodorion Record Series),. vol. i . 166-7.

33.

Silva Gadelica, pp. 107-8.

" All this is to us a recreation

of spirit and of mind, were ti only not a destruction of devotion and a dereliction of prayer," says Patrick. His two guardian angels tell him to write these tales, " for to the companies and nobles of the latter time to give ear to these stories will be for a pastim e."

34. Book of Taliesin, pp. 13-18 : a commentary in Y Beirniad, 19I6, pp. 207-12: M. E. Griffiths, Early Vaticination in Welsh, pp. I 0 7 - I I I .

35. Edited and translated, Transactions of the Cymmrodorion, 1940, pp. 66-83.

36. Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 194I, pp. 23-30 : I942, pp. 19-24.

37. B.T. 36, 19. 38.

B.T.

19-23.

39. Sir John Morris-Jones, Y Cymmrodor, vol. xxvii, 24I.

EARLY WELSH POETRY

76

40. Peniarth MS. III, written circa 1610, Reports on Welsh.

MSS.

vol. .i 664.

41. Peniarth MS. 66, p. 77; R.W.M. .i 458, kanys gwn a fu, y sydd, ag a fydd elto " for I know what has been, what is,

and what will be."

42. B.T. 6o, cf. Y Cymmrodor, xxviii, 156-7. I take 43. B.T. 67-8, cf. Y Cymmrodor, xxviii, 187-03. cywydeit ' to sing' in line 4, to be a verb noun, like ystyryeit, cysgeit, tybyeit, etc. and not as a noun 'judgment,' as J. M.-J. In .1 5 he read isgell, ' broth, soup,' and translates suggested. " At supper (time) [he heard] the acclaiming song of praise." I have never seen isgell used for 'supper,' only for " broth it is a borrowing of the Latin juscellum, cf. Old Cornish, iskel Here I prefer to see an Old Welsh 'jus,' in the Voc. Corn.

form of the word written ysgell in Hen Gerddi Crefyddol, p. I00, .1 66 (Red Book of Hergest, col. I162) : Kynn ysgell medrawt ysgar a'm pechawt. poet

The

prays

that

he

may

be

parted

from

his

sin

before

usgellmedrawi (or beddrawd ' grave'), s othatyseell must be a

suitable description of the g r a v e . I n the text, too, Taliesin uses it in exactly the same connexion.

Owain is in his grave

1(. 3), and in that 'narrow cell' lies the famous warrior. On cerd(a)glyt, see Lloyd-Jones, Geirfa, 133; an adjective, not a noun. The noun (a monosyllable) has been omitted by the scribe. Was it gwr ' warrior'? 44. C a n Aneirin.

45.

The line runs thus: dadyl diheu angheu y eu treidaw.

I read this "True is the tale, death got them," taking dadyl dihen as 'true is the tale': diher means 'certain, fixed, true.' The Irish cognate of dadyl, Mod. Welsh dadl, is dal, and. as dál báis and d á l éco are used in Irish in the sense of " a meeting

with death," or " sentence of death " (Marstrander, Dictionary,

s.v.), i t might be better to join dadyl here with anghew (cognate with Irish c). On the peculiar use of treidaw, cf. Canu Llywarch Hen, pp. 40-1: in Mod. Welsh it means ' t o make one's way

through,' in the older texts ' to visit, come to.' meet these young warriors

Death came to