Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions

ARTHUR IN THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

IX

ARTHUR IN THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND IN CELTIC LITERATURES AND TRADITIONS

edited by

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe

© The Vinaver Trust, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-343-3

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-345-7

The right of the Contributors to be identified separately as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: King Arthur, depicted in MS Peniarth 23C (Brut y Brenhinedd), f. 75v (1485–1515) © By permission of the National Library of Wales.

PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH

THE VINAVER TRUST

The Vinaver Trust was established by the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society to commemorate a greatly respected colleague and a distinguished scholar

Eugène Vinaver

the editor of Malory’s Morte Darthur. The Trust aims to advance study of Arthurian literature in all languages by planning and encouraging research projects in the field, and by aiding publication of the resultant studies.

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Series Editor

Ad Putter

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Glossary of Welsh Terms

Introduction

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe

Part One

Wales

The Beginnings of Welsh Arthurian Tradition

1    Arthurian references in Early Welsh Poetry

Nerys Ann Jones

2    The Earliest Myrddin Poems

John Bollard

3    Trystan and Esyllt

Jenny Rowland

Native Welsh Arthurian Tales

4    Culhwch ac Olwen

Simon Rodway

5    Breuddwyd Rhonabwy

Catherine McKenna

Medieval Translations and Adaptations into Welsh

6    Brut y Brenhinedd

Katherine Himsworth

7    The First Adaptations from French: History and Context of a Debate

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe

8    Owain or Iarlles y Ffynnawn

Regine Reck

9    Ystorya Geraint fab Erbin

Erich Poppe

10  Historia Peredur ab Efrawg

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

11  Y Seint Greal

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

Influences and Re-compositions

12  Arthur in Trioedd Ynys Prydain

Rebecca Shercliff

13  Arthurian References in Medieval Welsh Poetry, c.1100–c.1540

Barry Lewis

14  Later Hybrid Narrative Texts in Middle Welsh

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

15  Folklore and Popular Tradition

Elissa R. Henken

16  Arthurian Place-names of Wales

Scott Lloyd

17  Arthurian Tradition in Modern Welsh Literature

Llŷr Gwyn Lewis

Part Two

Cornish and Breton Traditions

18  Cornwall and the Matter of Britain

Oliver J. Padel

19  Arthur in Earlier Breton Traditions

Hervé Le Bihan

20  Popular Traditions and the Work of Hersart de la Villemarqué

Fañch Postic and Hélène Bouget

21  The Arthurian Legend in Modern Breton Culture

Françoise Le Saux

Part Three

The Gaelic World

Ireland

22  The Earliest Irish Material

Erich Poppe

23  Irish Translations and Romances

Aisling Byrne

Scotland

24  Scottish Gaelic Literature and Popular Traditions

Linda Gowans

Bibliography

Notes

PREFACE

This book forms part of the ongoing series Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. The purpose of the series is to provide a reliable and comprehensive survey of Arthurian writing in all its generic and linguistic diversity. For many years, the single-volume Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford, 1959), served the needs of scholars and students of Arthurian literature admirably, but it has now been overtaken by advances in scholarship and by changes in critical perspectives and methodologies. The Vinaver Trust recognized the need for a fresh and up-to-date survey, and knew that a series of volumes would be required to do justice to the distinctive contributions made to Arthurian literature by the many different cultures of medieval Europe.

The first volume to appear in the series was the The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature (1991). This was a landmark study. It has been reprinted many times in hardback and paperback editions, but it too has been overtaken by the passage of time. Moreover, as indicated by its title, its primary focus was on medieval Welsh literature, and while The Arthur of the Welsh has, faute de mieux, served as a guide to students and scholars of other Celtic languages, it did not provide adequate coverage of Arthurian writings in Celtic languages other than Welsh. The Vinaver Trust felt that a new guide to Arthurian literature in all the Celtic languages was needed, one that could provide an authoritative and up-to-date overview of the wider field. To that end, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe were invited to produce the latest volume in the series, Arthur in the Celtic Languages.

The series is mainly aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students and at scholars working in the fields covered by each of the volumes. The series has, however, also been designed to be accessible to general readers and to students and scholars from different fields who want to discover what forms Arthurian narratives took in literatures and languages that they do not know, and how these narratives influenced the linguistic and literary traditions that they do know. Within these parameters, the editors have had full control over the shape and content of their individual volumes.

Ad Putter

Professor of Medieval English, University of Bristol

(General Editor)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are most grateful to the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce photographs: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales (dust jacket and p. 96, fig. 1); Fañch Postic (p. 315, fig. 2); Tugdual de Langlais and the estate of Xavier de Langlais (p. 330, fig. 3). We wish also to record our thanks to the staff at the University of Wales Press. Our greatest debt of gratitude, however, is to all our contributors, who have worked hard to meet deadlines, sometimes in difficult circumstances. It has been a pleasure to work with them.

CLlM and EP

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

John Bollard is a medievalist, editor, and translator who has published articles on The Mabinogi and other early Welsh tales and poetry. His books include The Mabinogi (2006), Companion Tales to The Mabinogi (2007), Tales of Arthur (2010) and Englynion y Beddau/The Stanzas of the Graves (2015). He has taught medieval Welsh at the universities of Massachusetts and Connecticut, at Yale, and most recently at Harvard.

Hélène Bouget is a senior lecturer in medieval French language and literature at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO), Brest, and a full member of the Centre de recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC) at UBO. She has published widely on French Arthurian literature and has written several articles about the construction, the representation and the reception of the Matter of Britain from the Middle Ages to today.

Aisling Byrne is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has published articles on medieval romance and on translation and textual transmission in medieval Britain and Ireland.

Linda Gowans is an independent scholar working on survivals of the Arthurian legend in Scottish Gaelic oral tradition. Her publications in this field include a monograph on the Arthurian ballad Am Bròn Binn. A former British Branch bibliographer for the International Arthurian Society, her interests also include the development of Grail literature in Old French.

Elissa R. Henken teaches Folklore and Celtic studies as a Professor at the University of Georgia. Her published works include two books on Welsh saints, one on the Welsh national redeemer Owain Glyndŵr, and one on folklore and human sexuality. Other research includes Civil War legendry, Frank Lloyd Wright and developments in contemporary legend.

Katherine Himsworth’s first degree was in Modern Persian Studies, which was followed by a civil service career. In mid-career she studied for an external degree in Welsh at Aberystwyth and later followed this with a PhD on the fifteenth century manuscript, Peniarth 22.

Nerys Ann Jones has lectured and published in the field of Medieval Welsh Court Poetry for many years. She is a general editor of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies Medieval and Modern Welsh Series and The Modern Humanities Research Association Library of Medieval Welsh Literature. She is currently preparing a study of the Arthurian references in the work of early and medieval Welsh poets. Recently ordained as a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, she retains a link with the Celtic Department of the University of Edinburgh.

Hervé Le Bihan is Professor and head of the department of Breton and Celtic studies at the university of Rennes 2. His research is on the history of the Breton language and oral-written literary transmission, with particular focus on the Middle Breton period (twelfth to seventeenth centuries). He is a member of the editorial board of Etudes celtiques (CNRS), director of the periodical Hor Yezh and head of the publishing house Tir. His most recent book is an edition of the Middle-Breton text, the Dialogue of King Arthur and Guynglaff (2013).

Françoise Le Saux is Professor Emerita of Medieval Literature at the University of Reading. She has published extensively on issues of translation and cultural adaptation, in particular in the area of Arthurian studies. Her publications include Layamon’s Brut: The Poem and its Sources (1989) and A Companion to Wace (2005).

Barry Lewis is a professor in the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). His research interests are in medieval Welsh language and literature, medieval Irish literature and medieval hagiography. He has published several critical editions of the works of medieval Welsh poets.

Llŷr Gwyn Lewis completed his doctoral thesis on Celticity in the works of T. Gwynn Jones and W. B. Yeats at Cardiff University in 2014. He was appointed lecturer in Welsh at Swansea University in 2014 before moving to Cardiff University in 2015. He is currently an editorial officer at WJEC.

Scott Lloyd works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and has served on the committee of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society. He is the author of The Arthurian Place Names of Wales (2017), published by the University of Wales Press.

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan was formerly Head of Manuscripts and Visual Images at the National Library of Wales and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Bangor University. She has published widely on Welsh and French Arthurian traditions, including editing a special number of Arthurian Literature (2004) devoted to Celtic Arthurian material.

Catherine McKenna is Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is one of the editors of Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, and has written on Welsh narrative prose and bardic poetry, as well as on the hagiography of St Brigit of Kildare.

Oliver J. Padel was formerly Reader in Cornish and Celtic in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge. He has published on Cornish language, place-names and history as well as the Arthurian legend, including Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (2000, 2013).

Erich Poppe was Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at the University of Marburg (Germany) until his retirement in spring 2017. His main scholarly interests are processes of textual transfer and adaptation in medieval Wales and Ireland, Middle Welsh syntax and the history of Celtic Studies. He is co-editor of The Modern Humanities Research Association Library of Medieval Welsh Literature and has contributed to Arthurian Literature, 21 and 33.

Fañch Postic, a member of the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC) at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest), was Senior Researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). A specialist on the oral heritage of Brittany, he has published widely on the history of the collection of oral literature in Brittany from the nineteenth century onwards.

Regine Reck holds a PhD in Celtic Studies from the University of Marburg. She has published a monograph on the aesthetics of combat in medieval Welsh narratives as well as articles on medieval Welsh literature and has collaborated with Erich Poppe on an edition of selected passages of Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn.

Simon Rodway is a lecturer in Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University, specializing in medieval Welsh and Irish language and literature. He is particularly interested in the question of the date and authorship of the medieval Welsh prose tales, and has published a number of works on this subject, most recently Dating Medieval Welsh Literature: Evidence from the Verbal System (2013).

Jenny Rowland is an emeritus Senior Lecturer in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, University College Dublin. She is the author of Early Welsh Saga Poetry and numerous articles on medieval Welsh poetry.

Rebecca Shercliff has just completed her PhD in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil thesis (in the same Department) discussed the portrayal of Arthur in Trioedd Ynys Prydain and formed the basis for this chapter. Her PhD thesis is a critical edition of the medieval Irish tale Tochmarc Ferbe.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: The young Myrddin (right) advising king Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 23, f. 61r. © Trwy ganiatâd Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru © By permission of the National Library of Wales.

Figure 2: Sanctus Arthur. Stained glass window, Ile-aux-Moines, Brittany. © Fañch Postic.

Figure 3: Tristan returning victorious from his battle with the Morholt. Illustration by the author from Langleiz, Tristan hag Izold, p. 30. © Estate of Xavier de Langlais.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

GLOSSARY OF WELSH TERMS

awdl (pl. awdlau)

A long poem in the strict metres, whose form varies according to period, but which employs more than one ‘measure’ or pattern.

Beirdd y Tywysogion

‘The Poets of the Princes’, Welsh poets active c.1085–c.1285. See also Gogynfeirdd.

Beirdd yr Uchelwyr

‘Poets of the gentry’, active from c.1330 onwards; also known as cywyddwyr.

cantref

A territorial, administrative unit in medieval Wales; the semantic equivalent of English hundred.

cyfarwydd (pl. cyfarwyddiaid)

Traditional story-teller(s).

cyfarwyddyd

The stock of traditional tales transmitted by the cyfarwydd.

cynghanedd

A complex poetic system involving stress, alliteration and internal rhyme to produce particular sound patterns when poetry is recited or read aloud.

cywydd (pl. cywyddau)

A poetic form of variable length and subject to strict metrical rules.

cywyddwyr

Welsh poets so called because of their use of the cywydd form; active from c.1330 onwards, they are also known as beirdd yr uchelwyr.

englyn (pl. englynion)

Welsh poems in the form of short stanzas, most commonly of four lines, and subject to strict metrical rules. They may stand alone or form part of a sequence.

Gogynfeirdd

Welsh poets active c.1085–c.1370. See also Beirdd y Tywysogion.

gwyddbwyll

A board game, played with pieces representing a king and pawns, not to be confused with chess, though Welsh redactors drawing on French sources use it as a rough equivalent.

penteulu

The head of the retinue of a household or court.

teulu

A household; the retinue or war-band of a household or court.

uchelwyr

Men of the gentry class who become the main patrons of the poets from the fourteenth century onwards. See also Beirdd yr Uchelwyr.

INTRODUCTION

Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe

The Arthur of the Welsh (1991), edited by Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman and Brynley F. Roberts, was the first volume in this series whose purpose is outlined in the Preface above. The series now comprises volumes devoted to English (1999), German (2000), French (2006), Latin (2011), Nordic languages and the Rus’ (2011), Italian (2014) and the Iberian languages (2015). Since 1991, however, there have been major changes in the research landscape, and it has been felt for some time that Arthur of the Welsh could no longer provide a representative view of the field. Furthermore, there was a need for fuller coverage of the traditions in the Celtic languages other than Welsh, whilst The Arthur of Latin Literature had already updated the discussion of the relevant Latin texts considered in Arthur of the Welsh. Again, whereas the latter focused on medieval literature, other volumes in the series (such as The Arthur of the Iberians) have widened the scope to include more modern traditions. We are honoured to have been commissioned by the Vinaver Trustees to prepare a new volume devoted to literary and popular traditions of king Arthur and the Arthurian world, from the Middle Ages onward, in all the Celtic languages. As in other volumes of the series, it should be noted that it is the language of those works, rather than any geographical, cultural or social identity, which defines the scope of this book. Recent debates have, of course, highlighted the problem of defining the term ‘Celtic’ other than linguistically.¹

The only one of the six Celtic language not represented here is Manx, absent for the reason that we could find no reference to written or orally-transmitted Arthurian traditions from that domain. It is important to remember, in this connection, that the Goidelic languages – Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx – formed a single linguistic and cultural continuum until well into the early modern period, a fact reflected in Linda Gowans’s chapter on Scotland. On the Brythonic side of the Celtic family of languages, there is evidence of a similar continuum of traditions between Cornwall and Brittany in the earlier period, though both countries developed their own particular tales as well, a point well illustrated by Oliver Padel and Hervé Le Bihan in their respective contributions. Despite affinities and interchange with Cornish and Breton traditions, Welsh literature develops a strong individual identity from the early Middle Ages; it also stands apart from the other Celtic languages in possessing the largest surviving corpus of texts and traditions, including the earliest vernacular sources, notably the poetry discussed by Nerys Ann Jones and John Bollard. In Wales, too, a large corpus of triads, surveyed here by Rebecca Shercliff, supplements existing narratives and often casts light on otherwise obscure allusions.

The more modest number of extant Arthurian sources from Brittany and Cornwall may be due to several factors, but reflects the smaller corpus of surviving texts generally, especially in the vernacular. Like Wales, however, both countries have preserved Arthurian place-names, which can often be associated with known narratives from written or oral tradition, a point reflected here in chapters by Oliver Padel, Hervé Le Bihan, Fañch Postic and Hélène Bouget, which complement the surveys of Welsh evidence by Scott Lloyd and Elissa R. Henken. Arthurian traditions appear to have been more extensive and popular in the Brythonic than in the Gaelic-speaking world, and together the traditions of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany occupy an important position in relation to the development of Arthurian literature. Through the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, drawing as it did on sources from the Brythonic realms, the biography of Arthur found its way on to the international, Europe-wide stage and into many other vernaculars.² To what extent and by what means that seam was further quarried, by recourse to other sources, Celtic or otherwise, is still a matter of debate, which we touch on in our introduction to the chapters on the tales of Geraint, Owain and Peredur. For the editors of The Arthur of the Welsh, that debate was a core concern, but today the focus is overwhelmingly on the texts themselves, as cultural artefacts reflecting the taste, circumstances and concerns of their target audiences.³ Nonetheless, it is important to realize that the Arthurian traditions in the Brythonic languages from the earliest sources to modern times reflect a strong awareness that Arthur is an indigenous figure, not an exotic import as he would be in all other languages. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the persistence of the figure of Arthur and other Arthurian protagonists in the modern literatures. The traffic has not, of course, been one-way, for literary traditions in Welsh, Breton and Cornish might come to borrow and incorporate material from narratives that had accrued around him in those continental literatures which had earlier assimilated tales or tale elements ultimately derived from the Celtic world. The permeability of linguistic and cultural boundaries emerges as a constant in these countries where the Celtic vernacular coexisted not only with Latin but, increasingly as time went on, with other vernaculars, Norman French and English in Britain and Ireland, French in Brittany. By the later Middle Ages we find Welsh and Irish redactors of prose narratives translating, adapting or borrowing material from French, and Welsh poets borrowing French characters either from translations or directly from the French romances.⁴

The absence of a genuine lack of interest in Arthur by medieval Irish authors and audiences may appear striking. Clearly identifiable as the British hero and king, Arthur appears first in two translations, of the Historia Brittonum (Lebor Bretnach), in the second half of the eleventh century, and in the later translation of the Queste del Saint Graal (Lorgaireacht an tSoidhigh Naomththa).⁵ He and some members of his entourage were transformed into characters of six Irish ‘romances’ which emerge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their conventional designation as ‘romances’, or ‘romantic tales’, however, should not make us overlook the huge generic distance between them and continental, and also Welsh, Arthurian romances, problematic as this term may be, even in application to the Welsh tales Geraint, Owain and Peredur. Irish historical and genealogical sources from around 600 to 1054 refer to a number of persons named Arthur; Ann Dooley analyses these as reflections of dynastic links and an early ‘transference of the Arthur name among Ulster/north British families’.⁶ King Arthur, however, did not become part of the popular tradition and folklore of Ireland,⁷ and this constitutes a marked contrast to Gaelic-speaking Scotland, which is rich in oral, topographical and genealogical traditions about him, as Linda Gowans’s chapter shows. This lack of a sustained Irish interest in Arthur is probably due to the fact that he was not a native part of Irish history in the same way as he was in Britain and Wales – quite the contrary. In the seventeenth century, Geoffrey Keating clearly states that ‘it is not conceivable that he [i.e., Muircheartach, son of Earc, the Irish king contemporary with Arthur] who was in so much power, should have been tributary to King Arthur’.⁸ Referring to William of Newbury and Gerald of Wales, he further stresses that ‘it is evident that neither Arthur, nor any other foreign potentate, ever had supremacy over Ireland from the beginning till the Norman invasion; and, moreover, it is not conceivable that the Britons had any control over Ireland, since even the Romans did not venture to meddle with it’.⁹ Keating, for one, perceived King Arthur as a potential aggressor, a threat to the notion of Irish independence, and not as a hero who could be appropriated to Ireland’s history. This view of Arthur as a figure threatening sovereignty links up with his perception in Scots literature and historiography. It must be remembered at this point that not all areas of Scotland were Gaelic-speaking. As a descendant of the Northumbrian form of Old English, Scots spread during the Middle Ages from south-eastern Scotland to the Lowland zone and beyond. The corpus of late medieval and early modern texts in Scots includes a small number of works of Arthurian relevance, in the form of historiography and historiographical romance.¹⁰ Since Arthur was intimately involved in early British and English history, he necessarily acquires a role in Scots historiography, where ‘Arthur remains a contested figure, a point at which the relationship between the Scots and the English is examined’,¹¹ earning for himself faint praise at best.

The rough dates of the first attestation of Arthurian materials in the individual Celtic languages differ considerably. Contributing factors are varying degrees of interest in Arthur, which arguably accounts for the late date of the emergence of Arthurian literature in Ireland highlighted above, different dominant modes of transmission (written versus oral) of Arthurian traditions, and, importantly, the different dates at which earliest written sources are attested in each language. Thus, the late date of the earliest extant texts in Breton is counterbalanced by earlier sources in Latin and by reflexes preserved in the oral tradition, as discussed by Hervé Le Bihan. In spite of the many conceptual problems of dating texts, it is still safe to say that the oldest vernacular texts in which reference to Arthur is made are Welsh and consist of poems that can be placed in the ninth to the eleventh centuries.¹² The earliest surviving Breton Arthurian text is a verse dialogue composed around 1450, Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff (The Dialogue between Arthur, King of the Bretons, and Guynglaff), in which Arthur has only a small part: he happens to come upon the seer Guynglaff, grabs him by the hand and entreats him to foretell future events in Brittany before the end of the world.¹³ Similarly in Cornwall: the only Cornish text in which Arthur appears, is Bewnans Ke (Life of Ke), dated to around 1500,¹⁴ but for both Cornwall and Brittany uncontroversial evidence exists for earlier Arthurian traditions. The oldest Irish text about the British King Arthur, Lorgaireacht an tSoidhigh Naomhtha, may or may not predate the mid-fifteenth century. Traditions about Arthur in Gaelic Scotland reach back to at least the fifteenth century, as a genealogical sequence discussed by Linda Gowans shows: ‘… mhic meirbi mhic artuir mhic iubair .i. righ in domain gan rusan’ (son of Meirbi son of Artur son of Uther, the unopposed king of the world).

That the Arthur we meet in the literature of the Celtic languages (with the significant exception of Irish) is on his home ground, even if he and his entourage may be associated with many different geographical areas in these islands, sets the Celtic – especially the Brythonic traditions – apart from their counterparts in other language areas. Important differences also exist in the literary forms and genres employed. Where a significant corpus of medieval vernacular literature survives, that is, in Irish and Welsh, the narrative poem, whether lai or full-blown romance, does not exist. Instead, in those literatures prose is the standard medium for narrative, though poetry may refer to story material and make assumptions about the audience’s familiarity with it. The only exception to this rule is the mystery play, such as the Cornish Beunans Ke or the Breton Santez Tryphina hag ar roue Arzur. Here verse is the normal medium, and secular story material could be easily accommodated within the structure of an essentially religious genre – typically a saint’s Life – where secular traditions could be redeployed for didactic purposes.¹⁵

Like the mystery play, the Breton gwerz, a type of ballad form which emerges as perhaps the most significant vehicle for narrative in that language, is designed and intended for performance.¹⁶ In some cases it may be possible to establish a relationship between a written text from the Middle Ages and a later ballad or other narrative attested at a later period in oral tradition. Thus, as the contributions of Hervé Le Bihan and Elissa Henken reveal, a medieval saint’s Life, in Latin or the vernacular, may well share motifs or significant details with a folk tale or sung ballad collected in the nineteenth or twentieth century, though it may be well-nigh impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt whether one had appropriated such material from the other or whether both had a common source. This constant interplay between oral and written traditions, cutting across social orders, is a persistent and characteristic feature of the word-based culture of the Celtic countries, and hence a recurring theme in this volume. Elissa Henken, for instance, comments on ‘the intertwining of literary borrowings, inventions and traditional allusions, of local legends and international tale types and motifs’, while Hervé Le Bihan uses the different metaphor of circularity to describe the same process of transfer to and fro between oral and written, popular and learned, traditions, which operates from the Middle Ages to modern times. We might equally envisage the process as a spiral, since the material is constantly evolving. Oral traditions may lie behind medieval texts, which may rely to varying degrees on oral performance for their transmission, and written culture may feed back into oral traditions, from place-names to ballads or stories related in prose. Since the 1990s we have had the benefit of Sioned Davies’s ground-breaking work on the traces left by the legacy of orality and performance in medieval Welsh narrative texts, which has led to a re-evaluation of the development of the so-called Mabinogion tales, including those discussed here (in chapters 4–5, 8–10) and offers a useful toolkit for teasing out the elements inherited from oral tradition and distinguishing them from those that require or presuppose a written copy.¹⁷

The reciprocal relationship between oral and written media, which is such a significant feature of the traditions in the Celtic languages, is undoubtedly one of the factors in the significant time-lag that often obtains, in many of our poems and tales, between a presumed date of composition and the earliest known manuscript witnesses. The tale of Culhwch ac Olwen, discussed by Simon Rodway, and the early Welsh poems surveyed by Nerys Ann Jones, are cases in point. The problem this poses in establishing even the general period of composition is exacerbated by the difficulties of dating many of our manuscripts. The attribution of a text to a named author may indicate a rough date, or at least a terminus post or ante quem, but since much of the earlier literature discussed here is anonymous in the surviving manuscripts, we are left to rely on various kinds of circumstantial evidence when attempting to locate a given item in place and time. The concept of a stable text, deliberately composed by an individual author, is therefore highly problematic and, from the medieval prose tale in a manuscript to a Breton gwerz or Scottish ballad collected from a singer in the nineteenth or twentieth century, we must be prepared to accept textual fluidity as a norm. The manuscript traditions of the Welsh tales of Owain and Peredur (chapters 8, 10) demonstrate how inadequate and inappropriate, if not futile, this combination of factors renders any attempt to establish a ‘standard’ version of a given narrative text.

Developments in empirical research since 1991 have been dramatic and have challenged many previously accepted views of the Arthurian corpus in the Celtic Languages. In Cornish a significant new text, Bewnans Ke came to light as recently as 2000.¹⁸ Some important texts which were not easily accessible twenty-five years ago have benefited from new scholarly editions, which themselves stimulate further research and discoveries. A case in point is the Breton poem, An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff, published by Hervé Le Bihan in 2013, and complemented by the discovery of the manuscript known as the Livre du meunier de Trébeurden.¹⁹ In a parallel development, advances in linguistic and manuscript studies have also led to new insights. Databases of Welsh prose from 1300 to the end of the fifteenth centuries, developed by teams at the universities of Cardiff and Aberystwyth, have allowed scholars to map individual words or locutions more fully and with greater accuracy.²⁰ Meanwhile, major projects undertaken at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth have brought us a series of reliable, scholarly editions of the works of Welsh poets from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Given the prevalence in that corpus of eulogy and elegy for identifiable persons, these new editions, and extensive related work on historical records, have not only enabled us to date the poems themselves more closely but also extended and refined our understanding of linguistic changes, which in turn can assist in dating texts in other genres, such as prose tales.²¹ This work has been complemented by new research on the manuscripts and their scribes, notably by Daniel Huws in the Welsh domain.²² A volume of studies on Peredur published in 2000, edited by Sioned Davies and Peter Wynn Thomas, showed how new work in linguistic studies and codicology could be used together to establish more firmly the date and geographical origins of manuscript witnesses but also dramatically change our view of the evolution of a particular text.²³ Such collective, collaborative projects have reaffirmed the value of specialists working in a range of different fields pooling their skills and knowledge to find new solutions and bring fresh insights to long-standing challenges. At the same time, advances in digital technologies have enabled new fields of enquiry, new ways of interrogating and interpreting texts.

Complementing the impact of these developments on our field of research, new theoretical approaches have enhanced our understanding by offering fresh critical readings of familiar texts.²⁴ Perhaps the most prevalent and productive of these have been post-colonial interpretations, such as those applied to Geraint, Owain and Peredur, the three Middle Welsh tales broadly corresponding to three French romances by Chrétien de Troyes.²⁵ In some cases, notably that of Peredur, a combination of post-colonial and historicist approaches has proved to have a close fit with the more empirical approaches of linguists and codicologists.²⁶ While highlighting a variety of critical approaches, however, in accordance with the spirit of this series our main concern has been to provide readers new to the field with a firm grounding in the content and context of our texts, including their manuscript and bibliographical traditions and sources.

The evidence of a putative historical Arthur is not the concern of this volume, but rather the varied and constantly evolving Arthurian traditions that are reflected in our literatures and popular traditions originating in an oral or non-learned context. As in other languages, the Arthur who emerges from this extensive body of material is not a single, immutable figure, but a shape-shifter appearing in countless different guises from century to century and from place to place. In the early Welsh poetry he cuts a mainly heroic figure, a peripatetic warrior leader, mowing down his enemies and rewarding his men with booty, before developing into a more settled ruler, establishing courts at fixed locations, and from king he shifts to the higher status of emperor, a change in nomenclature discussed by Nerys Ann Jones in her chapter. His active participation in battles and adventures is perpetuated in the Brut tradition, and is echoed, though to a lesser extent, in Culhwch ac Olwen (chapter 4), but side by side a rather different Arthur comes to prominence, as French traditions of chivalry and courtoisie are absorbed. This Arthur’s role is not so much to fight as to provide a court which provides a starting point for adventures and a training centre where young men can learn knightly skills. At one end of the scale, this Arthur can become a model of good governance, a proven military leader now devoted to just rule, an image embodied in the depiction of Owain Glyndŵr on the obverse of his Great Seal (c.1400)²⁷ or the miniatures in National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 23, a late fifteenth-century version of the Welsh Brut.²⁸ At the other extreme, we may see affinities with the roi fainéant berated in some French romances, such as the Perlesvaus, known in Wales by the end of the fourteenth century through its translation into Welsh in Y Seint Greal (chapter 11). He may even become the butt of criticism or satire, as in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy. In some episodes recounted by the sixteenth-century Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd, he veers from being a doughty military leader to being helpless and humiliated when imprisoned by a family of giants, or cuts an undignified figure of fun for his own companion in arms, who reveals him as a cross-dressing womanizer.

In the late Irish romances, Cing Artúr is often described as ‘Rí an Domhain’ (King of the World) and thus loses some of his specifically British background. These narratives would appear to reflect knowledge of English and French romances, but Joseph Nagy cautions that there may perhaps be ‘evidence of the Celtic roots shared between traditional Irish narrative and the ensemble of motifs and story patterns operating in Continental Arthurian tradition’, and at the same time stresses ‘the openness of Irish literary traditions to outside sources, which are eagerly embraced and exploited, and also the persistence of native traditional models and motifs’.²⁹ In Scottish Gaelic, Arthur survived long and recognizably, and even became an ancestor of clan chiefs, presiding over splendid courts, a role that he did not obtain in the vast genealogical cosmos of late medieval and early modern Ireland.

The role of Arthur as the rex quondam et futurus, the redeemer-king who will return in his country’s hour of need, is not explicit in the earliest sources – though some might argue it is implicit in the ambiguous reference to Arthur’s grave in Englynion y Beddau (the Stanzas of the Graves, see chapter 1, pp. 16–17). It is with the wide dissemination of vernacular versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, during a period marked by recurring warfare or armed revolt against English royal power, that Welsh tradition begins to embrace fully the idea of a golden age that may return, with an Arthur-like Brythonic figure on the throne in London, governing the entire Island of Britain. By the fifteenth century the Arthurian, Brut tradition would be combined with the ancient but now renewed tradition of prophecy, and turned to overt political ends.³⁰ In Brittany too prophecy and Arthurian narrative came to be combined in new ways well beyond the Middle Ages, as Hervé Le Bihan shows in his discussion of An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff. Modern writers in both Welsh and Breton, aware of the earlier traditions, reappropriated and reinterpreted Arthurian legends to reflect and debate contemporary concerns, as Llŷr Gwyn Lewis shows in his discussion of Welsh writers from T. Gwynn Jones to Bobi Jones, and Françoise Le Saux in her chapter on Xavier de Langleiz and twentieth-century Breton literature.

Other volumes in this series have included surveys of Arthurian iconography, but in the case of the Celtic languages the number of sources which are illustrated or contain visual images is very limited. The lack of a wealthy aristocracy and the comparative poverty of the Celtic countries are reflected in their material culture and, specifically, in our medieval and early modern vernacular manuscripts, which are modest productions, lacking any lavish schemes of decoration.³¹ The only Arthurian manuscript to contain a planned series of miniatures illustrating the content of the text is National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 23, containing a version of Brut y Brenhinedd copied at the end of the fifteenth century.³² This codex is exceptional in that it includes fifty-six portrait miniatures representing sixty-four rulers of Britain, as well as other visual material.³³ The series includes the striking portrait of Arthur, reproduced on the cover, which is the only medieval Welsh depiction of Arthur. Apart from the portraits of individual rulers of Britain known, Peniarth 23 also includes a miniature showing the young Myrddin (Merlin) in discussion with Gwrtheyrn Gorthenau (Vortigern). Outside Wales, visual material is equally scarce before the modern period. By the twentieth century, however, Arthurian illustrations can easily be found in printed publications, such as the work of Xavier de Langlais discussed in chapter 21, and even, as the example on p. 315 shows, in the unlikely context of a church.

Given that the earliest Arthurian material is found in Welsh, the first part of this book is devoted to Wales and sources in Welsh, some of which, it should be noted, derive from locations outside what are now the country’s accepted geopolitical boundaries. The first chapters discuss the early poetry and the earliest vernacular references to Arthur and to protagonists, including Myrddin and Trystan who came to be closely associated with the Arthurian world as the tradition developed. Chapters on the native Arthurian prose tales are followed by discussions of translations or adaptations into Middle Welsh from narrative texts in Latin and French, and of references in the Triads and medieval Welsh poetry. The Welsh part concludes with chapters on Welsh saints’ Lives and other sources of popular tradition, place-names in Wales, and a survey of Arthurian material in modern Welsh literature. The next part is devoted to the other Brythonic traditions, those of Cornwall and Brittany, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, while the final part is devoted to Gaelic traditions, with two chapters on Arthur in Irish literature and one on Scottish Gaelic literature and popular tradition.

For consistency, Welsh text titles, names and terms have been standardized, using modern standard spelling. In some quotations from medieval Welsh, the graph 6 occurs. This was used by scribes most commonly where Modern Welsh would use w, but occasionally corresponding to modern u or f.³⁴

Part One

Wales

THE BEGINNINGS OF WELSH ARTHURIAN TRADITION

1

ARTHURIAN REFERENCES IN EARLY WELSH POETRY

Nerys Ann Jones

It seems appropriate that despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters in the Welsh literary tradition are, like Arthur himself, still shrouded in uncertainty if not mystery. This is due in large part to the non-narrative nature of the poems in which they appear and the fact that very few can be described as Arthurian. They belong to a wide range of genres and are composed in a variety of metres, both awdl and englyn.¹ Some focus on or are spoken by other legendary or semi-historical characters or praise a historical figure, some catalogue native lore, one contains religious instruction and some are so obscure that it is difficult to be certain of their genre.² What characterizes them is their dramatic quality and an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences, familiar with the figures and the incidents to which they refer. Whilst they do not add much to our knowledge of Arthur’s character they do portray him in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures.

Whilst they enrich our knowledge and understanding of native Arthurian tradition, it is not possible to claim that they were all composed before Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, although they do appear to be free of its influence. This is because, unlike the work of the court poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, none of the texts outlined below refer to datable events or are ascribed to a particular poet, and as a consequence they cannot be dated with any precision. On linguistic and stylistic grounds, most can be placed in the ninth to the eleventh centuries but one may possibly belong to the sixth century and some to the thirteenth century and later. They are scattered throughout the manuscripts in which they have been preserved which range in date from the mid-thirteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century.³

Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (The Black Book of Carmarthen)

The earliest of these manuscripts, the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW, MS Peniarth 1), is also the oldest extant manuscript written solely in the Welsh language and contains the oldest surviving collection of Welsh verse.⁴ A detailed study of the layout and script suggests that it was produced by one scribe over a long period of time during the thirteenth century at an ecclesiastical centre in south Wales.⁵ It is an unstructured anthology of religious poems, eulogies and elegies, poems related to traditional lore and poems containing legend and prophecy spoken by Myrddin, probably reflecting the compiler’s personal taste and interests. It is difficult to know how many different sources he had, as he used his own spelling system which hides the original from the modern reader, but a detailed analysis of the orthography has shown that they were numerous and varied.⁶

Englynion y Beddau

The first poem to contain references to Arthurian characters is known by the title given to it by a late medieval hand, Englynion y Beddau (The Stanzas of the Graves).⁷ Its main purpose seems to be to record the traditional burial places of early Welsh heroes but the use of techniques from saga and praise poetry gives these three-line stanzas an elegiac quality and, in the words of Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘unexpected poetic power’.⁸ Their language and style and the fact that most of the heroes named do not appear elsewhere, suggest that most of the verses predate the manuscript by several centuries. There is evidence that some are later additions, taken from sequences spoken by various figures, including the legendary Taliesin, but there is nothing to indicate that the three stanzas featuring well-known Arthurian characters are later than the rest.

Stanza 8, which contains what is probably the earliest reference to Gwalchmai and mentions Cynon ap Clydno Eidyn, and Stanza 12, which refers to Bedwyr and the Battle of Camlan, are typical of the series, with a formulaic opening followed by the naming of the heroes and the noting of the location of their graves

Bet Gwalchmei ym Peryton

Ir diliv y dyneton;

In Llan Padarn bet Kinon.

Bet mab Ossvran yg Camlan,

Gvydi llauer kywlavan;

Bet Bedwir in alld Tryvan.

(The grave of Gwalchmai [is] in Peryddon

As a reproach to men;

At Llanbadarn [is] the grave of Cynon.

The grave of Osfran’s son [is] at Camlan,

After many a slaughter;

The grave of Bedwyr [is] on Tryfan hill.)⁹

Stanza 44 refers to Arthur himself along with March son of Meirchion, a character from the Trystan stories; Gwythur, who may be identified with Gwythyr ap Greidyawl, a violent figure associated with Arthur in Culhwch ac Olwen; and Gwgawn Gledyfrudd who appears in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy as a messenger to Arthur.

Bet y March, bet y Guythur,

Bet y Gugaun Cletyfrut;

Anoeth bid bet y Arthur.

(A grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,

A grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;

The world’s wonder a grave for Arthur.)

The final line of this stanza has been the subject of much speculation. The main difficulty has been to establish the meaning of the word anoeth, which occurs in prose only in Culhwch ac Olwen but is fairly well attested in the work of the Poets of the Princes. It may have been an archaic term in these poems or it may have been deliberately employed to bring the story of Culhwch to mind as Patrick Sims-Williams has suggested.¹⁰ Its use in all these texts suggests that the most likely sense in this stanza is ‘a thing difficult (or even impossible) to find, a wonder’. The implication of the line is commonly understood by scholars: the locations of all the other heroes’ graves are well known, but that of Arthur cannot be found. It is possible that an early tradition alluded to here reflects or gave rise to the belief that Arthur did not die and would return as a deliverer of his people.¹¹

Mi a wum

The burial place of Llachau son of Arthur is not listed in the Stanzas of the Graves but his name appears amongst those of other famous heroes slain in battle in a similar series, elegiac in tone but primarily antiquarian in purpose.¹² It was Ifor Williams who first proposed that the last seven englynion of a rather obscure and clumsy dialogue between two well-known legendary characters, Gwyddno Garanhir and Gwyn ap Nudd, should be considered as a separate poem.¹³ In these verses, the dialogue has become a soliloquy by an unidentified speaker who, using the formula mi a wum ‘I have been’, states that he was present at the deaths in battle of various heroic figures from the past. Jenny Rowland makes a strong case for the speaker to be Gwyn, a supernatural character, and suggests that the sequence is similar to an addition to the Stanzas of the Graves where Taliesin uses his magical power to identify buried heroes. A few textual errors reveal that it was probably first written down in Old Welsh and is to be dated c. 900–1100.

The reference to Llachau, a shadowy character despite the fact that he is named in a number of medieval Welsh texts, does not add very much to our knowledge of him:¹⁴

Mi a wum lle llas Llachev,

Mab Arthur, uthir ig kertev,

Ban ryreint brein ar crev.

(I have been where Llachau was slain,

Son of Arthur, terrible in songs,

When ravens rushed to gore [or croaked on gore].)

In the second line of each stanza in the series, the name of the hero’s father is followed by an epithet reminiscent of formal praise poetry. In this stanza, uthir ig kertev is probably a reference to the fame that Llachau or Arthur enjoyed amongst the poets for his ferocity or his might in battle.¹⁵

The thirteenth-century poet, Bleddyn Fardd identifies the spot where Llachau was killed as Llech Ysgar, one of the royal courts of Powys, to the south of Oswestry.¹⁶ His name may have been simply used for alliteration here as elsewhere in the court poetry, but the reference may suggest that, as with Amr, another son of Arthur who met a violent end,¹⁷ there was at one time a local tradition surrounding Llachau’s death and this may also be reflected in the englynion.

Englynion Gereint fil’ Erbin

Another fleeting but intriguing reference appears in a series of englynion featuring Geraint son of Erbin, a figure associated with the south-west of Britain in the late sixth century who is mentioned in a number of medieval Welsh sources.¹⁸ In later romance, Geraint is depicted as a cousin of Arthur and one of his knights, but the earliest link between the two is found in this text.¹⁹ It opens with a depiction of Geraint, victorious in battle, driving before him the unnamed enemy’s bloodstained steeds. In the second sequence, the unidentified speaker describes the attack led by Geraint and the resulting carnage. A change of metre heralds the final sequence characterized by incremental repetition, which describes Geraint’s own steeds rushing into battle like eagles of different hues.²⁰

Another version of the poem is found in an early modern copy of the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1350)²¹ and the closely related Red Book of Hergest (c.1400).²² While there are substantial differences between the two versions, the stanzas they have in common are fairly similar, suggesting that much of the variation is probably due to oral and written transmission. Most scholars believe that they probably belonged to a lost collection of poems about Geraint similar to the Llywarch Hen cycle, with possibly a prose element, and composed sometime between c.800 and 1100.²³ They lack the emotional intensity of the saga poetry, however, and may, perhaps, be more usefully compared with the englynion on Cadwallon ap Cadfan which follow in the Red Book.²⁴

The stanza which names Arthur appears in the second sequence and seems to be closely related to an englyn referring to Geraint which follows it in the Black Book version but precedes it in the White/Red Book version. The order of the verses in the Black Book seems the more likely, as Geraint’s name is repeated in the stanzas which follow. Both versions are unsatisfactory in places, but they can be tentatively reconstructed thus:

Yn Llongborth llas y Arthur

Wyr dewr, kymynynt a dur,

Amherawdyr, llywyawdyr llauur.

Yn Llongborth llas y Ereint

Wyr dewr o odir Dyfneint

A chyn rhyllethid-wy, lleteint.

(In Llongborth were slain brave warriors belonging to Arthur,

they hewed with steel,

Commander, leader of battle.

In Llongborth were slain brave warriors belonging to Geraint

from the region of Devon

and although they had been killed, they were killing [the enemy].)

Other than the fact that both Arthur and Geraint lost a great number of their men at the otherwise unrecorded battle of Llongborth, there is very little which can be adduced from the poem. The use of the term amherawdyr (from Latin imperator) for Arthur is not likely to indicate the influence of the emperor figure of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as it was originally a military term for a commander-in-chief, and is used in the work of the Poets of the Princes, often in combination with llywyawdyr, for powerful leaders like the Lord Rhys, a ruler of Deheubarth in the twelfth century, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native prince of Wales.²⁵ Rowland is probably correct in suggesting that the parallelism between the two stanzas indicates that Arthur and Geraint’s men were allies rather than opponents, but there is no certainty that Arthur himself was present at the battle or that Geraint was killed at it. A. O. H. Jarman has suggested that Arthur’s name was introduced ‘to embellish a scene of turmoil and bloodshed in the traditional style of earlier Welsh verse’.²⁶ A more common view, however, is that this poem should be understood against a background of legend containing traditions of the south-west of Britain, into which Arthur had been introduced.

Pa gur?

Each of the poems discussed above has a strong element of listing or cataloguing. This is also true of the untitled poem in awdl metre known by its opening words, Pa gur? (What man?), the only poem from the Black Book of Carmarthen which can be described as Arthurian.²⁷ It is often referred to as a dialogue poem, but the conversation between Arthur and the gatekeeper, Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr, is brief, and most of the poem appears to be a monologue spoken by Arthur, listing the names of his followers, praising their heroic virtues and magical powers, and alluding to their exploits against monsters, witches and giants as well as human enemies the length and breadth of