Astronomy, Praise, and Ruin

Barbara Burns talks to Simon Rodway (Aberystwyth University) about the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature.

BB. You’re one of the General Editors of the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series which has been up and running since 2012. Can you tell us a bit about this series?

Simon Rodway beside the earliest extant words of Welsh, on a gravestone at St Cadfan's Church, Tywyn

SR. The Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series produces editions of medieval Welsh texts with introduction, notes, and glossary in English, suitable for use on English-medium university courses. We have a wide range of texts, poetry and prose, from a variety of genres, which help to give students an idea of the breadth of medieval Welsh literature. We’re always looking for contributors, so if anyone thinks they have something that might be suitable, they’re welcome to get in touch!

BB. Medieval Welsh is studied as an academic discipline not only in Wales, but also further afield in the UK, Europe, and North America. Does the subject primarily attract linguists, or historians, or folkorists interested in the Arthurian legends?

SR. There’s no question that many people come to medieval Welsh literature through an interest in King Arthur. Welsh is the only vernacular language in which we have Arthurian texts which are largely independent of Geoffrey of Monmouth and in which we can catch a glimpse of the sort of literature which no doubt caught Geoffrey’s imagination and led to Arthur becoming the international superhero that we know today: some of them feature in Nerys Ann Jones’s volume on Arthurian poetry in the series. Arthur can act as a sort of ‘gateway drug’ into the world of medieval Welsh literature.

He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur
Among the powerful ones in battle
In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade

This stanza from Y Gododdin, a Dark Ages text about lost heroes, makes a tantalisingly early reference to Arthur in passing. If genuine and not a later interpolation, it suggests that Arthur was proverbial even then.

Of course linguists with an interest in Celtic languages will wish to become acquainted with early Welsh. Middle Welsh literature is also useful for historians. Annals and court poetry from the twelfth century onwards are important historical sources. Anyone who wants to engage seriously with medieval Welsh history will have to be able to read medieval Welsh. Medieval Welsh texts are also valuable and interesting to historians of medieval Europe and to students of comparative literature.

BB. What were the key literary achievements of the Welsh medieval period?

SR. In terms of prose literature, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi stand out. These are four interconnected tales, probably dating from the twelfth century, and they are wonderfully written, with extraordinary characters, and a humane style that really sucks the reader in. They are a lot more subtle and layered and, in a way, modern-feeling than much medieval literature.

The Four Branches are a story retold in each century. As the American fantasy writer Evangeline Walton (1907-96) wrote: "My own method has always been to try to put flesh and blood on the bones of the original myth; I almost never contradict sources, I only add and interpret." And every retelling is an invitation to re-tell again. Screen rights to her novelisations (1936, 1971, 1972, 1974) have now been bought by Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac fame.

In terms of poetry, a good deal of the official praise poetry is quite dull and formulaic (although interesting for historians), but some of it is really good literature. Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s famous elegy for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last independent prince of Gwynedd, killed in 1282, manages to transcend the conventions of its genre and is rightly admired for its extraordinary outpouring of grief. Rhian Andrews collected some of the best of this type of poetry in her volume Welsh Court Poems, published in the series before it came under the aegis of MHRA.

In the fourteenth century, the obvious name to mention is that of Dafydd ap Gwilym: believe the hype, he really was good. Anglocentric critics sometimes call him ‘the Welsh Chaucer’: I don’t wish to belittle Chaucer, of course, but my opinion is that Dafydd was a far better poet! I think my favourite medieval Welsh poetry, though, has to be the so-called ‘saga poetry’, a selection of which was edited by Jenny Rowland for the series, particularly the poems in the voice of Heledd, a seventh-century princess of Powys, surveying the ruin of her home. They are collections of poems ‘in character’ and, while they are not narrative, a story can be teased out of them. They are simpler in style and diction than the court poetry, but pack a real emotional punch.

One of 55 manuscripts to come down to us of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poem The Magpie's Advice. As in Chaucer, or indeed Tolkien, birds have wisdom and speech in this woodland realm, but are not always to be trusted.

BB. How difficult is it for native Welsh speakers, or those who have learned the modern language to an advanced level, to read medieval texts?

SR. I don’t think that medieval Welsh prose is very difficult for speakers of modern Welsh. The sentence structures are quite different, so that takes some getting used to, and of course there is unfamiliar vocabulary or familiar words which have a different meaning. Nonetheless, speakers of Welsh have a significant head-start. Poetry, particularly court poetry, is a great leveller, however, in that it is difficult for everyone. Some of the poems require discussion of more or less every word. It is likely that much of this stuff would have been hard going for a contemporary audience – one of the medieval Arthurian tales, the Dream of Rhonabwy, has a dig at court poets, saying that no-one but the chief poet could understand their praise poems to Arthur!

The Book of Taliesin (MS Peniarth 2, at fol. 13) may preserve poems as early as 6th-century, and since the 17th century has inspired many would-be shamans. Deep Purple's version, 1968, has the booming lyric: The hare he bounds across the page / Past castles white and fair / Past dreaming chessmen on their boards / With a fool's mate as a snare.

BB. Your own forthcoming volume is entitled An Old Welsh Reader and takes us a step further back in history. What type of texts do you include, and what is the rationale underlying this publication?

SR. My volume collects together all of the long-ish texts in Welsh preserved in sources from the period c. 800 – c. 1100, together with a handful of texts from the early twelfth century. We don’t have very much from this period – mostly glosses on Latin texts (which I have left out) and short texts recorded in the margin of Latin manuscripts, plus one ninth-century gravestone from Tywyn with Welsh inscriptions. Other early gravestones have Latin inscriptions, so this is quite exceptional, and may be the earliest extant example of Welsh. We have no whole manuscripts in Welsh before the middle of the thirteenth century. It is quite likely that some texts preserved in these thirteenth-century and later manuscripts actually date from the Old Welsh period or, perhaps, earlier, but this is hard to prove, and at any rate early texts in late manuscripts have, no doubt, been adapted to some extent by copyists.

So the texts in my book, being unmediated, as it were, are really interesting for linguists. But they are valuable to historians too, and the handful of poems have a literary value. One really interesting text is the computus fragment. It deals with a very complex subject (charting the passage of the moon through the zodiac), and one which in other countries, e.g. Ireland and Brittany, is dealt with in Latin (albeit sometimes with vernacular glosses). The fact that Welsh scholars were studying this subject in their native language is really interesting – an early example of Welsh-medium education!

Ancient and medieval lunar charts had practical as well as religious value, placing the Earth within a celestial clock mechanism. By dividing the horizon of the night sky into 1/12th parts, the zodiac forms a natural frame of reference. If you can calculate how the moon's orbit traverses it, you can tell the date from a single observation: thus if it's 2026, and a waxing moon rises in Auriga, it must be 25 March. (This calendar calculated by Fernando de Gorocica.)

BB. The Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University in which you’re based has been teaching students since 1875 and is the oldest of its kind. How many of your students are native Welsh speakers? Is the interest in promoting Welsh language and culture in schools and broader society having an impact on specialized study of the language at university level?

SR. We have a mixture of native Welsh speakers and students who studied Welsh at A-level and who received Welsh medium education but who didn’t speak Welsh at home. We also have complete beginners from all over the world. They take an extra year in which they learn Welsh very intensively, and ultimately they are able to join the other cohorts. We have ‘traditional’ modules on Welsh literature, medieval and modern, but we also offer creative writing modules (many of the staff, myself included, are creative writers as well as academics) and vocational modules. Our graduates are sought after – we, like other Welsh departments, have a very high employability rate. It is frustrating, I think, that this fact does not always filter down. People still don’t think of Welsh as being a vocational subject, but it really is. In the public and private sector in Wales, employers really want young people who can express themselves accurately and confidently in Welsh.

The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, opened on St David's Day, 1916, as the culmination of a movement to preserve Welsh literature (though since 1989 it has been a full copyright library, so it is far from being Welsh-only). During the Second World War, its climate-controlled tunnels housed many precious volumes and manuscripts evacuated from London and Oxford. (Photo: Dylan Moore, 2024.)

Celtic Studies has been offered in the department from the start too. We teach Irish (modern and medieval), Scottish Gaelic, Breton and Manx, which allows our students to become familiar with almost the full range of modern Celtic languages. Regrettably we can’t do Cornish at present – a challenge for the future, perhaps! We also have an active interest in the ancient Celtic languages: at present I and my colleague Alexander Falileyev (who has in preparation a volume for the MHRA series, by the way) are working on a project to compile the first ever comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland. Despite being quite a small department, we offer a very wide variety of Celtic topics – something for everyone.

In 2010 the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classified Welsh as "Vulnerable", but it has proven resilient. About 500,000 people understand Welsh, and about 250,000 use it as their first language — which means that far more Welsh speakers are alive today than when the Mabinogi or the Book of Taliesin were being written.

BB. The Welsh government aims to halt the decline of Welsh as a community language by reaching a million Welsh speakers by 2050. How meaningful is that goal, do you think, and what is the younger generation’s attitude to preserving their linguistic heritage and cultural identity?

SR. This is a difficult question to answer. I think that having an ambitious goal is good in itself, but it has to be backed up by action. For minoritized languages, ability is not really enough. We need people who not only can speak the language but who do, day to day, and who pass it on to their children. What we need, I guess, is opportunities for young Welsh speakers to stay in the communities where Welsh is still strong, and to raise families there. Of course, it is also important for people all over Wales to have opportunities to learn and use Welsh, but networks of individual speakers just can’t compare with vibrant communities in terms of maintaining and strengthening the language. The two approaches should not be mutually exclusive, I suppose.