Dissonant Neighbours

Narrative Progress in Early Welsh and English Poetry

David Callander

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786833983
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786834003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Dissonant Neighbours compares early Welsh and English poetry up to c.1250, investigating why these two neighbouring literatures describe similar events in markedly different ways. Medieval Welsh and English texts were subject to many of the same Latin and French influences, and we see this in the stories told in the poetic traditions; comparing and contrasting the different approaches of Welsh and English poetry offers insight to the core narrative trends of both. How, where and why did early Welsh and English poets deploy narrative? These are key questions that this book seeks to answer, providing a groundbreaking new study which treats the Welsh and English poetry in an equal and balanced manner. It contributes to ongoing debates concerning multilingualism and the relationship between Welsh and English literature, dividing into four comparative chapters that contrast a wide range of early Welsh and English material, yielding incisive new readings in poetic tradition.

Chapter 1

Battle

INTRODUCTION

At some point in the middle decades of the last century, Ifor Williams was having trouble in his garden. He tells us:

Amser a ballai i mi adrodd hanes fy rhyfeloedd oll, yn erbyn morgrug, a phryfed cop bach coch, yn erbyn y wadd neu dwrch daear, a’r sgarmes fawr hefo ffwlbart, y pole cat. Daeth allan o’r coed yn f’erbyn, â’i ben i fyny, gan lamu’n hoyw i’r frwydr. Cleddais ef yn barchus dan garnedd o gerrig – yn ei gôt frown hardd o ffyr drud – am na wyddwn sut i ddatod y botymau.¹

Time wouldn’t allow me to tell the story of all my wars, against ants, and little red spiders, against the mole, and the great skirmish with the polecat. He came out of the wood against me, with his head up, prancing brightly to battle. I buried him respectfully under a cairn of stones – in his beautiful brown coat of expensive fur – because I didn’t know how to undo the buttons.

Here we see what is ostensibly a story of a battle without any depiction of the battle itself. This is a story which Ifor Williams himself told a few years before his edition of the ‘historical’ Taliesin poems reached press, but its relevance to the study of narrative in early Welsh poetry will hopefully become clear.

In treating verse which also involves more or less narrated battles, this chapter examines a comparative corpus of secular battle poetry, consisting on the Welsh side of Gweith Argoet Llwyfein, Gweith Gwen Ystrat, Ar vn blyned and Kat Godeu, each of which is outlined in further detail below. There is substantial variation in narrativity among these poems and comparing them is useful in pinpointing where narrative is present and why. These are compared with the Old English Fight at Finnsburg, Battle of Maldon and Battle of Brunanburh, along with the battle sections of the early Middle English Laȝamon’s Brut, composed between 1185 and 1216.²

NARRATIVE PROGRESS IN EARLY WELSH AND ENGLISH POETRY

As noted, in creating such a grouping I do not advocate a unified and exclusive genre of medieval battle verse into which all these poems fit, but that bringing these texts together according to the events described is productive in showing how apparently similar happenings are narrated in often divergent ways. One particular issue with this grouping is whether these works, especially Kat Godeu and Maldon, can always be described as secular battle poems. However, to include all Old English biblical and saints’ poetry with battle elements would create a corpus too sprawling for detailed analysis, and, although the poems investigated here are often explicitly Christian, they are neither biblical nor hagiographic verse. It will also be noted that Beowulf is not the focus here. Beowulf is not primarily a battle poem, and I could not give its narrative due discussion in this chapter without helping perpetuate the bias of critical discussion of Old English poetry (and especially its narrative style) towards that one poem. Naturally neither Beowulf nor its associated body of criticism can be ignored, and both are brought into discussion at relevant points. Laȝamon’s Brut, despite the myriad battles it contains, is perhaps not primarily a battle poem either, but including it is useful for showing the development of narrative tropes from Old English, being our major source of early Middle English battle poetry.

Selection among the early Welsh poems is a somewhat easier task, as there is relatively little battle poetry with extensive narrative elements as here defined. This chapter focuses primarily on Hengerdd rather than Beirdd y Tywysogion, due to the greater narrativity of some battle poetry in the former. Although descriptions of fighting abound in the poetry of Beirdd y Tywysogion beyond almost anything else, narrative is strikingly absent, even in poems running to hundreds of lines. In the most progressive narrative found, such as Gwalchmai ap Meilyr’s depiction of the Battle of Tal Moelfre, it is still hard to distinguish a narrative sequence from a list of descriptions.³

The narrative and structure of the Welsh and English battle poems have sparked little comparative criticism beyond the Chadwicks, and Higley’s contrastive approach is yet to be exploited here.⁴ The Chadwicks devised their own ‘types’ of heroic poetry, of which Type A refers to ‘narrative poems’.⁵ In making this their first type, the Chadwicks reveal their perspective, as it would certainly not be chosen as Type A by scholars of early Welsh poetry. What they create is an external model, never clearly defined, which they use as a yardstick for Welsh poetry. They claim that ‘Type A is practically unrepresented in Welsh heroic poetry’.⁶ They then state that Gweith Gwen Ystrat and Gweith Argoet Llwyfein ‘approach more nearly to (Type A) than do any other

BATTLE

early Welsh poems’ and that Gweith Argoet Llwyfein ‘can hardly be regarded except as a narrative poem, though it is very short’.⁷ No attempt is made to discuss how the English and Welsh and other poems differ as narrative poems, and thus we gain no real idea of a given poem’s style.

David Klausner has done the most comparative work on these texts in his study of Maldon, Brunanburh, Gweith Argoet Llwyfein, Gweith Gwen Ystrat and Y Gododdin.⁸ He views Brunanburh, Gweith Argoet Llwyfein and Gweith Gwen Ystrat as ‘poems of victory’, and Maldon and Y Gododdin as ‘poems of defeat’, and attempts to outline both groups’ shared features. Yet in seeking to cross linguistic boundaries, Klausner de-emphasizes the dissonances within these groups, which I seek to describe here. As readers are unlikely to be familiar with all the poems discussed, I begin here, as in subsequent chapters, with a brief summary of each poem.

NARRATIVE SUMMARIES

Gweith Argoet Llwyfein

Gweith Argoet Llwyfein ‘The Battle of Argoed Llwyfain’ (appendix 1) appears in the early fourteenth-century Llyfr Taliesin, amid poems traditionally assigned to the sixth-century Taliesin, including the two described below.⁹ It is perhaps this text which Ifor Williams had in mind when he wrote of his ‘great skirmish’ with the polecat. The poem tells of an encounter between the forces of Rheged and their enemy, Fflamddwyn. Having referred to the day-long battle on Saturday at the start of the poem (1–2), the poet moves on to relate Fflamddwyn’s approach and the response of Goddau and Rheged (3–6). Fflamddwyn shouts out, proudly expecting hostages (7–8). Owain replies, making clear they will not be given and that giving them would be cowardly (9–12). Urien then speaks (13). He commands his people that if Fflamddwyn is coming to make an alliance, they should fortify themselves, raise their faces over the edge of their fortification, raise up their spears and kill Fflamddwyn and those with him (14–19). After this the battle’s aftermath is described (20–3). Taliesin announces he intends a year of song for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Battle
• Chapter 2: Narrative at the End of the World
• Chapter 3: Tense and Eternity: Retelling Christ’s Birth and Early Life
• Chapter 4: List and Narrative
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Appendices
• Notes