Waiting fot' Cododdin;

Thou.ghts on Taliesin a,nd Iu.dic-Ha,el,

Ca,tt'a,eth, a,nd u,nt'ipe time in Celtic stu.dies

John T. Koch

Ulliversity of Wales Cel1lrefor Advallced Welsil and Celtic Studies

The novel term ' authenticist' came up following a talk I gave on earl y Welsh poetry in Cork in 2004. With reference to the Cynfe irdd poetry, as enumerated below and defined as Welsh texts. mostl y in the awdl metres . presenting themselves as court poetry hav ing been composed contemporary to events of the fifth to seventh centuries, 'authenticist ' would mean the view that some o f the li sted items have such occasional compos itions as the ir starting po ints­not all o f these tex ts surel y, and not necessarily every word or even every line of any of them- but some, a significant chunk.

[THE 'CYNFEIRDD' CORP US]

I. MarlVllad CUlledda :' National Library of Wales . MS Peniarth 2 (L1yfr Talies in),' 69.9- 70. 15 ldea ling with events of the peri od ca A.D. 430 (383x490)]

2. Y Gododdill: Cardiff, MS 2.81 (L1 yfr Aneirin).l I Battle of Catraeth , middle or second half of the sixth century 1 i.) Text B2 (awdlau B.24-B.42 in OW spe lling) ii. ) Text B I (awdlau B.I - B.23) including the 'S rath Carruin alVd!'

IBattle of Srath Carruin. December 642J4 and ' the reciter 's prologue ' ['Gododdill . gOIllYllnal go-til blegyd . . .' post-dating obsesio £till 6381'

iii. ) Text A, also including the ' Srath Carruin awd!' and ' the reci ter's prologue' as well as ' Pe is Dinogat'

3. Tra wsgallu Kyn{/11 GarwYII: Peniarth 2.45 .9-46.5 (=Ifor Willi ams, Canll TaliesilllPoellls of Taliesill I)" [referring to evenls of 570x610]

4 . AlVdlau addressed to Urien Rheged (= Callll TaliesilllPoems (!l Taliesin II- IX: a ll from Peniarth 2) [re ferring to events of 570x595I

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.e

5. Enei! alVeil/ ab Vrvel/ : Peniarth 2, 67. 18- 68.4 (= Canll TaliesinlPoellls 0/ Ta/iesin X)

6. Awd/all addressed to Gwallawg fab L1eennawg (= Cal/II Taliesilll Poellls o/Ta/iesill X I- X II : both from Pe niarth 2) lreferring to events of 570x6 1 0]

7. Molian! CadlValton: NLW Add itional Manuscript 14907 Ire ferring to events of 630- 634 17

8. Marwnad CYllddy/an: NLW MS 4973b, 108a- 109a 1 referring to events of 5 August 642 (when Oswald of Northumbria was ki lled)- 15 November 655 (Battle of Winwred)]'

The oppos ite position would the n be that none or very little of the extant material is a direct continuation of occasional court poetry of the fifth to seventh century. As this ' inauthenti cist ' pos ition is not what I think , I would not be the best one to fl esh it out in detail. But such a proposit ion wou ld requi re a pos iti ve as well as a negative side ; inauthenti c poetry wou ld also need to come from somewhere. The implication in the negati ve argument seems to be that the poems - even those set in the North - were composed in Wales. rather than the North, and at the period we can accurately speak of Wa les. rather than the territory that later became Wales. i.e. after the building Offa 's Dyke in the later e ighth century." Such a scenario would involve a sophi sticated meta literature or hi storical fi c ti on in which an artful simulacrum of one genre was embedded in another. Again , I am just imagining because thi s isn't what I think and there has not been detailed e laboration of the inauthenticist scenario - person. time. place. and cause of writing, and so on.

Un less we think about the case for authentic vs. inauthe ntic carefull y there are pitfalls in debating the isslle, sllch as assu ming that it must be all or nothing or that di verse things must be of like origin because we have lumped them together. also such assumpt ions as authentic must mean northern , inaut hentic must mean Welsh and a certain date range for each. or that authentic must mean orall y composed and transmitted as opposed to lite rary, pre-Christian or in the framework of a pre-Chri stiani sed native trad ition vs. the product of eclectic monasti c lea rning. There is no evidence to support any assumption along the lines that the li terary culture of post-Roman Britain can be distingui shed from that of medieva l Wales by its primitive simplic ity. Most absurdl y, a moral va lance can come into the question : so, as well as be ing older, authentic would be purer and simply better, and the inauthe ntic is gui lty of something. as though Melvill e shou ld be as hamed for wri ting

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a novel and calling its first-person narrator Ishmael. These are all separate issues, and it will not be easy to dea l with any of them so long as they remain muddled together unexamined.

The first two sec tions of thi s chapter wi ll be concerned primarily with materials linked to Taliesin rather than Aneirin or the other items in the li st, like Molialll Cadwallon and Marwllad Cynddylal1. When we face the Talies in tradition in all of its richness and complexity, a simpli stic notion of authenticity - heav ily laden with all sort s of unexamined tangentially related or extraneous concepts - is a significant obstacle. I think that we are probably better off laying aside the familiar modern concepts of the historical Talies in vs . the mytholog ical Taliesin or the Talies in persona. rather than starting off fee ling certain that these phenomena have a well understood, proven reality and that our task is mere ly to sort the wheat from the chaff in the texts.

T" LLesLn. Clru:llh.e Lfe of" I u.cLLc-HCLel

The hi sto rici ty of Aneirin a nd Taliesin is most often establi shed by means of the so-ca lled ' Me morandum of the Five Poets' in §63 of Hisloria BrillonulI/.

Ida, filiu s Eobba, tenuit reg iones in sinistra li parte Brittanniae, id est Umbri mari s, et regnauit anni s duodecim, et iunxit Din-Guairo i guurth Berneich. Tunc rO]utigirn in illo tempore fort iter dimicabat contra gentem Ang lorum. Tunc Talhaern Tat Aguen in poemate c laruit , et Neirin , e t Taliess in , et Bluchbard , et C ian qui vocatur Gue[n i]th Guaut , simul uno tempore in poemate Brittanico claruerunl. Ma ilcunus magnus rex apud Brittones regnabal. id est. in reg ione Guenedotae ...

Ida son of Eobba he ld kingdoms in the northern part of Britain , that is the Humber Sea, and he ruled twe lve yea rs Ir. 547- 59 1, and he jo ined Bamburgh to Brynaich. Then Eudeyrn at that time was bravely fighting aga inst the Engli sh lor Anglian] people. Then Talhaearn Tad Awen (Father of poeti c inspiration) was re nowned in poetry. and Aneirin. and Taliesin, and Blwchfa rdd , and C ian who was ca lled ' Wheat of Propheti c Verse ', were at the same time famous in Brythonic poetry. Maelgwn the great king was ruling amongst the Britons, that is. in the kingdom of Gwynedd.

Maelgw n Gwynedd has an o bit at the year corresponding to A.D. 547 in AnI/ales Cambriae: mortaliras magI/a iI/ qlla {Jamal Maile/III rex Gllelledolae.

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So that is the hi storica l era of the fi ve Cynfeirdd named in the Memorandum, the mid-s ixth century as Dav id Dumville has emphasized,'o not the late sixth century or about 600, which many modern commentators have seen as the most probable era of persons and events commemorated in surviving poetry attributed to Aneirin and Talies in .

Although as hi storica l ev idence goes, thi s is not the greatest, I used to accept the Memorandum and ob it as adequate for bringing the Cynfeirdd into hi story and supplying an approx imate date for them. For a couple of reasons, I no longer think this way. But on the other hand , in getting rid of the synchronism as hi story, we may di scover something rather more significant about the daw n of the Brittonic literary tradition. I' ll try to exp lain these ideas briefly.

Reason one for rejecting the synchron ism: the Maelgwn ob it - un like say the entry on the battle of Chester, on which more presentl y - does not occur in any version of the Iri sh annals, which means , it was almost sure ly not a contemporary entry made in lona or anywhere else , but rather a later insertion made in Wales." Bede wrote that Ida of Northumbria ruled from 547 to 559.'2 HislOria Brillollllll1 §§61 -3 says that lda and Maelgwn rul ed at the same time; so there is no mystery about where Annales Call/briae got the 547 date. It is only as good as the Ida- Mae lgwn synchronism of HislOria Brillollllll1 , and even if that is sound , the detail that Maelgwn died the year Ida 's reign began was probably just the result of the annal -editor 's twofold des ire to extract a particular yea r from a date range and give the Welsh king priority.

Reason two for rejecting the synchronism requires a sli ght excursus. For Patrick Ford 's Festschrift I worked up an ed ition of the conception legend in the ea rl y eleventh-century Breton-Latin Life of ludic-hael," which inc ludes the following characteri zation of the poetic persona:

Et protinus misi t aliquem sibion fidelem at prouinc iam Gueroci, ad locum Gilde, ubi erat , re ligiunem suam peregrinus et ex ul transmarinus to llens, Taliosinus bardus, filius Donis , fatidicus presagiss imus per diuinationem presagorum, qui, preconio mirabili , fortunatas uitas et infortunatas disserebat fortunatorum uirorum et infortunatorum per fatidica uerba.

'Coniector optime coniectorum . . . '

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And forthwith [Iudic-Hael] sent a certain loyal attendant to Bro Gueroc, to the monastery of G ildas , where there was a certain overseas traveller and ex ile fo r re ligion. namely Taliosin the bard. son of D6n, a prophet who had great fores ight through the interpretation of portents; one who with wondrous e loq uence, pro-c laimed in prophe tic utterances the lucky and un-lucky li ves of lucky and unlucky men ....

'0 greatest of all interpreters of visions . . . '

At any rate, at some poi nt rather embarrassingl y late in my years of interest in that Vita , it occurred to me, isn't it funn y, Taliesi n is synchronised with Gi ldas's great e nemy Mae lg wn in the Welsh HisTOria Brill0l1l1111 and he is located in Gi ldas 's community in the Breton Life of ludicae l? But there's nothing funny or coinc idental he re at all. Gildas was the first great author of the Britons, the fou ndation of the ir literary tradition. Columbanus writes ofSt Ui nniau corresponding with Gildas and expected Gregory the Great no less to be interested in what Gi ldas wrote." Bede in the earlier e ighth century knew Gi ldas 's fame and made abundant use of De Excidio Britanniae. The Breton sa ints' li ves, from Vi/a Prill1a Salllsonis onward - echo Gildas 's baroq ue diction. His/oria BrillOl1ulII func tions large ly as an extended commentary on De Excidio.

And G ildas unambiguously condemned the sycophantic vernacular praise poets of Maelgwn's court in the renowned ' foam ing-phlegm' passage:

Arecto aurium auscultantur captu non de i laudes canora Chri sti tironum voce suav iter mod ulante neumaq ue ecc les iast icae me lod iae, sed propriae. quae ni hil sunt , furc iferorum referto mendac ii s simulque spumanti fi egmate proximos quosque rosc idaturo, praeconum ore rilll bacchantium concrepante .. . "

Your exc ited ears do not atte nd the praises of God fro m the sweet voices of the harmonious followers of C hrist. not the sonorous music of the church, but onl y your own praises, wh ich are empty, fro m the mouths of rasca ll y sycophants , who squaw k like bacchanali an revell ers with the ir mouths full of lies and li bel to bedew bystanders wi th the ir foaming phlegm.

For Brinonic literary trad itio n to make use of and claim authority on the basis of it s famous vernacular poets-and both His/oria Brill0I1U111 and the Life of ludic-hael do make such claims in more than one way - the obstac le

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of the authority of G ildas had first to be co-opted . The Breton strategy ac hieved thi s literary necess ity directl y. Its Talies in had been accepted by Gildas 's community. so he was obviously an approved source.

In Wales, we get the converse strategy. In the Taliesin prose legend , the inspired youth challenges and dec isively be fuddles Maelgwn 's sycophantic court poets. So aga in , he was explicitl y part of the solution not the problem. YSlOria Tatiesill is of course a late text. But there are already allusions to Taliesin contending at Maelgwn's court at Degann wy in the so-called ' mytho logica l' poems of the Book o f Tali esin (Golycha/i gutwy6 33. 1-34. 14), which takes us back probably to some po int in the Old Welsh period.

doMyfDeganh6y y amryssonla·Maelg6n u6yhafy·ach6ysson.'· ' I have come to Degann wy for (poetic) conte ntion, with Mae lgwn whose pleadings are greatest. '

These same mythological poems a lso link TaPes in with characters and events of Math Jab Matho/Hvv, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.

G6ydyon ap Don dygynuerlheu Gwydion son of Don ...

a.hud6ys g6reic 0 vlodeu who conjured a wife from fl owers,

a.dy6uc moch 0 Deheu ... who brought pigs from the South ...

ry-m gelwir kyfr6ys yn lIys Don. I can be called sage in the court o f Don.

Mi ae Euron6y ae Euron, Myself with Gwronwy and Gwron (or the champion),

gweleis ymla6 laer yn Nanl Ffrangcon I saw ardent battl e in Nant Ffrancon.

6u6 Sui pryl pylgeinl r6g 6ytheint a.Gwydyon.17 Sunday at dawn between the fighting and Gwydion.

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So the fact that Taliesin is ca lled 'son of Don' in the Breton Vita points to a deve loped Tali esin legend be ing already widely known by the year 1000.

The ma in implication o f thi s is that the Talies in who belongs to the myth of the Children of Don and who is with Gildas and against Maelgwn is not two stories, but one, shared by Brittany and Wales , and it has one purpose in both branches of Brittonic literary tradition: to render words issuing from the mouth of Ta lies in usable as a source o f authority.

The Life of ludic-hae l uses Tali esin 's fame and authority to prophesy the future pre-emine nce o f its hero and hi s successors in both secul ar and ecc les iastic domains. The Breton Talies in thus functions much like the bardic pe rsona decla iming Armes Prydeill , for example. " But the Life's interest in Brittonic vernacu lar poets and poetry goes beyond thi s. It also contains-as Fle uriot pointed out '9 -a poetic malti al eulogy, whose themes are striking reminiscent of the Gododdin and whose strange Latin phras ing-such as the 'wailing widow wives' (11 11I/{lII tes lIidlle IIIl1lieres) left in the wake of ludic­hae l's army- imply translation from a Brittonic original, i.e. gwragedd gwyddw. Similarl y, the /alerati eqlli of verse 4 looks like the ve rnacular formula lIIeirch a seirch. as we ll as several other parall els noted by Fleurio t.

[II Multas hostium cateruas qui bus circumfundebatur. ex agili bus et robustis manibus, prosterbebat in quemcumque enim locum ille armipotens strenue dimicans;

[2] Ucl, more inquilinorum in campo iactantium, ludicae lus iactaret; ubicumque uoluisset ibi iac ulum suum descendebat;

131 Et interea quoque more be ll atorum in pugno robustorum contra aduersari os pergebat ad be llum;

14] Annigeri(s) e ius post se leti exeuntes plurimos faleratos diuidebat equos; et nonnulli hastecule qui post se ibant pedestres plurimas ex uuias inue nientes reuertentes domum ueniebant equites:

IS] Et ex cadaueribus de post se super terram inhumati s iacentibus, canes. uulturi , (corui ), milui . puceue, saturabantur:

[61 Et pI uri mae super ui cis in domi bus ululantes uidue maneban t mulie res;

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17 1 Quoniam sicut fort is taurus inte r boues incognitos et robustus uerri s inter porcos alienos aq uil aque inter anseres, fa lco inter grues. yrundo inter apes. ita lud icae lus - rex Britonum Armoricanorum - ue lox et agili s. du rus bell ator, in be llum hastabat inter inimicos in agonem contra insurgentes ;

18J Et prec ipue multas strages in Francos fec it et prouincias eorum multoties deuastauit , pro eo quod Franci uolebant Britanniam subiugare. ' o

[T,'u,cslutionj

I . With numerous ene mies surroundi ng him, by the power and ag ility of hi s hand , he fo ught brave ly on eve ry front , that man so powerful in feats o f arrns~

2. O r, in the ma nne r of fa rmers in the ir fie lds , sew ing seed , lud ic Hael scattered hi s j ave lins, each landing wherever he inte nded ;

3. And whe n, in the manne r of stro ng warrio rs fi erce in combat, he led the way to war aga inst adversaries .

4. With hi s armed men adva nc ing in high spirits in fro nt of him, he shared o ut many horses equipped wi th fi ne metal trappings , and so, many spearme n, who had earlier go ne out as in fa ntry, re turned home with ple ntifu l spo ils , as cavalry ;

5. And from the many corpses strewn over the earth behind him, dogs, vu ltures. c rows. blackbi rds , and mag pies were sated :

6. And ma ny were the towns in which there res ided wa iling widowed wives;

7. For like the virile bull amid unbred he ife rs o r the boa r among un fa mil iar swine . or the eag le among geese. the falco n among cranes , or the swallow among bees, so d id ludic Hael - king of the Armorican Brito ns, the sw ift and ag ile, the stee ly -hard man of wa r- make short work of the ene mies arrayed aga inst him ;

8. And he made ma ny great s la ughte rs of the Franks and many times la id waste the ir prov inces, because the Franks sought to subjugate the Britons. "

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Therefore. here is my conclusion. Talies in 's appearance at Maelgwn 's court in YSlOria Taliesill was not inspired by the Memorandum of the Five Poets; it is the other way around. Like the Life of ludic-hael, Hisroria Brirrol1l11ll uses the Cynfe irdd tradition as hi storica l ev idence, drawing thi s together with the accoun t of Gildas and other sources. This would not have been poss ible had not some sort of literary chal1er already ex isted to make G ildas and the Cynfeirdd compatible. We have clear renections in both Wales and Brittany of the shared legend of Talies in that prov ided thi s charter. The Memorandum of the Five Poets cannot itself be the charter. rather it refl ects the charter. In other words, it does not say how it was known that Maelgwn and Talies in li ved at the same time- it does not te ll us the story- but notes the synchroni sm implied by the story. If the Talies in legend re fl ects how the G ildasian Chri sti an Latin tradition of Brittonic literatu re merged with the vernacular praise poetry of the courts of warlords. when did this happen?

I think that the merger of the two learned classes must have happened by the time of the battle of Chester ca 6 15 and was then re in forced by the consequences of the battle itself. Just to rev iew briefl y the mai n detail s of that battl e, A:the lfrith the pagan king of Northumbria attacked the Britons, one of whose leaders was Solomon or Se lyf of Powys. At the time, as Bede informs us-and th is is borne out by othe r episodes in hi s Hisroria Ecclesiasrica- the greatest monastery amongst the Britons was Bangor on Dee, near Chester. 1200 of its monks had come out to pray for victory fo r the Chri sti an Britons, and A:the lfrith massacred most of them. Selyfa lso fe ll. We know of the king's death from a ll the other sources on the battle. The idea of ' King Solomon the Welshman' must have got under Bede's skin , so he suppressed the name and struck back with the bizarre deta il that the pagan A:thelfrith was just li ke the Old Testament king Saul. except fo r not be liev ing in God. that is."

Quibus vir Domini Augustinus rertur minitans praedi xisse, quia si pacem cum fratribus acc ipere nollent , bellum ab hostibus forent accepturi ; et si nationi Anglorum noluissent viam vitae praedicare, pe r horum manus ultionem essent morti s passuri. Quod ita per omnia, ut praedi xerat, di vino agente iudic io patratum est.

S iquidem post haec ipse de quo di ximus, rex Anglorum forti ss imus Aedilfrid , co llecto grandi exercitu , ad Civitatem Legionuin , quae a gente Anglorum Legacaestir. a Brettonibus autem rectius Carleg ion appe llatur, max imam genti s perfidae stragem dedit. Cumque be llum acturus videret sacerdotes eorum, qui ad exorandum Deum pro mi lite be llum agente convenerant. seorsum in tutiore loco consistere, sc iscitabatur qui essent hi .

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quidve acturi mo conveni ssent. EratH autem plurimi eoru m de monasterio Bancor. in quo tantus fe rtur fuisse numerus monachorum, . . . Exstinctos in ea pugna ferunt. de bis qui ad orandum vene rant, viros ci rci ter mill e ducentos . et solum qu inquag inta fuga esse lapsos .... Sicque completum est praesag ium sanct i pontificis August in i, quam vis ipso iam multo ante tempore ad caelesti a regna sublato, ut etiam temporalis interitus ultione senti re nt perfidi , quod oblata sibi perpetuae sa luti s consili a spreverant.23

It is sa id that Augustine, the man of God, warned them [the c le rgy o f the Britons] wi th th reats that , if they refused to accept peace from thei r brethren , they would have to accept war from the ir e nemies; and if they wou ld not preach the way of life to the English nation, they wou ld one day suffer the vengeance of death at their hands. This, through the workings of di vi ne judgement , came to pass in every particular as he had fore told.

For later on, that very powerful king of the English, IEthe lfrith , whom we have already spoken of, collected a great army against the city of the legions which is ca lled Legac(£slir by the Engli sh and more correctl y Caeriegioll by the Britons, and made a great slaughter of that nati on of heretics. Whe n he was about to g ive battle and saw the ir priests, who had assembled to pray to God on beha lf of the soldiers taking part in the fi ght , standing apart in a safer place, he asked who they were and for what purpose they had gathered there. Most of them were from the monastery of Bangor, where there was sa id to be so great a number of monks that, when it was divided into seven parts with superiors over each, no di vision had less than 300 men .. . They had a guard named Brocmail , whose duty it was to protect them against the barbarians' swords wh ile they were praying. Whe n IEthelfrith heard why they had come he sa id. ' If they are pray ing to their God aga inst us, then, even if they do not bear arms. they are fi ghting against us .... ,.

At the period when Welsh kings have names of the good and annointed kings of the Old Testament - lago/Jacob, SaweliSamuel, Selyf/So lomon (Solomon being Gi ldas's favourite biblical king)-and when monks take part in battles to pray for the ir victories, we are at a po int where the aims of monasti c literati and court panegyrists heavil y overl ap. Chester itse lf was simu ltaneously and indi visib ly a military disaster and a mass martyrdom.

Although I note that opinions differ o n the panegyri c Trawsganu Kyn{ln." I do not think it can be a coincidence that thi s is the most lingui stically archaic and one of the best preserved older poems in the Book of Taliesin and that

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it praises Selyf's father. It is also worth remembering in this connection that Cynan's enumerated enemies in the poem correspond closely to the dynasties of the five kings casti gated by Gildas, both list including Dumnonia/Cernyw, Dyfed, and Gwynedd.

That the batt le of Chester and the monks at Bangor on Dee sit near the epicentre of a revolutio n in vernacular literacy is also consistent with some further textua l ev idence. It is well known that Bede used multiple sources for the Battle of Chester, inc luding written sources from the Britons, in fact he says as much. And the names he takes from the Brittonic documents­Brocllwil, Belllcor, and Car-Legioll - are in a fully developed Neo-Brittonic spe lling, nothing like Gildas 's Romano-British orthography. This source was at least about a century older than the earliest Old Welsh survi ving on contemporary media - the Ecc lesiast ica l History was completed in 73 1-and the ori ginal noti ce very probably goes back nearer to the time of the batt le, ca 6 15, as a contemporary annal or the like.

These proposals imply that the othe r four poets of the Memorandum­Aneirin and three poets to who m no surviv ing poems are attributed - were also covered by this charter or had their own, though the Taliesin story alone caught on and surv ived in deta il. However, as I suggested in The Gododdill of Aneirin, Aneirin's unusual metronym Dw)'wei, shared with St Deinioel, like the Breton Life 's 'Ta lies in son of D6n', might refl ect a mythologized pedigree as the o ld genitive for Celtic ' goddess ' or the name of the ri ver Dee, or of the Roman fortress and town of Chester on that ri ver, all Celtic *Di!wa, genitive *DewUas.26

Culrnelh

There are a total of 23 mentions of Catraeth in the Gododdin; it 's in all three texts- the longer. more innovati ve A-Text and both the portion copied by sc ribe B in Middle Welsh spe lling and that in old spelling." Catraeth is also menti oned three times e lsewhere in the Cynfei rdd corpus (as itemized above)-twice in the Urien awdlall of Llyfr Taliesin and in Molianl Cadwal/on. In Yspeil Taliesin. Urien is mentioned as the ch ief or leader of Catraeth at the culmination of a unique and love ly description of Easter day. I return to those I ines below.

Gweilh Gwell YSlral is a poem about a battle in which Urienleads the men of Catraeth 'with the day ' to hard-won victory aga inst a mounted fo rce. and

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there is some kind of truce exchange and regrouping in the middle. In The Gododdill oj AlleirinlX. I argued that the most economica l explanation was that th is was the same battle of Catraeth as in the Gododdill viewed from the other side .

In Molialll CadlVal/oll. 'fierce Gwallawg ' is sa id to have been the cause of the 'great and renowned mortality of Catraeth ' .

30 Y digones gwychyr Gwallawc (as) fierce Gwa ll awc wrought

3 1 eilywed Gattraeth fawr vygedawc -the great and renowned mortality at Catraeth -

32 allmyr a maon a gwi[w]yonawc foreigners from overseas and followers lof the Britons] and ri ghtful noble men

33 biw rewyt y rann rad luossawc I yn aero eager for the sharing out of catt le as the ple ntiful takings of battle.

Gwallawg was . according to the O ld Welsh genea logies, Urien's cousin, and according to Hisloria Brillonul1Z §63 he was Urien's military ally at the time of Urien 's death at Lindisfarne (illsula Medcall/). Gwa llawg was 'anointed magistrate over Elmet ' (a·eninel )'n ),gnal ac Ellie/) according to another a lVdl in Callll Taliesill , and Elmet was not far from Catraeth. The lines from Molianl Cadwal/on above anticipate combat in ' Elmet 's land ' (Ii I' Eilled ), as well as ' York ' (EJralVc), w hich is also not far from Catraeth. Therefore , it is like ly that Urien and Gwallawg were at Catraeth on the same side, which seems to have been the winning side. accord ing Gweirh Gwell Ysrrar and Molian! CadlVal/on.

In order to assess all this, some brief background on the place Catraeth and its signifi cance in Roman and early medieva l north Britain will be useful. Cataractonium. modern Catterick , was a Roman fort and town and the key station on the road system between the Roman leg ionary fort and command centre at York and the Hadrianic fronti er. At the Colloquium ar yr Hengerdd in Aberystwyth in 1984- before anyone had suggested that Urien and Gwallawg were amongst Gododdin 's enemies at Catraeth-David Dumvi lle

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said that ' Urien Lord of Catraeth ' was incredible, largely because fifth-century Angli an finds had been di scovered at Catraeth , and he accordingly proposed that Gweith Gwen Ystrat and Yspeil Taliesin were ' ignorant constructs ' 29 It is possible that some earl y medieval We lsh sources that have surprising things to te ll us abo ut the rulers o f sixth-century north Brita in might actually know less than the little we know about this era. However, dismiss ing Canll Taliesin as ev idence might not be the only way to understand such ano malies. [n thi s connection, it is also worth noting some texts in which Catraeth is not mentioned- HislOria BrittollUln, the Annal s, the Triads, the saga e" gly"io" , Myrddin 's prophec ies, e lllh wch and the rest of Arthurian tradition , the sa ints' li ves, onl y twice the Gogynfe irdd , both direct refe rences to the Gododdill . Thus. the known pool o f sources from which later Welsh poets might ignorantl y quarry and recyc le Catraeth was limited, and echoes of Y Gododdin elsewhere in the Cynfe irdd corpus are rare. The article on sub­Roman Catterick that appeared in Medieval Archaeology shows, first. that the fifth -century Anglian materi al me ntioned by Dumville is more probably sixth century and also that there were sub-Roman c ist burials on the site, indicative of a Brittonic/sub-Roman Chri stian population] O The artic les by Ke n Dark and Ken and Petra Dark on the re-garri soning of Hadri ani c frontier in the fifth and sixth century show that the mixed occupation of Cllllerick at thi s pe ri od was part o f a wider pattern that was essentiall y sub-Roman rather than Anglo-Saxon," that is, if we can at last get past the 'Holl ywood cowboys and [nd ians'" mode l for interpreting Brittonic/sub-Roman vs. Germanic-style ite ms appearing in old Roman fortifi ed sites at thi s period . The Darks' case for re-occupation of the ' Hadrian frontier zone ' in the fifth and s ixth centuries notes finds from the fo llowing sites.

rods

( I) Be nwell /Condercum (2) Binchester/Uinouia (3) Birdoswald/Banna (4) Castlesteads/Camboglanna (5) Carvoran/Magni s (6) Chesterhom/ Uindolanda (7) Housesteads/Uercouic ium (8) Manchester/Mamuc ium (9) Maryport/Alauna ( 10) Old Carli sle/Olenacum

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( II ) Piercebridge/Magis ( 12) Ribchester/Bremetennacum ( 13) South Shields/Arbeia

( 14) Aldboroughll surium ( 15) Carl isle/Luguualium ( 16) Catterick/Cataracta ( 17) Corbridge ( 18) Malton/Deruentio ( 19) YorkiEburacum

Post-Roman l/icl/s Cataracta was, as Bede tells us. a Northumbrian roya l vill in the time of king Eadwine, the site of a mass baptism of thousands in the nearby ri ver Swale in 627" -which His/oria Brillonl/111 attributes to the agency of Rhun son of Urien-, and then later, when Northumbria re lapsed into paganism in 633--{)34, the area of Cataracta was the place where James the Deacon, lacobus diaconus, kept the fledgling Northumbrian church ali ve and continued to baptize.J•

... in the Kingdom of Deira where [Paulinusl used to stay very frequently with the king [Eadwine], he baptized in the ri ver Swale which fl ows beside the town of Catterick."

Now Pau linus had left in the church at York a certain James, a deacon, a true churchman and a saintl y man; he remained for a long time in the c hurch and , by treaching and baptizing, rescued muc h prey from the ancient foe. There is a village near Catterick in which he often used to dwell , which is still ca lled by hi s name. He was ve ry sk ilful in church mus ic and whe n peace was restored to the kingdom [634/5] and the number of be lievers grew, he also began to instruct many in singi ng, after the manner of Ro me and the Ke nti sh people; and when he was o ld and full of days, as the Scripture says , he went the way of the fathers .'6

In The Cododdin of Aneirill , I was sat isfied that the lingui sti c evidence of Cweith Cwen Ys/ra/ indicated that it belonged broad ly to the pre-Old Welsh horizon , or before ca A.D. 750. As to the points since rai sed by Isaac about the epe nthetic vowe ls, making one line short in the reconstruction ,37

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I can' t see this as decis ive for any of several reasons. First, the poem is not sy llabica ll y regular, nor are most of those in the list above. Speaking theoreticall y, it seems unlike ly that at the period shortly after Brittonic had had great instability in the number of sy ll ables in most words, it would have immediate ly developed rigidly sy ll able-counting metres. For those who nonetheless expect sy ll abica ll y regular archaic poetry, with these particular new vowels, it wo uld be mis lead ing to take Jackson's di scuss ion as indicating that the change had not taken place until the e leventh century, as it is sometimes written already in ninth-century Old Welsh and is a development shared by Welsh and all Western Romance and , therefore, must be very old as a tendency." In the case of the name Gwen YSlrat, it 's an o ld adjecti ve-noun compound. not a phrase; so are we certain that there would not have been a compos ition vowel reta ined between the e lements afte r general syncope, to avo id the heavy cluster?

I did not say in The Gododdin o/Aneirin that I thought that Gweith Gwen YSlrat, as we have it , was composed at the time of the battle of Catraeth by the historica l Taliesin . In fac t, thi s is not what I think . Urien would not be referred to in the poem as lead ing the men of Catraeth as rh lVyf bedydd, 'prillllls' or ' he lmsman of baptism '. as presiding over crowds of men washed in the ri ver with the ir hands on the cross. and I don' t thin k the site of the fo rd would have been called Gwen Ystral, if there was not some allegorical poi nt be ing made about the mass baptism in the Swale at Catlerick in 627 and probably also James the Deacon's continued baptisms in the Catterick area through the 630s. The po int would be prec ise ly the same as that made in Historia Brittolllllll 's northern chapters: Uri en as six th-century north Bri ta in 's Christi an champion, dri ving the pagans into the sea at no less signi ficant location than Lindisfarne. prefigured Northumbria's first conversion as carried out through the mass bapt ism of 627 and the agency of hi s son. A sixth-century siege of Lindisfarne may we ll have happened, but the reason Historia Brittolllllll thought it espec iall y important would have more to do with the importance of the place in the seventh-century church, rather than sixt h-century mil itary events.

Let's return now to Yspeil Taliesin and the unique description o f Easter.

5 G6eleis ilpasc am[I]-leu am[ll-lys. On Easter. I saw the great li ght and the abundant fruits.

G6eleis i 6eil 0 dyfyn a-dowys.

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I saw the leaves that shown brightly, sprouting forth . G6eleis i keig kyhafal y·blodeu. I saw the branches, all together in flower.

Neu·r weleis vii haelhaf y lieliueu. And I have seen the ruler whose dec rees are most generous:

G6eleis i ly6 Katraelh Ira maeu. I saw Catraeth 's leader from across the plains.

Obviously, we are to infer from thi s that both Urien and his poet were Christians - which is more than Trawsgal1l1 Kynal/ allows us to infer for Cynan and his eu logist, by the way. But more than merely observing Easter, Urien and Taliesi n observe Easter when the light is abundant and on the very day when all trees sprout leaves and all flowers bloom. I n other words, li ght has triumphed over darkness and life over death , just exactl y what should occur in the Christian cosmology of the anniversary of Christ 's resurrecti on.

If we rehearse the doss ier of the Insular Easter Controversy of the late r sixth to mid e ighth centuries , these points come up repeatedl y beg inning wi th Columbanus's letters in the late sixth century. So the point is that Uri en and Talies in were not merely Chri sti ans, but orthodox Chri sti ans, they knew the ri ght calendar and kept it at Catraeth , that part of Northumbria that was the centre of its first convers ion and never re lapsed into pagani sm and was thus never reconverted by the heterodox (to the Ro man party) Irish clergy of lona. h is probably not coinc idence that Tali es in later came to be praised as the authority greater than the monks on the properties of the e lements, darkness and light , the tides, and heavenl y bodies. in Preidell Al1l1 wfyn,39 for example.

It seems to me that the age nda for the two poems in the Book ofTalies in that name Catraeth - at least an important part of that agenda - is focussed on di visions within the seventh-century church of the vast multi-lingual, multi ­credal kingdom of Northumbria. After the Roman party gained the upper hand over the Iri sh (James the Deacon's Callerick over Aedan 's Lindisfarne) at the Synod of Whitby in 664, there would have been less immediacy in all thi s. After 768, when Wales abandoned the computlls of Anato lius according to AnI/ales Call/briae, there would have been less point still.

On the earl y side, Catraeth had , so far as we know, no spec ial Chri stian significance before 627 (apart from the Chri stian community implied by the

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cist burials mentioned above). And it became more significant mid century as fri ction increased between the Roman, Irish, and Britton ic foundations. Cweith Cwell Ystrat is still aware of the old military and strategic significance of Catraeth - the only signifi cance of which the Cododdin and Moliant Cadwalloll are aware - but it is a lso artfully consc ious of another audience and of what happened at Catraeth in another sphere in the century after Urien 's time. It is possible that thi s is the fictionali zed Taliesin persona- invented as a bridge between monastic learning and vernacular court poetry -as early as the seventh or eighth century.

Another upshot of these arguments is the likelihood that Gwa llawg had actuall y been the more important Coeling chief at Catraeth (as implied by Molialll Cadwalloll ), but the foc us later shi fted to Urien and hi s sons, probably because Gwallawg 's dynasty and kingdom Elmet ceased to ex ist about 620 (poss ibly Cadwallon's casus belli ). It was after thi s date that, according to the northern memoranda of Historia BrillollulII . Urien's family became prominent in the seventh-century Northumbrian church , and by ca 640 hi s great-granddaughter Rhie infe llt was married to King Oswiu o f Northumbria. In such a context we can see the purpose o f claimi ng that the ancestors of Rhun and Rhieinfellt had once defended the Chri sti ans of the Catterick area.

In the first part of thi s paper. I suggested that the Taliesin of Brittany and the Talies in legend o f Wales-going back as far as the Memorandum of the Five Poets and necessa ril y befo re- provide our most direct refl ection of an intellectual fusion achieved by accommodating Gildas to vernacular court poetry. As it stands. there is noth ing obvioll sly Gildasian in the references to Talies in and Urien at Catraeth , but the fact that it is the same vernac ular poet whose tradi tion is being ski lfully man ipulated to make cla ims re levant to the seventh-century church. as in the Li fe of ludic-hae! , impl ies that these are not coinc idental deve lopments . And if we a llow the poss ibility that thi s northern Talies in had also been harmonised with Gi ldas sapiens, thi s would explain why he was an authority to be trusted on what secular ru ler was ' the true leader of baptism ' and the correct signs of the true Easte r. It is possible that when Ui nniau wrote to Gildas it was on the subject of Easter; though th is is not what Columbanus says in his letter to Pope Gregory of about 595. hi s reference to Gi ldas and Uinniau comes immediate ly after the pro longed argument for the Insular Easter - it begins in the very nex t sentence. Therefore, in the inte ll ectualmifieu of the Insul ar scholars concerned with the earl y stirrings of the Easter di spute, Gi ldas was recognized as a church fat her of great authority and that recognition was expected to be universa l. It 's a lso

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worth re membering in thi s connecti on that although Gildas was revered in Wales and Brillany as a nati ve sa in!. both Welsh tradition and hi s Breton Life agreed in making him a northerner. and the laller source- though e leventh­century itse lf- did so with the unique Ro mano- British place- name Areclllla regia. pointing to very o ld written records of the sa int :'"

With reference to the theme o f our conference. the final question is there fore whether the aspects of Talies in di scussed here are essenti all y Welsh developments or whether they were the common literary property of the Brittoni c world. The overt Welsh ness o f Canll Taliesill , like that of Canll Alleirin, has always made the ir alleged northern ness hard for some to swa llow. however lillie the contents o f thi s poetry had to do with Wales. But wi th the Life of ludic-hael . we have Talies in son of Don, a Cel tic dynastic fo undati on legend akin to Breuddwyd Maesel/ , a martial eulogy reminiscent of Y Cododdin , and yet it is all thoroughly loca li zed in Brillany. There are no Welsh name form s and no overt inliuence from any known Welsh or Welsh Latin tex!. no insul ar British po lit ica l interests at all . and no case for Welsh transmiss ion. If the Li fe of ludic-hae l re presents a late and mass ive literary import from Wales 10 Brillany. its author has very skilfull y misdirected our allention from hi s sources. and le ft us to ask both how and why he has done so. But if the Life of lud ic-hael compe ls us to recogni ze a pan-Brillonic Talies in . this is very clearl y not the hi storical Taliesin that we might have expected at thi s leve l, if we are still assuming pan-Brillonic to mean authentic. Dark Age, illiterate oral court poetry. and so on, as set out above. While I think the interest in Talies in at Catraeth is more like ly to re fl ect seventh- or e ighth­century nOl1h Brillonic than ninth - to twe lfth-century Welsh lite rary acti vi ty, old and northern do not need to mean ' authentic ' , etc. We can have a pan­Brittoni c Talies in who is not, and maybe never was, a sixth-century oral court poet. In fact. that he is explicitl y not one of the oral court poets denounced by Gildas is Talies in 's most essenti al qua lifi cation.

I conclude. therefore, that the fi gure of Talies in as a double negati on of Gildas sapiel/s is a literary deve lopment that is both o ld and widespread . It is not imposs ible that there was a fa mo us court poet standing behind thi s deve lopment and that some o f thi s poet's work is re fl ected in the ex tant corpus. But it is also poss ible, so far as I can judge. that Talies in first came into being as a literary fi c ti on to allow monasti c scribes to cultivate wrillen vernacul ar poetry. About as far back as we can now trace it, a stimulating literary complex ity has affected the Tali esin trad ition. As tex ts with numerous

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I ingui stic archa isms and no Christi an ideas orChristian vocabulary, Trawsganu Kynan and Manvnad Cllnedda are (in my view) excellent candidates for contemporary court poems of the Migration Period preserved in the Book of Ta lies in . But ev idence in LJ yfr Taliesin fo r hi storical Cynfeirdd is not the same thing as ev idence for a hi storica l Taliesin . Marwnad Cunedda names Taliesin onl y in the first three lines, which seem clearly to be a later addition , and Trawsgallu KVllall names him not at all.

U rWLr e TLme in. CeLtic 8 lucli.es

As wel l as Jackson's Lallguage alld HislOIY in Early Brilaill41 and Shepard Frere's Brilalll1ia4

' . two books that had an impact on me when I studied archaeology as an undergrad uate in the earl y 1970s were Stuart Piggott 's Ancienl Europe, subtitled From Ihe Firsl Fanllers 10 Classical Allliquily""', and Leslie Alcock's Arlll.llr 's Brilaill : HislOI'y alld Archaeology AD 367 10 634"". Both were mostl y arc haeology and by now very out of date. I mention them here onl y to illustrate how much things have changed since then . Both were radica l departures from what had preceded them as bold interd isc iplinary syntheses laking in a grand sweep of time and space. And both - though covering severa l cu ltures and peoples - to ld the ir stories fro m a strongly Celtocentric perspective. For Piggott. the story of European prehi story culminated in Hallstatt and La Tcme and could be augmented by 'The Celtic ethnography of Pos idonius '"' For Alcock. Britain in Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages was essenti all y a Celtic Britain . Arthur was of course the central hi storical fi gure. The so-called Arthurian sites . such as South Cadbury Castle and Tintagel, provided the privi leged archaeological ev idence. Allnales Call1briae and Nennius. as we then called the text. were used as contemporary hi storical ev idence. and Jackson's epitomes of I for Willi ams's interpretatio ns of the poetry att ributed to Taliesin and Aneirin provided contemporary ev idence in the vernacular. As to the broader intell ectual contex t for such deve lopments at that time, C lass ica l and Anglo­Saxon studies had by then been we ll establ ished for a very long time and showed signs of running out of steam. but they had not yet closed their ranks defensively to a direct challenge to the ir prestige and resources from nascent multicultural ism. Thus, in entering Celt ic studies from the direction of archaeology, I expected an e laboration of an ec lectic Chadwick ian 'ea rl y cultures of north-west Europe ' approach46. with fresh vita lity in its Ce ltic strand , an approach in which interdi sc iplinary scholars would move more and more eas il y between hi story, archaeo logy, language. and lite rature.

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For anyone who became a Celtic ist at about thi s time wi th similar hopes ­maybe I was the only one, maybe not- the experi ence of the decades that fo llowed can be summed up with the motto , 'curb your enthusiasm.' Why the intervening years did not go as expected li es outside the central theme of thi s conference. so I' ll sketch briefl y a couple o f developments. enough to suggest how Celtic studies might possibly have taken a wrong fork in the road.

On the side of prehistoric archaeo logy, Graham Clarke's 1966 critique of 'The In vas ion Hypothes is in British Prehi story' was a mi lestone.41 While it is not immediately obvious why dispu ting the assumption that changes of prehi stori c material cultures necessarily re fl ected warlike mass movements of people should lead to deconstructing the Ce lts, that 's where it did lead in Briti sh prehistory. which is still pretty much a Celt-free zone·' Once hypothetical invas ions. materi al cu ltures. and group ident ity-previously assumed to be essenti all y one and the same thing - were decisive ly uncoupled, there was increasingly less reason for the arc haeologists and language and literature people to talk to each other at all; we were in fact now viewed as purer scholars and less intellectually suspect if we did not cross disciplines."· Collateral damage eventuall y ex tended to the Druids, the Willdow 011 the 11'011 Age,'" and the 'Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius'.

On the earl y medieval side, Alcock's ambitious, but basically sensi ble synthes is, was fo llowed by the bigger, bolder, and more deeply fl awed Age (~r Arthllr of John Morri s", which provoked multiple fierce reactions." When the dust had settl ed, casualties included the hi storica l Arthur and Nennius . which we had learned to call Historia BritlOllIIlII and to re-assign its historical worth nearer to Lebar Cabala and far below that of Bede 's Historia ecclesiastica." The case for the ant iquity of the Cynfe irdd poetry- under the cover of Welsh editions and Jackson's by then unassail able prestige-survived a few small ­scale attacks as de facto standard doctrine" (on the surface at least), albe it increas ingly hedged in wi th di sclaimers.

Some changes resulted fro m intell ectu al forces wholly ex ternal to Celti c studies. When it seemed no more than self-evident common sense that the cultures of the earl y Celtic-speaking peoples should be understood through combining every relevant body of ev idence and methodology, how were we to foresee the coming decades of deconstruction and the coll apse of the bel ief in the imminent possibility of unlimited intellectual progress, leading to common sense itse lf becoming a suspect concept?

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As well as specific changes in doctrine, the tone of ground-breaking arguments changed. A higher o rder of theory was in . The quality of ev idence and interpretations were measured against more demanding standards approx imati ng the lega li st ic ' beyond a reasonable doubt'. When identi fy ing itse lf, the new attitude was usuall y called ' scepticism' . sometimes with the honorific ep ithet ' hea lthy ' . But if we look at the overall direction of the fie ld, we might doubt whethe r it has been either. True sceptic ism - questioning what one has been told - is incompatible wi th new orthodoxies as well as old ones. It regul arl y leads to creati ve resynthesi s and a more meaningful understandi ng of a widening range of phenomena. Leaping forward to superior leve ls was achieved bri lliantl y in the period of Thurneysen. I for Williams, and Kenneth Jackson. but when we compare earli er and mid 20th -century Celtic studies with more recent times. we might wonder whether the dialectic is now stuck. As I said at the Celtic Congress in Cork in 1999: ' If we were teaching a lge bra. the answers " not enough information to solve for X" or " the time is not yet ripe to so lve for X" could be wrong answers. And I think that they can be wrong answers in Celtic studies too. '55 In the present connect ion, I mean that healthy sceptic ism is a two-way street, questi oning both the affirmat ive answer and the negati ve non-answer, without inte llectual or rhetorical bias for e ither. A discipline in which the answer 'we don ' t know' always earns full marks is not informed by scepti cism, but rather conditioned to sterile debunking in which rewards and punishments extrapo late inevitably to nihil ism. Havi ng recently spent some years edit ing an encyclopaed ia of Celtic studies" . I was often struc k by how capab le scholars, who were scrupulo usly c irc umspect in advanc ing affi rmati ve propositions, felt cons iderably less restrained in issuing sweepi ng negatives like, 'we have no evidence for what language the Picts spoke ' , o r 'we know nothing about what the Druids beli eved ' , o r ' there is no ev ide nce that Arthur ex isted', seeing no need to back up such pronounceme nts at a ll . o r to expla in , for example. the hundreds of P-Celti c place-names north of the Forth or how one non-historical character came to be mentioned twice in Annales Call/briae or. for that maller, how many o ther interlopers from myth and folktal e occur in the portion the Cododdin B tex t in hen orgrctff I am surpri sed by how often the unamplified statement. 't hi s is not convinci ng' , finds its way into print. where a reasoned argument is required. and how rare ly anyo ne asks why.

A factor more loca li zed than a general cri sis in the humanities has also contributed to the undermin ing of the intellectual position of Celtic stud ies in the past thit1Y years. The deconstruction of ancient Europe as Ce lt ic Europe and of the ' Art huria n' version of post-Roman Britain has come

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mostl y from scholars situated both institutionall y and in their subject matter in England. It is in uni versities of England in particular where the high­spirited cleverness of Celtoscept icism has come close to drowning ou t the most basic facts about the earl y Celt ic languages, as shown by the recent theory that a form of English was already the language of eastern Britain in the pre-Roman Iron Age." I don 't think that much conscious nationalism has been in vo lved. Rather. the brilliant nation-building sleight of hand of the Union of 1707 equated England 's modern empire wi th ancient pre-Anglo­Saxon Britain . and the resulting modern British identity produces a way of see ing world hi story in which the reality of ancient Celtic and modern Welsh identity do not fit and thus appear incredible. Even outside of England, a Celtocentric or Cambrocentric viewpoint is a natural blind spot for any first ­language English speaker, whether poorl y educated or even highl y educated in the so-called cultural 'mainstream ' . It is not a problem for what expelts know of ' language and history in earl y Britain ' that we should have poems in Wel sh attributed to poets said to have been contemporaries of Maelgwn Gwynedd and, more indisputably, that the contents of these poems concern peoples. places, and events belonging mostly to what is now England and Scotland rather than present-day Wales. But for all of us who have deeply internalized the fam iliar meanings of the invented trad itions of ' Britain ' and ' British' . and are accordingly stuck with a view Wales and the Welsh language as marginal and anomalous, the mere existence of the Cynfeirdd poetry is unsettling. The recent deconstruction of the Celts hasn't done this by itself; what can be deconstructed has first to be visible, and it is the British va ntage point being as successfully pervasive as the air we breathe that has made Celticity so visible and problematica l. With the Cynfeirdd, it doesn't matter whether we take the ' ispsissillla verba of Aneirin ' position or that of ' ignorant constructs ' cobbled together in Wales in the 9th to 12th centuries. Just to frame the Cynfeirdd problem. requires fact s which dissect the apparent seamless integrity England-UK-Britain with resulting queas iness. We would probably rather not know how England happened. since the standard story, in its many ve rsions from Gildas onward. is di sturbing. But in recent years, if I am understand ing correctl y how Anglo-Saxon archaeologists are lately deconstructing their own. post-Roman ' invasion hypothesis ' , a more complex process for lowland Britain's Anglicization is coming into view, more picture than story, and a picture less embarrass ingly genocidal and broadly consistent with processes of ethnogenesis envisioned in The Cododdin oj Aneirin.

The present remarks are not meant to imply conversely that in contemporary Wales. or even in Welsh-speaking Wales, there is any great observable

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attachment to the authenti city of the Cynfeirdd. Post-devolution, a literary tradition that a llegedl y beg ins o n the other side of Off a's Dyke is viewed with increas ing ambi va lence. There is also a marked decl ine of interest in the old We lsh CIIII1 British heroes like Arthur and Myrddin/Merlin in favour of the unambiguously We lsh," such as Dewi Sant, or the unambiguously Welsh and unambiguously hi storical, such as Owain Glynd\vr.

Two things I attempted in The Cododdin 0/ Alleirin were apparently controversial- applying hi sto rical lingui sti c reconstruction to pre-Middle Welsh texts survivi ng in Middle Welsh manuscripts and using the Cynfe irdd poetry to reconsider the hi story of post-Roman Britain. Whatever the state of our enthusias m might be today. I simply see no choice. The Promethean deed has already been achieved; it was done over fi fty years ago wi th the publication of Language and History in Early Britaill . We cannot now give fire back to the gods, nor could we indefi nitely postpone looking back at the Cynfe irdd poetry, in detail -every word , every spelling, every rhyme, every alliteration- with the new eyes LHEB gave us.

As with any linguistic reconstruction, those applied to early We lsh poetry must change relatively rap idly as our understanding advances, while the extant forms they seek to ex pla in change not at all o r onl y with the infrequent di scoveries of primary materia ls. One could not write a hi sto rica l and comparati ve grammar using o nl y starred forms or using them as anything more than an atte mpt to explain the attested forms . There fore, I did not claim in The Cododdill o/Alleirin, and do not cla im now, that any SOlt of lingui stic or orthographic reconstructi on could be an inherently superior way of presenting these texts. For the LJ yfr Aneirin corpus, each of the ava ilable versions are useful: the ed ited thirteenth-century tex t and extensive lex icographical notes of COIIII Alleirin , Jarman's modernized We lsh tcx t and facing line-by- line Eng lish translation'", the photographic facsimile with Gwenogvryn Evans's diplomati c text in Hu ws 's ed ition"', and Jackson's prose translati ons. Today, wi th the possibilities of e lectroni c publicat ion, we are no longer constricted by the fami li ar format of printed editions: front matter, back matter, tex ts on facing pages with apparatus be low. In o the r words , it should now be poss ible to include lingui stic reconstructions without hav ing to make diffi cult cho ices about sacrifi cing or subordinating the ex tant text, a version in Modern We lsh spelling, translations in e ither language, or scanned images of the manusc ript itse lf.

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Notes

Ed ited by J. E. C. Williams, ." Marwnad Cunedda" 0 Lyfr Ta liesin ' , ASludiaelhau ar yr Hengerdd: S/udies ill Old Welsh Poelry (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgo l Cymru , 1978),208-33 ; J. T. Koch, 'Marwllad CUlledda a Di wcdd y Brydain Rufeinig· . in P. Russell (ed. ), Yr Hen lailh : Sludies ill Early Welsh (Aberystwyth: Celti c Studies Publications, 2003), 171- 97; M. Haycoc k, Legendary Poems ji'{}/II Ihe Book of Taliesill (Aberystwyth: CMCS , 2007), 488- 502. On the manuscript , see M. Haycock. 'Uyfr Talies in ', Nal ional Library of Wales Jou/'IIal 25 ( 1987), 357-86. Edition: I. Williams. Canu Aneirin , (2nd edition , Caerdydd : Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru , 196 1), first publi shed 1938; facsimil e: D. Huws, Llyli' Alleirin: Ffacsilllile (Aberystwyth: U yfrge ll Gened laetho l Cymru) 1989: translation: K. H. Jackson. The Cododdi ll : The Oldesl Scollish Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni versi ty Press . 1969); modernized tex t and translation: A. O. H. Jarman, Alleirill : Y Cododdill , Brilaill 's aides I Heroic Poelll . Welsh C lass ics 3, (U andysul: Gomer. 1988); see also J. T. Koch, The Cododdin of Aneirill: Texl alld COlllexl ji'olll Dark-Age Norlh Brilain (Cardiff: Uni versity of Wales Press . 1997). Celebrating a batt le mentioned in the Annals of Ulster 64 1 (=642): Domna" Brecc in bello Srailh Cairuin in/ine allni in Decembri il1le~rec/us eSI ab Hoall rege BrilollulII .. On dating obsesio Din ' the siege of Edinburgh' (AU 637=638) and thi s

verse, see Koch, Cododdin li- li v; cf. K. H. Jackson, ' Edinburgh and the Anglian Occupation of Loth ian' , in P. C lemoes (ed. ), The Anglo-Saxons: Sit/dies ill SOllie Aspecls of Their HislOlY and CullLlre Presel1led 10 Bruce DickillS (London: Bowe & Bowe, 1959),35-42. I. Williams (ed.), ClI/III Taliesin (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2000), first published 1960; The Poellls of Taliesill , Mediaeval and Modern Welsh Series 3. (Dublin: Dublin Insti tute for Advanced Studies), 1968. Edi tions: I. Williams, ' Dalen 0 Femrwn ' , Bwlelin y Bwrdd Cwybodau Cellaidd 4 ( 1927) 41-48 ; R. G. Gruffydd. 'Canu Cadwallon ap Cad fan " in R. Bromwich & R. B. Jones (eds) , ASllldiaelhau ar yr Hengerdd: Sill dies in Old Welsh Poelry, (Caerdydd : Gwasg Prifysgo l Cymru , 1978), 25-43. Editions: I. Williams, ' Marwnad CYllddylan' . BBCC 4. 134-4 1; R. G. Gruffydd, . Marwnad Cynddylan' . in ed. R. G. Gruffydd (ed .) , Bardos:

Dark 1\9" Scotlan.d

200

Penodau ar y Traddodiad Barddol CYlllreig a Cheltaidd, Cyjfwynedig i J. E. Caerwvn Williams (Caerdydd: Gwasg Pri fysgo l Cymru, 1982), 10-28 (with Engli sh translation).

" D. Hill & M. Worthington, OJ/a's Dyke: History & Guide (Stroud , Tempus. 2003).

10 D. N. Dumville, ' Early Welsh Poetry: Problems of Historicity' , in B. F. Roberts (ed.), Early Welsh Poetry: Studies in the Book of Aneirin (Aberystwyth : National Library of Wales, 1988), 1- 16.

" On the compilation and development of the Welsh annals. see K. Hughes , 'The Welsh Latin Chronic les: Annales Cambriae and Related Texts', Proceedings of the British Acade/lly 59 ( 1973) 233-58.

12 Historia ecclesiastica 5.24. 13 ' De sanCia ludicaelo rege Hislaria and Its Implications fo r the Welsh

Ta li es in ', in Joseph Falaky Nagy and Lesli e Ell en Jones (edd .) Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford, CSANA Yearbook 3-4 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 247-262.

14 G. S. M. Walker, ed., Sancti Coillmbani Opera . Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2 (Dubl in: Dublin Institute fo r Advanced Studies, 1970), firs t publ ished. 1957,8-9 (Epistllia 1,6--7).

15 De excdio Britanniae §35. If, BT (= NLW Peniarth 2 ' L1 yfr Talies in '), p. 33, line 19. 17 BT p. 36. lines 3- 5, 10- 13 (Kadeir Kerritwen). 18 I. Williams (ed.), An nes Prydein 0 Lyfr Taliesin (Caerdydd : Gwasg

Prifysgo l Cymru , 1955); Armes Prydein: The Prophecy 0/ Britain from the Book of Taliesin , Mediaeval and Modern Welsh Series 6 (Dublin : Dublin Inst itute fo r Advanced Studies , 1972).

I. L. Fleu ri ot, ' La "gorchan" de ludicael', in J . Delumeau (ed.), Docllments de I'histoire de la Bretagne (Toulouse: Edouard Pri vat, 197 1), 156- 9.

20 Pari s. Bibliotheque ationale, Latin 6003 fo l. 49 verso; BN La!. 9888 fo l. 52 verso. This secti on does not occur in the Saint-Meen manuscript, BN La!. 6889. The Latin tex t is based on Fleuriot's, La litlliratllre bretonne dans ses rapports avec I'Histoire (Toulouse, 1988) 157.

21 The translation is essentia ll y the same as published in J. T. Koch with J. Carey The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary SOllrces/or Ancient Celtic Europe & Early Ireland & Wales (4th edn. , Aberystwyth , 2003), 409- 10.

22 Histaria ecclesiastica 1.34: ita ut Sauli quondam regi Israeliticae genti.l· cOlllparandus videretUl; excepto dumtaxat hoc, qllod divinae religionis ignarus.

Beyond th.e G od.od.d.i.n.

20 1

23 HisToria ecciesiasTica 2.2. 24 Translation: B. Colgrave from the edition of J. McClure & R. Collins,

Bede: The ecclesiasTical history of The English People, The World 's Classics, (Oxford: Oxford Un iversity Press, 1994),73-4.

25 Isaac , Graham R., ' Trawsganll Kynan Carwyn lIIab Brochllael : A Tenth­century Political Poem ', ZeiTschrijr fiir celTische Philologie 51 ( 1999), 173- 85.

26 The Cododdin 155 . 27 On the relationship of the three texts. see Isaac, Graham R .. ' Canll

Aneirin Awdl U ', Journal of CelTic LingllisTics 2 ( 1993) 65- 9 1; Koch, The Cododdin ofAneirin.

28 pp. xiii- xxxIV. 29 D. N. Dumville, ' Earl y Welsh Poetry ' , 1- 16. 30 P. R. Wilson, et al. . 'Early Anglian Catterick and CaTraeTh " Medieval

Archaeology 40 ( 1996) 1-6 1. JI K. R. Dark, 'A Sub-Roman Re- Defence of Hadrian 's Wall?', BriTannia

23 ( 1992) 11 1-20; K. R. Dark & S. P. Dark. ' New Archaeolog ical and Palynological Evidence for a Sub-Roman Reoccupation of Hadri an 's Wall ', Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser. 24 ( 1996) 57- 72.

32 B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering : An Anglo·BriTish Centre of Early NorThulllbria , Archaeologica l Report, Department of the Environment 7 (London: HMSO, 1977), 294.

33 Historia ecciesiasTica 2. 14. 34 HisToria ecclesiasTica 2.20. 35 Trans. Colgrave, p. 98. 36 Trans. Col grave, pp. 106-7. 37 G. R. Isaac, 'CweiTh Cwen YsTraT and the Northern Heroic Age of the

Sixth Century ', Cambrian Medieval CelTic STudies 36 ( 1998), 61 - 70. 38 K. H. Jackson, wngllage and HiSTory in Early BriTain: A Chronological

Survey of Th e Brillonic wngllages 1sT To 12Th c. AD, 2nd rev. ed .. Celtic Studies (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994), first published, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953, pp. 527- 8.

39 Haycock, Legendary Poems, 433- 51 . 4() Jackson, LHEB, 42. 41 Jackson, LHEB.

42 S. Frere, BriTannia: A History of Roman BriTain, 3rd ed (London: Routledge & Kegan Pau l 1987), first published 1967.

43 S. Piggott, AncienT Europe from Th e Beginnings of Agricllllllre To Classical AnTiqlliTy: A Survey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni versity Press. 1965).

Da.rk Age Scotla.ru:l

202

-l4 L. Alcock, Arthur 's Britaill: History alld Archaeology AD 367-634 (London: Penguin , 1990), first published 197 1.

45 J . J . Tierney, 'The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius ', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy C 60 ( 1959- 60) 189-275 .

46 Echoing the title of the me morial volume of H. M. Chadwick ( 1870- 1947): C. F. Fox & B. Dickins (eds), Early Cultures o/North -West Europe: H. M. Chadwick Memorial Studies (Cambridge: Uni versity Press, 1950).

47 G. Clark, 'The Invasion Hypothes is in British Archaeology ', Antiquity 40 ( 1966) 142-89.

48 I mean here the so-cal led 'Celtosceptic ' movement , on which see the seminal overview of P. P. Sims-Willi ams, 'Celtomania and Celtosceptic ism ' ,CMCS 36 ( 1998) 1-35. For the thoughts of the 'Celtosceptics ' themse lves (not their own preferred labe l). see M. Chapman. The Celts : The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke: Macmillan , 1992); J . Collis, 'Celtic Myths ', Antiqllity 71 ( 1997) 195- 20 I ; The Celts: Origins, Myths alld In ventions (S troud : Tempus Publishing, 2003); S. James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern In vention ? (London, British Museum Press , 2000).

49 Note the pro-multi -disciplinary and anti -' immobilist' thoughts of C. F. C. Hawkes, Archaeologists alld Indo-Europeanists : Call they mate? Hilldrallces alld Hopes (Washington D.C. , Institute for the Study of Man, 1987). In fa vour of keeping archaeology and Celtic philology apart, see, for example, G. R. Isaac, 'The Nature and Origins of the Celtic Languages: Atlantic Seaways, halo-Celti c and Other Paralingui stic Misapprehensions ', Studia Celtica 38 (2004) 49- 58.

50 K. H. Jackson , The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age (Felinfac h: Llanerch, 1999), first published, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; 1. T. Koch ' Windows on the Iron Age, 1964-1994'. in J . P. Mallory & G. Stockman (eds), Ulidia: Proceedings of the First Illternational COllference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales (December: Be lfast, 1994) 229-37.

51 Morri s, John , The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles/rom 350 to 650 (new ed. London : We idenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), firs t published 1973.

52 D. P. Kirby, D. P. & J. E. C. Willi ams, review of J . Morris, The Age 0/ Arthur: A History o/ the British Islesjrom 350 10 650 (New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 1973), in Studia Celtica 1011 1 ( 1975/6) 454-86; D. N. Dumville, ' Sub-Ro man Britain : Hi story and Legend ', History 62 ( 1977) 173- 92 .

Beyondtlce Cododd'n.

203

53 I am referring here primarily to the impact of Dumville 's seminal article cited in the prev ious note and his other important earl y publications on Historia Brillollulll , including: 'Some Aspects of the Chronology of the Historia Brittonum ', Bulletill oj the Board oj Celtic Studies 25 (1972--4) 439--45; '''Nennius'' and the HisToria Brillonum' , SC 10/11 (1975 /6) 78- 95; ' On the North British Section of the Historia Brillonllll/. ', Welsh History Review 8 ( 1977) 345-54; The Hisroria Brillonlllll 3: The . Vatican' Recellsioll (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985); 'The Historical Value of the Hisroria Brillonlllll ', Arrhllrian UTeraTilre 6 ( 1986) 1-26.

'" Jackson , The Cododdill. Criticisms of Jackson , The Cododdin: P. Mac Cana, Review of The Cododdin: The Oldest Scollish Poem', Celtica 9 (197 1) 3 16-29; D. Greene, ' Linguistic Considerations in the Dating of Early Welsh Verse', SC 6 ( 197 1) I- II. Jackson 's response to these critics: ' Some Questions in Dispute about Early Welsh Literature and Language ', SC 8/9 ( 1973/4) 1-32. A compari son of Greene 's article and Oliver Padel's contribution to this volume will show that some of Greene's doubt s have not gone away despite Jackson 's lengthy and energetic rebuttal.

55 ' Some Thoughts on Ethnic Identity, Cultural Pluralism, and the Future of Celtic Studies', in M. Herbert & K. Murray (eds), ReTrospect and Pro~pecT in Celtic STudies: Proc. II Th InTernaTional Congress oj CelTic Studies 25- 31 July 1999 (Dublin: Four Courts Press . 2003) 75-92.

56 Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (A BC-Clio: Santa Barbara and Oxford) 5 vols.

57 An unfortunate lapse in the influential and otherwise worthwhi le genetics­based prehistory: S. Oppenheimer, The Origins oj The British (Robinson: London, 2006).

5K Note, for example, the slender entries on 'Aneirin' and 'Boudicca' in J. Davies, N. Jenkins. M. Baines, P. Lynch (eds) The Welsh Academy Encyclopedia 0/ Wales (Cardiff: Univers ity of Wales Press, 2008).

5. A. O. H. Jarman, Aneirin: Y Cododdin, Britain 's Oldest Heroic Poem, Welsh Classics 3 (LJandysul : Gomer, 1988).

60 Huws, Llyjr Aneirin: F/acsilllile.

Ocwk-Age ScotLo.n.d

20L,