The Legacy of Iolo Morgannwg and Hersard De Le Villemarque
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Volume 10 Number 1 Article 10 4-15-1983 New Myths for Old: The Legacy of Iolo Morgannwg and Hersard de le Villemarque Alexi Kondratiev Independent Scholar Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kondratiev, Alexi (1983) "New Myths for Old: The Legacy of Iolo Morgannwg and Hersard de le Villemarque," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 10 : No. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol10/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico • Postponed to: July 30 – August 2, 2021 Abstract Discusses two of the noted forgers of ancient Celtic documents who influenced the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century and whose inventions influence our perceptions of Celtic literature and mythology (and fantasy writers) even today. Additional Keywords Celtic Revival; Hersard de la Villemarque, Theodore; Literature, Celtic—Forgeries; Literature, Celtic—Spurious; Morganwg, Iolo This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol10/iss1/10 MYTHLORE 35: Spring 1983 page 31 New Myths for Old The Legacy of Iolo M organnwg and H ersard de le Villem arque Alexi Kondratiev The idea of continuity—with its attendant hope such painstaking and time-consuming deceit are not for survival, for performance—has long been one of the always clear. In some cases vie are no doubt dealing main integrating factors in culture. Well-established with a compulsive liar and his urge to manipulate other roots in the past confer solidity and legitimacy upon people's credulity. Yet in other cases it seems that the activities of the present. An institution that has the main goal was not to delude, but to gain stood the te st of time is often thought to have more respectability and power for some beloved cause which authority than institution s that have just begun to was perceived as weak or languishing in obscurity. operate. Newly-formed organizations seek to gain This has occurred most commonly in the context of acceptance by showing that they are the fulfillm ent of nationalist movements, where the legitimacy of a processes that have existed in the culture since time nation's claim to self-determination was often felt to immemorial. And in literatu re, a tale or a poem that be confirmed by the long-standing continuity of it s has been passed on unchanged through many centuries is institutions and traditions. An ancient literary somehow endowed with a particular prestige, as though tradition in a given nation's vernacular would prove some unusual power within it were responsible for it s the historical distinctiveness of that nation. If no resistance to oblivion. Only since the Romantic period long tradition existed in writing, one could look for has originality come to be seen as an end in itself, evidence of it in oral folklore; or, if one had the and departure from tradition come to be praised more skill and the imagination for it, one could, of course, highly than the cultivation and furtherance of try to forge i t . Attempts of th is sort were made in tradition. Even in th is post-Romantic age of ours vie several countries—the Kralovedvorsky Rukopis in can s t i l l feel a th r ill at experiencing something that Czechoslovakia is a notable exanple—but no national has come out of the deep past. It establishes a sense movement attracted as many ingenious and g ifte d of contact, of sharing, between ourselves and our literary forgers as the last Celtic Revivial which remote ancestors; it reassures us by intimating that a began in Europe in the eighteenth century. generation's deeds are not erased when it dies out of the world, that good works are carried on and continue Before 1700 the word "Celt", to the average to grow even after those who initiated them have gone. educated person, referred to an ancient European people of which the Gauls and the Britons had been brances and It is not surprising, then, that writers should which, after being overrun by the Romans and Germans, often have claimed ancient models or ancient sources had vanished from the map. There remained the vague for certain of their works, even when the content of notion that the Welsh were the descendants of the early those works was mostly—or even entirely—their own Britons, but the cultural implications of this were invention. Thus J.R.R. Iblkien informed us that the never worked out and the word "Celtic" was not normally material for The Lord of the Rings was drawn from the used to describe them. Then, in the first quarter of Red Book of Westmarch, a chronicle compiled by hobbits the eighteenth century, the writings of the Welsh at the end of the Third Age of our world. Geoffrey of antiquarian Edward Ihuyd gave "Celtic" a new meaning Monmouth, whose twelfth-century Historia Regum and revolutionized concepts of Western history, not Britanniae may have been the seed from which the many- only in the C eltic countries but throughout Europe. branched and still-f]ourishing tree of Arthurian According to Lhuyd's comparative studies, the languages Romance sprang, claimed as his source an "ancient of the six nations now perceived as Celtic were not British book." In the case of the Red Book of only related to each other (a fact which, in the case Westmarch, we are of course aware that no such of Welsh and Irish, had long been overlooked) , but also manuscript is available, that to our knowledge there is to that of the people called "Celts" by the Greek and no h istorical context that could have produced such a Latin sources. The new cultural perspectives opened up work, and that therefore Iblkien meant it as a literary by this discovery were, to many scholars, immensely device, a signal that we should, by a suspension of important. It meant that the Celts were not just d isb elief, approach The Lord of the Rings as we would a obscure barbarians in the murky dawn of European work of great antiguity. In Geoffrey's case, the history, but a people still existing in the modern situation is less clear: we have no way of knowing how world. It also meant that, through the channel of seriously he meant h is "ancient British book," or how language, there was a link between the Celts of the seriously his contemporaries took the claim. The fact present day and the Celts who had invaded Rome and remains that subsequent elaborators of the Arthurian Greece, who had fought Caesar, and whose mysterious mythos have f e lt free to deal with it as fic tio n , priests, the Druids, were cryptically referred to by albeit relating to events that did perhaps take place the Classical writers as natural philosophers of no in some long-ago period. Geoffrey's "source" could as mean status. What had the wisdom of the Druids easily be understood as a literary device as otherwise. actually consisted of? There were no literary texts available from the Old Celtic period, only scattered Yet it has happened that, at various times and in inscriptions and references to personal and place various places, certain writers not only claimed names. None of the literature preserved in the modern imaginary ancient sources for their works, but went so Celtic languages was older than Mediaeval. There was a fat as to forge the documents to support their claim, gaping void in the record, then, between the Christian so as to induce not only secondary but primary b elief Celts of the Middle Ages and the barely glimpsed Druids in the antiquity of their material. The motives behind of antiquity. Yet the urge to f i l l that void became a page 32 MYTHLORE 35: Spring 1983 compelling one to many Celtic R evivalists, and indeed stay in London he became acquainted with many members to many non-Celtic intellectuals of the period. It was of the Biglish cultural establishment, who regarded him a time of cultural tension, social and aesthetic values as an amusing exotic with literary pretentions, "the were changing, traditional structures were being Welsh bard."2 iolo was a short and physically ugly challenged, nationalism, capitalism and industrialism man, but his quick wit and powerfully expressive speech began to play a dominant role in political life. There won him respect in intellectual circles. Anecdotes was an eager search for alternatives to the models about h is , eccen tricities abounded. Though intensely inherited from Classical antiquity and from the Church. fond of horses, he could never bring himself to ride A number of philosophers thought they might find such one, and would go on outings with his horse walking an alternative in the pagan traditions of the Celts, beside him, like a dog. Even i f he had forgiven demonstrably one of the most ancient European peoples someone who had wronged him, he would never again come and—even the Classical writers admitted it—once under that man's roof, but would, when visiting, possessed of great wisdom.