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06 Sharpe:Studia Celtica 42 27/11/09 10:48 Page 95 STUDIA CELTICA, XLIII (2009), 95 –121 Claf Abercuawg and the Voice of Llywarch Hen* RICHARD SHARPE University of Oxford The remains of early Welsh poetry have survived by a very restricted manuscript trans - mission. It is impossible really to discover how widely known were the poems that we still read and enjoy. The Red Book of Hergest, made towards the end of the fourteenth century, is the most varied monument of the early literature, but its close relationship with the older White Book of Rhydderch, from the middle of the fourteenth century, suggests that even when it was copied the manuscript circulation of early texts was already restricted. The importance of these two manuscripts as a source of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transcripts further reinforces the impression of limited manuscript circulation. 1 The Black Book of Carmarthen, now dated to the middle of the thirteenth century, stands apart though some of its contents present evident parallels. It is also evident that poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, poets whose names we know and whose environment we can infer, knew some of the poems that have reached us through the Red Book, just as they knew poems that have come down to us only in the Llyfr Aneurin of the late thirteenth century. 2 These poems were more widely known, it appears, in 1200 than in 1400. Singular manuscript transmission of works once more widely circulated poses a hard question: how far must we trust our only copy? Who can say how much hengerdd was known to the poets of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries? Yet thinking of the cynfeirdd as they were known to these gogynfeirdd may help to restore our perspective, enabling us to imagine the poems circulating in multiple copies before their transmission shrank to what is known today. It may also remind us that historicizing will mislead us in dating the poems. 3 The cynfeirdd sang about a very remote past, but in the englynion in particular there is a lively exchange of lines and even stanzas that suggests a poetic culture and community that need not be so remote. 4 * This paper was delivered as the 53rd University of tradition of the Red Book englynion ’, Studia Celtica Wales O’Donnell Lecture at Bangor on 18 April, at 18/19 (1983–4), 79–95. Lampeter on 23 April, and at Cardiff on 30 April 2 Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Y cynfeirdd yn gwaith y 2007. I am grateful to the Board of Celtic Studies of gogynfeirdd’, Ysgrifau Beirniadol 19 (1993), 13–28. the University of Wales for the invitation, and to those 3 Datings on the basis of suppositions about the people who made my visits to the three instititutions historical relevance of literary works must be treated so enjoyable. I offer my grateful thanks also to Oliver with great caution: Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Historical Padel and Nicolas Jacobs for their generous advice on need and literary narrative: a caveat from ninth- drafts of the paper and for sharing their own work century Wales’, Welsh History Review 17 (1994–5), 1–39, ahead of publication. discusses the assumptions that underlie the dating of 1 Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts Canu Llywarch Hen and Canu Urien to mid-ninth- (Aberystwyth, 2000), draws together up-to-date infor - century Powys in the time of Merfyn Frych. mation on these manuscripts. Particular reference 4 Some examples will be found below, in the may be made to Jenny Rowland, ‘The manuscript comments on stanzas 2, 12, 17, 19, 23, and 41. The 06 Sharpe:Studia Celtica 42 27/11/09 10:48 Page 96 96 RICHARD SHARPE This lecture will concern itself with some of the englynion copied consecutively in columns 1026–49 the Red Book. The first part of these are largely gnomic in character, forming sequences often defined by opening formulae. The second part is made up of speech poems in the voice of characters from the legendary past, Llywarch Hen and his sons; the slayer of Urien Rheged; and Heledd, sister of Cynddylan. When the foundations for our understanding of these texts were laid by Sir Ifor Williams in the early 1930s, the voice of legendary figures exerted a strong pull. He advocated a theory that these speech poems were the residue of ancient stories, the poetry without the prose, a theory which came with – or perhaps came out of – a sense that these were antique compositions. He used the expression englynion chwedlonol in Welsh, but his choice of the English word ‘saga’ reveals the connotations he had in mind. 5 He gave little attention to the poems that preceded these, and he appears to have agreed with his student Kenneth Jackson that the latter should edit the gnomic poetry. As a consequence of the theory, and of the division by genre, it takes a considerable effort to read the poems as they have come down to us in the manuscript. 6 Although the monologues concerning Urien and Cynddylan were not materially altered by Williams’s interpretation, the stanzas in the voice of Llywarch Hen, and his dialogue with his son Gwên, were much rearranged; poems preserved in the Black Book were introduced alongside those of the Red Book; and the poems were laid in sequence to construct a story that cannot be shown ever to have been so conceived by the poets or their audiences. Now, Williams’s theory has long since lost its simple power to explain the poems, but they are still presented in an editorial sequence. The search for story has meant real violence to the manuscript text, reordering what it must be supposed the compilers and copyists of our manuscripts had jumbled, and leaving much uncer - tainty as to what constitutes a poem. 7 The separation of legendary material from the gnomic and other englynion brought together in the Red Book has made it harder to recognize their shared language, the phrases and stanzas that pass in one direction or the other between gnomic poems and speech poems. As a result, there is a not-so-creative tension between how we read them, that is their literary impact on our perceptions, and what we are taught to suppose they are in terms of literary history, a jumbled residue. And yet some of this poetry has proved highly approachable to modern readers in spite of its difficulties. This paper will argue that gnomic lines and the emotions of a speaking persona contrary argument is made by N. J. A. Williams, ‘Canu contexts of Old English elegiac poetry’, Études celtiques Llywarch Hen and the Finn cycle’, in Astudiaethau ar yr 26 (1989), 95–142. I am more inclined to think that Hengerdd cyflwynedig i Syr Idris Foster (Caerdydd, 1978), the reciter of the poems might set the scene in his own 234–65 (at pp. 241–8), who explains recurrent lines words as appropriate to the occasion. and stanzas by looking beyond a written text to oral- 6 Patrick Ford made a partial attempt to rectify this formulaic composition. in The Poetry of Llywarch Hen (Berkeley, CA, 1974), 5 I. Williams, ‘The poetry of Llywarch Hen’, presenting the englynion of cols. 1034.1–1042.10 in a Proceedings of the British Academy 18 (1933–4), 269–302, single, unbroken sequence in modern orthography. introduced the word in company, ‘the verse elements For the collection of englynion as a whole, however, it is in a cycle of stories, tales, sagas told in pre-Norman still necessary to use the line-by-line edition of the times’ (p. 273), but subsequently used it alone, ‘the manuscript by J. Gwenogvryn Evans [1852–1930], The Llywarch saga’ (p. 279), and so on. The word ‘saga’ Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest (Llanbedrog, 1911). and the notion of elements surviving from sagas 7 Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry appear in this context already in H. M. Chadwick and (Dublin, 1944), 23, spoke of ‘the englynion now N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature , 3 vols jumbled together in these two old manuscripts’. (Cambridge, 1932–40), i. 33–47. The possibility of Oliver Padel has provided a good introduction to the connecting prose is discussed by Jenny Rowland, ‘The issues, ‘Legendary poetry in englyn -metre’, in A New prose setting of the early Welsh englynion chwedlonol ’, Guide to Welsh Literature , edited by Nerys Ann Jones Ériu 36 (1985), 29–43, and with wider linguistic (Cardiff, 2008). comparisons by Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Celtic saga and the 06 Sharpe:Studia Celtica 42 27/11/09 10:48 Page 97 CLAF ABERCUAWG AND THE VOICE OF LLYWARCH HEN 97 work together to create a poetic mood; the technique works as well in dialogue as in monologue; and the distinction between gnomic and legendary should play a smaller role in our approach to the early englynion . * The poetic idiom of these englynion is often difficult because of its use of gnomic or senten - tious statements. In 1577, Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence defined a gnome as ‘a saying pertaining to the maners and common practises of men, which declareth by an apte breuity, what in this our lyfe ought to be done, or not done ’. 8 In discussion of early medieval literature, the word is used rather to signify short statements both about the human condition and about the natural world. 9 The Welsh word gwirebol conveys the sense more clearly than the English gnomic. General statements, however, whether aphoristic or descriptive, become intermingled with particular descriptive phrases and particular human statements.

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