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“The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales

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“The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales Revised from a paper given to the Virgil Society on 18 May 2013 Davies Whenever I make the short journey from my home to Swansea’s railway station, I pass two shops which remind me of Virgil. Both are chemist shops, both belong to large retail empires. The name-boards above their doors proclaim that each shop is not only a “pharmacy” but also a fferyllfa, literally “Virgil’s place”. In bilingual Wales homage is paid to the greatest of poets every time we collect a prescription! The Welsh words for a chemist or pharmacist fferyllydd( ), for pharmaceutical science (fferylliaeth), for a retort (fferyllwydr) are – like fferyllfa,the chemist’s shop – all derived from Fferyll, a learned form of Virgil’s name regularly used by writers and poets of the Middle Ages in Wales.1 For example, the 14th-century Dafydd ap Gwilym, in one of his love poems, pic- tures his beloved as an enchantress and the silver harp that she is imagined playing as o ffyrf gelfyddyd Fferyll (“shaped by Virgil’s mighty art”).2 This is, of course, the Virgil “of popular legend”, as Comparetti describes him: the Virgil of the Neapolitan tales narrated by Gervase of Tilbury and Conrad of Querfurt, Virgil the magician and alchemist, whose literary roots may be in Ecl. 8, a fascinating counterfoil to the prophet of the Christian interpretation of Ecl. 4.3 Not that the role of magician and the role of prophet were so differentiated in the medieval mind as they might be today. An early, perhaps pre-12th-century, Welsh poem – a long work of nearly 250 lines – entitled ‘Kat Godeu’ (in modern orthography, ‘Cad Goddau’), “The Battle of Trees”, recalls a series of magical events, including the conjuring up of trees, and has its protagonist undergo all sorts of transformations. But at its end the poem “reminds us”, as its editor, Professor Marged Haycock puts it, “of the momentous events of Christian chronology – the Flood, the Crucifixion, the Day of Judgment”.4 It concludes with the fol- lowing assertion: 1 See J. Lloyd-Jones, Geirfa Barddoniaeth Gymraeg Gynnar, 1931–63, Cardiff, 505. Now see also P. Russell, Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales, 2017, Columbus OH, 222–26, 233–34. 2 ‘Telynores Twyll’ (poem 135, l. 56), in D. Johnston, H. M. Edwards et al. (eds), Cerddi Dafydd ap Gwilym, 2010, Cardiff, 530. All the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym can be accessed in this edition, together with English translation, via www.DafyddapGwilym.net. 3 D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke, 1895, London, part II, passim. 4 M. Haycock (ed. and trans), Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, 20152, Aberystwyth, 173. 32 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017) Eurem yn euryll mi hud wyf berthyll, ac ydwyf drythyll o erymes Fferyll. (“[Like] a magnificent jewel in a gold ornament thus am I resplendent and I am exhilarated by the prophecy of Virgil”).5 Fferyll, “Virgil”, is the last word of the poem, as the poet claims for himself a share in the prophetic power of Virgil. ‘Kat Godeu’ is one of many medieval Welsh poems attributed to Taliesin, an emblematic personage regularly seen as the founder of the Welsh poetic tradition.6 As a historical figure he belongs to the late 6th century and appears to have been court-poet to Urien, ruler of the northern Brythonic territory of Rheged, with its capital at or near today’s Carlisle. A dozen poems probably by him, mostly eulogies in praise of his patron, have come down to us in the much later (14th-century) manuscript usually referred to as Llyfr Taliesin (“The Book of Taliesin”), now Peniarth MS 2 in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. There also grew, around the Taliesin persona, a body of continually evolving legend, and poems that incorporate some of this later material, composed over many centuries and ascribed to him, are also preserved in Llyfr Taliesin.7 ‘Kat Godeu’ is of the number of the legendary poems. The figure presented as claiming that he is “exhilarated / by the prophecy of Virgil” is none other than Taliesin himself. He is a wonder-worker, a magus like the Virgil of the popular legends. But he also stands in the tradition of the Christian interpretation of Ecl. 4, and calls to mind the Flood, the Cross, Doomsday. A Welsh Virgil, he too is both magician and prophet.8 * 5 Ibid, 186 (‘Kat Godeu’, ll. 246–49). 6 See, for example, E. Humphreys, The Taliesin Tradition. A Quest for the Welsh Identity, 1983, London. For a succinct discussion of the beginnings of Welsh poetry, see A. O. H. Jarman, The Cynfeirdd. Early Welsh Poets and Poetry, 1981, Cardiff. 7 On the poems of the historic Taliesin, see I. Williams, Canu Taliesin, 1960, Cardiff; English version: J. E. Caerwyn Williams (trans), The Poems of Taliesin, 1975, Dublin. On the legendary poems, see Haycock (n.4 above). 8 For a comparative study of Virgil and Taliesin as magician figures, see J. Wood, ‘Virgil and Taliesin: The Concept of the Magician in Medieval Folklore’, Folklore 94 (1983), 91–104. Wace’s 12th-century Roman de Brut provides evidence of the extension of Taliesin’s reputation as magus and prophet beyond Wales: “En Bretainne aveit un devin / Que l’on apelout Teleusin. / Pur buen prophete esteit tenuz / E mult esteit de tuz creüz” (“There was a soothsayer in Britain called Teleusin; he was considered a good prophet and everyone gave him much credence”), J. Weiss (ed. and trans), Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, 1999, Exeter, 122–23 (ll. 4855–58). (I owe this reference to Haycock, n.4 above, 238). Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 33 What, however, of Virgil, the poet of the 1st century BC, and the place of his Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid in Wales? It is not surprising that, after the departure of the Roman legions from Britain, and through the Middle Ages, what awareness there is of Virgil’s poetry among writers connected with Wales emerges mainly in works written in Latin.9 It would be anachronistic to try to make a Welshman, in any modern sense of the word, of the 6th-century Gildas. Even so, tradition connects him with the monastic school at Llanilltud Fawr (Llantwit Major) in Glamorgan, and Maglocunus (probably Maelgwn, ruler of Gwynedd) is a particular butt for his attack in De Excidio Britanniae (“On the Ruin of Britain”). Gildas’ De Excidio has in it a number of borrowings and adaptations from the Aeneid, especially – and tellingly – from the first two books.10 Come to the 12th century, and the writings of the Pembrokeshire-born and Paris-educated Gerald of Wales, author of (among many other works) Itinerarium Kambriae (“Journey through Wales”) and Descriptio Kambriae (“Description of Wales”), show easy familiarity with Virgil and with a whole gamut of Latin authors, from Terence to Jerome and Sidonius Apollinaris.11 Not that Gerald’s creative use of Virgil compares with that of his won- derfully imaginative predecessor Geoffrey of Monmouth.12 In his Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”), Geoffrey exploits the parallel between two foundation myths, the one rooted in the journey of Aeneas from Troy to establish his new city, the other in that of Aeneas’ supposed descendant Brutus to become the eponymous occupier of Britain. Echoes of specific Virgilian material, particularly fromAen. 3, are used to good effect in the account of Brutus’ travels and his adventures along the way. For example, early in the Historia, Brutus and his followers reach the deserted island of Leogetia, where they discover a temple to Diana. Accompanied by an augur and twelve elders, Brutus offers appropriate sacrifices and makes an appeal, in elegiac couplets, to the goddess’s statue. The goddess subsequently appears to him in a dream and gives instructions, also in elegiacs, as to how he is to proceed, with the promise of future glory for him and his descendants: ‘Insula in occeano est habitata gigantibus olim, nunc deserta quidem, gentibus apta tuis. Hanc pete: namque tibi sedes erit illa perhennis. Hic fiet natis altera Troia tuis. 9 For the (very few) allusions to Virgil the classical poet in medieval Welsh-language sources, all translations from Latin texts, see Russell (n.1 above) 223–24. 10 See M. Winterbottom (ed. and trans), Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and other works, 1978, London, 10. 11 See R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: 1146–1223, 1982, Oxford, 209; C. Davies, Welsh Literature and the Classical Tradition, 1995, Cardiff, 37. 12 See H. Tausendfreund, Vergil und Gottfried von Monmouth, 1913, Halle, passim; E. Faral, La légende arthurienne: Études et documents, 1929, Paris, vol. 2, 69–92; J. Hammer, ‘Remarks on the sources and textual history of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae’, Quarterly Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Jan. 1944, 509–21. 34 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017) Hic de prole tua reges nascentur, et ipsis tocius terrae subdita orbis erit’. (“‘An island there is in the ocean, once occupied by giants; now it is deserted and ready for your people. Seek it: for down the years this will be your home; here will be a second Troy for your descendants. There, from your stock, kings will arise: the circle of the whole earth will be subject to them’”).13 Without being slavishly imitative, the situation is modelled on the account of Aeneas’ visit to Delos. Both command and promise echo those of Apollo, Diana’s brother, to Aeneas and his companions.
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