sign in sign up
<<
Home , Ardudwy, Book of Taliesin, Christianity in Wales, Cunedda, Ellis Wynne, Hanes Taliesin

“The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in

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 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, , 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 , 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 , ruler of the northern Brythonic territory of , with its capital at or near today’s . 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 ”), 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 . Even so, tradition connects him with the monastic school at Llanilltud Fawr (Llantwit Major) in , and Maglocunus (probably Maelgwn, ruler of ) 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 -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 .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 ; 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. True, Apollo’s words were misinterpreted by Anchises, but they too contain the promise of greatness to come:

‘Antiquam exquirite matrem. Hic domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris et nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis’. (Aen. 3.96–98) Likewise, Geoffrey’s earlier story of Brutus coming upon the descendants of Priam’s son Helenus recalls, with some intriguing alterations, the account of the arrival of Aeneas and his fellow- Trojans at Buthrotum and their meeting with Helenus and Andromache (Aen. 3.294–355).14 Geoffrey may have owed his connection with Wales to the chance that his family, which was perhaps of Breton descent, played some part in the Norman occupation of the Monmouth area.15 It is evident that he knew south-east Wales well, and -on-Usk (Urbs Legionum, as he calls it), which he has as the scene of a plenary court at which welcomed the kings and leaders of Europe, was a locus amoenus whose description he was able to embellish on the basis of local knowledge.16 Most of Geoffrey’s adult life, however, was spent in Oxford and its environs, and his natural milieu was the world of scholarship and the ecclesiastical politics of his day. Like Gerald of Wales, he wrote in Latin for that narrow band of readers and scholars for whom Latin was the international language of learning. The same can be said, four hundred years later, of the not inconsiderable number of Welsh 16th- and early 17th-century humanists: classical allusions, not least to Virgil, are part of the common coinage of their writings in Latin.17

13 Geoffrey of Monmouth,The History of the Kings ofBritain, ed. and trans. M. D. Reeve and N. Wright, 2007, Woodbridge, 21 (book 1, ll. 307–12). 14 Ibid, 9 (book 1, ll. 67–87). 15 See K. Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2010, Cardiff, 11. 16 Geoffrey of Monmouth (n.13 above) 208–11 (book 9, ll. 306–26). 17 See Davies (n.11 above) 64–65. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 35

* Writing in Latin is one thing; writing in Welsh is another matter. As we turn to the recep- tion of Virgil’s poetry in Welsh-language literature, especially of the post-medieval world, it behoves us to remember that, since the Edwardian Conquest of the late 13th century, and even more firmly after the 1536 / 1543 Tudor “Act of Union” (as it is conveniently, if impre- cisely, called), Wales was politically assimilated to . The 16th-century imposition, in Wales as in England, of the Anglican version of the Protestant Reformation, and with it a sense of the urgency that the Scriptures be made available in a language the people could understand, meant that during that century Welsh found its way into print, in translations of the , the and other religious texts. On the other hand, as Wales had very few endowed grammar schools and (unlike ) no university of its own, Welshmen with scholarly aspirations had to look to England for their education, certainly at university level, and many of them chose to stay there. There was, however, a steady stream of Oxford- or (less usually) Cambridge-educated men who returned to Wales and gave expression, in the , to what they had learnt. Classical interests played a major part in that. Thus, early in the 18th century, a fine prose writer like Ellis Wynne, rector of parishes in the area and author of Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsc (“Visions of the Sleeping Bard”, London, 1703), has echoes of the Aeneid, especially the sixth book, in the text of his “visions”.18 Later in the same century the pastoral poet Edward Richard is creatively aware of the tradition of Virgil’s Eclogues (and of Theocritus’ Idylls before them).19 But 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century Wales had no Spenser or Milton, certainly no Dryden. In the words of one of the most authoritative of 20th-century historians of Welsh literature:

“In a country which possessed neither a university nor a cultural centre of any kind, and lacked the wealth to dispense to its children that education which might enable them to comprehend the heritage of other peoples and assimilate it to their own, the period from 1650 till the middle of the nineteenth century is merely one unbroken effort to give the Welsh sufficient education for understanding the things which belonged to the salvation of their souls. Literature of every kind had to struggle for existence as it could; sometimes it was disparaged, sometimes ignored, sometimes used for the purpose of , but very rarely was it nurtured for the sake of its own special glory”.20

By the middle of the 19th century, however, there were in Wales several nonconformist

18 See S. Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, ed. R. G. Gruffydd, 1973, Cardiff, 217–24; G. Thomas,Y Bardd Cwsg a’i Gefndir, 1971, Cardiff, 175–78. 19 See D. E. Evans, ‘Edward Richard’, Y Beirniad 7 (1917), 252–62. 20 T. Parry, A History of Welsh Literature, trans. H. I. Bell, 1955, Oxford, 237. 36 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

academies and seminaries that gave considerable place to learning Greek and Latin and to the study of classical literature, as part of the training of men who would later minister to Welsh- speaking congregations. Significantly it wasY Traethodydd (“The Essayist”), a nonconformist periodical which is still with us, that published in the late 1860s the first serious discussion of Virgil’s work to appear in Welsh. Its author was John Peter, who taught at a seminary in Bala, and in it he gave brief accounts of the Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid, with translations into Welsh of Ecl. 1 and 4 and of selections from Geo. 1 and from Aen. 1‒4.21 John Peter’s contribution is symptomatic of a great ferment of interest in matters educa- tional and cultural that characterized all sections of Welsh society in the second part of the 19th century, soon to result in the establishment of university colleges, first in Aberystwyth, then also in Cardiff and Bangor, and subsequently in their federation in 1893 as the . The widening of educational opportunities, in County Grammar Schools as well as in the University of Wales itself, meant that, by the 20th century, far more Welsh men and women than ever before were given an opportunity to study Latin. Virgil’s central position in the new curricula, at all levels, is reflected in works by classically trained poets like D. Gwenallt Jones, Pennar Davies and J. Gwyn Griffiths (the last a professor of Classics and Egyptology in Swansea).22 Another prolific poet of the 20th century, Euros Bowen (who graduated in classics and philosophy from the University of Wales, and in theology from Oxford, and spent his whole adult life as an Anglican priest in rural Wales), turned all ten Eclogues into Welsh, and also the first book of theAeneid , in translations that are both engaging and technically interesting.23 No one, however, has yet rendered Virgil’s complete oeuvre into Welsh.

*

Among 20th-century works written in Welsh, ‘Marwnad Syr John Edward Lloyd’ (“Elegy for Sir John Edward Lloyd”), a long poem by Saunders Lewis (1893‒1985), stands out for its notably precise engagement with Virgil. The way in which a complex intertextual relationship is maintained with book 6 of the Aeneid is key to unlocking much of the Elegy’s meaning. The remainder of this paper is devoted to it.24 The poem’s author, Saunders Lewis, was a major, and often disturbing, player on the

21 Y Traethodydd 22 (1867), 309–22; 23 (1868), 23–36. 22 See Davies (n.11 above) 133–35. 23 Bugeilgerddi Fyrsil, 1975, Cardiff; Aenëis Fyrsil: Y Llyfr Cyntaf, 1983, Bala. On Euros Bowen’s innovative application of cynghanedd, the distinctively Welsh system of alliteration and sound-chiming, to the translation of Aen. 1, see C. Davies, ‘TheAeneid and twentieth-century Welsh poetry’, in M. Gale (ed), Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry, 2004, Swansea, 235–52 (237–40). 24 Two seminal studies are C. Davies, ‘Marwnad Syr John Edward Lloyd a Fyrsil’, Llên Cymru 12 (1972), 57–60, and J. Rowlands, ‘Marwnad Syr John Edward Lloyd gan Saunders Lewis’, in R. G. Gruffydd (ed),Bardos. Penodau ar y Traddodiad Barddol Cymreig a Cheltaidd, 1982, Cardiff, 111–27. Both are also available in M. Hughes (ed), Saunders Lewis y Bardd, 1993, Denbigh, 46–50; 106–23. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 37

Welsh scene in the 20th century. He was brought up, in a notably cultured and Calvinist Welsh family, not in Wales but in Liverpool (often jokingly referred to, on account of its large number of citizens of Welsh descent, as “the capital of north Wales”), and there was always something of the outsider about him. He graduated in French and English from the , and served with distinction in the First World War. and its political awakening played a crucial part in Saunders Lewis’s discovery of his Welshness. He was a founding member of the National Party of Wales (today’s ), and became its first president. In 1937, he was famously imprisoned, along with two other men of stand- ing, for setting fire to building material which was to be used for an RAF bombing school at on the Llŷn Peninsula. As a writer, dramatist and literary critic, Saunders Lewis transformed the cultural perceptions of 20th-century Wales, especially by his emphasis on the European dimension of pre-Reformation Welsh literature. That European vision, among other things, led him to convert to Roman Catholicism. He constantly explored the creative relationship between Wales’s own historical and literary past and that of Christendom, the Europe which held the Catholic and the classical within its embrace.25 The classical heritage mattered immensely to him, especially Virgil. In November 1947, in a letter to , herself a Welsh novelist and short-story writer of distinction, he writes of his regular read- ing of Welsh and French authors, “a rhyw hanner awr o Ladin bob dydd … rhag imi ei golli, byddaf felly’n mynd drwy Fyrsil bob blwyddyn” (“and about half an hour of Latin every day … in order not to lose it, and so I go through Virgil every year”).26 ‘Elegy for Sir John Edward Lloyd’ belongs to exactly the same period: J. E. Lloyd died in 1947; the poem was first published in 1948.27 Sir John Edward Lloyd (born in 1861) was, like Saunders Lewis, a product of Welsh Liverpool, and so shared the same bicultural background. Unlike the younger man’s, how- ever, Lloyd’s values throughout his life remained those of the religiously nonconformist and politically Liberal tradition in which he grew up. As a sixteen-year-old, he went to the then new University College in Aberystwyth, and studied there for four years, before proceeding

25 Saunders Lewis has been the subject of many studies, mainly in Welsh; among the most recent is a biography: T. R. Chapman, Un Bywyd o Blith Nifer: Cofiant Saunders Lewis, 2006, Llandysul. Two important introductions to his work in English are A. R. Jones & G. Thomas (eds),Presenting Saunders Lewis, 1973, Cardiff, and B. Griffiths, Saunders Lewis, 19892, Cardiff. 26 D. Ifans (ed), Annwyl Kate, Annwyl Saunders: Gohebiaeth 1923‒1983, Aberystwyth, 1992, 137–38. Like Euros Bowen (see n.23 above) Lewis here uses “Fyrsil”, the usual form for Virgil’s name in modern Welsh, not the more antiquated “Fferyll”. 27 ‘Marwnad i Syr John Edward Lloyd, Hanesydd Cymru Gatholig’ (‘An elegy for Sir John Edward Lloyd, Historian of Catholic Wales’) was the poem’s title when first published, inEfrydiau Catholig3 (1948), 3–5. It was subsequently re-published, entitled ‘Marwnad Syr John Edward Lloyd’, in S. Lewis, Siwan a Cherddi Eraill, [1956], Llandybïe, 13–15; in T. Parry (ed), The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse, 1962, Oxford, 463–66; in R. G. Gruffydd (ed),Cerddi Saunders Lewis, 1986, Newtown, 36–38; and in R. G. Gruffydd (ed),Cerddi Saunders Lewis, 1992, Cardiff, 31–33. 38 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

to Oxford, to Lincoln College. In 1883 he gained a “first” in Classical Moderations, and then transferred to the final school of Modern History, established only a decade earlier. In 1885 he gained the best “first” of his year in History Finals. After that he returned to Wales, as a lecturer first in Aberystwyth, then at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where he was promoted to the Chair of History in 1899. In that post, which he held until his retirement in 1930, he was to become the father figure of 20th-century academic study of the history of Wales.28 J. E. Lloyd’s eloquent writings on early and medieval Wales, especially his two-volume A History of Wales, from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest29 and his Oxford Ford Lectures of 1920, on the champion of Owain Glyndŵr, published over ten years later as Owen Glendower: Owen Glyn Dŵr,30 were nothing short of epoch-making. That is the figure commemorated, after his death in 1947, in Saunders Lewis’s elegy. It is not, however, to the annals of Welsh history that the poet takes his reader in the first 2 (of 11) stanzas, but rather to the Aeneid, book 6:

Darllenais fel yr aeth Eneas gynt Drwy’r ogof gyda’r Sibil, ac i wlad Dis a’r cysgodion, megis gŵr ar hynt Liw nos mewn fforest dan y lloer an-sad, Ac yno’n y gwyll claear Tu draw i’r afon ac i Faes Wylofain Gwelodd hen arwyr Tro, hynafiaid Rhufain, Deiffobos dan ei glwyfau, drudion daear,

Meibion Antenor ac Adrastos lwyd; A’i hebrwng ef a wnaent, a glynu’n daer Nes dyfod lle’r oedd croesffordd, lle’r oedd clwyd, A golchi wyneb, traddodi’r gangen aur, Ac agor dôl a llwyni’n Hyfryd dan sêr ac awyr borffor glir, Lle y gorffwysai mewn gweirgloddiau ir Dardan ac Ilos a’r meirwon diallwynin.

28 His achievement is splendidly explored in H. Pryce, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History. Renewing a Nation’s Past, 2011, Cardiff. J. E. Lloyd’s contribution was also celebrated in a poem by D. Gwenallt Jones, ‘Gorffennol Cymru’ (“Wales’s Past”), inCnoi Cil, 1942, Aberystwyth, 18–19; re-published in C. James (ed), Cerddi Gwenallt: Y Casgliad Cyflawn, 2001, Llandysul, 126–27. 29 London, 19111 (henceforth usually History.) 30 Oxford, 1931. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 39

The poem is carefully wrought and has an intricate metrical pattern. Each stanza contains 8 lines, all except the 5th of 10 or 11 syllables, the shorter 5th of 5 or 6 syllables. There is a regular rhyming pattern: a b a b c d d c. Joseph P. Clancy’s fine translation of the two opening stanzas reads as follows (hence- forth the text of the poem will be given in this version, with only occasional reference to the original Welsh):31

I read how, long ago, Aeneas went Through the cavern with the Sibyl, and to the land Of Dis and the shades, like a man wayfaring In a wood by night beneath the inconstant moon, And there in gentle dusk Beyond the river and the Field of Wailing, He saw Troy’s ancient heroes, ancestors of Rome, Deiphobus with his wounds, earth’s daring men,

The sons of Antenor and pale Adrastus; And they guided him, and crowded close behind him, Till they came to a crossroads, to a gate, Where his face was washed, the golden bough presented, And a dale opened and groves Delightful under stars and a clear purple sky, Where Dardanus and Ilus and the griefless dead Were lying in green meadows at their ease.

From the beginning we are taken into the text of Aen. 6: Darllenais (“I read”). The first four lines are a virtual paraphrase of ll. 268–71:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna, quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna est iter in silvis.

31 J. P. Clancy (trans), Saunders Lewis: Selected Poems, 1993, Cardiff, 31–33. I am grateful to the late Professor Clancy (d. 27 February 2017) for permission to quote liberally from his version. The 1993 translation is a reissue, with minor revisions, of the version in J. P. Clancy, Twentieth Century Welsh Poems, 1982, Llandysul, 83–85. For other versions of the poem in English, see S. R. Reynolds (ed), A Bibliography of Welsh Literature in English Translation, 2005, Cardiff, 177–78. 40 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

The details of the journey through thelugentes campi are equally precise, and Virgil’s pre­ sentation of Deiphobus (Deiphobum, lacerum crudeliter ora, 495), the Antenoridae (484) and Adrastus (Adrasti pallentis imago, 480) is carefully echoed. These dead Trojans led Aeneas to where the road parted in two (540), one way leading to Tartarus, the other to Elysium. Aeneas, of course, glimpsed the walls of Tartarus, girdled by the waters of Phlegethon and guarded by Tisiphone; he heard the sounds and groans of torment, and the Sibyl gave him a long description of the punishments endured by the Tartarean sufferers (548–627). Saunders Lewis, however, chooses at this point to pass over that part of Aeneas’ underworld experience. Rather he describes only the entry into Elysium, the sprinkling of the water and the fixing of the golden bough, based on ll. 635–36:

Occupat Aeneas aditum corpusque recenti spargit aqua ramumque adverso in limine figit.

Then follows the entry into thefortunata nemora, a summary of Virgil’s ll. 638–41, with Dardanus and Ilus (650) and the “griefless dead” meirwon( diallwynin), felices animae (669) indeed, at their ease in green meadows. Joseph Clancy has conveyed the sense and feel of the Welsh text to excellent effect. It should be noted, however, that the order of the last two lines of the 2nd stanza has been reversed in the English translation. Saunders Lewis, in fact, ends his summary of this part of Aen. 6 with Dardanus and Ilus and the “griefless” – or, perhaps better, “undejected” – dead.32 As will be demonstrated later, the stanza’s final word,diallwynin (“undejected”), rare negative of the uncommon adjective allwynin (“dejected”), carries an important resonance as the epithet used to sum up the panoramic view, not of sufferers in Tartarus, but of Troy’s old heroes and of the blessed dead in Elysium. In the 3rd stanza, the poet turns to John Edward Lloyd, hen ddewin Bangor, “Bangor’s ancient seer”. The historian is his Sibyl, the one by whose writings he has been led into the mysteries of Welsh history. The Virgilian imagery is maintained, in an evocation of the crossing of the Styx in Charon’s boat (Aen. 6.384–416). Also present is a sense of the place J. E. Lloyd gave to prehistoric epochs at the beginning of his History of Wales. Discussing Palaeolithic Wales he wrote: “in Wales … our knowledge of the period is entirely derived from the caves which abound in the carboniferous limestone”.33 Lewis couples with this a suggestion of Plato’s allegory of the cave (in Republic, book 7):

32 G. Thomas (translator of one of the other versions referred to in n.31 above) in Jones & Thomas (n.25 above) 186–89 (187), translates diallwynin as “undejected”, but the last line of the Welsh stanza is penultimate in his version also. 33 History (n.29 above) 2. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 41

So I, one evening, led by Bangor’s ancient seer, I went down to the river, dared the boat, Left the shoals of today where there is no anchor And crossed the water, like ashes in night’s pit, To the darkness of the caves Where among the trees stern phantoms stared Whispering dead hunters’ faint dead cry I could not hear; a mere shape on a den’s walls.

The “darkness of the caves” is followed, however, by light and by the ever-increasing revelation of a pageant of characters from Welsh history, corresponding to the ghosts of dead Trojans that Aeneas encounters in the underworld, and especially to the vision, at the end of Aen. 6, of the procession of unborn Romans. Significantly, the Welsh pageant begins with the Roman conquest and occupation of Wales (the subject of the third chapter of Lloyd’s History, ‘Wales under Roman rule’):

Then light came, and a form like a smiling dawn, Helmet and cuirass sparkling and a brazen eagle And trees were felled, ponies in the tide of Menai, Hills were paved and fortresses roped in a row.

The symbol of what the occupation meant for Wales is Agricola and his attack on (as described by Tacitus).34 Agricola personifies Roman ideals of conquest, ideals encapsulated in Anchises’ famous words to Aeneas, Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (Aen. 6.851). Saunders Lewis has Agricola quoting Anchises on the shores of the Menai Straits:

Tu regere … populos, I saw the image of Agricola standing On a beach in Môn, he was murmuring Virgil’s prophecies, The brine on the toga’s hem like a snowdrift at nightfall.

It is noteworthy that, in what may be a deliberate attempt to catch something of the sense of Virgil as seer, Saunders Lewis uses here the medieval Welsh form of the Roman poet’s name, murmurai frudiau Fferyll (“he was murmuring Virgil’s prophecies”), although in the near- contemporary letter to Kate Roberts he had deployed the modern form, Fyrsil.35

34 Agricola 18.3–5. For J. E. Lloyd on Agricola, see History (n.29 above) 58. 35 Cf. n.26 above. 42 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

After the Romans in the 4th stanza there comes, in the 5th, a picture of in Wales in the Age of the , as the poet continues to follow the sequence of Lloyd’s History. This then leads, in the 6th stanza, to an expression of Saunders Lewis’s conviction that European civilization was founded on the fusion of Christianity and the classical:

I hesitated: ‘I know, while Europe lasts, will last The memory of these; they will not wholly die, Builders of the empires of the Cross and the Eagle’.

Geographically, from Anglesey (Môn) to North Africa (Cyrenaica); culturally, from Dante to Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot), the Dutch jurist and theologian of the early 17th century; politically, from the 13th-century Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, to King Philip II of Spain, the dream of the “builders of the empires of the Cross and the Eagle / … that tied beneath a single toll, / One people [un giwdod, one civitas] on one rock, was a ground of hope”.36 In the 7th stanza, however, the poet turns to the historian and asks after those Welshmen, “the bitter lineage of ”, whose lot is that of Sisyphus. According to early sources like the (attributed to “Nennius”), Cunedda was a chieftain who migrated in the 5th century to what is now Wales from the northern Brythonic territory of Manaw (in the area of Edinburgh), expelled the Irish from Gwynedd, and was the pro- genitor of a dynasty of Welsh rulers who extended their sway throughout north and west Wales. The story, whose historicity has been much debated (and about which Lloyd is suitably circumspect), has about it elements of an origin or foundation myth not unlike the legends of Aeneas and Brutus.37 The Welsh often viewed themselves as belonging to “the lineage of Cunedda” and his sons, much as the Romans thought of Aeneas and the Trojans as “ancestors of Rome” (stanza 1):

‘But here in the region of the shades is a race Condemned to the pain of Sisyphus in the world, To push from age to age through a thousand years A stone nation to Freedom’s hill-crest, and when – Oh bitter lineage of Cunedda –

36 On some of this stanza’s resonances, especially the image of King Philip II of Spain, see M. P. Bryant-Quinn, ‘Phylip Brudd o Sbaen’, Llên Cymru 38 (2015–16), 95–99. Bryant-Quinn suggests that Grotius’ contribution to developing ideas of international law is particularly in Saunders Lewis’s mind here. 37 Historia Brittonum 62: J. Morris (ed. and trans), Nennius: British History and The Welsh Annals, 1980, London, 37, 79. On Cunedda, see R. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein / The Triads of the Island of Britain, 20063, Cardiff, 316–18; J. T. Koch (ed), Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, 2006, Santa Barbara CA, 518–20. For J. E. Lloyd on Cunedda and his sons, see History (n. 29 above) 116–22. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 43

The hill’s summit is in sight, through treachery or violence The rock is hurled to the valley and the effort fails’.

Sisyphus belongs to Tartarus (saxum ingens volvunt alii, “some are rolling huge rocks”, as the Sibyl puts it, Aen. 6.616), the part of the Virgilian underworld that Saunders Lewis omitted from his account of Aeneas’ journey in the first 2 stanzas. Those who strove for the freedom of Wales share the kind of frustration to which his punishment consigned Sisyphus. And the next stanza opens with the question, Pa le mae’r rhain? (“Where are these?”). In response, another spectacle, or pageant, of the underworld unfolds, again in the manner of Aeneid 6, its content made possible thanks to the works of Lloyd: the characters revealed were all discussed and brought to life by him. They mostly belong to the heroic age of the princes who struggled to defend Wales against the Normans. In the 8th stanza the reader witnesses the sad end of Gruffudd ap Cynan, ruler of Gwynedd in the late 11th and early 12th centuries and a leading figure in Welsh political and cultural life for over fifty years,Cambrorum regum rex (“king of the kings of Wales”).38 He died, “old, decrepit and blind”, in 1137, attended by Bishop David of Bangor and other ecclesiastics.39 The poet has events from his turbulent life come back to him on his deathbed: the support he received from “Gothri”, King Godfrey of Denmark; his taking refuge against local enemies in a cave in , and the battle fought at Bronyrerw; his imprisonment at one time in , in the “gaol of Hu Fras”, Hugh of Avranches, the Norman baron who was earl of Chester: Helbulon saga oes a’i loes dan ennaint (“The trials of the saga of an age and its agony under the ointment”).40 In the 9th stanza, the pageant moves into the 13th century, which (in Lloyd’s words) “may, in Welsh history, be appropriately described as the age of the two Llywelyns”.41 First, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (d. 1240), “”, a figure whose prominence dominated the whole of Wales in the first forty years of that century. He has “a starring role”, as Huw Pryce describes it, in Lloyd’s History.42 It is, however, the fragility and personal sadness of Llywelyn’s life that the poet recalls. Llywelyn was married to Joan, illegitimate daughter of the English King John; but she was imprisoned for infidelity and her lover, the marcher lord William de

38 P. Russell (ed. and trans), Vita Griffini Filii Conani: The Medieval Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, 2005, Cardiff, 68–69 (§17). 39 History (n.29 above) 468–69. 40 The events are all in Gruffudd ap Cynan’sVita (n.38 above), a work unique for being the only extant biography of a Welsh prince. It was also translated from Latin into Welsh: see D. S. Evans (ed), Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, 1977, Cardiff. J. E. Lloyd draws “without hesitation” on the evidence provided by it, “despite some inaccuracies and the inevitable disposition to magnify the deeds of its hero” (History, n.29 above, 379). The phrase dan“ ennaint” (“under the ointment”) refers to the anointing of the dying prince’s body, as described in the last paragraph of his Vita. 41 History (n.29 above) 612. 42 Pryce (n.28 above) 160. 44 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

Braose, hanged. Llywelyn and Joan were reconciled, but their felicity was cut short by her death, its circumstances described by Lloyd in these words:

“She died at Aber, the royal seat of the commote of Arllechwedd Uchaf, now becoming a favourite residence of the princes of Gwynedd, on 2nd February, 1237, and the best proof of her complete restoration to the old footing of trust and affection is to be found in the honour paid by Llywelyn to her memory. Her body was borne across the sands of Lafan and ferried to the Anglesey shore, where, not far from the prince’s manor of Llanfaes, a new burying-ground had been consecrated by Bishop Hugh of St Asaph. Here she was laid to rest, while for mon- ument Llywelyn built on the spot a house for Franciscan friars, so that the most saintly of the religious, as they were then accounted, might pray for her soul”.43

For all Llywelyn’s political and military successes, Saunders Lewis’s focus is on the circum- stances surrounding Joan’s imprisonment and death:

And I saw a gallows on a lawn and audacious hands Reaching toward it between bars of iron, Till a ship came from Aber and silent oarsmen, Torches on the tide and ashes on a monarch’s hair And a cross between hands on a shrine.

So much for the beginning of the 13th century. Before its end, any hope of an independent polity in Wales was gone, with the defeat of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, grandson of Llywelyn the Great. In Lloyd’s stately words:

“The younger Llywelyn comes to the front as the one leader of the , pursuing his grandfather’s policy for many years with all his grandfather’s success, until in the last quarter of this century, so fateful in the annals of the Welsh, his good fortune deserted him and he fell a victim to the power and skill of Edward I, bringing down with him in his ruin the edifice of Welsh independence”.44

In December 1282, in a battle against English forces near Builth Wells, Llywelyn, “the Last Prince”, was separated from his troops and struck down by an enemy horseman. His head was cut off, and sent to King Edward, who arranged for it to be paraded in London.45 His

43 History (n.29 above) 686. 44 ibid. 612. 45 ibid. 763–64. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 45 brother, Dafydd, tried to continue the struggle, but the following year he was caught and was executed in Shrewsbury, his body dragged through the streets. The pageant continues, but its picture, at the end of the 9th stanza, is one of desperation:

And there, a head upon a spear, and horses’ hair Dragging in Shrewsbury’s dust behind their harness The battered body of the feeblest last of his line.

The pageant’s culmination, in the 10th stanza, is with Owain Glyndŵr. The hopes of a nation were pinned on him. For a brief moment, at the beginning of the 15th century, it looked as if those hopes might be realized. Owain, “heir of the two houses of Wales”, and , took Harlech and Aberystwyth castles:

And for a moment, like a lighthouse’s shaft of flame Across the night’s deluge, flashed the clefts of the fort That stands on a cliff at Harlech, the heir of the two houses Of Wales wearing a crown, a dance for the heir.

(The words remind one of Glendower in Shakespeare’sHenry the Fourth, Part One [Act III, Scene 1]: “At my nativity / The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, / Of burning cressets; and at my birth / The frame and huge foundation of the earth / Shak’d like a coward”). Is there a chance that the nation’s stone will at last reach the top of the hill of freedom?

Then near Glyn y Groes A second Teiresias in the dawn of Berwyn gave The verdict of fate’s oracle, and there was an end: His shade melted in the mist that covered him.

The story, as recorded by the 16th-century chronicler Elis Gruffydd, was that Owain Glyndŵr was out walking early one morning near Valle Crucis Abbey, Glyn y Groes, in the Dee valley beneath the Berwyn mountains of north-east Wales, and that he met the abbot. “Ah, Sir Abbot”, he said, “you have risen too early”. “No”, replied the Abbot, “it is you who have risen too early, by a hundred years”.46 “The verdict of fate’s oracle” was that Owain was a century ahead of his time. For Saunders Lewis, the abbot is a Sophoclean figure, “a second Tiresias”. What remains

46 ‘A Sr Abaad, chychwi a godasogh yn hry uore’. ‘Nage’ hebyr yr abad, ‘chychwi a gyuodes yn hry uore o gan mlynnedd’. National Library of Wales MS 3054D (Mostyn 158), 285 (quoted in J. Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson. Hanesyddiaeth a Hunaniaeth yn Oes y Tuduriaid, 2000, Cardiff, 115). The story is alluded to by Lloyd (n.30 above) 1–2. 46 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

with us is a picture of failure and of hopelessness. After all the suffering, despondency is what characterizes the Welsh panorama. It was emphasized earlier that, in the first two stanzas, Saunders Lewis selected characters from Elysium to end his Virgilian section. These were the “undejected dead” ofAen. 6, not Tartarean sufferers like Sisyphus. When the poet calls the dead in Virgil’s Elysium “undejected” (diallwynin: di- is a negative prefix), he is echoing the opening of another elegy, one of the most famous and poignant of Welsh medieval poems, the Elegy of Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch after the death of Llywelyn, “the Last Prince”, in 1282:

Oer galon dan fron o fraw – allwynin Am frenin, dderwin ddôr, .

(“Cold heart under a breast of fear – dejected For a king, oak door of Aberffraw”).47

As we saw, Llywelyn and his brother Dafydd have already featured in the 9th stanza’s list of ill-fated Welshmen. It is a picture of defeat and disaster. The Welsh pageant is one of nothing but sadness and dejection, in total contrast to the Elysian picture drawn at the beginning from Aen. 6. The importance of Virgil for the poem is such that, in the final stanza, Saunders Lewis ends by comparing John Edward Lloyd, not with the Sibyl any more, but with Virgil himself:

Like him who climbed the cliffs of the land of despair I turned to my leader …

This is now not only Virgil the author of theAeneid , but also Dante’s guide, that other Sibyl-like figure, who (in Canto 30 of thePurgatorio ) vanishes at the appearance of Beatrice. Dante has, in fact, been present in the poem from at least the 3rd stanza onwards: in taking the Virgilian journey to the underworld as a paradigm, Saunders Lewis was following what Dante had done on a vastly larger scale. Likewise, the only two literary authorities named in the poem are Virgil (Fferyll) in the 4th stanza, and Dante in the 6th. Now, at the end, the poet questions the historian, his Dantean “Virgil”, about a prophecy:

47 Poem 36, ‘Marwnad Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’, ll. 1–2, in R. M. Andrewset al. (eds), Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion VII: Gwaith Bleddyn Fardd a Beirdd Eraill ail hanner y Drydedd Ganrif ar Ddeg, 1996, Cardiff, 423. The translation is from A. Conran (ed), Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, 1967, Harmondsworth, 128 (with “dejected” substituted for Conran’s “grieved”). The poem is quoted by Lloyd,History (n.29 above) 763, in the closing paragraph of his magnum opus. Davies – “The Prophecies of Fferyll”: Virgilian Reception in Wales 47

‘Can your thought Ascend the steep of time and see a hope? Their language they will keep, will the prophecy hold true?’

If Virgil and Dante are the only poets named, the only two quotations in the poem are Anchises’ words, Tu regere … populos (in the 4th stanza) and the words here, “Their language they will keep” (Eu hiaith a gadwant). They come from lines attributed to Taliesin: not the historic Taliesin of the 6th century, but, rather, Taliesin the wonder-worker, magician and prophet represented by the poem ‘Kat Godeu’. Taliesin as magus was also the subject of Ystoria (or Hanes) Taliesin (“The Story of Taliesin”), a medley of prose and verse preserved in various forms in several manuscripts. The oldest surviving version is in the 16th-century chronicle of Elis Gruffydd, the source which also gives the story about Owain Glyndŵr meeting the abbot of Valle Crucis.48 In a long poem (of 30 four-line stanzas) that concludes the Ystoria, the legendary “Taliesin” has it that the descendants of the ancient Britons may suffer defeats, but their language will endure:49

Their Lord they will praise, their language they will keep, their land they will lose except wild Wales.

Thus, at the end of Saunders Lewis’s poem the question of the survival of the Welsh language, by the middle of the 20th century perhaps the one remaining badge of a meaningful Welsh identity (that identity established by Cunedda and defended – fruitlessly, it seems – by his descendants), is posed to John Edward Lloyd:

48 The earlier part of Elis Gruffydd’s chronicle, containingYstoria Taliesin, is National Library of Wales MS 5276D: cf. n.46 above for the manuscript source of the later part. For an edition of the text of Ystoria Taliesin, with introduction and notes, see P. K. Ford (ed), Ystoria Taliesin, 1992, Cardiff. 49 Ystoria Taliesin (n.48 above) ll. 618–737 (722–25) (p. 86). This stanza (the 27th) was quoted in , Antiquae Linguae Britannicae … Rudimenta, 1621, London, sig. b4v, the first time (as far as I am aware) for it to be put into print. Davies also provided his own Latin version (in a Sapphic stanza): Usque laudabunt Dominum creantem, Usque servabunt idioma linguae, Arvaque amittent sua cuncta, praeter Wallica rura. The prophecy,Eu hiaith a gadwant (“Their language they will keep”), carries, as Daniel Hadas commented to me, an uncanny echo of Jupiter’s decree that the Latins were to retain their language, sermonem Ausonii patrium … tenebunt (Aen. 12.834), although it is unlikely that Saunders Lewis is alluding to it here. 48 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 29 (2017)

‘Their language they will keep, will the prophecy hold true? Will the last relic Of Cunedda be kept by his sons’ painful labour?’

The historian, however, has disappeared, like Dante’s Virgil, and left no answer:

But he, the lantern-bearer of lost centuries, He was there no longer, neither his lamp nor his word.

Saunders Lewis’s unusual “elegy”, with its discomfiting end, stands out as an extraordinary work, not least for the complexity of its response to the figure of Virgil,Fferyll , and to Aen. 6. It is also an example of Virgil being appropriated and put to use in a specifically Welsh context. Bruce Griffiths, one of the most perceptive critics of Saunders Lewis’s literary output, is surely justified in claiming that “this is among the most majestic and moving poems” of the 20th century.50

Swansea University CERI DAVIES ([email protected])

50 Griffiths (n.25 above) 76.