The Middle Ages

Welsh literature has extended in an unbroken tradition from about the middle of the 6th century to the present day, but, except for two or three short pieces, all pre-Norman poetry has survived only in 12th- to 15th-century manuscripts. Welsh had developed from the older Brythonic by the middle of the 6th century. In the Historia Brittonum (c. 830) references are made to Welsh poets who, if the synchronism is correct, sang in the 6th century. Works by two of them, Taliesin and Aneirin, have survived. Taliesin wrote odes, or awdlau, in praise of the warlike deeds of his lord, Urien of Rheged, a kingdom in present-day southwest Scotland and northwest England. To Aneirin is attributed a long poem, Y Gododdin, commemorating in elegies an ill-starred expedition sent from Gododdin, the region where Edinburgh stands today, to take Catraeth (Catterick, North Yorkshire) from the invading Saxons. The background, inspiration, and social conventions of the poems of Taliesin and Aneirin are typically heroic, the language is direct and simple, and the expression terse and vigorous. These poems, and others that have not been preserved, set standards for later ages. The alliterative verse and internal rhyme found here were developed by the 13th century into the intricate system of consonant correspondence and internal rhyme called cynghanedd.

The heroic tradition of poetry existed also in Wales proper and was continued after the break with North Britain in the mid-7th century. The earliest surviving example is a poem in praise of Cynan Garwyn of Powys, whose son Selyf was slain in battle. This poem struck a note that remained constant in all Welsh eulogies and elegies down to the fall of the Welsh bardic system: Cynan is the bravest in the field, the most generous in his home, all others are thrall to him and sing his praises.

The period between the 7th and 10th centuries is represented by a few scattered poems, most of them in the heroic tradition, including Moliant Cadwallon (“The Eulogy of Cadwallon”), by Afan Ferddig, the elegy on Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn of Powys in the first half of the 7th century, and Edmyg Dinbych (“The Eulogy of Tenby”), by an unknown South Wales poet. Poetry claiming to foretell the future is represented by Armes Prydain Fawr (“The Great Prophecy of Britain”), a stirring appeal to the Welsh to unite with other Britons, with the Irish, and with the Norse of Dublin to oppose the Saxons and to refuse the unjust demands of their “great king,” probably Athelstan of Wessex. Poetry outside the main bardic tradition is preserved in englyns (stanzas of three or four lines), a dialogue between Myrddin and Taliesin, and in Kanu y Gwynt (“The Song of the Wind”), a riddle poem that contains the germ of the later convention known as dyfaliad (kenning).

The poems associated with the name Llywarch Hen are the verse remains of at least two sagas composed toward the middle of the 9th century by unknown poets of Powys, whose basic material was the traditions associated with the historical Llywarch and Heledd, sister to Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn. In these, it seems that prose (now lost) was used for narrative and description and verse for dialogue and soliloquy. The metrical form was embellished by alliteration, internal rhyme, and incipient cynghanedd. The theme of both sagas was lamentation for the glory that once had been. The background was the heroic struggle of the Welsh of Powys against the Saxons of Mercia. Some fragments of poetry preserved in the Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1250) were parts of soliloquies or dialogues from other lost sagas. Examples are a conversation between Arthur and the doorkeeper Glewlwyd Mightygrasp; a monologue of Ysgolan the Cleric; verses in praise of Geraint, son of Erbin; and a fragment of what may be an early native version of the Trystan and Esyllt (Tristan and Iseult) story. The manuscript shows that there once existed a legend of Myrddin Wyllt, a wild man of the woods who went mad at the sight of a battle, a legend associated with Suibne Geilt in Ireland and with Lailoken in Scotland. This Myrddin (later better known as Merlin) had the gift of prophecy. The historical poet Taliesin also became the central prophetic figure in a folk tale that was given literary form in the 9th or 10th century, but that has survived only in certain monologues preserved in The Book of Taliesin and in garbled versions in late texts of Hanes Taliesin (“Story of Taliesin”).

Nature, a source of similes in the heroic poetry and of symbolism in verse fragments of the sagas, was sometimes a subject of song in its own right. Generally, treatment of the subject was remarkable for its sensitive objectivity, its awareness of form, color, and sound, and its concise, often epigrammatic, expression. In mood, matter, and form (that of the englyn) it often overlapped with gnomic poetry, which consisted of sententious sayings about man and nature. Most gnomic and nature poems were probably produced in the 10th and 11th centuries by poets other than professional bards. Toward the end of the pre-Norman period a few poems on religious, biblical, and other subjects showed acquaintance with nonnative legends. Saga poetry gradually gave way to prose.

With the consolidation of the principality of Gwynedd under Gruffudd ap Cynan (1054–1137) and his descendants, court poetry flourished in the country, composed by the gogynfeirdd, or poets of the princes, who continued and developed the tradition of their predecessors, the cynfeirdd. The bardic order seems to have been reorganized, although no clear picture of it emerges from references in the poetry and law texts, and it seems to have been less schematized in practice than in theory. At the top of the order was the pencerdd (“chief of song or craft”), the ruler’s chief poet, whose duty was to sing the praise of God, the ruler, and his family. Next came the bardd teulu, who was the poet of the ruler’s war band although he seems to have been poet to the ruler’s family as well. There were other, less exalted grades, with less exalted duties and the license probably to engage in satire and ribaldry.

Bards were also graded according to proficiency. This classification led to the holding of an eisteddfod, or a session of bards, to confer certificates of proficiency and to prevent the lower orders from proliferating and drifting into mendicancy. One of the results of a bardic system of this type was a remarkable conservatism in literature. Most of the 13th-century bards used a conventional diction that was consciously archaic in its vocabulary, grammar, and idiom and incomprehensible to anyone uneducated in poetry.

Bardism often went by families, and among the first court poets were Meilyr, his son Gwalchmai, and his grandson Meilyr ap Gwalchmai, who were attached to the court of Gwynedd at Aberffraw. Gwalchmai in his Arwyrain Owain (“Exaltation of Owain”) displayed one characteristic of all the gogynfeirdd, description of water, whether of river or sea. Bardic poetry, highly conventional in form, was now marked not by profundity but by adornment and linguistic virtuosity. Two poet-princes, Owain Cyfeiliog of Powys and Hywel ab Owain of Gwynedd, however, stand out from contemporary bards. Cyfeiliog’s most famous work, the Hirlas Owain (“Owain’s Long Blue Drinking Horn”), celebrates a victorious raid; Hywel ab Owain’s departure from convention was more striking; for the first time in Welsh literature love of country and of beauty in the modern sense appeared: land and sea and women and the Welsh language spoken in cultured accent by his ladylove awoke in him feelings of awe and wonder. The gogynfeirdd poetry alternated throughout this period between marwnad (“elegy”) and moliant (“eulogy”), and the period closed with the most famous of all elegies, Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s elegy after the death in 1282 of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, last native prince of Wales.

The religious verse of the gogynfeirdd was generally simpler in style than the eulogies and elegies. A set type was the marwysgafn (“deathbed song”), in which the poet, sensing the approach of death, confessed his sins and prayed for forgiveness. Other religious poems were in praise of God and the Trinity, in honor of saints, on the torments of hell, and on the birth of Christ. They illustrate the gradual widening of the bardic horizon.

With the passing of princes and their pageantry, the poets were forced to find patrons among the new aristocracy. These patrons had more limited means and less restricted interests, with the result that the bardic system and its educational basis were gradually changed and a new kind of poetry was produced. The language became less esoteric, less specialized. Poets in the years between the English conquest (1282) and the appearance of Dafydd ap Gwilym in the mid-14th century seem to have returned to an earlier poetic fashion or to have been influenced by new ideas from other lands. Famous in this period of transition were Gruffudd ap Maredudd, Gruffudd ap Dafydd, and Casnodyn.

The conquest of Wales by Edward I transferred the patronage of court poetry at Gwynedd and Powys from prince to landed aristocracy. The pencerdd lost his superiority over the lower bardic ranks, who were no longer restricted in choice of content and style, and who, especially in South Wales (where the Norman Conquest had been established for a whole century before the conquest of Gwynedd), became more vocal as the older bardic song began to decline. The new poets of the south were well established before their works began to be preserved. The most important of them was Dafydd ap Gwilym, who in his early period wrote according to two distinct traditions. He wrote awdlau, or odes, in the manner of the later gogynfeirdd. (Originally an awdl was a poem with a single end rhyme throughout; later it contained sequences of lines with such end rhymes. In both cases the lines were embellished with alliteration, a correspondence of consonants or internal rhyme; i.e., “free” or incipient cynghanedd.) In the manner of a more popular and perhaps lower class of poets, Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote cywyddau, composed of couplets of seven-syllable lines rhyming in alternately stressed and unstressed final syllables. Each line was embellished by a stricter form of cynghanedd, the cynghanedd gaeth. Dafydd established, if he did not invent, the cywydd, but his main achievement was the simplicity of diction he cultivated in it. His successors followed his lead; the old diction became obsolete, and he thus established the standards of modern Welsh. The substance of his poetry was also new, for he seems to have borrowed many of his themes from the wandering minstrels and trouvères of France. He wrote love poetry but perhaps is best known for his descriptions of nature.

Dafydd’s influence was twofold: the cywydd was established as the leading form, and the new subjects were recognized as fit themes for poetry. One contemporary, Gruffudd ab Adda, went much further toward a modern conception of nature; another, Iolo Goch, in his poem to the husbandman shows traces of English ideas, as seen in Piers Plowman. Llywelyn Goch Amheurug Hen wrote some early poems in the gogynfeirdd tradition, but his “Elegy to Lleucu Llwyd” successfully combined the Welsh elegy tradition with the imported serenade form.

In the 15th century the cywydd was refined. Although Dafydd Nanmor was inferior to most of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s contemporaries in treatment of his subject and in imagination, in his mastery of the cywydd form he had no equal. Further advances in the cywydd meter were made by Lewis Glyn Cothi and Guto’r Glyn, in whose work a real consciousness of Welsh nationhood is seen.

The earliest examples of Welsh prose were utilitarian: notes on Latin texts dealing with weights and measures, an agreement, a list of church dues, and an astronomical commentary. Shortly before the middle of the 10th century, Howel (Hywel) Dda, according to tradition, had the Welsh laws codified. Although the earliest Welsh law manuscripts belong to the first half of the 13th century, some of the texts probably derive from 12th-century and earlier exemplars.

The stylistic merits of the legal texts were reflected in a more conscious literary use of prose by storytellers (cyfarwyddiaid), who recited oral tales made up of a medley of mythology, folklore, and heroic elements. Some of these were recorded in writing; the most famous collection is the Mabinogion, preserved in The White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1300–25) and The Red Book of Hergest (c. 1375–1425). The Mabinogion are composed of 11 anonymous tales, based on older oral material. The greatest are the four related stories “The Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” redacted in the second half of the 11th century by an unknown author. The author of “Culhwch and Olwen” (c. 1100), drawing on material akin to that of the “Four Branches,” appears to have kept closer to the oral tale, but his inferior stylistics presaged the later decadent areithiau (“rhetorics”), which were in part parodies of the Mabinogion. Three of the Mabinogion tales, “Owain” (or “The Lady of the Fountain”), “Geraint and Enid,” and “Peredur Son of Efrawg,” represented a transition from purely native tales to those composed under Norman influence. These romances correspond to the Yvain, Erec, and Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, and the exact relationship between the Welsh and French texts has long been debated. Although more sophisticated, they show a decline from the directness and restraint of the native tales.

Many translations from Latin and French helped to create a prose that could express aspects of life rarely touched on in the tales. Most of them dated from the 13th and 14th centuries and were probably made by monks. Notable among them were translations from the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and the French of the Queste del Saint Graal and Perlesvaux. Their prose was largely experimental and influenced in varying degrees by the language and style of the originals, but at its best it was a not unworthy development of the prose of the law tracts and native tales.

The development of medieval prose was hampered by a gap between Welsh literary tradition and the wider learning of western Europe. The inspiration for the fashioning of a prose able to express all facets of thought and activity arose toward the middle of the 16th century out of the Reformation and the Renaissance, from foundations laid by humanists, both Protestant and Catholic.