Cornish literature

Cornish literature, the body of writing in Cornish, the Celtic language of Cornwall in southwestern Britain.

The earliest extant records in Cornish are glosses added to Latin texts as well as the proper names in the Bodmin Manumissions, all of which date from about the 10th century. The 11th-century Domesday Book also includes records in Cornish. The Vocabularium cornicum (c. 1100; Eng. trans. The Old Cornish Vocabulary), an addition to Aelfric’s Latin–Anglo-Saxon glossary, provides the only substantial record of Old Cornish.

A 41-line poem, perhaps from a longer work, is the earliest known literary text in Cornish. It was written on the back of a charter dated 1340 and gives advice to a prospective bride. The poem Pascon agan Arluth (“Passion of Our Lord”; also called in English Mount Calvary), about Christ’s suffering and Crucifixion, was written in the 14th century. Literature in Middle Cornish otherwise takes the form of lengthy religious plays produced for popular audiences and performed in the open. These are in verse, typically consisting of four- and seven-syllable lines, and are related to the miracle plays, morality plays, and mystery plays performed throughout medieval Europe. The main centre for the production of the Cornish plays was Glasney College in Penryn, founded in 1265 and dissolved in the 1540s. The three plays that constitute the Ordinalia (Eng. trans. Ordinalia) are the finest examples of Middle Cornish literature: Origo mundi (“Origin of the World”) addresses the Creation, the Fall, and the promise of salvation; Passio Domini (“Passion of the Lord”) describes Christ’s temptation and his Crucifixion; Resurrexio Domini (“Resurrection of the Lord”) covers the Resurrection and Ascension. The Ordinalia cannot be dated with certainty but may be from the late 14th or early 15th century. Unlike contemporary works in English, these plays are linked by the legend of the Holy Rood and are notable for the absence of the Nativity or details of Christ’s ministry. Other features, such as Pontius Pilate’s death, also point to a distinct Cornish tradition that nevertheless shows Continental influences.

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Poetry: First Lines

Set in Cornwall and Brittany, the play Beunans Meriasek (from a manuscript dated 1504; Eng. trans. Beunans Meriasek) is a life of Meriasek, the patron saint of the Cornish town of Camborne. A pagan tyrant, identified as a member of the House of Tudor, expels Meriasek from Cornwall and is in turn defeated by the Duke of Cornwall, a sequence of events that has been seen as a reference to the rebellion that followed the landing in Cornwall of Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne, in 1497. The play, which includes scenes from the life of St. Sylvester I, has strong Marian elements, and among its themes are salvation, the nature of evil, and the relationship of church and state. Gwreans an bys (The Creation of the World) is the latest surviving medieval religious play in Cornish, perhaps composed about 1550. Some 180 of its lines also appear in Origo mundi, and its language shows features associated with Late Cornish. John Tregear’s Homelyes XIII in Cornysche (c. 1560; Eng. trans. The Tregear Homilies) is the longest text in historical Cornish, the form of the language extant prior to the language’s disappearance by the early 19th century and its revival in the 20th. This manuscript renders into Cornish 12 sermons by Bishop Edmund Bonner of London; appended to these sermons is “Sacrament an alter” (“Sacrament of the Alter”), written in another hand. Tregear’s manuscript was rediscovered in 1949 but received little attention despite its capable and idiomatic prose, in which English words are borrowed freely.

Cornish literature after 1600 is fragmentary. The brief translations of the Bible by William Rowe (c. 1690) are notable as examples of Late Cornish. Nicholas Boson’s Nebbaz gerriau dro tho Carnoack (c. 1665; “A Few Words About Cornish”) gives an account of the status of Cornish during the 17th century. From about 1680 the scholar William Scawen encouraged his contemporaries to write in Cornish. A number of them, notably Thomas Tonkin and William Gwavas, collected words, sayings, and manuscripts. Most 18th-century works are short poems, songs, and letters. In 1700 the linguist and naturalist Edward Lhuyd visited Cornwall to study the language. His Archæologia Britannica (1707) reproduces Boson’s folk tale “John of Chyannor” in a phonetic script, the only example of a secular prose story in historical Cornish. William Bodinar’s letter (1776), the last surviving text in historical Cornish, describes how he learned the language as a boy by going to sea with old men.

With the revival of the Cornish language in the early 20th century came the creation of a new body of Cornish literature that soon surpassed in breadth and volume that of historical Cornish. By the turn of the 21st century, this literature had become wide-ranging in its form and subjects, although short stories and translations remained the literature’s dominant genres.