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Chapter 9.3: The
Welsh language and the new native poetry
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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The late Roman Empire experienced
a decisive shift in the centre of culture, away
from secular institutions such as the
professorships of rhetoric set up in most cities,
and into the new monasteries. This had an
inevitable artistic consequence: that the more
consciously religious the culture of the
monasteries became, the more areas of human
experience it left out. In particular, the whole
royal/aristocratic world which could have fed on
Classical warrior legends of Hercules, the war of
Troy, Aeneas, Turnus, and the heroes of
republican Rome, sympathetic and highly relevant
to its own military and governmental concerns,
was simply not communicated any of them. Members
of the aristocratic class who went for
instruction to monasteries learned exclusively
religious matter, to a surprisingly high
standard, but also with a very narrow focus; it
was to be centuries before the age of Aquinas and
Dante started taking as much interest in the
Creation, or in the Creature, as in the Creator.
And conversely, the member of a warrior
aristocracy who did go to a convent to be
educated, did so with the intention of abandoning
the rank and responsibilities of a warrior
aristocrat altogether and enter the separate
world of what King Alfred called the gebedmen,
the men of prayer.
It follows that the
aristocracy’s own experiences only expressed
itself through the barbaric (this is a
descriptive, not a pejorative adjective) cultural
artifacts of their pagan ancestors. In Britain,
the demise of secular classical culture formed a
gap outside the cloisters, into which stepped the
English from the East and the Welsh from the
North. The only secular learning known to Gildas
is that of Maglocunus' bards; the alternative is
already between the life of the cloister and that
of the Celtic court.
In the earliest stages of this
evolution visible to us, the literary language is
still Latin. There is certainly another culture,
a Celtic culture, at the back of it; but no
written Celtic item has reached us before the
historical Taliesin. O, the
Vortigernid-Pascentiad family legend, which took
form in Gwynessi (that is, probably, in Old
Carlisle, in the north), certainly had an oral
and legendary Celtic legend that suggests
bardism, but it was indubitably written in Latin;
but what is most likely to be the first
historical mention of Welsh-speaking bards is
Gildas’ fuirious reference to certain
“parasites” at Maglocunus’ court,
who advertise and defend his actions. Who are
they? The strongest evidence is in the manner of
Gildas himself when dealing with the Five
Tyrants, especially with Maglocunus; for it may
very easily be described as anti-bardism.
Comparison with the historical Taliesin’s
praise poems show that Gildas has set himself
conscientiously to reverse the chief points of a
bardic praise song: where the bards praise their
subjects’ virtues, he exalts their sins;
where they declare their generosity and bravery,
he points out their mendacity, cruelty, greed and
murders; he reverses bardic values one by one,
reading murder in courage, seduction in
generosity, and violence in the beauty of song;
and in spite of his praise of sweet church music,
his manner is pretty nearly as agitated and
aggressive as Taliesin’s. I have postulated
that Gildas intended a severe attack on his own
culture, meaning to reverse the values and
postulates of L and A; here we can see him
actually doing it, not against a piece of
literature whose existence we can only suggest,
but against a genre of praise poetry some of
whose finest instances we still possess. And
Maglocunus gets a triple blast - far more than
any other tyrant; which strengthens the
suggestion, clear in Gildas’ writing, that
bardism in his day was particularly connected
with him. It was he who had imported those whom
Gildas call “parasites”, the screamers,
the bedewers-with-spittle, not only for the sake
of being praised, but in order to have his
actions justified and his propaganda spread
around.
Bardic tradition - which probably
had good reason to remember Maglocunus - records
that he died of the plague in his royal hall in
Rhos. This is usually identified with the
place of that name in north Wales, but
considering how many places called Rhos, Ross,
Roos and so on there are in Britain (including a
couple in Yorkshire), the identification is thin
to say the least. After his death, Maglocunus -
or Maelgwn - became a matter for legend, quoted
as a high king in law codes, mentioned in poetry
and even brought face to face, in much the most
famous of his legends, with Taliesin - I mean the
Taliesin of legend, the archetype of bards. I do
not think this is a coincidence. I want to argue
that Maglocunus' most important contribution to
future British history may well have been the
bards at his court.
We have had enough to do with the
historical Taliesin, the first known Old Welsh
poet, who wrote praise-songs for Urien of Rheged,
his son Owein, Cynan Garwyn of Powys, and
Gwallawg, ordained gwledig of Elmet; but
the Taliesin who meets Maelgwn is simply the
figure itself of poetry as sacred and magical,
with much the same overtones as Virgil assumed,
in the same period, among the Latin-speaking
nations, as archi-mage and sage. It does not seem
likely that the two great figures met, although I
think that Taliesin may have been a younger
contemporary of Maglocunus. Maglocunus, I
suggested, died in the 570 plague; Taliesin lived
long enough to praise Gallawg, father of Ceredig,
the last king of Elmet, driven out and possibly
killed in 615. That is, Taliesin was probably
active in the last quarter of the sixth century.
I suspect, however, that Gwallawg son of
Lleenawg, whose name means “man, or master,
of the Wall”, had become lord of southern
Yorkshire in the wake of the conquests of his
Gododdin kinsman Maglocunus; that is, that by the
time Taliesin went to Elmet, Maglocunus must have
been, in every sense of the word, history. It is
quite possible that, as the legend says, Taliesin
was a boy when Maglocunus was in his glory,
surrounded by his bards; but as the lord whom he
defends against Maelgwn, Elffin, lived
generations after Gildas’ great bandit, I do
not think we need treat the legend too seriously
as a historical source.
The Taliesin who was at Maelgwn's
court was another one of those Celtic miraculous
wise children we have met so often; a legendary
figure, the Arch-Bard, who appeared at the court
of an equally legendary Maelgwn to teach the king
and his bards a lesson. And the point is that he
could have taught that lesson to any tyrant of
legend: that he was associated with Maelgwn shows
that Maelgwn was particularly remembered as the
king associated with bardism. Though the various
versions of his story hinge on the vindication of
Elffin and his wife, in all the versions I have
consulted[1] the point of the story
is the proper establishment of bardism as a skill
and profession. When he sets out from the court,
what he says is that he will intervene in the
contention of the bards and make them all look
sad and defeated; and that is what he does.
Of the five poems he subsequently sings before
Maelgwn (excluding the last, the prophecy of
Britain, sung at the king's request when the
issue was already settled), every one has to do
with bardism. The first affirms Taliesin's
universal wisdom and mastery by identifying him
(in veiled terms) with the Second Person of the
Trinity[2]; the second challenges
the bards of Maelgwn to match his "three
hundred and sixty songs"; the third demands
specific evidence of wisdom, knowledge both of
God and of creation; the fourth lays down the law
about the minimum requirements for a proper bard
(and let whoever cannot come up to scratch flee
from Taliesin's face!), and the fifth and last
attacks the more disgraceful members of the
craft.
The conflict between the king and
Taliesin's lord Elffin, which had been started by
the latter's boast that he had a wife as chaste
as the king's, a horse as fast as his horses, and
a bard wiser than any, becomes the occasion for
the manifestation of true bardism on earth. It
follows that Maelgwn was more than casually
associated with bardism: what the legend says is
that bardism became manifest at his court. And
this agrees with Gildas' very peculiar emphasis
on the bards at Maglocunus' court. The story is
the bardic equivalent of one of the foundation
stories in which the patriarch of a dynasty was
first humiliated and then consecrated by a great
Saint such as Patrick; which has to mean that
Maelgwn bore the same relationship to kings who
protect bards as the founder of a dynasty has to
all his descendants - an organic relationship. He
was the exemplar and the founder of the peculiar
relationship between king and bard.
Maelgwn was a Gododdin, the famous
tribe from Stirling and Lothian known to Roman
geographers as Uotadini. One of the chief
monuments of Welsh bardism is the cycle of poems
known simply as the Gododdin, attributed to the
bard Neirin (or Aneurin), which is mainly devoted
to a heroic and catastrophic raid south, from
Lothian into a Bernicia already under English
control, which ends with the complete destruction
of the raiding force at Catraeth, usually
identified with Catterick. Another Coeling
(Gododdin) realm, that of Elmet, also stood
between Gwynedd and the north, until its
destruction by Aethelferth in 615. Relationships
between the Coeling dynasty of Maglocunus and the
Gododdin of the north remained close until the
latter ceased to exist: Neirin’s own poetic
cycle mentions distant Gwynedd no less than five
times, and a number of the Gododdin heroes are
actually said to come from that remote land. Even
later, the story of Cadwallon’s great war
against Northumbria shows clearly enough that his
strategic objective was conjunction between the
forces of Gwynedd and of the northern Gododdin,
who seem to have rushed to take his side.
Connecting two known facts about
Maelgwn and his court, could it be that the
central role of the Gododdin cycle in later Welsh
bardic practice had something to do with the
Gododdin origin of Cunedda and Maelgwn? According
to one regulation, knowledge of the Gododdin
cycle was regarded as equivalent to 363 songs and
was paid accordingly. To Gruffydd's Taliesin, we
remember, the proper number of songs for a bard
to know is 360; that is to say, knowledge of the
Gododdin was equivalent to a full bardic
training. And if the very institution of bardism
had reached Wales through the Gododdin courts of
Maelgwn’s descendants, this would explain
the huge importance of that lost tribe; it was
not even a matter of the importance or otherwise
of Cunedda or Maelgwn, so much as that they had
been the vehicle by which the traditional
institution of Welsh historical memory and
national self-consciousness, bardism, had reached
the country.
The picture is further complicated
by a linguistic riddle about the stage of
evolution from Celtic to Welsh[3]. It will have escaped
few readers that the name forms we found in
Gildas are nothing like any Welsh anyone ever
heard; they belong to an earlier language, with
more syllables and a quite different sound
system. Maglocunus and Cuneglasus turn up in
Welsh as Maelgwn and Cynlas, having undergone the
same process that turned Ambrosius into Emrys,
Vitalinus into Gwythelin, Octavius into Eudaf.
The question is: Continental evidence shows that
sixth-century Latin-speaking ears heard British
names in a sound system that was already Welsh -
the Welsh of Taliesin, if not that of modern
speakers. In particular, a name very close to
that of Maglocunus - which would probably be
written, in this old spelling, as *Maglocus
- turns up in a church record of 574 as Mailoc
(modern Welsh Maelog). Now there is
nothing particularly surprising in finding Latin
words undergoing sound-changes, even of the swift
and extreme sort that has, already by Nennius'
time, altered Ambrosius into Embreis;
what is surprising is to find a phonetically
exact rendition of old Celtic sounds in the sixth
century - and, in some inscriptions, even later -
when we know that they cannot have been
pronounced as they were written. And we must
realize that this archaic way of writing names is
a pattern: it is not that we find a name here and
there written according to an old-fashioned
spelling, but that the mass of inscriptions from
the period all tend to have more or less perfect
archaic spellings, and that every name in Gildas
is spelled in a form that would not be
pronounced by contemporary British Celts.
Professor Charles Thomas called this archaic
language and spelling Inscriptional Old Celtic, a
convenient enough name; for though IOC is
probably an insular form, nevertheless it is
clear that it has much the same sound-system and
even vocabulary as the polysillabic Old Celtic
whose names were transcribed into Latin by
Caesar.
Now it can be demonstrated that
the sound-changes that led from Old Celtic to
Welsh were already starting to operate on the
Border, next door to the Gododdin, long before
the age of Gildas. A Roman tombstone found at
South Shields, written in rather ropey Latin for
a resident of Syrian origin, commemorates the
latter’s ex-slave and later wife, Regina
(this hints at a rather touching story), whose
tribe was Catuellauna[4]. This is a well-known
British name, used both for tribes (the Catuuellauni
of Hertfordshire, the most important tribe of
southern Britain in Caesar’s time) and for
people (Cadwallon himself). In its original Old
Celtic form, which Caesar recorded as he heard
it, it was Catuuellauni, that is a
compound of the ancient word catu-
(battle). Now the important thing about the
South Shields inscription is that the ear of the
Syrian foreigner and of his untrained stonemason
have heard the lady’s tribal name as Cat-uellauna,
that is, that the –u- stem of catu-
has disappeared. –U- stems are the defining
feature of important groups of words in the
earliest, polysyllabic Indo-European languages
– Latin, Old Celtic, Sanskrit, Avestan
– and their vanishing is often one of the
defining points in the process that turns the
classical ancient languages into the following
historical stage: Sanskrit into Prakrit and Pali,
Avestic into Pahlevi, Latin into Italian. In
other words, this is not only a matter of a
sound-change, but a serious potential grammatical
change (since the fall of a stem can change the
inflection of a word), even potentially of a
revolution in the language: in Italian, the
collapse of the Latin stems spelled the end of
inflection and the need to restructure the whole
language around articles and prepositions.
Old Welsh and Old Irish do not
represent as strong a change from inflected
Indo-European languages, but they are strong
enough. To pronounce, one after the other, Cassiuelaunos
and Casswallawn, Ambrosius and Emrys
gives something of the dimension of what
happened. Vowels have collapsed into each other,
syllables have merged; the rules of pronunciation
and therefore of prosody can no longer be the
same. Now given that the –a at the
end of Catuellauna is certainly a Latin
stem imposed on a native name – that is,
that there is no evidence that the name as the
Syrian gentleman encountered it ever had the
native –os stem in the feminine
– the Catuellaunian lady’s name seems
quite close in form, if not in sound, to the much
later name of our old friend Cadwallon of
Gwynedd. In other words, the South Shields
inscription – which, though difficult to
date, belongs to the Roman age, two to four
centuries before Gildas – shows that the
form of words used at the popular level, among
people who spoke the sort of poor Latin of our
Palmyrene gentleman, was probably already Welsh,
and in any case certainly on its way; while the
existence of what Professor Thomas calls
Inscriptional Old Celtic shows that there was a
class of people in Britain who were still
acquainted with early Celtic vocabulary, grammar
and morphology as late as Gildas' time. A
mandarin class of language specialists had a
clear understanding of the rules of grammar and
morphology which the native Celtic populace had
been losing for centuries.
Though no literary remain of this
Old Celtic has come down to our own time, the
parallel of Sanskrit shows that it was not
impossible for a "dead" language to
live, in a very archaic form, as the language of
an educated class, even if evidence of writing is
very dubious. By the time when writing is certain
in India, Sanskrit was already a learned
language, and the uneducated spoke Prakrit; its
elaborate inflection and sound system had been
transmitted down the generations by memory
reinforced by traditional analysis.
What this postulates, however, is
a vast body of traditional literature memorized
and analyzed by specialist learned classes. Such
classes indubitably existed, both in India and in
the Celtic lands. With the enormous reach of the
bardic class, everyone who ever studied ancient
Ireland, Scotland and Wales is familiar; but both
of these use relatively later languages, Welsh
and Old Irish, in which the polysyllabic nature
of Old Celtic has already collapsed, requiring an
altogether new prosody and, indeed, a different
aesthetics. What has to be demonstrated is the
existence and activity of an Old Celtic-speaking
learned class with an advanced grasp of
grammatical studies.
I would suggest that the passage
from Old Celtic to Welsh and Old Irish is related
to a major difference between Celtic and other
Indo-European cultures. In every other
traditional Indo-European literature, the great
epics are written in verse. The earliest Latin
version of the epic of Aeneas, that of Naevius,
was in verse; so, as everyone knows, was Homeric
epic; so was the Mahabharata; so are the
early Germanic heroic poems, both in mainland
Germany (the Nibelungenlied) and in
England (Beowulf). Except for the Celtic
world, there is not one Indo-European province in
whichlarge-scale narratives are not in verse.
In the Celtic world, and in the
Celtic world alone, epic and heroic accounts are
consistently told in prose. The grandest
manifestations of Arthurian epic – Perlesvaus,
the Vulgate cycle – are in prose; where one
of the same grandeur, Parzival, is in
verse, it is because the author Wolfram von
Eschenbach, a High German oral versifier who
admits again and again to not being able to read
and write, is using his own traditional verse
form, that of the German epics, to tell what
seems to him an epic poem. (Indeed, it is
interesting that all the Arthurian poetry of
Chretien de Troyes is said to have been versified
from previous “books”, that is, surely,
prose accounts. The same process may be suggested
for every large-scale Arthurian verse narrative,
which would explain why originals are so
difficult to reconstruct.) The Mabinogi
and all the other Welsh tales are in prose; there
is no example of a large-scale Welsh verse
narrative. The same goes for the so-called
“epic” of the Tain bo Cuailnge
and for other large-scale Irish narratives such
as the Book of Conquests. Throughout the Celtic
world, the formula for large-scale narrative is
the same: long prose accounts, interspersed with
short related poems, or with such poems placed in
appendix.
Now Taliesin's description of
himself and his likes as "the singers of
little songs" indicates that a separate
group was known that sang "long" songs.
This may refer either to lengthy heroic or epic
sagas, or to the indubitably different prosody
demanded by the polysyllabic Inscriptional Early
Celtic. Certainly Taliesin's snappy verse, full
of internal assonance and rhyme, would be
impossible in the sort of language IEC seems to
have been; it would seem to demand something a
lot more like Latin metres. There is also –
this is perhaps a subjective judgement, but it is
based on literary criticism – an exultation,
a happy freedom and abandon, about Taliesin's
work, that suggests the discovery of the
expressive means of a new medium.
I admit that the following theory
does not account for the parallel developments in
Ireland; but I would suggest that the
sophisticated use of Welsh as a literary language
was the work of Taliesin and his generation, and
was restricted to shorter song-like compositions.
Such a restriction may seem difficult to
envision, but, once again, there is a direct
parallel in my country, where dialectal poetry,
while widespread to the point that most Italian
dialects count as literary languages, is rarely
used beyond the confines of songs, sonnets,
shortish comic poems, or comedies[5] (a form for which we
have no examples among the earliest Celtic
literatures). It is clear therefore that if the
Roman of Trilussa, or the Milanese of Carlo
Porta, or even the Venetian of Carlo Goldoni or
the Neapolitan of Eduardo de Filippo, had ever
broken away from Italian altogether and
established themselves as completely autonomous
languages, they would inherit a poetic tradition
rather more restricted than that of Dante,
Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso.
Bards were at the court of Arthur,
who was renowned down the centuries as one of the
sovereigns who were generous to bards; we know
that at least one bardic praise poem about him
was written after Badon but before his great
conquering outburst. But not a single line has
survived of their work; nor indeed have their
names (unless one of them happened to be called
Myrddin). And I think we might take seriously the
apparently sarcastic notice in The dream of
Rhonabwy that the bards of Arthur sang songs
in praise of Arthur that nobody could understand,
except that they were in praise of the
king: quite simply, these bards may have been
speaking a language that nobody except bards
would understand – the already dead
Inscriptional Early Celtic. We have already seen
that the picture of The dream has probably
quite a lot to do, despite its dreamlike
strangeness, with real history. In all
likelihood, the bards of Arthur’s court were
in fact understandable to any educated
contemporary, since we know that Gildas –
who was not a bard – understood the inner
rules of Inscriptional Old Celtic; what the
sentence means is probably that a writer of the
age of Rhonabwy, the 1200s, would not be
able to understand it. Which suggests, in turn,
that shreds of the old songs were known at the
time; or, possibly, that a tradition of the
existence of an ancient language still existed.
Another straw in the wind that
suggests that Arthur’s court was known to
have used Inscriptional Old Celtic is the
evidence we have seen in Book VII, that an early
version of the legendary account of Camlann,
incorporated in Geoffrey’s work, had made a
clumsy attempt to render the two mythological
names of Arthurian lore, Gwennhwyvar and Caledvwlch,
as Guanhumara and Caliburnus, and
that Guanhumara, in particular, showed an
unfortunately mistaken reversal of the Welsh
sound changes to form what its author thought was
an Old Celtic form. In other words, the author of
the legendary “Death of Arthur” used by
Geoffrey knew that Old Celtic, rather than Welsh,
was used at Arthur’s court, and wanted to
adequate the Welsh names of Guinevere and
Excalibur to it. (As for why they should need to
be adequated, we have seen reason enough to
believe that the legendary Guinevere and
Excalibur were late addition to the identity of
Arthur, and may well have come first into
Welsh-language accounts, with no Old Celtic stage
at all.) Finally, there is the evidence of Gildas
himself, who, born and brought up in Arthurian
times at the court of his father Caw, could parse
and spell correctly Inscriptional Old Celtic
names; which shows that in his and Arthur’s
times, the literary language was still widespread
and as well understood as Gildas’ marvellous
Latin.
It is in the next generation that
we first have certain evidence of Welsh poetry;
first at Urien’s court, then –
consistently – at Gododdin courts. What
language the bards of Maglocunus spoke we do not
know, although I will suggest a reason to suspect
it might be Welsh. The first known connection
between Gododdin royalty and Welsh poetry, two
generations before Neirin, is at the court of
Gwallawg, to which I suspect, Taliesin moved
after Urien’s death – to judge from the
fact that one Owein was one of the great heroes
of Gwallawg’s time. Gwallawg, the gwledig
of Elmet, ordained – that is, surely,
consecrated by religious rite – and head of
a fleet and many lesser heroes, is surely a king
of higher rank than Urien; but the fact that,
late in his career and when his son Owein was
already an adult, Urien began to claim descent
from Coel, suggests that this may be not just the
casual career move of an increasingly renowned
bard from the court of a self-made cateran of no
descent who illegitimately claimed Coeling
descent to that of one of Britain’s
political leaders (who happened to be a genuine
Coeling), but the sign of a political alignment
between Urien and his children on the one hand,
and the most important Gododdin king on the
other.
I suspect that, with the arrival
of Taliesin at Gwallawg’s court, the
Gododdin complex, from Edinburgh to Gwynedd began
to welcome and use, even to identify itself with,
the new vernacular poetry; and that the peculiar
impact of the Coeling and Gododdin bards may well
have depended on their being the first to pick up
the artistic gauntlet thrown down by Taliesin,
and use Welsh rather than Old Celtic. When
Cadwallon came back from Irish exile, sixty years
after, to lead the revolt of the Gododdin lands
from Gwynedd through Elmet to Lothian and the
Borders, there was not wanting his own bard, Afan
Little-bard, who punctually became known as one
of the Cynfeirdd, the first age of poetic
classics[6]. It does not even seem
unlikely that the sense of distance from the
great men of the past that seems evinced by N,
with its implicit criticism of Ambrosius and
Constantine for being too nice to the barbarians,
its assimilation of Uther (father of Arthur) to
them, and its general separation from the past in
the name of a new nationalistic
“morality” that preaches the
destruction of the enemy by any means at hand,
may be related with this adoption of a new
language, a new poetics, which set the men of
Cadwallon’s time apart from their
predecessors as effectively as the political
situation. The rejection of the politics of
Ambrosius, however great his qualities, and the
treatment of Arthur as great but outdated and
with no future, seems to agree with the rejection
of the poetics of Latin and of Inscriptional Old
Celtic, in favour of the new language of the
poets of the Gododdin, Taliesin, Neirin, Afan
Little-Bard.
Something like the reverse may
have operated in Gildas’ time. If, by any
chance, Maglocunus was the first – perhaps
even before Urien - to employ bards using demotic
proto-Welsh instead of aristocratic IOC, then
Gildas’ protest might have another aspect:
his vivid and slightly gross description of the
“flatterers” roaring out their praise
until they spatter the hearer with their spittle,
might involve a criticism for the novelty of
using poetry in that base, dialectal language.
Yet, oddly enough, Taliesin and Gildas resemble
each other like twins. There is the same vehement
and absolutely genuine passion in both their
spirits; there is a similarly fervent adhesion to
individual people – which we see, in Gildas,
not only in his desperate renunciation of the
admirable, yet damned Maglocunus, but also in his
warm mention of their unnamed teacher, and of the
few but admired good men of his time; there is
the same wildly imaginative use of a highly
wrought literary language, Gildas' Latin running
Taliesin's Welsh close for elaboration and
grammatical boldness; and, as I observed, Gildas
(though his grim view of the feuds of his
contemporaries led him to prophecies that came
all too true) has social and political ideas
little more advanced than Taliesin's. His
desperate call for uprightness in public and
ecclesiastical life has little future in it so
long as he is bound to a purely Celtic conception
of history; in a world of soldiers, the realities
of a social life based on the sword were not
going to bend to mere appeals to better natures,
however truthful and admirable. And he is
conscious of it: he is trying hard to break from
the shackles of his own social background –
but while the result of his struggle is
magnificent literary art, it is not, and it
cannot be, politically effective. But what is
certain is that the motor of Gildasian-age
culture was in the North: all the finest literary
figures in tradition come from the North, both
Gildas and the Welsh poets.
The effect of the arrival of
Northern bards on subsequent British history is
immense. Welsh, we must realize, is not a popular
slang slowly erected, like the earliest French,
into a national talk by upper classes that had
become too ignorant for Latin: it was, from the
beginning, a language heard at the court of
kings, and its very earliest manifestations, the
poems of Taliesin, have a virtuosity allied to a
marvelous directness of expression, that places
them among the great classical poetry of the
world. Single sentences stand out, as vivid and
luminous as Sappho or Goethe: “They did not
see a man, who did not see Gwallawg”;
“O Gwallawg, teyrned are stung to
silence and submit”; “There is more
glory in the world, Because Urien and his sons
exist”, a voice, as Sappho calls it, sweeter
than the lyre, golden more than gold. Poetic
early Welsh had probably only recently emerged
from the shadow of literary Latin and the
original IEC, and yet it almost immediately
soared to classic level, when Italian, for
instance, took three centuries from its first
manifestations as a speech with its own grammar
and morphology to the rise of the Florentine
poets[7]. This argues the
existence of a learned class able to grasp and
make elaborate use of the potential of this new
medium, because it already had a very broad and
varied experience in earlier languages.
When this same society adopted
Latin, it made use of it with a virtuosity and
inventiveness that put the rest of the West to
shame, rhetorically indeed, but with none of the
dead conventions and turgid bombast of a Sidonius
or a Cassiodorus; and that is, in my view,
because it was already used to the virtuoso
handling of a literary language separate from
everyday realities. No two languages require more
different handling than Latin and Welsh, and yet,
within two generations, North Britain had
produced two most extraordinary virtuosi in both,
Gildas and Taliesin.
The influence of bardic morals and
royal theory on the history of Wales and Ireland,
Scotland and Brittany, has been, politically,
almost invariably disastrous. An aristocracy bred
in a bardic climate was, from several points of
view, quite incapable of coping with enemies not
bound by the categories of widespread sovereign
monarchy, unchangeable borders, and the peculiar
mixture of self-righteousness and justification
of violence found in so many bardic texts[8]. At the same time, the
intense societal concentration on musical and
artistic achievement that followed from the
exaltation of bards among other social classes
has meant that, artistically, and especially
musically, the Celtic countries have always
punched far above their weight. The literature of
Ireland, Scotland, Wales, has been important for
the whole of Europe from the moment it began to
be set down on paper; the immense impact of
Arthurian epic, which changed European taste and
even manners from one end of the continent to the
other, would alone place these little countries
in the forefront of European civilization, but
how many people are familiar with the collections
of Breton traditional tales – simply the
most beautiful fables and fairy tales I have ever
read?
Even more important than their
literature is their music. From the time when
Gerald of Wales marvelled at the dexterity and
virtuosity of Irish and Scottish musicians to the
time when Haydn and Beethoven delighted in
harmonizing tunes from the British countries
(Beethoven’s renderings of The Miller of
Dee and The Highland Watch would
suffice, had every other work of his perished, to
certify his genius), to the immense influence of
Irish and Scottish folksongs on present-day
popular music, these have never ceased to be
important, nay, central; and that is not even to
count the theory that places the invention of
polyphony – the fundamental core of all
European musical art – in the British isles.
When the citizens of the Celtic countries call
each of their lands land of song, they are
telling the exact truth. If the poetry and
song of the bards have in some ways proved the
death of the Celtic countries in political terms,
they, and their cultural successors, have been
their survival, their beautiful lifeblood, and
their great gift to the world.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
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