The Other 300 | Record Today

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19th-century drawing of the Battle of the Winwaed (655) between Mercia and Northumbria, by Patrick Nicolle.
19th-century drawing of the Struggle of the Winwaed (655) in between Mercia and Northumbria, by Patrick Nicolle © Glance and Master/Bridgeman Pictures.

The Gododdin is a intriguing, but frustratingly elusive, piece of literature. Contained in an incomplete late 13th-century Welsh manuscript, yet attributed to the sixth-century north-British poet Aneirin, it is a selection of verses written in medieval Welsh about otherwise unrecorded people today and occasions. It belongs, broadly speaking, to a style of heroic elegy. The verses mourn named warriors who fell in battle and a lot of of those warriors belonged to a people identified as the Gododdin. They have been killed at a place named Catraeth. Not like, say, the Iliad or Beowulf, the poetry does not notify a tale and the model is dense. The meaning of substantially of the vocabulary should be inferred from etymology or context. Nonetheless, the poem has an simple energy and its unflinching depiction of youthful gentlemen killing and dying on the battlefield has resonated by means of the hundreds of years, not minimum with the Anglo-Welsh creator David Jones, who drew on it to body his ordeals in the trenches throughout the Initially World War.

The Gododdin was edited by Ifor Williams in 1938 and his comprehensive notes continue to kind the foundation of our knowledge of the textual content. It has due to the fact been translated into English half a dozen occasions. Gillian Clarke’s is the latest of these, while it is not rather a translation. Relatively, Clarke’s function resembles Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. It reads superbly, as a person would count on from this kind of a talented poet, but it does not usually give a pretty shut rendition of the original textual content. For illustration: 

Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth, oedd ffraeth eu llu, Glasfedd eu hancwyn a gwenwyn fu (Men went to Catraeth, their host was swift, Fresh new mead their feast and it was poison) 

is below rendered 

Men rode to Catraeth, debonair their snare, the honey-trap, gold mead

Audience who require a closer being familiar with of the textual content as it stands should look in other places. Of the most literal translations, Kenneth Jackson’s The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (1969) is admirably careful.

The failing of Clarke’s e book, having said that, is its introduction. Clarke summarises Ifor Williams’ original hypothesis about the track record, composition and transmission of the textual content, but fails to point out that Williams’ arguments have been matter to in depth criticism in the 80 a long time and much more because his landmark publication. Williams himself was suitably tentative in presenting it at very first, but inevitably with just about every repetition question marks and caveats were drop. Place succinctly, Williams’ argument is this: in the late sixth century, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, ruler of the Gododdin (the successor of the Wotadini recorded in Ptolemy’s Geography) summoned a retinue of 300 warriors to Edinburgh (the Eidyn of the poems) and feasted them for a calendar year – a type of workforce-bonding work out. He then despatched them down to Catterick in current-working day Yorkshire (the Catraeth of the poems) to get it back from the Angles of Deira and Bernicia. The expedition was a catastrophe and all but a single of the 300 died. Aneirin, Mynyddog’s courtroom poet and maybe the lone survivor of the fight, composed elegies for the lifeless, which were preserved orally and eventually transmitted to north Wales in which they were composed down for the very first time throughout the Aged Welsh time period (about 800-1150).

However, no battle of Catraeth is recorded in any historical supply and the crucial staff, like Mynyddog, are unmentioned in annals or genealogies. Hence we have no other sources to enable reconstruct the historic functions alluded to in the Gododdin. The Celtic historian and linguist John T. Koch has reconstructed a really various account of the fight of Catraeth, which he sees not as an ethnic conflict in between the Britons of Gododdin and invading Angles, but as section of a energy wrestle between warring British factions, equally of whom experienced Germanic-speaking allies. This is plausible, in the light-weight of events in the seventh century, when the king of Mercia, Penda, allied with Cadwallon of Gwynedd from the Northumbrians. Nonetheless, in the absence of testimony, Koch’s hypothesis is each and every bit as speculative as Williams’.

What’s more, Ifor Williams instructed that a handful of verses do not belong to the Gododdin suitable (a stanza on the battle of Strathcarron of 642, a poem to just one of Llywarch Hen’s sons and a lullaby dealt with to a little one termed Dinogad). This raises the risk that other verses might be considerably less apparent interpolations. The authentic main of the Gododdin could be very small certainly. Could we go a step even further? We know that medieval Welsh scribes at times improperly attributed poems to famed poets of a former age. We also have Middle Welsh elegies composed for fictional characters these types of as Dylan eil Ton and the Irish hero Cú Roí. Consequently the Gododdin in its entirety could be a really late composition. This simply cannot be proved or disproved on linguistic grounds: if the poem was transmitted orally, then its language would absolutely have been updated. If, as Koch has argued, it was penned down practically straight away, we may possibly count on it to preserve early kinds of the language, but we have no surviving texts in Brittonic languages in manuscripts from in advance of 800 to compare it to. This type of linguistic dating is speculative in the extraordinary.

It is worthy of mentioning that the probability of late composition was canvassed as early as 1932 by Saunders Lewis, who advised that the Gododdin preserved the operate of apprentice bards whose teacher had requested them to compose a poem on the popular battle of Catraeth. This was airily dismissed by Kenneth Jackson, but new critics, although not necessarily endorsing the ‘schoolroom’ element of Lewis’ strategy, are inclined to see the do the job as a collection of poems of various dates, which might protect small or no genuine lore about a historical battle of Catraeth. A summary of recent considering on this significant and hard textual content is a desideratum and in this regard Clarke’s book is a missed option.

The Gododdin: Lament For the Fallen Gillian Clarke Faber 184pp £14.99 Acquire from bookshop.org (affiliate url)

 

Simon Rodway is Lecturer in the Division of Welsh and Celtic Experiments at Aberystwyth University.

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