Creative Spaces: A Postgraduate Journal for the Creative Industries Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. School of Creative Studies & Media, Bangor University Bangor, Wales, UK Vol 1(1): 18-30 Mead-Halls and Men-At-Arms: Problems of Dating and the Image of the Heroic Age Kit Kapphahn krk08@aber.ac.uk Prifysgol Aberystywth University Abstract: Problems of dating consistently haunt modern scholars who have no way of knowing whether a text written down in the fourteenth century might have been composed in the sixth, the tenth, or even later. Despite this, the enduring image of the ‘heroic age’ of early Britain has persisted, with poetry—Y Gododdin, the praise of Urien Rheged, and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf—providing a historical canvas. Scholars pick apart the texts for clues like (and sometimes as) archaeologists, patching together what they can find into a framework built from other, equally unreliable sources. Writers of high middle ages held an equally romantic vision of the bygone age of the noble barbarian, and far less attachment to the authorship of their own work. The images of mead-halls and blood-feuds, while attested to some extent, are far from complete, though their remnants are found throughout modern popular culture. Were the scribes who saved the poems really preserving the works of the ancients, or merely the medieval version of historical fiction? Linguistically, a strong case can be made for a later date; historical attestations point to an earlier one. Care must be taken when attempting to present a firm conclusion. Key words: Medieval Welsh, heroic poetry, Gododdin ‘All that is really known of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few pages.’ - Dr. Johnson The goal of attempting to date the Gododdin at all is a matter rife with agenda and bias, even beyond simple scholarly curiosity, becoming what Williams termed ‘furious controversies’ (1972, p.60) that remain unsolved as experts lay claims on behalf of Wales, Scotland, and even post-Norman Britain. Because of the Welsh bards' love of archaic turns of phrase and the late date of any actual manuscript containing the poem it is impossible to determine a date, place, or author, but the desire for this ‘oldest Welsh poem’ to be exactly that is rooted in an innate patriotism; Williams attributed it to early Wales and Jackson claimed it for Scotland, lines are drawn from Rheged to Powys and further still across the CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 18 Irish sea. Scholars pick apart the texts for clues like (and sometimes as) archaeologists, patching together what they can find into a framework built from other, equally unreliable sources. There exists already a vast corpus of scholarly material all amounting, in the end, to an admission of confused but encouraged ignorance: confused because some parts of the text and its possible historical context are so obscure as to baffle even the most knowledgeable scholars, but encouraged because of that peculiar thrill that the academically-minded seem to get from getting their metaphorical hands dirty and digging into the text. It is not the objective of this paper, therefore, to make any case for a firm date for the Gododdin, but rather to address the problems inherent in attempting to settle on one, and discuss, in light of the lack of concrete information, its usefulness to the literary historian as a cultural mirror, or a method of glimpsing a genuine, historic ‘heroic age.’ It shall be necessary, therefore, to briefly outline some of the existing theories regarding the background of the Gododdin, its transmission, and textual history, and then address some of the reasons for varying arguments. Helen Fulton, in ‘Cultural Heroism in Aneirin’s Gododdin,’ states that: Setting aside the problems regarding the exact date of composition of both the Taliesin poems and Aneirin’s work, they can still be read as constructs of a historical context in which small British kingdoms in Wales and the Old North were fighting for survival against the advancing Anglo-Saxons. As such, they provide valuable evidence concerning the material culture and ideology of a British warrior class which represents for many modern readers the expression of a ‘British Heroic Age.’ (Fulton 1994, p.21) A bold and hopeful assertion, but when she goes on to explain, however rightly, that the Gododdin and the concept of a Chadwickian ‘heroic age’ rests on the ‘surviving literature of the dominant social group, generally the dual patriarchal hegemony of a militaristic aristocracy and learned literate class’ (1994, p.24), the dilemma of how much of the poem can be read as an accurate cultural history becomes apparent. The amount of information the Gododdin is expected to provide is perhaps too much burden for any single poem to bear. Because so little early British text survives, the little that exists is expected to reveal all possible secrets—a clear picture of post-Roman Britain; the details of warfare, cavalry tactics, and the political environment; the socio-political climate of the Anglo-Saxon conquest; the linguistic evolution of early Welsh; and whether there was a ‘real’ King Arthur. That the reality of the text falls somewhat short of these grandiose aspirations is not the fault of the poet. The poem is found in the Book of Aneirin, a thirteenth-century manuscript now kept in the Cardiff Central Library. The pages show the work of two scribes, generally known as A and B, and their corresponding versions of the poem are the A-text, which John Koch calls CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 19 ‘the most innovative’ and the B-text, which he names ‘the most archaic’ (Koch 1997, p.51). The A scribe, after eighty-eight stanzas, added the gorchanau, a series of other poems that may be tangentially related. The B scribe appears to be working from more than one exemplar, including repeated sections or variants of the A text and part of which uses Old Welsh orthography (Jarman 1988, p.xiv). The stanzas are a series of elegies for a band of warriors who fell in a battle at Catraeth against the men of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. The historical details are unclear. The sources of the time make no mention of any great battle at Catraeth, or of Mynyddog Mwynfawr, the lord of Din Eidyn (modern Edinburgh) to whom the poet attributes sponsorship of the band, or of most of the warriors named. As to its authorship, the clues are equally vague: a note on the manuscript itself reads, hwn yw e godod (‘this is the Gododdin, Aneirin sang it’), and the Historia Brittonum does name Aneirin as being ‘renowned in poetry’ sometime in the late sixth to early seventh centuries1, when the political situation of the Old North would make the battle most likely to have taken place (Williams 1972, p.52). Several theories have been put forward as to the ‘backstory’ behind the Gododdin. The earliest reasonable suggestion, brought forward by Sir Ifor Williams and elaborated by Kenneth Jackson, is that the assassination of Urien Rheged in the late sixth century left a power vacuum in the north, and the remaining kingdoms were unable to stop the advance of the English armies, resulting in the loss of Catraeth (likely Catterick, in north Yorkshire). The aim of the men of Gododdin, then, was to reclaim their territory from Saxon hands, to ‘smash the dangerously growing power of the English on his borders’ (Jackson 1969, p.12) and halt the expansion of King Æthelfrith, who united the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia into the single unit of Northumbria in 605. Jackson suggests that although only three hundred warriors are mentioned as having been part of the war-band, that this refers only to those of the nobility, and they would have been accompanied by a rank-and-file of foot soldiers whose names are not given, swelling the army to a number perhaps around three thousand (1969, p.15). John Koch, in the introduction to his reconstructed ‘Archaic Neo-Brittonic’ text of the poem, offers a different suggestion. O.J. Padel sums it up in his review of Koch’s work, calling it ‘not a hopeless heroic stand by a threatened Brittonic kingdom against English expansion, but a squabble between two British kingdoms, Gododdin and Rheged, in which 1 The Harley 3859 version of the Historia Brittonum, chapter 62, reads 'Tunc Talhaen tat aguen in poemate claruit, & neirin & taliessin & bluchbard & cian qui vocatur gueinth guaut simul uno tempore in poemate brittannico claruerunt. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 20 English allies took part on both sides’ (1998, p.46). Koch then proposes that the battle of the Gododdin is the same one described in Taliesin’s Gweith Gwen Ystrad, and that chief enemy is not Deira and Bernicia themselves, but Rheged. This would place the battle sometime before Urien’s battles against Bernicia in the late sixth century. He suggests that the poem was attributed to Aneirin somewhat later in Strathclyde, which used it to bolster political claims to the old lands of the Gododdin (Padel 1998, p.46), and that the idea of the campaign as a wholesale disaster only came about in the later seventh century after the poem had been imported to Wales. Jenny Rowland, in ‘Warfare and Horses in the Gododdin and the Problem of Catraeth,’ puts forth yet another suggestion, that there was no large-scale battle at all, but a ‘mounted raiding party whose expedition went disastrously wrong’ (1995, p.32). Through an examination of Roman-era cavalry tactics and early British warfare, she proposes that the most reasonable use of a mounted army of that size would be a small-scale raiding party, which she says also ‘disposes of some of the unlikely hypotheses required to see this as a grand army of invasion’ (1995, p.32): the high percentage of casualties, the absence of the lord Mynyddog Mwynfawr from the battle, and the conspicuous lack of any mention in the historical chronicles. In contrast to all of these theories, Saunders Lewis suggested in 1932 that the Gododdin is not a single poem at all, but rather a collection of exercises written by bardic trainees (Lewis 1932, p.23). The format of many short stanzas and the repetition in places of theme and character would make this plausible; the foremost question arising from this theory is why such training exercises would be saved, restored and re-copied by scribes with so much effort for several centuries. As important as the historical background is the authorship and transmission of the poem. With so little reliable information about pre-Saxon Britain, all we have must be mined for any tidbit of history it might reveal in order to construct a picture of the political climate and social structure of its inhabitants. The heroic culture of ancient Britain was a complex process of compromise and balance. A powerful king was powerful because of the war-band that fought for him, and he bought their loyalty with treasures. Glory and fame, Aneirin tells us many times in the Gododdin, is the highest goal, greater than gold, or loyalty, or (by omission) perhaps even the rewards of Heaven. Errant warriors of an age for combat would seek out a lord who could promise them fame and riches, and in this the poets, those spin doctors of the heroic age, were instrumental, but because of this, especially with an unspecified number of centuries having passed, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 21 Knowing whether Aneirin or someone contemporary to him actually composed the poem, and how it reached Wales from the North, would reveal much about the tradition and movement of Welsh poetry in the centuries preceding the manuscripts we actually have. As Sir Ifor Williams said, If we only had a number of manuscripts belonging to the ninth or tenth century, whose authenticity was beyond challenging, then we could discover definite canons for Old Welsh as compared with Early Medieval. As it is we have to be content with the glosses--and furious controversies are the result. (Williams 1972, p.60) Williams himself laid the foundation for the study of the Book of Aneirin in 1938, and such was his influence, and the devotion of his students, that his theories dominated the field for years afterward. He believed that the Gododdin had its roots in sixth century oral transmission, but that it had been adapted and modernised over time until it reached the form that the B scribe was copying from. Kenneth Jackson, in many ways following in Williams’ footsteps, believed that at least the kernel of the poem had genuine roots in sixth-century Scotland, and that The poems were composed orally and handed on orally for two centuries or more. During that process a considerable degree of modernisation of language would inevitably occur; some obsolete words and archaic grammatical forms and constructions no longer intelligible would be replaced…and quite likely some newer metrical features might put in an appearance…. (Jackson 1969, p.63) The idea of an ancient tradition of oral composition has long been a popular one, in Anglo- Saxon and Norse as well as early Britain, evoking the image presented in Beowulf of an ancient bard, perhaps accompanying himself on a harp, inspiring a mead-hall full of warriors with tales of their glorious predecessors: ‘Hroþgares scop æfter medobence mænan scolde’ (‘Hrothgar’s baard, after the mead service, would sing’) (ln 1066-7). That there was some tradition of panegyric and elegiac poetry by the sixth century seems clear despite an unfortunate lack of surviving written evidence; in ‘Gildas and Vernacular Poetry’ Patrick Sims-Williams calls the medieval beirdd ‘the true heirs of their British counterparts’ (1984 p. 174) and quotes—although without completely ascribing to—Jackson’s assertion that the earliest surviving manuscripts were ‘a direct continuation of the bardic panegyric in praise of the nobility which was the classic concept of poetry among the Celts from the beginning’ (Sims-Williams 1984 p.182). Certainly this was an idea popular with and propagated by the later medieval poets in Wales, and forms a large part of the difficulty with linguistic and stylistic methods of determining a date. The Welsh language, unlike English, remained stable for several centuries; the gogynfeirdd were prone to using archaic turns of phrase, and untroubled by modern concepts of intellectual property ownership. As Ifor Williams explains: CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 22  A bard writes to cheer his countrymen in a national emergency by foretelling victory, success, a glorious future, and in order to win their belief, he ascribes his own splendid vision to Taliesin. (Williams 1944, p.D) Williams and Jackson believed the text in the manuscripts had been modernised over time, that it ‘preserves the essential character and content, and broadly speaking the words’ (Jackson 1971, p.1) of the original sixth-century poet. This attractive proposition is of course impossible to prove. Williams’ theory dealt with the lack of English loan-words and of the definite article, and pivoted significantly on the existence of incomplete rhymes that could have existed only in an older form of the words. He also suggested that some of the alliteration was ‘consistent with a stage in the history of the language when the consonants...had not yet finished undergoing mutation’ (Williams 1938, p. xcii). Celtic philologist Proinsais MacCana expressed syntactical and stylistic concerns about such an early date, including a lack of grammatical concord2 and use of the imperfect tense (Evans 1971, p.78) and D. Simon Evans claimed there was nothing in the text to suggest a date earlier than the twelfth century for the A-text, and the ninth or tenth for the B version (1978, p.88). David Greene suggests a date of about 850 on linguistic grounds, tracing the arguments of Jackson’s ‘linguistic earthquake’ theory as well as theorising that the early monasteries would have considered literature in Welsh as ‘barbaric’ and not written it down, and that some changes would affect spoken language but not a more conservative written form (1971, p.1). Jackson responded to these arguments again with the claim that a considerable amount of modernisation and dialectical change had taken place, though not much interpolation of completely new text. He also pointed out that the only existing evidence of monastic opinion on the matter comes from a single source, Gildas, and also that ‘phonologically there was no drastic difference between the Welsh of about 600 and that of about 800 or 900’ (1973, p.2). John Koch took up the challenge set by Greene and later by David Dumville for a ‘reconstructed’ early text by building a new version in what he terms ‘Common Archaic Neo- Brittonic…spoken along the 800-mile span between the rivers Forth and Loire in the period during which the poems are set’ (1997, p.xii). He ascribes to some degree to A.O.H. Jarman’s Strathclyde model of transmission, suggesting that an early version of the text was passed into Wales around 655, and the ‘reconstructed’ text must be traced back through several prior incarnations no longer extant. Padel called the work impressive, but made up of ‘hypotheses 2 The line gwyr a aeth Gatraeth is used more than once, with a plural subject but singular verb form, a construction found commonly in modern Welsh. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 23 built on hypotheses’ and warned against drawing too firm a conclusion from Koch’s deductions (1998, p.50). Koch mentions an assertion of Graham Isaac, one of the few things the two seem to agree on, suggesting that two distinct sources acted as exemplars for the B-text in the Book of Aneirin. Isaac points out that the significance they each derive from this ‘varies radically’ and that the textual history of the variant manuscripts is quite complex (1999, p.55). Based on the idea of there having been some minim confusion in previous texts before scribe B’s exemplars, he suggests there must have been multiple copies of the Gododdin prior to 1200. Allowing for lines of transmission, and because part of the B-text ‘shows clear evidence of reflecting a text from the period prior to the development of the prosthetic vowel’ (1999, p.65), he believes there existed a written copy of the poem in the tenth century. Regarding any previous versions, Isaac makes no claim but that of lack of evidence. One distinct difficulty in proving anything about an archaic text is the obscurity of the words themselves. In a study of one of the gorchanau, Isaac addresses a translation made by Kathryn Klar and Eve Sweetser in which they read the line ‘kyn y olo gouudelw’ as ‘before the covering of the inflicted shape.’ Golo, with its Irish cognate folach, he says, does mean ‘covering,’ but finds attestations of the phrase ‘kyn y olo’ that show its use is primarily to mean ‘before he was buried’ (Isaac 2002, p.76). This small exercise demonstrates the differences that even good linguists can find in the same passage, and the difficulty inherent in proving anything linguistic beyond a reasonable doubt. All this being examined, there is a lingering politicism surrounding the dating problem with deep roots reaching back to at least the ninth century and possibly before. The one shred of genuine historical evidence—the reference to Aneirin in the Historia Brittonum —should be worth something; if the poem were not written by him, why would the Reciter’s Prologue and a later scribe claim as much? Thomas Charles-Edwards suggests that ‘Aneirin was famous as the poet of the Gododdin even if he was not the author of the Gododdin’ (1978, p.63)—that is, that the attribution was meant to be genuine and there may well have been a general belief in the poem’s authorship even at the time. The desire by some for an early date is easily explained. To have the remains of a poem from the sixth century, three hundred years before the earliest surviving written Welsh, would be a window into a distant past that in so many ways has been lost—and that past could be seen as rich and glorious, a source of pride that has left its mark on northern Britain even now. Ifor Williams said, CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 24  I know that the Welsh song was written on vellum eleven hundred years ago: that has been proved to the hilt. I am growing more and more certain that the heart of it was sung by a proud and sorrowful British bard more than thirteen hundred years ago. (Williams 1944, p.70) The sense of a Welsh presence in yr Hen Ogledd, a grand place in the greater history of Britain, is not limited to modern scholars. The theory of a Strathclyde transmission suggests a medieval propaganda machine, meant to strengthen British claims to British land, in a way Padel describes as similar to the later kings of England and France sponsoring histories that allowed them to claim sovereignty over one another (Padel 1998, p.48). Paraphrasing Koch, he explains that if refugees from the fallen Gododdin kingdom had fled and settled in Strathclyde then the poem, attributed to Aneirin sometime after, would have been: …of political value to Strathclyde, for shortly after Bernicia’s annexation of the Gododdin territory in 638, a power vacuum was created there by southern pressure on Bernicia….Strathclyde’s position was further strengthened by its defeat of its north-western neighbour, Dalriada, at Strathcarron, also in 642. Strathclyde therefore had ample opportunity to claim the former territory of Gododdin, and the poetry was augmented to support this claim. (Padel 1998, p.46) This is when John Koch suggests the addition of the Strathcarron stanza, and would also provide some insight to the ‘Pais Dinogad’ gorchan, which reads, rather than as a ‘cradle song’ as described by Jackson (1969, p.46), as a mourning poem by the lady of a noble family in exile. There are possible political motives for the Gododdin, then, even in the earliest incarnations, but all attempts at building a story up around the text are ultimately only conjecture. There is more evidence, however, for a medieval fascination with the old North by the Welsh poets. The englynion of Llywarch Hen remove members of Urien Rheged’s family to Wales, drawing clear lines of association between Rheged and the ninth-century princes of Powys. And the thirteenth-century court poets, whose memories for evils done to their supposed ancestors was long, referenced events long past, or supposed to be long past. As Marged Haycock notes: ...we can note how they [the Northern battles] were used as glorious precedents, or events which could be avenged: so Llywelyn the Great’s victory at Chester in 1215 avenges the death of Cadwallon at the Battle of Caysgawl…six centuries earlier in 634. (Haycock ca. 2009, p.21) And Kenneth Jackson, in his discussion of the gorchanau rubric, says it shows ‘that the Gododdin was recognised as a great bardic classic and was recited as such at competitions. It CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 25 was still known by the poets of the “period of the Princes”’ (Jackson 1969, p.53)3 and makes note of later references to the poem and to the battle of Catraeth, from Cynddelw in the twelfth century to Dafydd Benfras in the thirteenth. In the end, the Gododdin does work as a window to the past—but not as far back as the sixth century and not with any kind of certainty. What we can know is summarised by Williams in Beginnings of Welsh Poetry: 'What they did we do not exactly know, further than this, they were loyal and brave, and true; their mothers wept for them, their kinsmen sorrowed for them, and their countrymen have remembered them for over thirteen hundred years.' (1972, p.69) Whether parts of it are genuine, as they may well be, the insight offered by the poem is limited. But even if the date of composition is later—ninth century as per Greene or Evans, or tenth as per Isaac—this still allows for a tradition in which the Gododdin, in some form, was passed down for centuries. We can see what scribes and poets, from a span that may reach three hundred years, thought worthy of copying and saving in multiple forms. We can see that there existed a drive to keep hold of and be part of an older bardic tradition, the pride the early Welsh poets felt in their predecessors, and what the idea of an old heroic age of the North meant to those writing a thousand years before our time. 3 The rubric says, ‘Every verse of the Gododdin is worth a whole continuous poem because of its rank in the poetic competition. Each one of the Gorchanau is worth three poems and three score and three hundred; this is the reason, because the numbers of the men who went to Catraeth are commemorated in the Gorchanau. No bard ought to go to the competition without this song any more than a man ought to go to battle without weapons. Here now begins the Gorchan of Maeldderw. Taliesin sang it, and gave to it as high a rank as to all the verses of the Gododdin and its three Gorchanau in the poetic competition.’ For deeper analysis of the Gorchan Maeldderw, see Graham Isaac, ‘Gwarchan Maeldderw: A Lost Medieval Classic?’, CMCS 44. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 26  Appendix John Koch reconstructs and translates the first section of the A-text thusly (1997, p.52-3): Neo-Brittonic Reconstruction4: Guredïm guûr, oït guas, guurït amm-dias, mer'ch muth mùng-bras guotan mortûït mïcr-guas, Guell gurëim . . . Cïnt ï-guoyt dï-laur nocït ï-nöch't'įợr, cïnt ï-buyt dï-brein noc ï-arcïbrein. Middle Welsh: Gređyf gŵr, oed gwas, ŵrhyt am đias, meirch mwth myngvras, a dan vorđŵyt mëgyrwas, ysgŵyt ysgauyn llëdan ar bedrein mein vüan, kleđyuawr glas glan, ethỷ eür aphan. Ny bi ef a vi cas ë rof a thi gwell gwnëif â thi: ar wawt dy uoli. Kynt y waet ë-lawr, nogyt y neithyawr kynt y vwyt y vrein noc y argyurein. English translation With the instinct of a hero, [though] immature in years, [with] boisterous valour, [and] with a swift, thick-necked horse under the thigh of a splendid youth, [with] a broad light shield on the crupper of his slender swift [horse], [with] bright blue swords of painstaking gold wirework. 4 Some characters are not able to be recreated without specialist fonts; I have come as close as possible to imitating them but there may be a few discrepancies. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 27 It will not be... hate between me and you. I shall do better with you, praising you in inspired song. His blood flowed to the ground before his wedding rite. His flesh went to crows rather than to thy burial rite. CREATIVE SPACES VOL. 1 NO. 1 28  Bibliography Charles-Edwards, T. M., 1978. ‘The authenticity of the Gododdin: an historian’s view.’ In Bromwich, R. and Jones, R.B., ed. Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd. Cardiff: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, pp. 44-71. Evans, D. 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