A Rare History of the Genre-Setting Welsh Literature
Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton, eds. The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. 826pp, 6X9”, hardback. ISBN: 978-1-107-10676-5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
*****
Books about our modern world are far more dishonest than histories of past centuries. After every responsible party for a massacre is dead, historians finally find documents proving whodunnit. If the world is seen in the contrast between modern accounts and past histories in any period, it always seems as if things have rapidly progressed for the better in the lifetime of those around the world in the present. This illusion of progress is merely the cloaking of horrific current events with propaganda. As these events retreat into history, they become mere dramatic stories like fiction meant to entertain with their terror and tragedy. New tyrants appear to read such stories to figure out how to cause new mayhem rather than to avoid past mistakes. Given my personal sense of helplessness to change things for the better in the present, I enjoy retreating into these truthful accounts. In these pages I suddenly understand replicated scenarios playing out in the news. If I just watch the news, it all appears mystifying: who is causing all these wars and inequality? Then, that same evening, I read a history about the Inquisition or about the Witch Trials, and the answers are blatant. No, Trump is not suffering a Witch Trial or the Inquisition; he is putting all Americans through equivalently horrifying trials with his anti-human policies and corruption. Thus, I now come across this stress-relieving history of Welsh Literature from the much-admired “Cambridge History of…” series. I have recently realized I have a gap in my knowledge when it comes to Wales among the British Isles; I studied Scotland and its literature for my PhD dissertation, and English literature across most of the rest of my education. But authors from Wales appear less likely to advertise this origin than those from Scotland or Ireland, places with more pronounced nationalistic literature traditions. Always afraid to be embarrassed by being found out not to know something, I enter this book with hope for enlightenment.
Given the universal ignorance regarding Wales, the book thankfully begins with a glossary of Welsh literary terms and a series of maps representing geographic changes in this region over the centuries. The “Introduction” explains that the previous version of this book called A History of Welsh Literature was released in 1955, and just as I have been pondering, it was corrupted by current political events that prevented it from honestly describing what should be an apolitical history of fiction (i). The long gap between that volume and this one indicates that Welsh literature scholarship really has been relatively dormant: explaining my own cluelessness in this field. These introductory notes are followed by a detailed chapter on the early history of the region. Then a chapter by Helen Fulton details “The Earliest Writing in Welsh” beginning with its Latin tradition, and onto the earliest surviving texts in the Welsh language: The Black Book of Carmarthe, The Book of Aneirin, and The Book of Taliesin: I have never heard of any of these and I believe myself to be widely read. These are the “four ancient books” referred to by Skene, which represent “early poets” “composing in Welsh before the Normal conquest”. This text was written in sections “between the ninth and twelfth centuries” by a group of distinct scribes and authors (28). This is very interesting for my current “Shakespeare” project, so I will put this book aside to read it more closely for clues to solve these later puzzles. How was collaboration viewed in these early texts: why were so many writers editing a single text rather than starting their own compositions?
Every page of every chapter is dense with similar insights in a variety of different fields of study. For example Diana Luft’s chapter describes similarities between early texts and the roots of the Bildungsroman as they are also “charting the main character’s development from ‘nice but dim’ into a wise and successful leader… or is it simply a joke that someone so lacking in common sense is called ‘Pwyll’ (literally ‘sense’)” (74)? This type of self-questioning is a sign that a critic is disclosing the true ambiguity in interpreting any text that was composed nearly a millennium ago. While some compilations of essays by different authors can leave a few rough essays that fill space with nonsense, it seems all of the participating authors are aware of the great task before them and have taken the challenge to heart.
The publisher summarizes it thus: “The literature of Wales is one of the oldest continuous literary traditions in Europe. The earliest surviving poetry was forged in the battlefields of post-Roman Wales and the ‘Old North’ of Britain, and the Welsh-language poets of today still write within the same poetic tradition. In the early twentieth century, Welsh writers in English outnumbered writers in Welsh for the first time, generating new modes of writing and a crisis of national identity which began to resolve itself at the end of the twentieth century with the political devolution of Wales within the United Kingdom. By considering the two literatures side by side, this book argues that bilingualism is now a normative condition in Wales. Written by leading scholars, this book provides a comprehensive chronological guide to fifteen centuries of Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English against a backdrop of key historical and political events in Britain.”
Linguists, literary scholars and historians will find material to aid their research in these dense pages. The translations of Medieval Welsh alone would be sufficient to fill an average book. While I have been studying the literature of the British Isles for a couple of decades, it is amazing how ignorant I remain of Welsh literature; this reinforces the need not only for me to read this book more closely, but also for members of the general public with a blind spot in it to review these pages to improve their comprehension of the British islands and their distinct literature cultures that have only recently been artificially merged. Given the rarity of books about Welsh literature, all libraries definitely need to acquire this history to fill this oversight. And courses on British literature should incorporate either this history of some of the texts discussed herein, or otherwise they risk being blamed of really being courses in English literature…