Myrddin Poetry Project – what treasures have been unearthed?
You might have heard of the legend of the Arthurian Merlin but did you know he had poetry attributed to him?
Prosiect Barddoniaeth Myrddin (Myrddin Poetry Project) aims to study the poetry attributed to him before 1800.
Dr Llewelyn Hopwood is a Research Associate at the school and one of those working on Prosiect Barddoniaeth Myrddin. The project is a joint piece of work between Cardiff University and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth and will culminate in a website containing all editions, as well as further research and teaching resources.
Although the project looks at the development of the figure over the centuries, and the relationship between the Welsh poems and the wider Arthurian tradition, the day-to-day work is divided between editing and analysing the early poetry, undertaken by Dr Ben Guy for the first 18 months, before the work passed to Dr Hopwood, and the later poetry by Dr Jenny Day.
With the project now halfway through its three-year research phase, Dr Hopwood talks below about a few treasures that have come to light, and gives an insight into what the researchers, which include Dr Dylan Foster Evans and Dr David Callander from the School of Welsh, and Professor Ann Parry Owen from the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, have learnt about this mysterious and wizarding figure so far.
"The early poems are famous within the field, but as this is the first time many of them have been edited, Dr Ben Guy has made several important textual discoveries as he compares all the copies of the poems, not just the copies found in the famous manuscripts. It has been proved, for example, that the Black Book of Carmarthen does not preserve the full text of the famous poem 'Yr Afallennau': there are only extracts.
"The same goes for the poem ‘Gwasgargerdd Fyrddin’. We now understand that the end of the poem was preserved in later manuscripts, but not in the White Book of Rhydderch or the Red Book of Hergest. This is an exciting discovery as the ending is highly entertaining. It criticises the founding of the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida and details the Viking attacks on the former monastery of St Dogmaels in 988.
"Another poem that was regarded as a masterpiece of medieval Welsh literature, although we were unsure of its status as a whole, was 'Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer'. Now, thanks to the editing, we are certain that the poem is a unified and coherent composition: a poem that centres on the relationship between Myrddin and his sister Gwenddydd, and between themes of death and the end of the world in a way previously unknown.
"There are thematic as well as textual discoveries in Dr Jenny Day's research on the later poems. It has emerged that Myrddin is an extremely flexible figure, as evidenced by the examples where a predictive poem is attributed to a number of different poets when going from one manuscript to another.
"In one case ('Mi a’th ofynnaf Ferddin’), there is a dialog between Myrddin and another early poet called Culfardd in the oldest manuscript, but, in later versions, there is a dialog by Fyrddin and 'Cwsg-fardd' (the Sleeping Bard), by Daliesin and 'Bardd Adda' (Adda Fras), and by Daliesin and Myrddin.
"As well as being flexible, Myrddin is also a secret poet. We get a strong picture of his enigmatic persona in a dialogic poem recorded in Elis Gruffydd's Chronicle, where Myrddin says: Myfi a wn y dydd a fydd, / ac eto ni ddatgelaf i y dydd a fydd (‘I know the appointed day that shall come, / and yet I will not make known the day that shall come’).
"Furthermore, we now know that the poets of these poems have been fond of building the mystery of Myrddin into the making of the text itself, including with intricate references that are like cryptic crossword clues.
"In a poem from the Wars of the Roses period, the crown going to the 'rich hill' is mentioned, but this was a person, not a location: Here we have Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, with 'Richmond' ('rich' and 'mound') elements translated into Welsh: 'rich hill'.
"Work will continue over the next 18 months, with more wide-ranging discoveries expected, such as the above, as well as detailed ones, such as the handful of words where no other example of their use has surfaced ('hapax legomena'): words such as piborig ('like a pipe') and cehydrawl ('of equal strength')."
