Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature
400
Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature
400eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783165872 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Prophecy, apocalypse and return
1a. Beginnings
Mor druan gennyf mor druan
British history is apocalyptic history, and Welsh literature reflects this. The island of Britain was – in one tradition – revealed as a Promised Land in a visionary dream to its founder, and human sovereignty was assured on the defeat of the giant Gogmagog, when the island was given its name. Prophecy and apocalypse go hand in hand in this foundation legend, and such apocalypse is refigured repeatedly in the literature as the legendary (and perhaps mythical)sovereignty of Britain is lost and relost. A constant backdrop, it takes centre stage in many of the most monumental works, most famously in the lament of Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch, bewailing the death by beheading of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in AD 1282. This event is depicted as the end of nation, reason, history and world. Clearly apocalyptic also is the story of Branwen, the second branch of the Mabinogi, wherein Bendigeidfran, crowned king of 'this island' ('brenin coronawc ar yr ynys hon'), suffering the death of a Fisher King during total war in Ireland, orders his own decapitation. The two self-mirroring islands of Britain and Ireland, each otherworldly and unheimlich to each other, clash with the force of pure self-annihilation: 'Da a dwy ynys a diffeithwyt' ('Two good islands have been laid waste'), cries Branwen before breaking her heart and dying. The sovereignty of Britain is lost, geographies are reinscribed, new historical periods are initiated, and worlds change.
Schlegel famously commented that '[d]er Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet'('The historian is a backwards-turned prophet'). In Welsh, history and prophecy are identical not only if considered figuratively or tropologically (turning backwards), but even literally. Legendary British history (brut) – with its origins in the foundation of Britain by Aeneas' grandson, Brutus – is, to the medieval Welsh mind, and also to Middle Welsh writing, identified with the prophecy of brud. Not only were the words brut and brud often indistinguishable in the earlier tradition (whose orthography did not distinguish clearly between word-final -t and -d), but the words were used fully interchangeably by later poets:
[D]engys tystiolaeth y cywyddwyr nad oeddynt yn gwahaniaethu'n haearnaidd rhwng brut a brud. Golygai'r ddwy ffurf y ddau beth, hanesyddiaeth a phroffwydoliaeth, fel ei gilydd iddynt. Gofynion y gynghanedd a'r brifodl yn anad dim a effeithiai ar yr union ffurf a ddewisid mewn llinell o gywydd.
[The evidence provided by the cywyddwyr [fifteenth-century poets using the cywydd metre] demonstrates that they did not differentiate decisively between brut and brud. Both forms had both meanings: historiography and prophecy. The form chosen in a line of a cywydd depended, above all, on the demands of rhyme and cynghanedd.]
Brut/d is a unified discourse in which prophecy speaks of the fulfilment of an original British history. According to this discourse, the British (the Welsh) are the true inheritors of the island's post-Trojan sovereignty. The main elements of this ultimately eschatological discourse constitute the 'Matter of Britain', used by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, and became the basis for the pan-European Arthurian legend (the figure of the 'once and future king' features among key borrowings). Within the Welsh tradition itself this material is widespread from the earliest texts and the earliest manuscripts.
These legends are perhaps not mythical in anthropology's sense of mediation between gods and men, but they are mythologies in that they create patterns of understanding – mythos – that enable historical cognition. History – and historiography – are necessarily more than discourses concerning the past, and that past may certainly not be considered a vanished age. Histories are by definition written by the victors, when the figuration of the past is the act that claims it for the present, thus enabling a specific figuration of the lived moment. It is clear, too, that in considering an apocalyptic history (as an extreme example), there is more than simple linear temporal progression: the structure of historical revolutions is such that the accompanying paradigm shift is all-encompassing, including the structure of time itself. Myths are in this way entirely true, even if not for everybody; they are certainly real, widely shared and fervently contested. The Welsh were far from the only ones who believed themselves to be the real British (even if they were – and are – often tempted to see themselves as the only original ones).
From this point of view it is unsurprising that the medieval Welsh often saw themselves as being on the wrong side of history, and even in the wrong kind of time. If it would take an apocalypse to refigure this narrative sufficiently, then perhaps one should be hoped for. Or more than hoped for: predicted and promised. Political prophecy provides this glance forwards towards a subsequent turn of the wheel of (mis)fortune, taking as a premise the idea that the widening gyres are plural, and that more ripples in time are yet to come. Such prophecies are common in Welsh manuscripts from the earliest surviving codices of the thirteenth century. Indeed, the initial poem in the oldest Welsh-language book of poetry is a melancholic prophetic dialogue between Myrddin and Taliesin, and literature proclaiming and promising regained sovereignty remained politically viable at least until the Tudor dynasty stole the British crown. Henry Tudor of the family of Penmynydd, Anglesey, entered battle at Bosworth Field in 1485 under the standard of the red dragon, knowing that he was seen by many as the mab darogan, the long-promised and finally returning hero. 'Henri' would be the latest name by which the mab darogan was known, following in the hoary tradition of Arthur, Owain, Cynan, Cadwaladr, Caswallon, Hiriell and others. Henry's success, however, brought an end to the tradition when, in the presence of the returned king, the prophets fell silent:
[N]i allai bardd ganu brud ar ôl coroni'r Tudur cyntaf am ddau reswm amlwg. Yn gyntaf, ef oedd y mab darogan yn ôl brudwyr enwog diwedd y bymthegfed ganrif, ac felly ni ellid canu i fab darogan newydd heb fradychu'r traddodiad. Ac yn ail ... roedd proffwydo yn erbyn y brenin yn gyfystyr â brad. Yn wir, deddfwyd yn erbyn proffwydoliaethau ... drwy gydol cyfnod y Tuduriaid.
[A poet could not sing brud ['political prophecy'] following the coronation of the first Tudor for two evident reasons. Firstly, he was the mab darogan ['son of prophecy', i.e., the returning hero] according to the famous brudwyr [prophetic poets, poets of brud] of the end of the fifteenth century, and thus it would not be possible to sing to a new mab darogan without betraying the tradition. Secondly ... prophecy against the king was equivalent to treachery. Indeed, laws were passed against prophecies ... throughout the Tudor period.]
Though it may have been silenced at the courtly levels of the professional poets, the tradition was far from fully dead, and political prophetic material had a significant manuscript afterlife until at least the late seventeenth century. Indeed, copying of political prophecies in the post-medieval period far exceeds what was seen at the time of their initial historical relevance. Of course, the figures of Arthur and Owain capture the popular political imagination even in our own century, as full devolution to Cardiff (if not full independence from London) of legislature and executive are anticipated in literature, speeches and songs whose rhetoric does not shy from medievalist metaphor. Naming the mab darogan 'Henry' brought not so much an end to the line of prophecies as a caesura: the identification was (once again) reinterpreted as mistaken identity. The beast was seen to be a rough one.
* * *
There is little doubt among scholars of British 'political prophecy' where the main historical origins lie. While it is ultimately unprofitable to seek a single source, Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Prophetiae Merlini' is, for clear and useful reasons, the prime point of departure for the English tradition. Together with Geoffrey's Vita Merlini (c. 1150), the 'Prophetiae', which circulated independently before being incorporated as Book 7 of the massively influential Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136), translated into the voice of Merlin the main elements of the 'Matter of Britain' whose earliest literary witness is the ninth-century Historia Brittonum. Geoffrey's work introduced to European traditions beyond Wales not only the far-echoing voice of Merlin, but also many of the most important rhetorical features that became the basis for a large body of political prophecy in the 'Galfridian' style.
The 'Prophetiae' are delivered by the young Merlin to king Vortigern (Gwrtheyrn), when he is brought as a blood-sacrifice to strengthen the foundations of a collapsing tower. Merlin immediately identifies the source of the problem: under the earth, at the bottom of a pool, inside two hollow stones 'you will see two Dragons which are sleeping.' On waking the dragons, the main event of 'Y Broffwydoliaeth Fawr' ('The Great Prophecy') ensues:
While Vortigern, King of the Britons, was still sitting on the bank of the pool which had been drained of its water, there emerged two Dragons, one white, one red. As soon as they were near enough to each other, they fought bitterly, breathing out fire as they panted ... As they struggled on ... the King ordered Ambrosius Merlin to explain just what this battle of the Dragons meant.
Merlin bursts into tears and enters a 'prophetic trance', saying:
Alas for the Red Dragon, for its end is near. Its cavernous dens shall be occupied by the White Dragon, which stands for the Saxons whom you have invited over. The Red Dragon represents the people of Britain, who will be overrun by the White One: for Britain's mountains and valleys shall be levelled, and the streams in its valleys shall run with blood.
Red and white (blood and water?) opposite and identical, violently clash in a prophecy whose biblical imagery is manifest. Further, red and white, as is well known, frequently signify the Otherworld in medieval Welsh prose. Less obvious is the semantic layer that connects the dragons to the prophecy–history continuum. In the Latin texts the dragons are vermes, and Sims-Williams has suggested that their appearance in such texts is 'perhaps due to the word gormes having by-forms wormes and *wermes in early Welsh.' Gormes ('oppressor, violator') and armes ('prophecy') are not merely similar, but etymologically related and semantically convergent.
As the two dragons rage at the edge of the pool, Merlin utters his series of increasingly strange prophecies, populated by a cast including the Boar of Cornwall, the German Worm, The Lion of Justice, the Boar of Commerce, and the mysterious 'Sixth' (sextus), accompanied by various kites, lilies and nettles, eagles, lynxes and bulls – characters that proceed and vanish from the stage with the certainty and regularity of the shadow of the sundial, or the 'processions that pass around the cathedral clock at noon', chased (or led) by the ultimate authority of the Reaper. In this case (also), the Death that provides the authority and that voices the ultima multis is history – the brut that is smokily thrashing in its death throes even as Merlin recounts its afterlife and second life. A certain telos is reached early on in Merlin's visionary narrative, at the only moment when animal symbolism briefly yields to personal naming. Not only are the heroes given names, but this nominal clarification is extended to the entire Island of Britain: it is itself renamed, in an echo of the original renaming that founded the brut. The acts of renaming and of regaining sovereignty are simultaneous and synonymous; in an echo of Adamic naming, the sign and referent are made adequate to each other.
Cadwallader shall summon Conanus and shall make an alliance with Albany. Then the foreigners shall be slaughtered and the rivers will run with blood.
The mountains of Armorica shall erupt and Armorica itself shall be crowned with Brutus' diadem. Kambria shall be filled with joy and the Cornish oaks shall flourish. The island shall be called by the name of Brutus and the title given to it by the foreigners shall be done away with.
This 'genesis', perhaps predictably, becomes a further apocalypse: ends were in beginnings and beginnings are in ends. Cynan and Cadwaladr leave the stage, and are followed by bellowing horns, a speaking forest, a town-building Hedgehog, a matricidal Fox and other bestial marvels until the planets and constellations themselves enter final chaos. Merlin, says Geoffrey, 'filled all those present with amazement by the equivocal meaning of his words', and none is more amazed than Vortigern, who insists Merlin prophesy his own fate. Merlin reminds him of his personal responsibility for the downfall of the Britons, the result of Vortigern's self-serving hospitality in welcoming the treacherous Saxons to the island. The guests, he indicates, like so many parasites, will kill the host and make his-story theirs: in this historical caesura, guest will become host. Guest, host, ghost: etymologically one. The spectral repetition of these fateful acts will haunt the history of Britain.
Welsh political prophecy is both the same as and different from its English counterpart. It is the same entity in as much as – arbor fertilis – we see the product of a stem that has been cut and transported east. It is different for the same reasons. 'Prophetiae Merlini' and Vita Merlini, the 'origins' of most English political prophecy and the sources of the eponymous Galfridian style, themselves have origins, as Geoffrey himself claimed as he sought authority for his work, in the liber vetustissimus he claimed to have been given and to have translated. This liber was an ancient repository of Welsh and British tradition: 'Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford ... presented me with a certain very ancient book written in the British language ... At Walter's request I have taken the trouble to translate the book into Latin.' Geoffrey was from a certain perspective entirely unduplicitous in his acknowledgement of his sources, for even if no such physical liber has ever been found or otherwise attested, the metaphorical identification of books with tradition per se is neither uncommon nor unusual. Curtius was among the first to consider the symbolism of the book in western literature and culture, noting that Jesus is the first god to be iconographically associated with the codex. The centrality of the book to the Abrahamic religions, along with the explicit and exclusive naming of the 'Bible', is consistent with the identification of the tradition of brut/d as allegory of the wider Christian eschatological narrative. The llyfr brud ('book of brud'), representing the tradition of brut/d for poets such as Dafydd Gorlech, is a potential synecdoche for historical and prophetic understanding per se.
* * *
The 'cast' of Merlin's visions reappear again and again in the medieval political prophecies – eternal revenants – as various factions from various nations recycle and reinterpret the events recounted before and after the return of the heroes. Equally pervasive – and probably more important generically – was the 'Galfridian' style, the 'arbitrary' symbolism of representing a promised leader by an animal. The term 'arbitrary' was popularised by Taylor, who took it from an introductory essay to the Bridlington prophecies. This essay, appended to four manuscript witnesses of this long series of verses, interprets the poem and identifies ten kinds of 'prophetic disguise' by which elements such as the name of the object of prophecy or the date of fulfilment of the prophecy may be obscured.
The ten kinds of 'disguise', as listed by Taylor, are: (i) 'arbitrary names', e.g., use of animals' names to represent leaders; (ii) 'accidental designation' such as punning on the names or the arms of the object; (iii) 'equivocation', a rather catch-all category; (iv) metaphor; (v) words as roman numerals, e.g., 'milvij' for MLVII; (vi) 'etymological translation', i.e., translation of component parts of words such as mare mortis for Mortimer; (vii) 'enigma', similar to a cryptic crossword clue; (viii) division of words; (ix) 'ambiguous words'; (x) abbreviation. Of these, animal substitution had by the twelfth century become by far the most common in England. This was a symbolic language with many roots, and while it may seem a natural deductive step, given the chronology, to conclude Galfridian influence, it also has clear echoes with the Book of Revelation and the rich Welsh tradition of encomiastic metaphor: why should a rich chieftain not be called 'boar of battle', 'bull in war', 'eagle' or 'hawk'?
(Continues…)
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