The World of Myth Magazine

So, recently I had Covid. I genuinely do not believe numerical scores can stand for complex opinions but if I was to give one: 0/10 - would not recommend. At least it gets you a week off work, I guess.

But while I was lying in bed, thinking of all the things I could have been doing instead of being very sick, I had this overwhelming feeling of loss. I was losing time, that kept slipping away so quickly even though being ill is boring, and I could have been doing so many things instead. Loss is very much a theme in the poem we are looking at today too.

Before the birth of England, the British islands were a warzone. Long before the English arrived in around 600 AD, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons) from Germany and Denmark migrated and settled in the south east, there were other tribes and peoples that called Britain home. Many of them are now lost to history because Anglo-Saxons wiped out most of them out when they conquered what is now England, but it was a long process and there was a lot of fierce and bloody resistance.

The Gododdin (or in the original Old Welsh, Y Gododdin – apparently pronounced ‘God-oth-in’) is a poem about that resistance, and in 2021 it was translated into modern English by Gillian Clarke, who was the Welsh poet laureate between 2008 to 2016. Clarke’s version has breathed new life and interest into this ancient poem, but if it will become a commercial success with the general reader like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf or Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight still remains to be seen. At the very least this poem does deserve to be more widely known, read and appreciated.

This is a bilingual book, with the original Old Welsh is on one page and the English translation on the opposing page, which is something that should really be a lot more common when a book has been translated. Also, I do not know Welsh, and certainly not Old Welsh; this is (for me personally) not like reviewing Armitage’s Sir Gawain or the poetry of Catullus, where I either already have or can easily access the original text, and I can read both Latin and Middle English well enough, especially with the help of a dictionary or a glossary. As such, I can only be reading and reviewing The Gododdin as a casual reader. I do not know very much about the history of the original text, or the historical context it was written in.

Apparently historians know little for sure about this time period as well, making the text of Y Gododdin quite mysterious. We think it was written by a Brythonic poet named Aneirin, someone we do not know very much about. The poem, in the form we have it, was written in Edinburgh, Scotland, sometime in the 13^th century AD, but the poem itself is much older - dated to about the 7^th century AD. It is not an epic poem like Beowulf or the Iliad, a narrative based around a theme, but instead it is a series of laments to the fallen after a battle at ‘Catraeth’ (maybe somewhere in Yorkshire) against the Anglo-Saxons.

The Britons lost that battle but it is unknown how many people were killed, and strangely not even the poet seems to know either: at some points it is suggested three people survived, at some points one (presumably the poet himself). He also simply gives the number three hundred people in connection with the battle, but it is unknown if he means three hundred Briton lords leading their own soldiers against the Anglo-Saxons, or three hundred people that made up the entire Briton army, or three hundred people combined from both the Briton and Anglo-Saxon army. It is also not known exactly where this battle occurred. With three hundred being such a prominent number in this poem, and it is a series of elegies (basically poetic laments) for dead warriors, and the poem is so long, you might have assumed that there would be three hundred stanzas – fitting into some kind of theme, but there are only one hundred stanzas and less heroes than that named and lamented. There are a lot of questions marks, and we may not (ever) fully understand all this fully.

But when reading this poem it is easy to feel a strong sense of loss and what once was. Close your eyes and you can almost imagine the people being mourned, as you listen to this poem being spoken in a mead hall. Many of these stanzas feel very heartfelt, and feeling the emotion is very easy. It is almost like you yourself knew these dead warriors in a past life. This is a series of elegies, but The Goddodin is also a long series of little snapshots of different people’s personalities that the poet cared for deeply, and so reading this poem is an emotional experience.

In her introduction, Clarke says that she made no attempt to recreate the poetic beauty of the original poem. This might be true, but there are still some really beautiful lines and stanzas here. For example stanza 29 to a warrior called Isag begins:

Isag, esteemed man of the south, his

manners smooth as summer seas,

genial and generous

as flowing mead.

There are also small details that are genuinely mysterious. In stanza 99 we have what might be the first ever reference to King Arthur:

He fed ravens on the fortress wall

although he was no Arthur

And that is it, and what this could mean and who this Arthur is has left scholars puzzling ever since.

But despite all this mystery and beauty, it is not easy to read page after page of elegies with basically the same or similar styles and conventions in a single sitting. It might be easier to read this poem piece by piece, putting the book down for a while between bursts. This is absolutely not the fault of the translator, or really the poem, it is simply the nature of this type of poetry – especially considering we do not have any real connection to the people named here, like the original audience would have.

That original audience, and their culture and everything about them, is irreparably lost. As such, this poem is a kind of a message from an almost forgotten past. A kind of indirect ‘we were here once’. This poem is a eulogy, a style of poetry usually written to remember the dead, and it has since become a eulogy for culture it came out of because of the cruel of history and its scythe. The sense of loss here is not just from the content or words themselves, but the loss of the world this poem come from.

If you are interested in British history and medieval literature then this is certainly a book to look at. It is different, and it is well written – it is exactly the sort of thing that would have inspired J.R.R Tolkien like other literature, Norse and Anglo-Saxon, did. However, it might be a slight disappointment too – and for reasons you might not be able to really explain, even to yourself.