Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe Matthieu Boyd (bio) Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. ISBN 978–1–78683–343–3 (cloth), e-book formats available. 432 pages. £75 (e-book £34.99) / US$100. The Arthur of the Welsh (Bromwich, Jarman, & Roberts 1991, henceforth AoW) was hailed as a landmark book, and was followed, in due course, by seven more Arthurs in the Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages series co-published by the University of Wales Press and the Vinaver Trust. Now the series has come full circle with Arthur in the Celtic languages (henceforth AiCL), which is both much more and slightly less than a second edition of AoW. That is, AiCL should happily join AoW on everyone’s bookshelf, but it is not clear that it can entirely replace it, given AoW’s continuing value for the history of scholar-ship. Nor would AiCL seem to entirely replace the other single book that has so far been the closest thing to it, the special volume (xxi) of Arthurian literature on Celtic Arthurian material (Lloyd-Morgan 2004). For each chapter of AiCL, there will be earlier work that comes to mind—often by the same authors—that is similar and perhaps goes into significantly more or less detail, including chapters of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Arthurian literature edited by Helen Fulton (2009). AiCL brings almost all of this together in one place and makes a few significant revisions; and instead of the ‘Celtic origins’ framing in Fulton’s Companion, here the Celtic literatures take center stage. The introduction to AiCL mentions some of the developments since AoW that justify revisiting the Welsh material. The Cornish, Breton, and Gaelic coverage, of course, is mostly new to the series, and wonderful to have in this convenient form. [End Page 251] AoW did discuss saints’ lives, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and related prophecies, for which the primary reference would now be the chapters by Andrew Breeze, Siân Echard, and Julia Crick in The Arthur of medieval Latin literature (Echard 2011). AoW also started with a brief inquiry into the historical Arthur, which has fallen by the wayside in AiCL in favor of approaching Arthur from the outset as a literary and cultural phenomenon. AiCL opens with Nerys Ann Jones on ‘Arthurian references in early Welsh poetry’ (see her more extensive treatment in Jones 2019), John Bollard on ‘The earliest Myrddin poems’, and Jenny Rowland on ‘Trystan and Esyllt’. The Welsh Triads, meanwhile, show up not in this earliest round of texts, but in a later section on ‘Influences and re-compositions’, which reframes them as an evolving corpus showing European influence, as opposed to primordial lore. The ‘native Welsh’ tales Culhwch ac Olwen and the famously undatable Breuddwyd Rhonabwy are covered by Simon Rodway and Catherine McKenna respectively, and benefit from the singular focus: these chapters not only situate the stories, but ask important questions about what they are saying. There follows a section on translations and adaptations into Welsh: Katherine Himsworth discusses Brut y brenhinedd, the Welsh version of Geoffrey of Monmouth; then there are chapters on Owein, Geraint, and Peredur. These are treated independently in AiCL: the usefulness of grouping them together as ‘the three romances’ is considered and rejected at 113–114. The respective chapters—by Regine Reck, Poppe, and Lloyd-Morgan—highlight specifics of the adaptation from the corresponding romances by Chrétien de Troyes and related shifts in theme and values. A topic mentioned only briefly here (111–113, in Poppe & Lloyd-Morgan’s overview ‘The first adaptations from French. History and context of a debate’) is the problem of Celtic influence on Arthurian literature in French and English. A common view prior to AiCL (see, for example, Hellman 2014) has been that, even if the Welsh adaptations show influence from Chrétien, they also reflect the source material Chrétien had to work with. Since The Arthur of the French (Burgess & Pratt 2006) did not go into...