Arthurian Literature XXI: Celtic Arthurian Material edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (review)

Abstract

CERIDWEN LLOYD-MORGAN, ed., Arthurian Literature XXI: Celtic Arthurian Material. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. vii, 136. ISBN: 0-84384-028-6. $80. The latest volume of Arthurian Literature showcases six articles on Celtic Arthurian material. Different from The Arthur of the Welsh (Cardiff 1991) and O. J. Padel's Arthur in Medieval Welsh Tradition (Cardiff 2000), together a nearly exhaustive 'resume'of scholarly 'consensus,' the essays collected here offer 'cutting-edge' and 'speculative investigations' of Irish, Welsh, and Breton texts (3). Editor Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan introduces these essays as a nudge to a field that to her remains 'depressingly' over-reliant on 'Loomisite' methodology, the 'exasperating' survival of which she attributes to a language barrier that bars English-only readers from working with primary texts in medieval Celtic languages and limits if not denies their access to significant secondary scholarship published in Modern Welsh (2). Her primary aim, after making a call for Welsh language studies, is to bring current, innovative, dramatically post-Loomis scholarship to a wider audience. Contra Patrick Sims-Williams, Ann Dooley argues for a significant degree of cultural contact across the Irish Sea, and her article 'Arthur of the Irish' posits a 'reciprocal performative system of story exchange between the two nations [Ireland and Wales]' (21; echoed by Sioned Davies, 38). Of note here is the apparent influence in Ireland of the Historia Brittonum and its British Arthur, a tradition which Dooley links to an Arthurian episode of the Acaliam na Senorach (printed and translated 24-28) and which presents a decidedly negative version of Arthur as 'unstable and uncouth, a grabber of other people's property' (23). Sioned Davies is similarly concerned with the intertextual, performative aspect of medieval narrative, and her emphasis on the 'all-pervasive' 'acoustic dimension' of Culhwch ac Olwen demonstrates the 'theatrical' aspects of a written tale meant to be voiced (48, 49). To highlight strings of repetition, alliteration, and rhyme, as well as 'to transmit the rhythm and essence of the oral performance to the printed page,' Davies divides several sections of prose into lines (36-7, 39-40, 46). Passages long associated with Irish 'runs' and Welsh rhetoric or araith here take on the look of Gogynfeirdd verse, and the prose tale is shown convincingly to represent the rhetorical and performative worlds of both poet and storyteller. An important cultural and literary distinction between the Arthurian court of Chretiens Erec etEnide and the cyuoeth (lands, territory) of Gereint uabErbin marks Helen A. …