Creative Bilingualism in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry

Abstract

This article considers why bilingual poets from medieval Wales exploited their various languages as avenues of creativity. It discusses five poems from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that synthesize Welsh and either English or Latin to varying degrees. The article untangles the conscious and often complex linguistic integration, using the term 'extralinguistic bilingualism' to do so with two exclusively English poems that nonetheless use Welsh strict metre and 'orthography'. One of these is a series of once anonymous English englynion recently found to be the work of prolific poet Tudur Aled, who flourished in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth century. By examining the poems in tandem and contextualizing their apparent isolation within Wales's contemporary linguistic landscape and within the phenomena of multilingual poetry, Marian lyrics and 'aureate' diction, the impetus behind their curious hybridity is queried. It is argued that comedy, piety and literary craft are key considerations, and that all are connected by an overarching concern for relative linguistic prestige: the perceived divergence between the social and literary status of each language.