The Translation of the Sibylla Tiburtina into Middle Welsh

Abstract

The Sibylla Tiburtina is a medieval prophetic text with roots in Late Antiquity. It tells the story of the wise Sybil, who is summoned to the court of the Roman emperor when a hundred of his senators dream the same dream during the same night. Her explanation of this dream is a lengthy prophecy about future kings and their qualities and faults, as well as about the natural disasters and wars the future will bring. The whole culminates in a prophecy about the signs of the Day of Judgment. The text has a long and complicated history of transmission. Originally written in Byzantine Greek, it has undergone considerable changes since being translated into Latin around the turn of the first millennium. Of this Latin text we have an edition with variants published by Ernst Sackur (1898). More recently, Anke Holdenried has worked extensively on the various versions of the Latin Sybil, and the differences between them, notably in her book The Sybil and her Scribes (Holdenried 2006). The first extant vernacular translation is in Norman French and dates from the twelfth century. There are two Middle Welsh versions of this text, one in Peniarth 14, the other in the Red Book of Hergest [RB] and the White Book of Rhydderch [WB]. In this paper, the latter will be discussed. There are only slight variations between these two versions, and I base my text on RB as edited recently on the Welsh Prose 1300–1425 project (Luft et al. 2013), with a few variant readings from WB in the same corpus. The Latin source of this translation is unknown, but must, as Marged Haycock has noted (Haycock 2005: 123), have been close to Sackur’s text. In my research I am interested in the translation process of the text from Latin into Middle Welsh, and in this paper I discuss some of the general tendencies of the Welsh translator of Sibli Ddoet ‘the wise Sybil’.