Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature

By Aled Llion Jones

Political prophecy was a common mode of literature in the British Isles and much of Europe from the Middle Ages to at least as late as the Renaissance. At times of political instability especially, the manuscript record bristles with prophetic works that promise knowledge of dynastic futures. In Welsh, the later development of this mode is best known through the figure of the mab darogan, the 'son of prophecy', who - variously named as Arthur, Owain or a number of other heroes - will return to re-establish sovereignty. Such a returning hero is also a potent figure in English, Scottish and wider European traditions. This book explores the large body of prophetic poetry and prose contained in the earliest Welsh-language manuscripts, exploring the complexity of an essentially multilingual, multi-ethnic and multinational literary tradition, and with reference to this wider tradition critical and theoretical questions are raised of genre, signification and significance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783165872

Aled Llion Jones

Aled Llion Jones is a lecturer in the School of Welsh, Bangor University.

Book preview

DAROGAN

Darogan

Prophecy, lament and absent heroes in medieval Welsh Literature

Aled Llion Jones

I Handel, fy nhad ac er cof am Sheila, fy mam

© Aled Llion Jones, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2675-6

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-587-2

The right of Aled Llion Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter 1 Prophecy, apocalypse and return

Chapter 2 Praise, lament and silence

Chapter 3 Manuscripts, multilingualism and fragmentation

Chapter 4 Rhys Fardd, ventriloquy and pseudonymity

Conclusion: History split and promises unmade

Appendix 1: Manuscripts containing darogan

Appendix 2: Tables of manuscripts and their contents

Appendix 3: Prophecies of Rhys Fardd in pre-c.1540 manuscripts

Appendix 4: Bilingual manuscripts containing prophetic material

Bibliography

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Am amryw gymwynas mewn amryw fan:

For help with readings and with writing: Catherine A. McKenna, Jerry Hunter, Christopher D. Johnson.

For guidance and support: faculty and staff of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University: Patrick K. Ford, Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, Barbara Hillers, Margo Granfors.

For ideas, method and motivation within and beyond Celtic: Timothy Bahti, Homi K. Bhabha, Sioned Davies, John T. Hamilton, Joseph F. Nagy, Nicholas Watson.

For discussion, argument, disagreement and friendship over many years: Thomas A. Lorman, Gareth Griffiths and Anna E. Antonowicz; Matthieu Boyd, Christina L. Chance, Samuel A. Jones, Patricia M. Malone; Ekin E. Tușalp, Edyta Lehmann, Margaret Harrison, Tom Chance, Emma Nic Chárthaigh, Rhiannon H. Williams.

For comments and other assistance: Annalee Rejhon, Morgan Kay, N. A. Williams, Morfydd Owen, Carlos Alberto Blanco; all at the University of Wales Press who have assisted in the production of this book, especially Siân Chapman, Dafydd Jones, Henry Maas, Eira Fenn, Catrin Harries, Angharad Watkins, and the press’s anonymous reader.

At the School of Welsh, Bangor University, diolch: Jason Walford Davies, Peredur I. Lynch, Angharad Price, Gerwyn Wiliams.

Very special thanks to Pia Maybury-Lewis, and Bob and Mary Bransford, of Cambridge and Winchester, MA. Mange tak!

This book is dedicated to my parents, and especially to my mother, who would have been proud to have seen its publication.

FOREWORD

Until the late Middle Ages the role of the professional Welsh poet was one of high politics, his status in the court of the King affirmed by convention and by Law. Poetry and politics were one, and the cultural genealogy of the poet proved the origin of his art in prophecy and divinity.¹ That aside, full engagement with the mode of prophecy is rarely seen in the surviving work of the court poets – or, at the very least, it may be said that the manuscripts (with important exceptions) rarely link the names of these poets with prophetic pieces: the prophetic ‘origins’ are generally more implicit, more profound, and certainly more intriguing.

It is estimated that between one and two thousand pieces of Welsh-language prophecy have been preserved in the manuscripts.² Many, if not most, of the prophetic pieces – and certainly the ‘popular’ or ‘sub-bardic’³ – are of uncertain authorship, with uncertain dates of composition and unclear reference; indeed (as the estimate indicates), they are even difficult to identify and to count. These prophecies, contained in medieval Welsh manuscripts from no earlier than c.1250,⁴ include mainly shorter poetic works that are often little more than fragments, along with prose works and also a small number of longer pieces, such as the monumental ‘Armes Prydain Fawr’ (‘The Great Prophecy of Britain’).⁵ This 200-line poem has recently been described as ‘[t]he earliest datable prophetic poem [darogan]’, in which ‘the essential elements of the later prophecies [proffwydoliaethau] are clearly visible’.⁶ Significantly, the title of this somewhat ‘originary’ work explicitly questions its status as darogan: its earliest manuscript witness bears the rubric ‘ar(y)mes’. Both ‘darogan’ and ‘armes’, among other terms (e.g., ‘brud’, ‘proffwydoliaeth’), are generally translated as ‘prophecy’, though important aspects of cultural specificity within this reduction are to be taken into account as the Welsh ‘prophetic’ is interrogated. This interrogation is performed in later chapters in a series of engagements with selected texts, and primarily with the ‘popular’ political prophecy for which I reserve the term ‘darogan’.

Perhaps the simplest and most familiar definition of prophecy in Wales is that given by Ifor Williams in his edition of ‘Armes Prydain Fawr’: ‘the poet’s concern is with the future, and not with past events’.⁷ Dumville take us a step further, describing vaticinium ex eventu:

[Armes Prydain] takes its stance on well known truths of the present and past, prophesying these as future events and circumstances, and uses its reliability in these matters as a means of gaining credit for the poet’s vision of … the future.⁸

While the point of prophecy may be to present a vision of the future, its goal is also to influence the present. While distinguishing between the apocalyptic and prophetic modes in Hebrew literature, Emmerson argues that prophecy is ‘not concerned primarily with the future, but with the present, and it is certainly not predictive in nature’. He continues:

Events in the future will resemble those of the past, for Yahweh controls both. When the prophet does warn of future judgement, the warning is conditional, intended to elicit change in the present, and the future is dependent upon the decision of the present.⁹

Blanchot also reminds us that ‘[t]he term of prophet – borrowed from the Greek to designate a condition foreign to Greek culture – deceives us if it invites us to make of the nabi a person in whom the future speaks. The prophetic word is not only a word of the future.’¹⁰ It remains to be considered how the etymologies, denotations and connotations of darogan, dysgogan, gwawd, cathl, armes, derwydd, dryw, syw, sywyd, sywedydd, dewin, doethur, etc.,¹¹ might shed light on these issues: it is likely that if it is incorrect to simply equate nabi, prophetes, vates, it may also be worth a moment’s pause before identifying the Welsh terms with any or all of these.¹²

Equally, what may be said about Biblical prophecy is not necessarily the case for the Welsh darogan, though Christian influence was doubtless strong on all aspects of medieval Welsh culture. In any case, whatever details might not apply to the darogan, the temporal parallel surely remains. The past and the (projected) future are employed in order to be realised (of necessity) in the moment of poetic utterance. This is on a certain level a model of reading itself (or even, to anticipate somewhat, of understanding and consciousness) and as such the prophetic poem is seen to contain within itself a macro-level model of the process of signification; and in the face of the paucity of external criticism, the observation of such features is a vital aspect of developing an understanding of the medieval Welsh literary consciousness – and also of the ‘prophetic origins’ of poetry.¹³

Chapter 1 serves in many ways as introduction to this work, both literary-historically and conceptually. After briefly considering the historical and literary origins of political prophecy, I clarify a number of the key terms used in the study, both from the Welsh tradition (‘brut’ and ‘darogan’) and wider (‘prophecy’ and ‘apocalypse’). After a precursory discussion of the figure of the mab darogan, the returning hero, this chapter concludes with a few comments on that ‘first’ Welsh political prophecy, ‘Armes Prydain Fawr’, probably the most perfect single piece of prophetic poetry in Welsh. The literary and ideological quality of ‘Armes Prydain’ contributes to the methodological and conceptual framework within which the other daroganau are read, and my main (and quite limited) goal here is to emphasise the inescapable ambiguity of reference that obtains in the identification of national ‘self’ and alien ‘other’ in this most programmatic of ‘nationalist’ works. This foundational ambiguity of identity – including that of voice, address and interpersonality – is developed in obvious ways through the following chapters.

Such a context of uncertainty and ambiguity regarding textual identity, dating and authority, as well as voice, genre and temporality, might be thought ideal for strategies of reading focused on uncertainty and inconclusivity, and my work is far from dismissive of late-twentieth- century literary theory that might be labelled poststructuralist. While my explicit engagement with such works of theory is here rather minimal, most of this study is yet a dialogue between the ‘theoretical’ or ‘literary-philosophical’, and a more closely textual (one might even say ‘philological’) approach. It seems clear that – even beyond well-worn arguments of perspectivism and interpretative subjectivity – a twenty-first-century (say) concept can illuminate a fourteenth-century text as usefully as a critic contemporary with the text might have. Given, however, that we have no contemporary readings, we are left in the position of having to enter into creative dialogue across the centuries; and this dialogue between ourselves and the medieval texts is in many ways a ventriloquism.

The positions from which I read the texts are most often ahistorical and formalist; this is to say that while I have no wish to deny the ultimate validity of various kinds of historicism, neither do I wish here to engage closely with such strategies: my priorities lie elsewhere. Appeals to historical specificity are mainly limited to the choice of texts from a certain period of manuscript production, i.e., the ‘medieval’, contingently defined as c.1250–c.1540. The latter date is admittedly arbitrary, but the first is inescapable: there are no earlier Welsh-language manuscripts. In a study such as this, which will borrow ideas from recent centuries, anachrony should not be seen as an a priori problem: it is rather an essential feature of the work, since the poems we have are themselves naturally anachronistic. They are often seen to exist – ironically perhaps – due to an antiquarian collecting impulse. Thus these works of the future are conserved due to an impulse whose concern is decidedly the past. And yet, each of these aspects – the historicism of the ‘collectors’ and the temporality of the poetry – is itself complex.

To ask the question ‘what is darogan?’ – parallel to the fundamental qu’est-ce que la littérature? – requires a contextually informed study, and to provide a definition from a certain literary-historical perspective it is necessary to consider a range of such contexts. Beginning in the immediate physical neighbourhood of the manuscript, the frame reaches out through the Welsh literary tradition to a wider European intellectual and cultural context. It is not to be doubted that the Welsh tradition of darogan intersects at many points with the wider European culture of prophecy, and while the Welsh material will certainly not be considered as a peripheral offshoot of a European phenomenon (much of European political prophecy is, after all, indebted to the Welsh tradition for key features), there is little to be gained from a study in complete isolation.

In general, the strict historical context, while locating the moment of copying, is not here used as an interpretative strategy. Neither do I provide much contextualisation by reference to prophetic poetry in other languages, even though English-language prophecies especially – as well as Latin – were current in the Wales of the period. This was notably the case during the fifteenth century, the focus of chapters 3 and 4, and translations of these texts pepper the manuscripts. I do give fair consideration to the issue of translation and multilingualism, but the current study offers no detailed engagement with the non-Welsh-language texts. That – along with a more historicist reading of all the material – must wait, to be, perhaps, a second movement of the dialectic (with or without a third).

The question of what darogan is presents itself as a question of genre, but a purposeful question of genre must not only study in terms of genre, but also consider the applicability of the term itself – what can and should be meant by ‘genre’, and why? The western European critical tradition has models of description and definition from at least as early as Plato and Aristotle, while modernity has seen a reappraisal of the reception of medieval, Renaissance, neo-classical and Romantic critics of this Graeco-Roman heritage. A study of the genre(s) of darogan must acknowledge this wider tradition of generic criticism, as it considers the discussion internal to the Welsh literary tradition itself.¹⁴ Given their formulaic, repetitive, obscure and often fragmentary nature, the daroganau have on the whole been disregarded as literature, but questions of poetics, epistemology and semiotics must be foregrounded in a preliminary but necessary critical interrogation of the literary function in this period of Welsh culture. An overarching question in the current study is what semantic, rhetorical possibilities did darogan provide that made prophecy so attractive to the poets: in its basic question of what ‘prophecy’ is in the medieval Welsh tradition, this study is essentially concerned with the production of meaning, and thus with the ‘genre’ of ‘prophecy’ in the widest sense of both words.

Such concerns provoke the central question asked by Barthes in S/Z: ‘Qui parle?’¹⁵ and lead to a vital consideration of voice. From Plato’s tripartite categorisation of pure and mixed narration (of the poet’s voice or an imitation: Republic 394c), taken up by Aristotle’s Poetics (1448a) and developed (many would say misrepresented) by later critics in the triad of epic, lyric, drama, the ‘genres’ (or ‘modes’) of literature are essentially dependent on the nature of the enunciation and the position of enunciation. To approach the genres of Welsh poetry from a perspective of voice or voicing (who voices, who enunciates, and how) of course requires close attention to the subjectivities performed in the poetry, work which is correspondingly an interrogation of the temporality and ethics revealed by the literature. Qui parle? Who is speaking, and how? The almost essentially apostrophic¹⁶ mode of Welsh court poetry – where there may be no such thing as soliloquy or presumed private dialogue, even in works which partake most strongly of the ‘dramatic’ mode – gives the person of speech increased drama and weight. It will be seen how these concerns with persons of speech, clearly evident in the tradition, play out in the prophetic mode, and specifically as the prophetic word is considered to be a repetition of (potentially divine) authority. Chapter 2 provides an excursus through readings of non-prophetic court poetry of the Welsh princes and of the saga englynion of an earlier period, in order to introduce a number of questions concerning poetic language, voicing and inspiration. Specifically, Chapter 2 enquires how absence and the apophatic are witnessed within the traditions of praise and lament (modes whose rhetorical strategies depend fully on the interplay of presence and absence) in order better to understand the related question of the promised return of the absent hero.

Of all the surviving pieces of prophecy, a relatively small proportion is found in manuscripts from the medieval period itself; the first part of Chapter 3, along with the appendices, provides a survey of these manuscripts and their contents. This chapter then narrows its focus onto bilingual and multilingual manuscripts that contain Welsh and English texts and, in Chapter 4, I turn specifically to a single manuscript, the remarkable trilingual Cwta Cyfarwydd (NLW Peniarth MS 50), a large, mainly prophetic anthology from c.1450. Here I give special attention to the work of a single ‘prophetic poet’, Rhys Fardd, in order to develop an argument concerning the eschatological temporality of the daroganau, specifically within the native British historiography of brut.

As the manuscript context is theorised, a starting point for the historiographical interrogation is Nietzsche’s tripartite view of the historian: antiquarian, monolithic, critical;¹⁷ it must (counter-intuitively, perhaps) be wondered continually whether the prose and verse was (and may be) seen as literature, or whether it is, alternatively, ‘practical lore’ or fossilised obscurities gleaned for their presumed traditional authority. Manuscript content, method, place and period(s) of compilation; transmission, etc.: these are only the most initial possible points of departure. To consider the temporality of the texts themselves (rather than – to separate for a moment the qualities of what might be from a different perspective a single entity – the textual manuscripts),¹⁸ Balfour has noted well, in his study of prophecies from a different period, that, ‘[e]ven if a text, prophetic or otherwise, were produced in a single moment, the text, as text, resists ascription to that single moment. To acknowledge this fact is not to deny the text’s historicity but to recognise its complexity’.¹⁹

One of the many points of interest here is the manifestly palimpsestic²⁰ nature of the poetry in question: the question of historicism is immediately raised when one turns, for example, to fourteenth-century manuscripts copied from exemplars a few centuries older which (it is argued) contained compositions dating back centuries further. These questions are with us whenever we approach the literature of the Middle Ages, and are hardly absent from the work of any age, but they take on an additional dimension in the context of the prophetic poetry with its explicit – and, one might say, generically necessary – concern with time, history, epistemology and causality (who is and was the mab darogan; how might we know him; when will he come or how can we summon him; and what will he do?). The still-popular quest for the Urtext is probably futile; we must accept that we are exclusively studying the Nachleben of our literature, and must enjoy the fact that our own problems of literary history entirely parallel the problems of epistemology foregrounded by our texts. A manuscript-centred perspective necessitates the questioning of the integrity of works that are, it may be argued, repetitions of an original utterance. ‘The prophetic word,’ as Blanchot has said, ‘is originally a dialogue’,²¹ and the enaction of repetition is also the central metaphor of the prophecies – that of the returning hero.

Beyond considerations of literary form and motif, understanding the function of darogan thus requires close attention to temporality, tradition and poetic authority; this includes the concern with present, future and history revealed by the prophetic vocabulary, and also authorship and the role of the pseudonymous prophet (authority figure). Useful comparative models here are the Biblical ascription of apocalyptic vision to prophets or to wisdom figures, and likewise the ascription in Britain of prophecies to prophets such as Thomas of Erceldoune, John of Bridlington, or of course Taliesin and Myrddin/Merlin in and beyond Wales. The early darogan is entirely a literature of anonym and pseudonym, and in many of the ostensibly ‘authored’ texts we possess, utterances are placed in the mouth of traditional authorities. In seeking a social and personal context to this prophetic material, much ink has been spilt over Giraldus Cambrensis’ awenyddion, the inspired glossolalists uniquely mentioned in his Descriptio Cambriae, and yet it may not be proved that any more historical veracity lies behind his accounts of these than behind his tales of Irish kings and their intimate knowledge of horses. Of these authorities and personae, Myrddin and Taliesin stand tallest in the tradition as a whole, though Rhys Fardd surpasses them in terms of ascription in extant medieval manuscripts. The question of the functioning of proper names of authority, however (as well as of the relation between the predicative and nominalising functions of the prophetic poetic act), is an important question across the entire mode, discussed further in Chapter 4.

The detailed questioning performed by contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Geoffrey’s Merlin, concerning the authenticity of his prophetic powers in terms of his relationship to Christianity and thus the truth of his revelation (there were five full commentaries on the Prophetiae Merlini by the end of the twelfth century), inform us as to some aspects of the reception of the vernacular prophecies performed in his name or otherwise. Geoffrey’s work and the problems surrounding it provide further approaches to the native poetry, as its richness (some might say confusion) of styles suggests; a comment by Jan Ziolkowski neatly summarises these issues of modality and characterisation:

The Vita teems with contradictions in its treatment of vaticination. At times it casts divination and prophecy in a positive light, at others negative; at some times it espouses an orthodox medieval Christian view of prophecy, at others it preserves heterodox pre-Christian conventions of soothsaying. Much of Merlin’s behaviour during his spell as a madman resembles that of a seer, diviner, or shaman; during other long stretches he is a political prophet; and at the end, when he has been rid of his madness, and has become as ascetic and holy as a biblical prophet, he loses his mantic powers altogether.²²

It is necessary to remain aware of all these various kinds of prophecy and prophetic speech, here melded in Geoffrey’s cauldron of poetry, but always present around every prophetic work as a sometimes nebulous context of traditional possibility. While critics have often used indications of shamanic prophecy as a criterion of dating, suggesting that the presence of such ‘pre-Christian’ practices in works is indicative of archaic kernels, it is likely (as indicated by Ziolkowski) that the situation is more complex, and that such textual archaeology risks undermining the legitimacy of a vital tradition. Since the Vita Merlini and the Prophetiae Merlini have been more productive of ideological readings than the majority of the poetry in Welsh, given the relative brevity of this latter work, they provide a very useful sounding board for possible interpretations and wider interpretative possibilities, not least considering their sometimes-occluded Welsh origins.

From other literatures we are led to believe that the prophetic endeavour was of marked diversity:

clerics, monks, lay brothers, lower grades of poets and other secular entertainers, noblemen and military leaders were involved in the composition, compilation, collection and propagation of the prophecies, in a variety of oral and written forms.²³

However, we must be wary when working with the Welsh evidence of projecting a context without justification, be this a context of composition, transmission or (what often amounts to the same thing, from the perspective of the ‘ethics’ of manuscript culture)²⁴ public performance. In order to approach the issue of the function of ‘prophecy’, the question of meaning must be interrogated from the perspective of action. Given the politics generally ascribed to Welsh prophecies, they are frequently considered to have practical goals aligned with national liberation and the restitution of British sovereignty over either Wales or the island of Britain (Ynys Prydain). What, though, was the nature of the action to be encouraged or effected by these texts? Here as throughout, these works are to be considered as much as literature as political propaganda, in order to ask what alternative goals (what allegorical utterances) are thus achieved. The problem of agency raised by the mab darogan and the prophecy is partly that of prosopopeia: if the figure figures nothing but itself (i.e., the voice given a face – ‘prosopon’ – on the basis not of metonymic contiguity or metaphoric similarity but a catachretic identity) then the question is raised as to how language may gesture beyond itself and reach into the field of action.²⁵ The radical problematic of prosopopeia, and the politicality of the historical voice speaking from beyond the grave has not only a theoretical but also a formal role in the tradition of the mab darogan and works such as, e.g., ‘Gwasgargerdd Myrddin o’i Fedd’ (‘The Song of Myrddin from his Grave’). As this study explores at length, the political prophecy presents an allegory that is complex, eschatological and probably critically so.

A difficulty faced here is the importance of social and linguistic context to an understanding of how a genre is formed, and how it influences – and is influenced by – meaning (i.e., ‘the meaning of genre’, with attendant double genitive). While the manuscript context available for our study may be limited by the small numbers of exempla that have survived to our time, further aspects of the ‘metatext’ of performance have been almost entirely lost. For all the weight placed too often on the famous fragment published by Ifor Williams in ‘Hen Chwedlau’,²⁶ referring to late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Welsh assemblies to hear prophecies, there is little or no external evidence from our period concerning the context of performance, and any recontextualisation is to be performed guardedly and from literary and comparative evidence alone. We may take cues from the wider body of poetry in order to attempt to glean clues concerning performance, and we may also seek to find assistance as to the nature of the poetic speech act internal to the poetry itself; in fact, an internal, intertextual contextualisation is key to our evidence, and in this case it is as true as ever – if not implicitly truer than in most cases – that il n’y a pas de hors-text.

This study thus continues a trend that shifts reading and interpretation from individual texts to a more ‘open’ position, taking account of the necessarily porous nature of the boundaries between ‘Welsh’ and ‘English’ (or even French and the nationally-ambiguous Latin) literary production of the period. Connectedly, it questions the relationship between reception and production, and (circling back to the ever-present nexus of genre and literary nature) asks again what these ‘prophecies’ are. The context of ‘frame’ and ‘fringe’ necessitates an interrogation of the standard readings that see the prophecies as clearly nationalist (or proto-nationalist).

While there are undoubtedly explicit ethnic polarisations within many of the poems, and the historical context was one fraught with the problematics of colonisation, domination and conquest, the milieu of textual production is one in which any such categorisation is seriously problematised: the ‘texts’ leap across ‘national’ boundaries, being translated back and forth, used and reused, cited and recited. Thus, as argued in Chapter 4 and in the Conclusion to this study, the ‘frames’ of meaning expand to include not merely the manuscript context but also the interrelationship of entire languages: the prophecies, it is argued somewhat nostalgically, are translations in an essential and essentially complex way. They borrow (necessarily) from the same ‘originary’ prophetic authority as the elevated court poetry, in order to provide a criticism of that (and any) authority’s implicit claims to traditional, textual power. The conclusions of this work, however, are certainly less than final, and – consistent with the subject studied – may be taken to be gestures towards future action or, indeed, promises that might be fulfilled, or which may fall silent.

1

Prophecy, apocalypse and return

1a. Beginnings

Mor druan gennyf mor druan

British history is apocalyptic history, and Welsh literature reflects this. The island of Britain was – in one tradition – revealed as a Promised Land in a visionary dream to its founder, and human sovereignty was assured on the defeat of the giant Gogmagog, when the island was given its name.¹ Prophecy and apocalypse go hand in hand in this foundation legend, and such apocalypse is refigured repeatedly in the literature as the legendary (and perhaps mythical)² sovereignty of Britain is lost and relost. A constant backdrop,³ it takes centre stage in many of the most monumental works, most famously in the lament of Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch, bewailing the death by beheading of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in AD 1282. This event is depicted as the end of nation, reason, history and world. Clearly apocalyptic also is the story of Branwen, the second branch of the Mabinogi, wherein Bendigeidfran, crowned king of ‘this island’ (‘brenin coronawc ar yr ynys hon’), suffering the death of a Fisher King during total war in Ireland, orders his own decapitation. The two self-mirroring islands of Britain and Ireland, each otherworldly and unheimlich to each other, clash with the force of pure self-annihilation: ‘Da a dwy ynys a diffeithwyt’ (‘Two good islands have been laid waste’), cries Branwen before breaking her heart and dying. The sovereignty of Britain is lost, geographies are reinscribed, new historical periods are initiated, and worlds change.

Schlegel famously commented that ‘[d]er Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet’⁴ (‘The historian is a backwards-turned prophet’). In Welsh, history and prophecy are identical not only if considered figuratively or tropologically (turning backwards), but even literally. Legendary British history (brut) – with its origins in the foundation of Britain by Aeneas’ grandson, Brutus – is, to the medieval Welsh mind, and also to Middle Welsh writing, identified with the prophecy of brud. Not only were the words brut and brud often indistinguishable in the earlier tradition (whose orthography did not distinguish clearly between word-final -t and -d), but the words were used fully interchangeably by later poets:

[D]engys tystiolaeth y cywyddwyr nad oeddynt yn gwahaniaethu’n haearnaidd rhwng brut a brud. Golygai’r ddwy ffurf y ddau beth, hanesyddiaeth a phroffwydoliaeth, fel ei gilydd iddynt. Gofynion y gynghanedd a’r brifodl yn anad dim a effeithiai ar yr union ffurf a ddewisid mewn llinell o gywydd.⁵

[The evidence provided by the cywyddwyr [fifteenth-century poets using the cywydd metre] demonstrates that they did not differentiate decisively between brut and brud. Both forms had both meanings: historiography and prophecy. The form chosen in a line of a cywydd depended, above all, on the demands of rhyme and cynghanedd.]⁶

Brut/d is a unified discourse in which prophecy speaks of the fulfilment of an original British history. According to this discourse, the British (the Welsh) are the true inheritors of the island’s post-Trojan sovereignty. The main elements of this ultimately eschatological discourse constitute the ‘Matter of Britain’, used by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, and became the basis for the pan-European Arthurian legend (the figure of the ‘once and future king’ features among key borrowings).⁷ Within the Welsh tradition itself this material is widespread from the earliest texts and the earliest manuscripts.

These legends are perhaps not mythical in anthropology’s sense of mediation between gods and men, but they are mythologies in that they create patterns of understanding – mythos – that enable historical cognition. History – and historiography – are necessarily more than discourses concerning the past, and that past may certainly not be considered a vanished age. Histories are by definition written by the victors, when the figuration of the past is the act that claims it for the present, thus enabling a specific figuration of the lived moment. It is clear, too, that in considering an apocalyptic history (as an extreme example), there is more than simple linear temporal progression: the structure of historical revolutions is such that the accompanying paradigm shift is all-encompassing, including the structure of time itself. Myths are in this way entirely true, even if not for everybody; they are certainly real, widely shared and fervently contested. The Welsh were far from the only ones who believed themselves to be the real British (even if they were – and are – often tempted to see themselves as the only original ones).

From this point of view it is unsurprising that the medieval Welsh often saw themselves as being on the wrong side of history, and even in the wrong kind of time. If it would take an apocalypse to refigure this narrative sufficiently, then perhaps one should be hoped for. Or more than hoped for: predicted and promised. Political prophecy provides this glance forwards towards a subsequent turn of the wheel of (mis)fortune, taking as a premise the idea that the widening gyres are plural, and that more ripples in time are yet to come. Such prophecies are common in Welsh manuscripts from the earliest surviving codices of the thirteenth century. Indeed, the initial poem in the oldest Welsh-language book of poetry is a melancholic prophetic dialogue between Myrddin and Taliesin, and literature proclaiming and promising regained sovereignty remained politically viable at least until the Tudor dynasty stole the British crown. Henry Tudor of the family of Penmynydd, Anglesey, entered battle at Bosworth Field in 1485 under the standard of the red dragon, knowing that he was seen by many as the mab darogan, the long-promised and finally returning hero. ‘Henri’ would be the latest name by which the mab darogan was known, following