The Gododdin Read online

  THE GODODDIN

  Lament for the Fallen

  a version by

  GILLIAN CLARKE

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Singer’s Prologue

  Owain

  Madog

  Cadfannan

  Gwefrfawr

  Hyfaidd Hir

  Son of Bogdad

  Rheithfyw

  Son of Cian of Maen Gwyngwn

  Neirthiad

  Tudfwlch Hir

  Erthgi

  Tudfwlch and Cyfwlch Hir

  Blaen

  Gwrfelling

  Cynon

  Cydywal

  Breichiawl

  Aeron and Cynon

  Llif

  Graid

  Buddfan

  Gwenabwy

  Marchlew

  Isag

  Ceredig

  Caradog

  Gwlgod

  Rhufon Hir

  Morien, Cynon, Gwid

  Morien

  Cynon

  Eithinyn

  Cadfannan

  Gwyddien, Morien, Bradwen,

  Gwenabwy

  Bradwen

  Cynhafal

  Aneirin’s Song

  Cenau

  Heilyn

  Rhys

  Cynwal

  Addonwy

  Tears

  Cadfannan

  Merin

  Tudfwlch

  Cibno

  Gwaednerth

  Cynon

  Cynddilig Aeron

  Mynyddog

  Gwrhafal

  Owain

  Erf

  Mynog

  Moried

  Cynddilig Aeron

  Ceidio’s Son

  Rhufon, Gwgon, Gwion, Gwlged

  Tafloyw

  Tyngyr

  Geraint

  Eiddef

  Gorthyn Hir

  Gwair Hir

  Bleiddig

  Gwaednerth

  Mynyddog

  Madog Elfed

  Cynon

  Heinif

  Bubon

  Urfai

  Edar

  Gwawrddur

  Cibno

  Pais Dinogad

  Dinogad’s Coat

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Aneirin was one of the two earliest British poets whose names are known. The other was Taliesin. Aneirin’s famous work laments the deaths of the men of the Gododdin at the battle of Catraeth, in the late sixth century. The language was early Welsh (Brythoneg).

  The work was not conceived as the written poem that has survived, but as a sung elegy, a lament to be heard, as indicated by the Singer’s Prologue which introduces it. By the time the poem with its Prologue and bloody narrative was sung to the listening crowd in the hall, time had passed, the battle was done and the poet Aneirin was dead. The Prologue concludes:

  Er pan aeth daear ar Aneirin

  Nw neud ysgarad nâd â Gododdin

  When earth covered him, Aneirin,

  poetry departed from Gododdin.

  The poem laments the loss of the men of the tribe known as the Gododdin, who fought against the Deirons at the Battle of Catraeth, some time before the year 600. In my version, almost every elegy takes as its title the name of the dead soldier it remembers. It was originally sung, perhaps accompanied by the harp, in house, hall and tavern, to be heard, memorised and passed on down the generations, from singer to singer, just as we, as children, learned nursery rhymes, playground games, and dipping and skipping songs.

  The Welsh word cerdd means both ‘song’ and ‘poem’. It is important never to forget that our earliest poetry was heard and not read, as it helps to explain the importance of poetic devices such as the tradition of cynghanedd, still practised by many Welsh poets today. The strict pattern of alliteration, syllabic stress and rhyme was an aide-memoire for listeners to hold the poem, recite and pass it on, beguiling them with its linguistic music. We still learn poetry ‘by heart’ because we love the sound, because it stays in the mind. So Y Gododdin was passed, singer to listener, as word-music, for seven centuries before the making of a written text by a medieval scribe.

  Fragments of the poem appeared in 1967, rendered into fine English poetry by Tony Conran in his Penguin Book of Welsh Verse – but they are tantalisingly few. Other attempts to transfigure parts into new poems in English do exist, but are, in my opinion, less satisfying. So Aneirin’s music remains locked in silence to all who speak no Welsh or can’t read early Welsh. Even the word ‘Welsh’ originates from a hostile Anglo-Saxon term suggesting the ‘untrustworthy stranger’ or ‘slave’.

  About one hundred verses long, Y Gododdin belongs to the later part of the sixth century. Composed by Aneirin, it was written down seven centuries later by two scribes, known as Scribe A and Scribe B. It was composed at a time when the poet had a seat at court and a role as historian, news-bearer, storyteller, genealogist and remembrancer. It was the court poet’s duty to report, praise, sing and elegise. Y Gododdin is archaeology in the form of song. An event that would have been lost was recorded, remembered in its lines and passed down, singer to listener, across the centuries. British poetry today is rooted in that distant, oral tradition.

  I am not a Welsh scholar, and Welsh is not my mother tongue. Although Welsh was the first language of both my parents, and I read and hear it spoken every day, reading early Welsh is another matter. The search for the sound and meaning of Y Gododdin seemed like climbing a mountain whose summit is in the clouds. I want to share with readers, those with or without Welsh, my search for the poem’s music and its narrative.

  What follows is my version, an attempt to retell Aneirin’s elegy for men who died in the long-ago battle, and to find word-music in English to tell the story today. We share Aneirin’s grief through his verses. We too easily imagine the slaughter, because the misery of war is brought to us daily in words and images almost as it is happening: deaths not of soldiers but of civilians, not on battlefields but in the bombed ruins of cities. We see dead and dying children, weeping fathers and mothers, processions of refugees fleeing with all they can carry. The historical litany that begins with Catraeth is a long one: in the last century Ypres, the Somme, then Gaza, Helmand, Aleppo. Aneirin’s lamentation is not done.

  One of the jewels and complexities of Welsh poetry, cynghanedd is described in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics as ‘the most sophisticated poetics in the world’. We need not understand the strict rules of it to see, and to hear, something magic happening in the alliterative patterns of the poem. For example, in the early part of Y Gododdin there are nine elegies forming a chain of verses that begin with the same four words: ‘Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth’. The second of these verses opens with these lines:

  Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth, oedd ffraeth eu llu

  Glasfedd eu hancwyn a gwenwyn fu

  which I translate as:

  Men rode to Catraeth, debonair,

  their snare, the honey-trap, gold mead

  Even those who can’t pronounce the Welsh couplet will be able to see the pattern: aeth rhymes three times, g rings four times; hancwyn echoes with gwenwyn; and at the ends of the lines, llu rhymes with fu, stressed and rhymed as English ‘we’, or ‘see’. For non-Welsh readers, think of ‘so are we’, and ‘you see’. Welsh stresses the penultimate syllable in a word, as Gatraeth, glasfedd, hancwyn, gwenwyn and, of course, Aneirin; in Gododdin, dd is pronounced ‘th’ as in ‘the’.

  Welsh (Cymraeg) and English could hardly seem more different, and a translation aiming to be poetry must lose one music in the attempt to find another. One difference between the two languages, and one of the
difficulties arising in any effort to try for the beat of cynghanedd in English, is the indefinite article, absent in Welsh. The intricate sounds which sing in Aneirin’s elegies make translation a conundrum. The burden of the song to be borne across the airwaves of language brings so much more than meaning. An attempt to sing a new song must be made, using English words which are as faithful as possible to the meaning of the original, but which, with sound, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and assonance, do their best to compensate for the loss of the music of Welsh. In recompense for that loss I have listened, rhymed, chimed, alliterated and tapped the iambics of English which we hear in poetry from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the best of common speech today. I fussed over word choice, favouring plain-talking single-syllable words over formal Latinates, and avoiding words coloured by over-use. I chose one meaning over a possible other in some translations: for example, of the three meanings of the Welsh word glas (‘green’, ‘blue’, ‘fresh’), I sometimes choose ‘green’, for its sound and ambience. A ‘green dawn’, a ‘green grave’. No translation is perfect. I could not sing Aneirin’s song or replicate the original, but I could aim to follow and honour it.

  *

  The Gododdin were a tribe from what we now think of as southern Scot-land, or Yr Hên Ogledd, ‘The Old North’, as it is known in Welsh tradition. Aneirin’s poem elegises three hundred men of the war-band of Mynyddog Mwynfawr, who feasted on mead for a year before marching from the court of Dyn Eidyn, now Edinburgh, to the battle of Catraeth, probably Catterick in North Yorkshire.

  To the Celtic peoples bees were sacred, and all that they brought humankind – their honey, and mead made from fermented honey – bore a holy significance. According to the Laws of Hywel Dda (c. 880–950):

  The lineage of bees is from paradise and it was because of man’s sin that they came from there and that God gave them his grace; and therefore the mass cannot be sung without the wax.

  The men chosen to take part in the year-long mead-feast were fed holy wine to strengthen body and soul. However, feasting on mead for a year made them merry but could not save them.

  As the story goes, only one man came home alive from the battle – or was it three? The poem cannot agree.

  Aneirin, who survived the battle, sang his elegies in cynghanedd, whose intricacies I wanted to solve. Like our ancient stones and burial chambers, like the stories from The Mabinogion that my father told me, the poem was mine, and yet not mine, part of my culture but just out of hearing, whispers through the wall of a neighbouring room. I longed to learn this 1400-year-old secret, its sound and its story, and, finally, to make my version of the poem in English.

  The reference works I have found most enlightening are The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem by Professor Kenneth Jackson (Edinburgh University Press, 1969); Llyfr Aneirin: The Book of Aneirin (National Library of Wales, 1989), with an introduction by Daniel Huws and a facsimile of the medieval manuscript that shows the Welsh text scribed on the pages edge-to-edge, unshaped by modern lines or verses; and Aneirin: Y Gododdin by Professor A. O. H. Jarman (Welsh Classics, 1988) with the Welsh poem and his English translation on facing pages.

  As for the claim to its being ‘the oldest Scottish poem’: geographically this is true, composed as it was in Yr Hên Ogledd, in a Britain made of kingdoms rather than countries. The language in which it was sung, and later written down, is, however, early Welsh (Brythoneg). It is not geography but language that created the poem and brought it down the centuries to us. Welsh is the oldest living literary language in Europe still written and spoken today, and Y Gododdin is one of the greatest cultural treasures of the islands of Britain.

  *

  In the winter of 2016, I began to work on trying to understand and translate Aneirin’s poem. I read other versions and translations, some rendered into poor verse and often confusing and inaccurate when checked against the text and the detailed analyses of Professors Jarman and Jackson, whose approaches are academic and scholarly. Neither man laid claim to his work as poetry. Jarman stated in his Preface that he made no attempt to reproduce the poetic beauty of the original, quoting Gibbon’s judgement of Pope’s translation of Homer as being ‘endowed with every merit excepting that of likeness to the original’, and that in his translation he sought ‘to express the thought and content of the original as closely as possible’, mainly keeping to ‘a line for line correspondence’. This makes their work the more accurate and, for my task, more useful. I placed my trust in their scholarship.

  In Professor Jarman’s book, the entire Welsh text and his English translation, sometimes closer to an approximation, are usefully printed on facing pages; one is a guide to a reader’s understanding of the other. I could read and hear the Welsh, then check its translation, and check it once more against the Jackson version, which often gave me a different answer, or several, from which to choose. Aneirin’s verses are fourteen centuries old and sometimes mist-enshrouded. To me it is important that his original Welsh versions are included.

  Professor Jackson’s introductory essays on the history and possible dating of the Battle of Catraeth (between 588 and 590), on the number of men who went to fight, and on the tribes, the traditions and the language, are invaluable. How many of the Gododdin fought at Catraeth? Three hundred? Three hundred and sixty-five? Or possibly, he suggests, a far greater number if the three hundred who feasted in the hall of Eidyn for a year before marching into battle were knights, who might have been accompanied by an unrecorded number of foot-soldiers. Did three men come home alive? Or did just one survive: the poet, Aneirin? Whether three hundred died or three thousand, whether one man survived or three, what is certain is that Aneirin lived to tell a terrible tale and to compose a great poem. Jackson’s scrutiny of the two medieval manuscripts, A and B (often offering alternative translations of words or lines and orderings of the elegies), and his honesty when he found a meaning obscure allowed me the excuse, when in doubt, to let poetry have the last word. Equally stimulating are Professor Jarman’s Preface and his close examination of the text and background to the story and the tradition.

  So with two translations to hand, two word-by-word interpretations and two ideas of the poem’s sequencing, as well as Llyfr Aneirin: The Book of Aneirin, containing the text in old Welsh and a facsimile of the manuscript, and several dictionaries, I was ready to attempt my English version. I decided to use Jarman’s pagination, as it provided the simpler model for me to follow, and his ordering and numbering of the poems would be helpful to a reader who might wish to check my verses against his. Jarman numbers the verses. In my translation I have additionally given each verse as title the name of the soldier or soldiers it elegises.

  I began by making a literal translation of the elegies, reading each one aloud over and over, shifting a word, keeping and sometimes losing the precise meaning to meet poetry’s demands on metrics or melody. My version of Y Gododdin stepped into English syllable by syllable, word by word, line by line, verse by verse. I must have gone through it, listening and refining, hundreds of times.

  I have used stanzas, line breaks and form. The two scribes, of course, had no notion of lines, verses or punctuation. Listening to the sung poem, and being obliged to use vellum sparingly, they filled the pages edge to edge with words they heard and knew by heart but had never seen. For them, what they heard is what they scribed. For us, now that poetry is printed, in silent reading we hear the music as we do when it is spoken aloud. What we see is what we hear. Unlike the scribes, we can afford to be extravagant with a page, and, as with written music, we use space to indicate sound with patterns of line endings, verses and breaks. We can shape sonnets, ballads, villanelles, sestinas on the page. We can use end rhyme, internal rhyme, free verse. In print, the way we hear a poem, the way we read it aloud, is directed by line break and stanza. For the early bards, listening was everything – and we should still be listening, or we risk losing poetry’s very essence.

  Following Professor Jarman’s pagination, I have tr
anslated and made my versions of the elegy, dividing it as he does into one hundred and one verses. Almost every one of Y Gododdin’s songs is a short elegy dedicated to a warrior, usually named. Included between the named elegies are a few verses that seem to be Aneirin’s personal musings. Together they make a single lament on the tragedy of one war, one people. Some verses are connected by cross-reference. Some form chains of songs linked by repeated opening refrains.

  Towards the end, verse ninety-nine of Aneirin’s poem is remarkable for containing the earliest known reference to Arthur:

  He fed ravens on the fortress wall

  though he was no Arthur.

  Those words make clear that, at the time of Y Gododdin’s composition, Arthur was already a powerful mythic hero, many centuries before his name was used and his character gentrified by Camelot, and twelfth-century French romance.

  *

  At the end of Y Gododdin, I have added one extra poem. The poem is ‘Dinogad’s Coat’, my version of a widely known and much anthologised song to a child, praising a father’s courage and skill as a hunter. Even its inclusion after the last of the Gododdin elegies is, I know, controversial. Professor Jackson dismisses it as the odd one out, found scribed into only one of the medieval manuscripts, MS A, but not, in his opinion, part of Aneirin’s elegy. He is probably right. However, it appears in Professor Jarman’s book as poem 103, among his translations of other early manuscripts, immediately following Y Gododdin’s one hundredth elegy. I hear it as one more lyric in praise of a man’s courage, perhaps in the voice of a woman singing to a child in death’s aftermath, a healing epilogue to the tragedy, wholly in the spirit of the one hundred verses preceding it. More to the point, it is such a haunting poem that I could not bear to leave it out. It fits the spirit of the times, and Y Gododdin’s elegaic tone.

  Tony Conran’s translation of this poem, titled ‘Song to a Child’, is beautiful, but it illustrates one of the difficulties of translation from Welsh into English: the problem is the word for ‘father’, which Tony Conran translates as ‘Dad’. I think neither word will do. In English-language culture the naming word, ‘Dad’, has become diminished and sentimentalised by common usage as a noun, along with that of ‘Mum’. ‘Father’ is Anglo-Saxon. My solution is to keep the Welsh name for father: Tada or Tâd – with a long ‘a’ in Tâd.