Darogan , livre ebook

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.
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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.
C ONTENTS
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
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
F OREWORD
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 fourtee