Welsh Journals

REVIEWS CANU CREFYDDOL Y GOGYNFEIRDD. Gan yr Athro J. E. Caerwyn Williams. Coleg y Brifysgol, Abertawe (Darlith Goffa Henry Lewis), 1977. Tt. 39. 50p. (plus postage 9p.). This lecture, dedicated to the memory of Professor Henry Lewis, is virtually a commentary and an excursus upon one of Henry Lewis's major contributions to Welsh scholarship, his edition of the religious poems of the Gogynfeirdd in Hen Gerddi Crefyddol (Cardiff, 1931). Professor Williams discusses the poems as compositions which are characteristic of certain deeply rooted Celtic concepts of divinity and of kingship, and at the same time as incorporating ideas which are common to medieval reli- gious verse as a whole. A well-known passage in the Welsh law-books states that it is the duty of the pencerdd or 'chief of song' to sing a song in praise of God in the royal assembly, before he embarks upon the praise of his patron or of any other temporal ruler. The author traces the two forms of praise-poetry thus implied to a single religious idea, which descends from the primitive Indo-European concept of the ruler as a semi-divine being or priest-king (rix), who was the representative on earth of a pagan deity (perhaps, one might add, of that 'god by whom my tribe swears' who is so frequently invoked in the Old Irish hero-tales). For here, as else- where in the early Welsh and Irish legal codes, the process known as 'peripheral survival' has ensured the perpetuation on the outer perimeter of Europe of customs which are paralleled elsewhere only in ancient India, but which in the remote past were common to the early development of Indo-European society. The pencerdd, who corresponded to the highest grade of poet in Ireland-the fili or 'seer'-inherited both his duties and his privileged status from the fact that his office descended from that which had previously belonged to the druid; while the druid had in his turn derived his semi-occult functions from those of the priest-king whom he served. Interestingly enough, the aura of divinity which surrounded the king was in no way diminished as a result of its transference from a pagan divinity to the Christian God, whose representative the Celtic ruler then became. One result of this was that the official poets in Wales and Ireland shared with Christian clerics an equal status and an equal obligation to uphold the ruler's authority: it is significant in this respect that Welsh poets (like poets elsewhere in Christendom) claimed that their awen or inspiration was of divine origin. In praising God the poet was performing the same office as he performed for his king: he employed similar synonyms for God as he employed for temporal rulers-dofydd, gwledig, mechteyrn, and the like-and he adopted the same topoi, such as ni'th oes gystedlydd ('Thou hast no peer'). The poet claimed an equivalent protection from God as from his earthly patron, and just as he would intercede for reconcili- ation with an offended ruler by addressing to him a dadolwch, so would he make atonement and seek reconciliation with God by the composition on his death-bed of a marwysgafn. Against this background it seems at first somewhat inconsistent to find that the values which the Gogynfeirdd eulogized in their patrons were the