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old heroic values celebrated by the Cynfeirdd: the values which were in fact inherent in the tight conservative tradition of Celtic bardic verse. Thus, from an intellectual point-of-view, Meilyr's elegy for Gruffudd ap Cynan shows no perceptible advance upon the ethos of the Gododdin and of Taliesin's awdlau to Urien Rheged. Yet change was on the way, and in Wales as in Europe as a whole, the twelfth century was a major turning- point, signalizing both the end of an era and a new beginning. Gradually it became less necessary to exalt as their outstanding virtue the military prowess of rulers who had found it much easier to identify with the heroes of the Old Testament than with the exponents of the New Testament's moral values. This change is discernible in such poems as the marwnad composed at the end of the century by Gruffudd ap Gwrgenau for a later Gruffudd ap Cynan (a prince who had taken upon himself a monk's habit in which to die); or indeed in the hesitant ambivalence expressed in Meilyr's marwysgafn. Yet in spite of all that was left unsaid or half-said by these poets, it is in the work of the Gogynfeirdd that we find the most direct and sincere expression of the twelfth-century layman's interpretation of Christianity. It is on the whole a sombre and a despondent view of the human lot. In this semi-barbaric society, poets and clerics were the joint upholders of 'culture' in the fullest sense. The two streams of tradition came together in the religious verse of the Gogynfeirdd, drawing as they did upon their immensely ancient inheritance of the techniques of canu mawl. The delight- ful nativity poem (Oxford Book of Welsh Verse, no. 34) of the Franciscan Madog ap Gwallter marks a new departure in the blending of secular with religious creative activity when, with simple and eloquent words, and in a traditional metre, he dwells above all upon the humanity of Jesus. And in eulogizing St. Tysilio, the chief saint of Powys and the patron of Meifod, Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr had no intention that his mixed audience of warriors and clerics should be allowed to forget that their saint had been brother to Cynan Garwyn, the sixth-century ruler of Powys to whom Taliesin (or some other poet) had addressed the oldest awdl of praise which has come down to us in the Welsh language. RACHEL BROMWICH Bangor THE NORMAN CONQUERORS. By David Walker. Christopher Davies, Swansea, 1977. Pp. 109. £ 2.95. This book is one of the first two titles to appear in the series 'A New History of Wales', edited by Ralph Griffiths, Kenneth O. Morgan and J. Beverley Smith. The object of the series is to bring to sixth-formers, undergraduates and general readers the fruits of recent research in com- pact form, and Dr. Walker has contributed a thoughtful and helpful volume on a complex theme. The basic question, as he reads it, was to know what would grow out of the 'frontier conditions' of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries into a more settled age; and he recognises that no answer was given to that question at any time during the twelfth century. It will be interesting to