Welsh Journals

from the wider Anglo-Saxon scene. As for his Hwicce and Magonsaetan, they ought to have been studied within the wider context of Mercia as a whole. A wider spatial format and a greater chronological span would in turn have facilitated an element of true interdisciplinarity. As the book stands, it contains a collection of studies in which there is little meeting point between broad-based scholarly discussion on Anglo-Latin writing and. densely technical and derivative material on soils and settlements. Readers approaching this work from their specialised angles of scholarly vision will be forced to rely on two cluttered maps, both of which fail to set the region within the wider context even of Mercia. References in footnotes to maps supplied in the works of M. Gelling and R. Hilton only serve to highlight the lamentable absence of adequate mapping in this book, of features such as soil suitability, coin hoards, various place-name elements, Roman roads and ancient trackways and saltways-all of which are discussed within a labyrinth of other partially digested geographical and ecological details. The author acknowledges his great debt to the masterly studies of C. Dyer, R. Hilton, and D. Hooke. But all three of those scholars significantly allowed for spatial and chronological room to manoeuvre, and they wisely concentrated on regions and time-spans offering a coherent body of material to yield analysis and results. Sims-Williams might also have studied with profit work currently being published on early Irish historical geography where territories contemporary with those in Anglo-Saxon England are mapped in great detail, and studied systematically in more viable geographical units than is attempted in this book. Neither this comparative Irish material nor M. Richards's important paper on 'Places and Persons of the Early Welsh Church', published in The Welsh History Review in 1970, is cited in the bibliography. So, in spite of undoubted scholarly qualities in its vignettes, it is as a book that Sims-Williams's work must come under criticism. It is to be hoped that the significant problems which it raises will prompt its Cambridge editors to rethink and re-define their notion of interdisciplinary studies. ALFRED P. SMYTH Kent GWLAD Y BRUTIAU. By Dafydd Glyn Jones. Coleg Prifysgol Cymru, Abertawe. 1991. 30 Tt. £ 1.50. THE CRUCIBLE OF MYTH. By Emyr Humphreys. University College of Swansea, 1990. Pp. 20. £ 1.50. Two 1990 lectures, the Henry Lewis Memorial Lecture and the W. D. Thomas Lecture, both delivered at Swansea, the one at Prifysgol Cymru, the other at University College, whatever may be the significance of the nomenclature, and presented in the embarrassingly and strikingly different typefaces of typewriter and word-processor. Rarely, however, can two college lectures have complemented each other so neatly.