Welsh Journals

HISTORICAL NEED AND LITERARY NARRATIVE: A CAVEAT FROM NINTH-CENTURY WALES RECENTLY historians of the Celtic-speaking peoples have been alert to the possibility that works of early medieval literature were composed for particular political or dynastic interests which, if they can be identified, may reveal a work's date and intended audience. This approach, which has obvious attractions for literary historians, was well illustrated with Irish material by Professor Donnchadh 6 Corrain in his lecture 'Historical Need and Literary Narrative' to the Seventh International Congress of Celtic Studies in 1983. He concluded: Ownership of the past was, in a sense, control of the future and when much of our literature comes to us from the workbooks of the mandarins who preserved, made and re-made that past, it should be particularly rewarding to bear historical need and historical context in mind when studying that literature. The validity of his verdict has been upheld by subsequent studies of a number of Irish literary texts, notably by Dr. Maire Herbert.2 There is a danger, however, that the fact that vested interests can be detected behind some texts may tempt literary historians to assume their existence behind other texts and to place works in specific historical contexts on the basis of mere hypotheses.3 Professor 6 Corrain himself enters a couple of caveats: firstly, that Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Celtic Studies, Oxford, 1983, ed. D. E. Evans et al. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 141-58 (p. 153). 2 Maire Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry (Oxford, 1988), pp. 151-79; Betha Adamndin: The Irish Life of Adamndn, ed. Maire Herbert and Padraig 6 Riain (Irish Texts Society, LIV, London, 1988), pp. 6-31; Maire Herbert, 'FledDtiin na nG6d: A Reappraisal', Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, XVIII (Winter 1989), 75-87. Cf. Patricia Kelly, 'The Tain as Literature', in Aspects of the Tain, ed. J.P. Mallory (Belfast, 1992), pp. 69-102 (p. 72): 'encoding statements about the present in terms of events of the past is not confined to the genre of origin legends but has been demonstrated in the other narrative cycles'; see ibid., pp. 88-89, on attempts to apply this to the Tdin. 3 Cf. my caveat in a symposium at Odense in 1983: 'It might be argued that the legend of Macsen as ruler of Britain was not only cultivated but also invented by the dynasties which claimed descent from him. Such an argument would certainly be in tune with current trends in Celtic scholarship, but would in my opinion be rather simplistic, for it is equally possible that the legend of Macsen gave rise to the genealogical claims, or, more likely, that legend and genealogy developed together as inextricably intertwined branches of hones or cyfarwyddyd' (P. P. Sims-Williams, 'Some Functions of Origin Stories in Early Medieval Wales', in History and Heroic Tale, ed. Tore Nyberg etal. (Odense, 1985), pp. 97-131 (pp. 108-9), an argument endorsed by Kim McCone in his review in CMCS, XIII (Summer 1987), 109. In n. 47 I promised to discuss these trends 'elsewhere in connection with the Llywarch Hen material'; here, long overdue, is that paper, originally delivered in 1978 (see n. 23 below).