Papers by Andrew Welsh
Narrative in Celtic Tradition: Essays in Honor of Edgar M. Slotkin, ed. Joseph F. Eska, Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook 8-9 (Hamilton, NY: Colgate University Press, 2011), 256-275
Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, ed. Maurice Charney, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 2:429-446., 2005
Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, ed. Maurice Charney, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 1:153-156.
Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 76-95
Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 2:824-832
Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 1:210-212, 2:607-609
Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In: Poems by Ed Roberson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), xi-xvi
Old and Middle English Literature, ed. Jeffrey Helterman and Jerome Mitchell, Volume 146 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research,1994), 100-104
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 182, 183, 1005-06, 1070-72
Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples: Proceedings of the Second North American Congress of Celtic Studies, ed. Cyril J. Byrne, Margaret Harry, and Pádraig Ó Siadhail (Halifax: Chair of Irish Studies, St. Mary's University, 1992), 369-82
Philological Quarterly 70 (1991), 485-502
ANQ: Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews NS 3 (1990), 90-93
Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 65.2 (April 1990), 344-62
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi is a work, or perhaps a cycle of four related works, composed i... more The Four Branches of the Mabinogi is a work, or perhaps a cycle of four related works, composed in Middle Welsh prose probably near the end of the eleventh century and perhaps in southwest Wales. It is the most important surviving prose fiction produced in Britain before the romances of Malory four centuries later and is all the more valuable in that we do not have from medieval Britain, as we do from Ireland, a rich legacy of vernacular prose fiction. It draws freely from a broad background of traditional narratives, many known to us primarily as oral folktales, and yet is certainly the work of an author, composed in writing: few of the telltale signs of oral composition appear in its controlled and economical style.' The artistry of the unknown author is evident, but the meaning of his story is not. Both factors have attracted scholarly analysis and critical interpretation for more than a century. In general, those studies have assumed that the narrative lacks structure and coherence, a lack which is often explained by seeing the Mabinogi as composed of, or in some way embodying, the fragmentary remains of some lost earlier worka complete heroic saga about the mysterious birth, victorious career, and tragic death of a legendary hero or a coherent body of mythology recounting the archetypal exploits of Celtic gods long since forgotten. The "saga" and the "mythology" approaches are both standard views of The Four Branches with a long history, and they are not mutually exclusive, having at times been combined in studies that find in the medieval Welsh work survivals of a lost heroic saga which was itself based on an even older body of mythology. Interpretations such as these are rooted in the late-nineteenth-century theory of "survivals," a way of seeing older literary works as the relics of lost myths, rituals, or national epics. There is a curious ambivalence, as some of those interpretations acknowledge, in a critical approach that admires the accomplishment of an author's style even as it argues that his story is badly in need of reconstruction.2 An early example of the "saga" approach is Edward Anwyl's argument at the turn of the century that The Four Branches seems "to consist of fragments The assumption of a single author for all four Branches has been questioned, though not supplanted; see most recently Sioned Davies, "Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi-A Case for Multiple Authorship," in Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies, ed. Gordon W. MacLennan (Ottawa, 1988), pp. 443-59. 2 A recent example of the idea that the author of The Four Branches was a good stylist but not a good storyteller is Proinsias Mac Cana's interesting discussion of the qualities that make up that style (The Mabinogi, Writers of Wales [Cardiff, 1977], pp. 41-48). 344 SPECULUM 65 (1990) Doubling and Incest from various sagas more or less skilfully combined into a unity," with the whole organized around the life story of the hero Pryderi, "which seems to form the main trunk upon which the Four Branches hang."3 A generation later, W. J. Gruffydd developed in great detail a theory of the hypothetical original form and gradual disintegration of a four-part "Saga of Pryderi," which, he believed, represented the earlier, and better, state of The Four Branchesan influential argument which is still reflected, for example, in the introduction to the widely read Everyman translation of the Mabinogi.4 On the whole, however, the "mythology" approach has been more enduring. Taking as representative of this approach its various views of the figure of Rhiannon, we find her regarded by John Rhys (who in 1877 became the first professor of Celtic at Oxford) first as a goddess who was wife to the Lord of the Underworld and mother of the Sun God; later, he saw her as belonging to one of the great families of an earlier race of non-Celtic inhabitants in Britain, legends of which survived among the early Celts, those legends eventually being transformed into myths of gods and goddesses.5 John MacCulloch in the next generation wrote that beneath the "romantic tales" of the Mabinogi "there is a mythical substratum surviving all changes" and that "the dramatis personae are the ancient gods."6 Rhiannon's name suggested to him that she was once the goddess *Rigantond ("Great Queen"), and her association with the magic birds of the Second Branch seemed to mean that she was also "an Elysian goddess."7 A later book by W. J. Gruffydd emphasized the presence of a mythological layer of narrative beneath his reconstructed "Saga of Pryderi" and focused on the figure of Rhiannon as "the survival of an immemorial myth in which she was the Great Mother who became identified with the Great Horse Goddess, Epona."8 More recently, the mythological approach has again been called upon by Proinsias Mac Cana, who writes that Rhiannon and the other strong female figures in The Four Branches are "literary reflexes of the Celtic goddess in some of her many aspects," and by Patrick K. Ford, who writes that "there is a considerable body of evidence that compels us to regard Rhiannon as a literary version of the horse goddess, Epona."9
Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 17 (Summer 1989), 15-41, 1989
Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 15 (Summer 1988), 51-62, 1988
Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 89-113.
Books by Andrew Welsh
Book Reviews by Andrew Welsh
reviewed in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 86.3 (July 2011), 730-31
reviewed in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 85.3 (July 2010), 686-88
The landscapes of the fourteenth-century poem Sir G awain and the Green Knight, the finest by far... more The landscapes of the fourteenth-century poem Sir G awain and the Green Knight, the finest by far of Arthurian romances in M iddle English, are somewhere in western England and in Wales. The dialect of the poem has been identified as that of the northwest M idlands, perhaps Cheshire, but the name of the author, where he worked, the way of life he followed, and the audience for whom he wrote are all unknown. Sir Frederic M adden published the first modern edition of the poem in 1839 in a collection with ten other Gawain romances, most of which are connected in one way or another with Cumberland, the far northwest corner of England. Accordingly, he located Bertilak's castle and the nearby Green Chapel, where Gawain completes his quest, in Cumberland's Inglewood Forest. In Looking Westward Ordelle G. H ill directs his gaze instead toward the geography, literary traditions, and political history of the west M idlands, the M arches, and Wales. Sir G awain is a romance, but it is also, he writes, " a roman à clef, fiction with recognizable historical and contemporary allusions." M ore than just reflecting the cultural milieu of the poem, those allusions are intentionally designed " to access the knowledge and memories of the recent, and often tragic, past" of the west country. That is to say, for both the poet and the original audience, historical memories embedded in the poem's landscapes were an essential part of the poem's meaning. H ill explores the allusions and memories in four main chapters. The first argues for two quite different kinds of literary influence on the poem: fourteenth-century Welsh poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym and Iolo Goch and the Anglo-Norman Livre de seyntz medicines (1354) by H enry Grosmont, the first duke of Lancaster. The next chapter attempts to follow Gawain's route as he searches for the Green Chapel, setting out from Camelot, riding through an unspecified part of England and into Wales, across north Wales and the Wirral, and finally into a mysterious realm where he eventually finds Bertilak's castle and, on N ew Year's morning, the Green Chapel. H ill then turns to prominent families and individuals of the west in the fourteenth century and proposes various " historical prototypes" for characters in the poem-finding, for example, that H enry of Lancaster, in whom he has a particular interest, is likely to have served as a real-life model for both Gawain and Bertilak. Finally H ill takes up the narrative backbone of the poem, the " beheading game," a traditional motif that has been traced back through French romance to Irish saga but which H ill also connects with particular " historical realities" in the west, especially three " significant beheadings" of prominent figures who had opposed English kings: Simon de M ontfort (1265), Llywelyn ap
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Papers by Andrew Welsh
Books by Andrew Welsh
Book Reviews by Andrew Welsh