Period Storytelling

[Heather Rose Jones]

On Wed, 3 Jan 1996 kohrn at bach.seattleu.edu wrote:

> Tangwystyl
> 	Is there any evidance the Mabinogian was originally told in either
> verse or meter? These are very hard things to come up with continuously
> over the course of a story.  Therefore it becomes necessary to remember exact
> words to fit either the rhyme or the meter.  This might be the very reason
> for originally working the story into a poem.  People in an oral culture
> must have been very aware of how easily a story becomes changed (a la whisper
> down the lane).  To prevent this from happening to important works (historical,
> religious, or legal) poetry could have been used.  I don't know much about
> the Mabinogean, but I had a great deal in school on classical poetry and
> reasons behind it (i.e. Homer).
> 			Calote of Wyncote
> 			kohrn at seattleu.edu

The Mabinogi, like many of the early Irish and Norse epic works, seems to 
have originally been structured as a narrative with interspersed verse. 
There are two places in the extant version where such interposed verses 
clearly survive: the episode in Branwen where Efnissien declaims an 
englyn concerning the bags of "flour" (really warriors) that he has just 
destroyed; and the episode in Math where Gwydion is coaxing the eagle 
(who is really Llew) down out of the tree. There are several other 
passages where there is fairly strong evidence for corrupted verses. (You 
have to remember that in a manuscript the verses would not be written in 
some set-off fashion as is the modern style. This sort of corruption 
would be more likely after the tale had become a written, rather than 
oral, work.) A representative example of these possibly corrupted verses 
comes in Pwyll in the "pillow-talk" scene between Arawn and his wife 
where he says:

Cadarn a ungwr y gydymdeithas
^                ^     ^^
a diffleis, a geveis i yn gedymdeith
       ^^^    ^  ^^^      ^     ^^
We have a whole string of radical alliteration (i.e., the marked "g"s are 
underlyingly "c"s -- early examples of Welsh poetry were as likely to 
alliterate the underlying consonants as the surface ones); and a string 
of half- or full-rhymes.

Her response includes:

Gavael gadarn a geveist ar gedymdeith ...
^      ^        ^          ^
Again, a string of alliterations. The chances are that there are more 
examples of this sort of thing -- poetic-style "ornamentation" that 
points to a lost verse -- if you look for them systematically. It is 
worth noting that in both the above passages, the poetic section is 
interrupted by a fairly awkward phrase that brings the whole statement 
more into line with Christian philosophy.

Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn