Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General Editor's Foreword
- Introduction
- I Arthur of the Irish: A Viable Concept?
- II Performing Culhwch ac Olwen
- III Court and Cyuoeth: Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide and the Middle Welsh Gereint
- IV Owein, Ystorya Bown, and the Problem of ‘Relative Distance’: Some Methodological Considerations and Speculations
- V Neither Flesh nor Fowl: Merlin as Bird-Man in Breton Folk Tradition
- VI Narratives and Non-Narratives: Aspects of Welsh Arthurian Tradition
- CONTENTS OF PREVIOUS VOLUMES
VI - Narratives and Non-Narratives: Aspects of Welsh Arthurian Tradition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General Editor's Foreword
- Introduction
- I Arthur of the Irish: A Viable Concept?
- II Performing Culhwch ac Olwen
- III Court and Cyuoeth: Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide and the Middle Welsh Gereint
- IV Owein, Ystorya Bown, and the Problem of ‘Relative Distance’: Some Methodological Considerations and Speculations
- V Neither Flesh nor Fowl: Merlin as Bird-Man in Breton Folk Tradition
- VI Narratives and Non-Narratives: Aspects of Welsh Arthurian Tradition
- CONTENTS OF PREVIOUS VOLUMES
Summary
Writing in his Tours of Wales, published in 1781, the renowned traveller and scholar Thomas Pennant, of Downing in Flintshire, gives an account of various places he had seen in Anglesey, including the following brief but telling reference:
Above Llanddona is a high hill, called Bwrdd Arthur or Arthur's round table; the true name was probably Din, or Dinas Sulwy; for a church immediately beneath bears that of Llanfihangel Din Sulwy.
Pennant notes that the hill, a limestone pavement, provides natural defences and that these were enhanced by building ramparts, but it is his comments on the place-name that are particularly significant. In a single sentence he notes that the spot now has an Arthurian name, but demolishes any idea of its antiquity and authenticity. Bwrdd Arthur is tersely and correctly dismissed as a late accretion. Today we might characterise this Arthurianisation of a non-Arthurian Welsh place-name as an example of the persistent popularity of Arthurian tradition in Wales, or with a slightly different emphasis, a reflex of a late, learned tradition ousting a ‘genuine’ native tradition. Here, as so often, we may blame Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Arthurian narrative first enchanted Welsh audiences in the twelfth century, presenting as it did an irresistible image of a heroic past when, as descendants of Brutus, their ancestors the Brythoniaid or Brythons ruled the entire island of Britain, an image which was to shape Welsh political attitudes and provide virtually the only political discourse for centuries.
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- Information
- Arthurian Literature XXICeltic Arthurian Material, pp. 115 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004