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Author: Nicolas Jacobs
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322582
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Among the most enigmatic and fascinating of early Welsh poems are the sequences of stanzas commonly categorized as gnomic. In their most typical form they juxtapose vivid natural description with generalisations about the physical world and about human life, combining an evident delight in weather and the changing seasons, landscapes and seascapes, and birds, beasts and plants with a serious and often witty concern for the moral and practical aspects of daily life. The origin and function of these stanzas remains a puzzle; some may be associated with particular situations in narratives now lost, but as a whole they appear to have developed at an early stage into a recognised genre of their own. They may be supposed to have a philosophical purpose, serving to assert a continuity between the natural and moral orders; on the other hand they may be read simply as a repository of folk-wisdom. While their interpretation remains a matter for discussion, their language is comparatively simple, and they thus provide an engaging window on the ordinary conceptual world of mediaeval Wales. This volume presents texts of the gnomic stanzas from the most important collection, that in Red Book of Hergest, and from some other manuscripts, with a few other poems containing related material, some of them edited in English for the first time, together with a literary and linguistic introduction, explanatory commentary and extensive glossary. Nicolas Jacobs is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
Author: Nicolas Jacobs
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322582
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Get Book Here
Book Description
Among the most enigmatic and fascinating of early Welsh poems are the sequences of stanzas commonly categorized as gnomic. In their most typical form they juxtapose vivid natural description with generalisations about the physical world and about human life, combining an evident delight in weather and the changing seasons, landscapes and seascapes, and birds, beasts and plants with a serious and often witty concern for the moral and practical aspects of daily life. The origin and function of these stanzas remains a puzzle; some may be associated with particular situations in narratives now lost, but as a whole they appear to have developed at an early stage into a recognised genre of their own. They may be supposed to have a philosophical purpose, serving to assert a continuity between the natural and moral orders; on the other hand they may be read simply as a repository of folk-wisdom. While their interpretation remains a matter for discussion, their language is comparatively simple, and they thus provide an engaging window on the ordinary conceptual world of mediaeval Wales. This volume presents texts of the gnomic stanzas from the most important collection, that in Red Book of Hergest, and from some other manuscripts, with a few other poems containing related material, some of them edited in English for the first time, together with a literary and linguistic introduction, explanatory commentary and extensive glossary. Nicolas Jacobs is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
Author: Jenny Rowland
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322639
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
The saga englynion are among the most appealing medieval Welsh poems. Despite some difficulties, their style is generally direct and their contents interesting to modern readers. In these poems the anonymous poets speak as characters from story. The full narrative setting has been lost, but enough can be reconstructed to appreciate the poetry. This selection includes dramatic dialogues and monologues exploring the acceptable limits of heroism. The old warrior, Llywarch Hen, mourns his sons’ death in battle and his lonely old age full of regrets. Heledd, the only major female character in the saga poetry, laments the loss of her family and her country to the invading English. A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems, the fifth volume of the Library of Medieval Welsh Literature Series, presents edited texts from the main manuscripts. The introduction offers a guide to interpretation, dating, and metrics, while a full glossary and explanatory notes make these poems readily accessible to the reader.
Author: Nerys Ann Jones
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1781889082
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
For over a thousand years, Arthur has had widespread appeal and influence like no other literary character or historical figure. Yet, despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters are still shrouded in uncertainty. They are mostly found in poetic texts scattered throughout the four great compilations of early and medieval Welsh literature produced between 1250 and 1350. Whilst some are thought to predate their manuscript sources by several centuries, many of these poems are notoriously difficult to date. None of them are narrative in nature and very few focus solely on Arthurian material but they are characterised by an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences in the courts of princes and noblemen the length and breadth of Wales. They portray Arthur in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They also testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures. Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry, the fourth volume in the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series, provides discussion of each of the references to Arthurian characters in early Welsh poetic sources together with an image from the earliest manuscript, a transliteration, a comprehensive edition, a translation (where possible) and a word-list. The nine most significant texts are interpreted in more detail with commentary on metrical, linguistic and stylistic features.
Author: Morton W. Bloomfield
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859913478
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
This study draws on a wide range of texts — early Irish, pre-modern Scottish Gaelic, early Welsh, Early Norse, Old English —to illustrate the role of the poet as a tool of power, as seer, and as ceremonial figure.
Author: Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gnomic poetry, Welsh
Languages : cy
Pages : 79
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Book Description
Author: Rowan Williams
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141396946
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
The great work of Welsh literature, translated in full for the first time in over 100 years by two of its country's foremost poets Tennyson portrayed him, and wrote at least one poem under his name. Robert Graves was fascinated by what he saw as his work's connection to a lost world of deeply buried folkloric memory. He is a shapeshifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; a 6th-century Brythonic bard; and a legendary collective project spanning the centuries up to The Book of Taliesin's compilation in 14th-century North Wales. He is, above all, no single 'he'. The figure of Taliesin is a mystery. But of the variety and quality of the poems written under his sign, of their power as exemplars of the force of ecstatic poetic imagination, and of the fascinating window they offer us onto a strange and visionary world, there can be no question. In the first volume to gather all of the poems from The Book of Taliesin since 1915, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams's accessible translation makes these outrageous, arrogant, stumbling and joyful poems available to a new generation of readers.
Author: Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gnomic poetry, Welsh
Languages : cy
Pages : 70
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Book Description
Author: Kenneth Jackson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107600189
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Kenneth Jackson examines nature poetry that was produced in Ireland and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841429
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1678
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Book Description
The most important poetry reference for more than four decades—now fully updated for the twenty-first century Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition—the first new edition in almost twenty years—reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry, all while preserving the best of the previous volumes. At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth. Entries range in length from brief paragraphs to major essays of 15,000 words, offering a more thorough treatment—including expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies—than conventional handbooks or dictionaries. This is a book that no reader or writer of poetry will want to be without. Thoroughly revised and updated by a new editorial team for twenty-first-century students, scholars, and poets More than 250 new entries cover recent terms, movements, and related topics Broader international coverage includes articles on the poetries of more than 110 nations, regions, and languages Expanded coverage of poetries of the non-Western and developing worlds Updated bibliographies and cross-references New, easier-to-use page design Fully indexed for the first time
Author: Sarah Lynn Higley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Early Welsh and Old English poetry are rarely spoken of together, but when they are, they have been described as like or different from one another. Sarah Higley breaks this cycle of mutual marginalization by examining what it means to read otherness or sameness into a text, concluding that too much of our reading is "anglo-centric" in its expectations and dictated by invisible ideological agendas. Examinations of the Llywarch Hen Corpus, for instance, have sought comparisons among the Old English elegies, but mainly for the purpose of demonstrating how the Welsh are of a color with them: derived from the same penitential genre merely less explicit in their penitential thrust. Scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the secular nature of these Welsh laments, which are discomfitingly silent about divine solace and which, like the Old English poems, do not cooperate with our efforts to categorize them. The author reexamines notions of genre, category, and poetic "explicitness" and how they snare us. Higley sees the English and Welsh traditions as foils to one another rather than as template and variation, and she starts with the connection of natural image and emotion, employed differently in these two contiguous but separate traditions. She shows how the English poems, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic, are invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the Welsh are not. The Welsh "omissions" might be better understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics, imagery, context) serve to link ideas, perhaps even to disrupt them. She sees difficulty, ambiguity, and dialogism as loci of power - neither accidents of our reading distance nor defects in other classical standards of wholeness. Reading the English and the Welsh together with a respect for the mutual differences helps us to get beyond some of the cliche's about what is English and "familiar" and what is Celtic and "other." Her argument revolves around the plight of the lone human as he or she is depicted in these texts in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the world: caught between society and wilderness, inside and outside, sacred and secular, meaning and nonmeaning. This focus on connection informs the title as well: "between languages" expresses our position as readers reading two different cultures together, reading ancient literature mediated through modern poetic theory, and the position of medieval scholarship in its struggle between traditional and postmodern approaches. Between Languages brings obscure and moving poems into a wider academic orbit, offering new editions and translations of Old English and Early Welsh elegies, wisdom poems, and enigmata, including one of the few complete English translations in this century of a vatic text from The Book of Taliesin.
