Abstract
Perhaps more than any nation of Western Europe, England is haunted by voices in foreign tongues. From its origins in the petty kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy to its ascension as a world power and its current status as the metropole of a former empire, the Welsh language has been, if not the loudest, certainly among the most persistent of these other voices. This is no surprise: Wales is the only polity that England has reduced to an apparently irreversible loss of sovereignty, or at least a loss that has yet to be reversed, the recently devolved National Assembly for Wales notwithstanding. In name if nothing else, Wales is still the privileged endowment of the heir apparent to the English throne and has been so since Edward of Caernarvon’s birth there in 1284. Yet the proximity of Wales to its conquerors and the chronological primacy of its conquest also grant it a unique power. More than India or Hong Kong, more than South Africa or Iraq or the United States, Wales stands as the mote in England’s imperial eye. Wales is England’s original repressed Other, the unruly subaltern that England sees in its mirror, the barbarian standing at the threshold.1
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Notes
William Shakespeare, Henry V, 3rd Arden ed., ed. T. W. Craig (London: Routledge, 1995), IV:7, lines 94–118.
Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 384.
See Megan S. Lloyd, “Speak It in Welsh”: Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Lexington Books, 2008).
Even the subversive force of Fluellen’s unfavorable comparison of Henry to Alexander the Great is humorously undercut by the Welshman’s insistence on the Hellenistic conqueror’s epithet: the “pig.” See Shakespeare, Henry V, IV: vii; David Quint, “‘Alexander the Pig’: Shakespeare on History and Poetry,” boundary 2 10 (1982): 49–67, and esp. 60, shows persuasively how Fluellen’s attempts at historical analysis and panegyric undercut themselves, rendering him ludicrous.
For a larger discussion of the representation of the Welsh in Elizabethan texts, see Peter Roberts, “Tudor Wales, National Identity, and the British Inheritance,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1536–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 8–42.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, 3.1. ed. David Bevington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
See R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, Vol. 1, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 150.
See, for instance, Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1915);
David Charles Douglas, The Norman Achievement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969);
J. O. Prestwich, “War and Finance in the Anglo-Norman State,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 4 (1954): 19–43;
and, more recently, Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
For a recent example, see C. Warren Hollister, “Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Proceedings of the Borchard Conference on Anglo-Norman History, 1995, ed. C. Warren Hollister (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 1–16.
For a full account of the battle and its aftermath, see J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1939), pp. 384–388;
and Kari Maund, The Welsh Kings (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2000), pp. 78–82.
Rees Davies provides a valuable outline of early Norman colonization in Wales in The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 27–32.
Lynn Nelson, The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1172 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 180–182.
Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4.
See Cory James Rushton, “Malory’s Divided Wales,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2008), pp. 175–189.
Brut y Tywysogyon, or The Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), pp. 78–79.
Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, Vol. VI, ed. James Dimock (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), p. 225n;
and see H. C. Darby, “The Marches of Wales in 1086,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 11 (1986): esp. pp. 260–262.
Gesta Stephani, ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 14. Translation is mine.
Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 59–60.
Quoted by Gerald of Wales, De Invectionibus, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, Vol. III, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), p. 15.
Emyr Humphries, The Taliesin Tradition: A Quest for the Welsh Identity (Bridgend, Glamorgan: Seren Press, 1989), pp. 10–11, emphasizes the extent to which Welsh prophetic traditions were dedicated to preserving this sense of historical continuity with the ancient Britons: “The Welsh saw themselves as the Israelites of old, the remnant of a more glorious past celebrated by a continuing poetic tradition which kept them buoyant and confident and filled them with an unquenchable expectation of a promised land.”
Jehan Bodel, La chanson des Saisnes, ed. Annette Brasseur, Vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1989), p. 2.
Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xiii.
Marie de France, Lais, ed. A. Ewert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1945), p. xiii.
Paul Ricouer, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. 31–90;
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27.
White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)
and Robert D. Hanning’s The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) have also been seminal in my thinking about the narrative teleologies.
Jean Blacker, The Faces of Time: Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narratives of the Anglo-Norman Regnum (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994);
Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Otter, Inventiones, esp. pp. 1–7; Elisabeth van Houts usefully breaks down the distinctions between fiction, history, Latin, and the vernacular in “Latin and French as Languages of the Past in Normandy during the Reign of Henry II: Robert of Torigni, Stephen of Rouen, and Wace,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 53–78.
J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 40.
Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Press, 1979), p. 3.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 1.
See The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1990).
Before ever appearing in an Arthurian romance or in a Norman history like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s, most of these names appeared in Welsh texts: Arthur, Bedwyr, Kei, Gwalchmai (= Gawain), Gwenhwyfar (= Guenevere). The name Mordred, interestingly, seems to come from a Cornish form. The name Launcelot is of a difficult and highly debated etymology, and it may well be the coinage of an unknown twelfth-century raconteur. For a definitive survey of Celtic Arthurian nomenclature, see John T. Koch, “The Celtic Lands,” in Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996). See also the discussion in the Kerth/Loomis/Webster edition of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet: Lanzelet, trans. Thomas Kerth, notes by Kenneth G. T. Webster and Roger Sherman Loomis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4.
Rachel Bromwich, “First Transmission to England and France,” in The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 276–277.
Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 109.
And see also Patrick Sims-Williams, “Did Itinerant Breton Conteurs Transmit the Matiére de Bretagne?” Romania 116 (1998): 72–111.
For an overview and refutation of Geoffrey’s reliance on the ancient British book, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael Faletra (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), pp. 14–21.
See “A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini,” ed. Michael J Curley, Speculum 57 (1982): 217–249; Gerald of Wales, Itin. Kamb., Opera Vol. VI, 124; and see also Ad Putter, “Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin,” in Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (2008): 90–103.
Jean Frappier, “Chrétien de Troyes,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 164.
Constance Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966). Another scholar who aims at providing a solid geohistorical basis for the emergence of the Matter of Britain—specifically, of the templates of the tair rhamant-is R. M. Jones in his “Narrative Structure in Medieval Welsh Prose Tales,” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. C. W. Sullivan (New York: Garland, 1996), esp. pp. 219–224.
For example: M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963);
W. F. Bolton, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 597–1066 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univerity Press, 1967);
and F. A. C. Mantello and A. C. Rigg, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1996).
Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229–249;
Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, ed., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100 – c. 1500 (York: York Medieval Press, 2009).
Per Nykrog, Chrétien de Troyes: romancier discutable (Geneva: Droz, 1996). For the best case for the English provenance of Erec et Enide and Cligés,
see Constance Bullock-Davies, “Chrétien de Troyes and England,” Arthurian Literature 1 (1981): 1–61;
and see also Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7 (1975): 135–163.
As an example of Loomis at his most excessive, see The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963). The contemporary critical reaction against Loomis’s life work, while certainly not misplaced in general, does tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, however. Loomis’s The Development of Arthurian Romance (London: Hutcheson, 1963) provides a solid overview of the genre; many keen insights likewise emerge from his prodigious knowledge of the primary materials, especially in his Wales and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1956) and Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).
I would draw particular attention to the work of historians R. R. Davies, John Gillingham, and Robert Bartlett. Davies in his The Age of Conquest draws long-needed attention to all aspects of the English colonization of Wales in the High Middle Ages; John Gillingham in numerous articles likewise consistently recognizes the cultural and even ideological wars fought between Welsh and English during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), as well as his England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) incorporates the clash of cultures—especially between England and Wales—as a vital aspect of historical change in the period.
For a useful overview, see Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
See Warren, History on the Edge, pp. ix–xiii and pp. 1–22; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy; and Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries, pp. 105–132.
For a deeper discussion of these problems, see Bruce Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogy of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002): 1195–1227.
See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 1–17.
See Valerie Flint, “The Historia Regum Brittaniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and Its Purpose. A Suggestion,” Speculum 54 (1979): 447–468; Otter, Inventiones, pp. 69–84; and
Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 31–67.
Meecham-Jones, “Introduction,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–2.
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© 2014 Michael A. Faletra
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Faletra, M.A. (2014). Introduction: The Scrap-Heap of History. In: Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391032_1
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