Abstract
Despite the recurrence of his primal scene of druid sacrifice at intervals between 1787 and 1842,2 one would not say that Wordsworth ever made the subject of Druids and their beliefs, or Bards and their work, the central focus of any of his major work. Speculative expositions of the alleged beliefs and values of the Druids and their Bardic successors have little purchase on him. When one thinks of the output of antiquarian verse between Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622) and Cottle’s The Fall of Cambria, a poem in Twenty Four Books (1808), Wordsworth’s investment in ‘The Matter of Britain’ can seem belated, insignificant and even, until the scrupulously researched Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ill-informed.3
Majestic Skiddaw round whose trackless steep Mid the bright sun-shine darksome tempests sweep, To you the patriot fled: his native land He spurn’d when proffer’d by a conqueror’s hand: In you to roam at large; to lay his head On the black rock, unclad, unhous’d, unfed
—George Richards, The Aboriginal Britons1
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Notes
George Richards, The Aboriginal Britons, a Poem (Oxford, 1791), 17.
Apart from the visionary moments in The Vale of Esthwaite, Salisbury Plain, The Prelude, and The Excursion, ancillary motifs appear in An Evening Walk, Yew-Trees, A Weight of Awe (on Long Meg and her daughters), Humanity, The Pass of Kirkstone.
The output included Mason’s Caractacus and Elfrida (1752), Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (1748), Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757) and his transcreations of Aneirin, Robert Holmes’s Alfred (1778, in which Saxon Alfred inherits druid wisdom), Cowper’s Boadicea (1782), George Richards’s Songs of the Aboriginal Bards (1791), James Boaden’s The Camro-Britons (1798), William Sotheby’s The Cambrian Hero, or Llewellyn the Great (c. 1800), Thelwall’s ‘The Fairy of the Lake’ (1801), and Southey’s enormous investment in Madoc (1805).
Three articles addressing this topic are: H. Wright, ‘Wordsworth and Wales’, Welsh Outlook 11 (1924) 103–5 and 127–29. T. H. Bowen, ‘Wordsworth’s Welsh Friend’, English 8:43 (1950) 17–21; and D. Myrddin Lloyd, ‘Wordsworth and Wales’, National Library of Wales Journal, 6:4 (1950), 338–52.
D. Myrddin Lloyd (342–45) adds that there were several dashes into Wales from Somerset in 1797–98 (including the visit to Thelwall’s hermitage), and ongoing communication between the Wordsworths and Thomas Hutchinson in Radnorshire and John Monkhouse at Stowe, near Hay on Wye, between 1809 and 1841. If there was a period of coolness between Wordsworth and Jones it may have related to an encounter in 1793 with a Reverend Thomas who was boasting of the concision of Welsh as compared to English. The inebriated Reverend produced only one example; that ‘tad’ [dad] is Welsh for ‘father’. When Wordsworth smiled at this, the cleric brandished a carving knife and cried ‘You vile Saxon … to come here and insult me an ancient Briton on my own territory’. Wordsworth revenges himself on this ancient Briton as ‘the revd Taffy’ in a letter of 14 May 1829 to George Huntly Gordon (LY 2: 77–79).
For the Cymmrodorion see LY, 2: 11; for Pughe’s Abridgment of the Welsh-English Dictionary (1806), see LY, 2: 650: ‘I often wish to consult a book of that kind’.
Matthew Arnold has a similar passage in Celtic Literature, evoking Diganwy, where Mael-gwyn shut up Elphin’, ‘God-daeth, the place of feasting, where the bards were entertained’, and ‘Llanrwst … and Taliesin’s grave’ On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 14.
Lloyd notes this ambition, 346–47, but deplores Wordsworth’s lack of understanding of the culture of Wales, as compared to Cumbria.
Thomas Pennant, Tours in Wales, 3 vols (London 1810), 2: 323–4.
Edward Davies, Mythology and Rites, 323.
Pennant, 2: 351, citing Poly-Olbion.
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), 10.200f.
Whether Wordsworth really heard such bards, or relied upon Pennant’s testimony that one could, is a moot point. See Pennant, 2: 242.
See Geoffrey Hartman’s ‘Blessing the Torrent: Wordsworth’s later Style’, in The Unremarkable Wordsworth.
William Sotheby, A Tour Through Parts of Wales, 112–13. For Arthur and Merlin Sotheby refers the reader to Faerie Queen, book 1, canto 1.
Thomas Carte, A General History of England (4 vols, London: 1747), 2: 195. For Gray’s use of this passage see Arthur Johnston, Thomas Gray and the Bard. An Inaugural Lecture [at Aberystwyth]. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966.
Arthur Johnston, 18. Gray’s use of the prophecy of the return of a British dynasty to post-Plantagenet England parallels Drayton’s frequent use of that same motif—though Drayton associates the prophecy with Merlin.
Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (4th edn. 3 vols, 1794), 3: 340ff
George Copway, The Traditional History and Characteristics of the Ojibwa Nation (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), 8.
Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16.
See Nora Chadwick, The British Heroic Age, passim, and Sir Ifor Williams, The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, ed. Rachel Bromwich, 2nd edition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980).
James Clarke, A Survey of the Lakes, 5.
From Wordsworth’s time until very recently scholarship was concerned with recovering a historical Arthur from the legendary one. Now this ‘historical Arthur’ is seen by some as an equally suspect back projection from the legendary one. For scholarly surveys of the historicity of Arthur, Aneirin, the sources in Gildas, Galfridi, Nennius, see inter alia, R. Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and B. F. Roberts, eds, The Arthur of the Welsh. The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), D. N. Dumville, Histories and Pseudo-Histories of the Insular Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1990) and T. D. Griffen, Names from the dawn of British legend: Taliesin, Aneirin, Myrddin/Merlin, Arthur (Felinfach: Llanerch, 1994), in which work only Aneirin survives as a historical figure. Thomas Green concludes in his exacting review of sources that ‘there is no reason to believe that the concept of Arthur as a 5th-/6th-century warrior is anything other than a secondary development of the legendary/mythical Arthur’, ‘The Historicity and Historicisation of Arthur’, online, http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/–tomgreen/Arthuriana. For the legendary exploits of the legendary Arthur see John Lewis, The History of Great Britain, book 6, and, inter alia, John Leland, whose credo-like title reads: The Assertion of Arthur. A Learned and True Assertion of the original Life, Actes and death of the most Noble, Valiant and Renowned Prince Arthur, King of great Brittaine. Who succeeding hisfather Uther Pendragon, and right nobly governing this land six and twentie years, then dyed of a mortall wounde receyued in battell, together with victory over his enemies. And was buried at Glastonbury, An 543 (London, 1582.
Wordsworth knew, from schooldays, West’s Guide, Gilpin’s Observations, and Hutchinson’s Excursion. West and Gilpin recycled large quantities of Camden and Stukely. He refers to Mason’s Caractacus in Descriptive Sketches. He travelled in Wales with Thomas Pennant’s Tour in hand, and visited him in 1791. He quotes from James Clarke’s Survey in An Evening Walk and used it extensively for The Borderers, when he also relied on Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burns, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (1777). Clarke’s Survey shows an interest in precisely the kind of local tradition that interested Wordsworth in 1794 and again in 1800. It would be astonishing if he knew neither Hutchinson’s History and Antiquities nor Thomas Carte’s History of England, which owed its Celtic scholarship to Lewis Morris. Carte and John Lewis’s The History of Great Britain, from the first Inhabitants thereof ‘till the death of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britains; and of the Kings of Scotland to Eugene V(1729) were standard historical fare. By 1805 he evidently knew Pughe’s Llywarch, which contained much of lolo Morganwg’s speculations, and may have consulted either Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799) or his Vindication (1803) on which he certainly relied sixteen years later for Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Virtually everything referred to in chapter 1 is quoted or referred to in these volumes, along with Camden, Gildas, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Leland, Giraldus Cambrensis, Rowlands and Stukeley.
My 1910 Everyman copy of Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature (1867) includes appendices from ‘D. W. Nash’s forgotten book on Taliesin’ which testified to the extensive manuscript base of the Myvyrian Archailogy (16,000 ms pages of verse and 15,300 of prose) but dwelt on the gap of six hundred years between the period when the earliest poetry was said to have been composed and the earliest surviving manuscripts. Nash reviewed the testimony of William Owen, Iolo Morganwg, Edward Davies and Sharon Turner, along with further scholarly quarrels of the 1850s, touched off in part by Lady Charlotte Guest’s 3 volume Mabinogion (1838–49), and his scepticism provoked Arnold’s reply. The Everyman edition itself belongs to a fresh Celtic Renaissance, whose landmarks include the publication of Oxford facsimiles of The Red Book of Hergest and The Black Book of Carmarthen, the work of Standish O’Grady and Lady Gregory, Sir John Rhys’s Studies in the Arthurian Legend (1891) and the earliest work of Jessie L. Weston, whose From Ritual to Romance followed in 1920.
Sir Ifor Williams, The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, 71.
Nicolson and Burns, History and Antiquities, 2: 3.
Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4th edn, 3 vols (London: Longman et al, 1823), 1: 285.
Taliesin, cited from Joseph P. Clancy, The Earliest Welsh Poetry (Macmillan 1970), 27.
Ifor Williams, 43.
Sharon Turner, Vindication of the Ancient British Poems of Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and Merdhin, with Specimens of the Poems (London: Edward Williams, 1803), 157, 160.
Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 275–6.
William Owen [Pughe], The Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen, Prince of the Cumbrian Britons (London: 1792), x.
William F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, containing the Cymric Poems attributed to the Bards of the Sixth Century, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), 57, 67.
Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803), 9. Algernon Sidney’s version of the Tacitus quotation had been restored to public circulation by Joseph Johnson’s reprinting in 1795 of the Discourses on Government, published on 14 July 1795: ‘It is ill that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults and wars; but it is worst, … to give the name of peace to desolation’.
Bede, The History of the Primitive Church of England, from its origin to the year 731. tr. Rev. William Hurst (London: 1814), 95, 161.
Nicolson and Burns, 2: 3.
‘Maelor, The Vale of Clwyd, and other parts of Gwynedd, according to Brut y Tywysogion of 890, were liberated from the Saxons by exiled men of the North, whose kingdom of Strathclyde had been ravaged repeatedly in c. 875.’ Skene, 182.
William Owen, in The Heroic Elegies, claims that Llywarch ‘was born about the commencement of the sixth, and lived to the middle of the seventh century; being about a hundred and fifty years old at the time of his death’, and that he was alive at the time of Arthur’s death in 542, and of Cadwallon in 646 (vi). C.f. Sharon Turner, Vindication, 14–15.
Aneirin, cited from Clancy, The Earliest Welsh Poetry, 48.
Patrick K. Ford concludes that Llywarch Hen ‘was the creation of a functionary in the court of some Welsh prince of the late ninth or tenth century; … to legitimize the rule of the dynasty then in power and to glorify it through celebration of the deeds of its heroic ancestors’. The Poetry of Llywarch Hen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 4.
Skene, 576.
Turner, History, 290.
Ifor Williams, 69.
As Thomas Parry points out: ‘though we know today that Myrddin did live at some time (more than probably in the sixth century) and was a poet, no poetry now exists under his name except the prophecies attributed to him centuries after his time’. A History of Welsh Literature, tr. H. Idris Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 27. See also, Meic Stephens, The New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), 1998, 522.
Skene, 371.
‘In Praise of Urien’, in Clancy, 26.
Taliesin, The Battle of Gwenystrad, cited from Sharon Turner, History, 289. Thomas Stephens identifies Gwenystrad as Winsterdale in Westmorland and places Urien’s battle of Argoed Llwyvain, celebrated by Taliesin, at Leavington, next to the forest of Durham, and the battle of Arderydd, ‘at which battle Rhydderch Hael ensured the triumph of Christianity over the pagan Gwenddolau, and his bard Merddin, who took refuge in the woods of Celyddon’ at Airdrie, nr Glasgow. Stephens, The Gododin of Aneirin Gwawdrydd, an English Translation, ed. Thomas Powel (Printed for the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. London, 1888) 67, 72, 73, 78.
Iolo’s Madoc is an enterprising Pantisocrat modelled on Thomas Cooper the land agent: ‘America was discovered, about the year 1170, by Madoc…. We have manuscript accounts of this discovery that were written before the birth of Columbus. Dr David Powel, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, says, in his History of Wales …that Madoc, in hopes of discovering the lands beyond the Atlantic (of which there were ancient manuscript accounts … in Wales), and of finding there a retreat from the horrors of intestine wars which then deluged all Wales with blood, resolved on a voyage of discovery.’ Having discovered ‘a fine fertile country, destitute of inhabitants’ he left a hundred men, came back to Wales, and set out again ‘with a fleet of ten ships, full of such persons of both sexes as preferred peace to discord’. Edward Williams, PoemsLyric and Pastoral, 2: 64 n. Iolo is responsible for the unpublished and more radical version of Southey’s Madoc, in which the pantisocratic flight from religious and political tyranny is enacted by twelfth century Bardic Unitarians.
Wu, 161. Coleridge had met Iolo by May 1796 (Griggs, 1: 214) and Iolo presented him with a copy.
Richard Watson, a Cumbrian, inspired, by a process of reaction, Wordsworth’s most Paineite production. His name also graces Jones’s Relics and Davies’s later Researches.
The same year, 1794, saw the publication of Jacob des Moulins’ Antiqua Restaurata: A Concise Historical account of the Ancient Druids, William Sotheby’s Tour Through Parts of Wales, and the second edition of Edward Jones’s very important Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784) with its bardic transcreations by Thomas Gray. These followed hard on William Owen’s edition of The Heroic Elegies, dedicated to Pennant. It was a moment of exceptional druid resurgence.
H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London: Athlone Press, 1962), 70.
‘Refulgent’: Wordsworth may have remembered this word from Cumberland’s ‘Ode to the Sun’ quoted in West’s Guide, where it is used twice, along with the equally potent word, ‘diurnal’. Wordsworth’s setting sun makes a brief appearance from behind clouds; while Cumberland’s fought its way through storm clouds on Skiddaw.
James Clarke, Survey, 56. Clarke’s intriguing ‘vouchers’ are detailed, extensive and witnessed. He concludes: ‘This country … abounds in the aniles fabellae of fairies, ghosts, and apparitions; but [unlike this] these are never even fabled to have been seen by more than one or two persons at a time…. Speed tells of something indeed similar to this as preceding a dreadful intestine war. Can something of this nature have given rise to Ossian’s grand and awful mythology? (56)
For Clarke’s account of the burial see chapter 1, n.8.
Aboriginal Britons, 11.
Geoffrey Hill, The distant fury of battle, from For the Unfallen (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959) in Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 26.
EPF, 200: MS 5, 4r.
The Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh, 1792), 33, 399.
From the Llywarch Hen Saga, Clancy, 68. Owain and Elphin were sons of Urien.
Skene, ‘The Book of Taliesin’, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, 1: 349. Wordsworth is likely to have read a version of these lines in Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, 290: ‘If there be a sigh on the mountains;/Is it not Urien who conquers? l If there be a sigh on the slope of the hills; Is it not Urien who wounds?/If there be a sigh of dismay;/Is it not from the assault of Urien?/There is no refuge from him;/Nor will there be from famine,/To those who seek plunder near him!’.
Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first edition (1765), 1, vii. This dedication to the Countess of Northumberland was in the edition used at Hawkshead.
Reliques, 4th edn, 1794, xxi (the edition Wordsworth bought in Hamburg in 1798).
Abbie Findlay Potts, Wordsworth’s Prelude: A Study of its Literary Form, 68.
Kathryn Sutherland, ‘The Native Poet: the influence of Percy’s Minstrel from Beattie to Wordsworth’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 33: 132 (1982) 414–33, 418, 432. Sutherland demonstrates persuasively the genetic continuity between Percy’s conception of the bard/minstrel, and Wordsworth’s pedlar/wanderer.
George Borrow, Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings (London: John Murray, 1928) 39.
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© 2003 Richard Gravil
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Gravil, R. (2003). ‘Unforgotten Lays’. In: Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510333_3
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