Abstract
This chapter proposes that several prose tales of the Mabinogion acknowledge English military and political supremacy over Wales during the centuries that followed the Edwardian conquest. Such a recognition of English might enable Welsh literature to exhort its audience to a mutually profitable complicity with the English, one of the goals of which was the perpetuation of the Welsh language.
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Notes
Huw Pryce, “British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales,” in English Historical Review 116 (2001): 780 [774–801].
R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 ), 4.
R.R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 ), 23.
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© 2008 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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Williams, J.K. (2008). Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion. In: Cohen, J.J. (eds) Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614123_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614123_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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