Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in good condition. Pages in excellent bright condition. No notes or highlighting. Cover is a little worn and marked. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> About A.D. 600 a force of 300 cavalry rode south from Edinburgh (where they had spent the previous year being royally entertained by the local king) and attacked an English army at Catterick in Yorkshire. The attackers-the men of Gododdin-were all but annihilated; but the poet Aneirin returned to tell the tale and to sing the fame of the warrior dead. His poem composed in very early Welsh and surviving in a Welsh MS ‘The Book of Aneirin’ is the subject of this book. Professor Jackson first discusses the veracity of the above account and argues strongly in favour of the historical existence of Aneirin in Edinburgh about the year 600; and for the genuineness of the Gododdin and its associated lays though modified in the process of oral trans- mission. Professor Jackson shows con- vincingly how the poem fits into what is known of the history of Northern Britain at this period. The book is much indebted to Sir Ifor Williams’ great Welsh edition ‘Canu Ancirin’ which has never however been translated. Professor Jackson therefore attempts an English rendering of the Gododdin. The archaic language and the corrupt text make it impossible to present a complete translation; but here for the non-Welsh reader is as much of The Gododdin as accurate modern scholarship can recover. (LL)