8 - Translating Charlemagne for Welsh Audiences: The Case of Rhamant Otuel

Summary

This chapter explores the reception of the Charlemagne legend in Wales by analysing how Welsh translators of French-language chansons de geste accommodated their source texts to the tastes and expectations of their audiences during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Welsh Charlemagne compilation comprises a prose translation of three French epic poems and a Latin chronicle, namely La Chanson de Roland, known as Cân Rolant and inserted as the twenty-second chapter of the Welsh rendition of the Latin Historia Turpini (the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle); the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, known as Pererindod Siarlymaen; and Le romans do Otinel, as it is called in the explicit of one of the manuscripts, identified as Rhamant Otuel or Tale of Otuel.

The Ystorya de Carolo Magno, as the tales are known collectively after Stephen J. Williams’s edition based on Oxford, Jesus College MS 111 or the Red Book of Hergest, is thought to have been compiled c. 1275, when the Pererindod and Cân Rolant were introduced into the narrative arc of the Pseudo-Turpin. Cân Rolant, which is based on a late twelfth- or thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text in assonant verse, very close to the Oxford version but with noticeable traces of the half-assonant, half-rhymed Venice 4, has been firmly situated by Annalee Rejhon, on orthographical, morphological, and syntactical grounds, in the first half of the thirteenth century. Moreover, subsequent investigations on dating Middle Welsh prose tales, particularly that of Simon Rodway, even if not directly concerned with this text, would mostly favour this conclusion. Otuel, however, is a later addition of sometime before 1336. This date appears in the earliest extant copy of the text (Peniarth 9), along with the name of the scribe, ‘Jeuan yscolheic’ (‘John the Scholar’). It should be noted, finally, that the division of the Middle Welsh Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle edited by Williams follows Sebastiano Ciampi’s Latin text, and thus differs from Cyril Meredith-Jones’s edition from chapter XII onwards. Therefore, chapter XII in Williams’s edition is actually part of chapter XI in Meredith-Jones. As a consequence, Cân Rolant occupies the position of chapter XXI, not XXII. Nevertheless, Williams’s order of chapters was kept here for the sake of coherence with other scholarly works.