3 - History and historia: uses of the Troy story in medieval Ireland and Wales

Summary

The translation of the story of the destruction of Troy into the vernaculars of Irish and Welsh happened several centuries apart. The Irish Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy) was in circulation by the eleventh century, and had perhaps been translated as early as the tenth century. The Welsh Ystorya Dared (The History of Dares) was first translated in the early fourteenth century and survives in over forty manuscript versions, though only around a dozen of these are genuinely ‘medieval’, that is, occurring in manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Despite the gap in time between these vernacular versions of the Troy story, a gap accounted for largely by the differing contexts of production of the two vernaculars, the appropriated legend served a similar purpose in both cultural landscapes, as part of a complex process of contemporary identity-formation. Erich Poppe has recently compared the Welsh, Irish and Norse versions of the Troy story from the point of view of textual adaptation and the ‘typology’ of the different versions. On the basis of the manuscript contexts of extant texts (as far as these can be deduced), he argues that all three linguistic variants are primarily historiographical in function, despite cultural differences of style. Considering the heavy debt owed by all three adaptations to Dares’s De excidio Troiae historia (History of the Destruction of Troy), this is perhaps not surprising, and in what follows I hope to investigate further the elements of historia in the Welsh and Irish versions.

Though Togail Troí and Ystorya Dared are conventionally referred to as adaptations or even ‘translations’, it would be more accurate to consider them as remediations in the modern sense of a transfer from one medium to another. The process of remediation is most evident today in the adaptation of a novel to a film, or a play to a musical, but many medieval written texts were also ‘remediated’ into a different mode of writing, often via one or more different languages. The Irish and Welsh vernacular texts are both based on the same Latin original, De excidio Troiae historia attributed to Dares Phrygius, a text dating (at a best guess) from the early sixth century which incorporates Latin and possibly Greek sources.