3 - Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland

Summary

The medieval vernacular literatures of Wales and Ireland have been often neglected in comparative literary studies, Arthurian Studies probably being the one major exception. However, these literatures participated in many pan-European trends and fashions through the translation and adaptation of foreign secular and religious literary sources. Cases in point are the story about Troy attributed to Dares Phrygius, narratives about Charlemagne, and the story of Mary of Egypt, all of which were translated into both Welsh and Irish. The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone (hereafter Boeve) also proved to be very successful in the island (or Insular) literatures of the British Isles and Iceland, and it is the immediate source for the Middle Welsh Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn and the indirect source for the (incomplete) Early Modern Irish version, which is based on a Middle English version of the romance.

The Middle Welsh Bown was probably translated around the middle of the thirteenth century from a text close, but not identical, to one of the known texts of Boeve. It thus belongs to the earliest phase of such translations into Welsh and is more or less contemporaneous with the translation of the core texts of the cycle about Charlemagne, namely of pseudo-Turpin's Historia and of the Chanson de Roland and the Pelèrinage de Charlemagne. The only two medieval manuscripts in which Bown is transmitted are Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (the White Book of Rhydderch), written c. 1350, and Llyfr Coch Hergest (the Red Book of Hergest), written c. 1400. These are two large collections which contain, among other things, what was perceived to be the corpus of medieval Welsh secular narratives of both native and foreign origin – the inclusion of Bown is therefore an indication of its literary status. The interest in adaptations of popular foreign literature shared by both Rhydderch ab Ieuan Llwyd and Hopcyn ap Tomas Rhydderch, for whom the White Book and the Red Book respectively were produced, is probably not surprising in the political and cultural contexts of fourteenth-century Wales. The two manuscripts share a significant number of prose texts, and the relationship between them is problematic. The drift of modern scholarship in this matter inclines to the view that it is generally more likely that they derive from common sources, rather than that the texts in the Red Book are copied from the White Book.