Facsimile of a page from the
Book of Taliesin (Folio 13).
The Book of Taliesin (Welsh: Llyfr Taliesin) is one of the most famous of Middle Welsh manuscripts, dating from the first half of the 14th century though many of the fifty-seven poems it preserves are taken to originate in the 10th century. The manuscript, known as Peniarth MS 2 and kept at the National Library of Wales, is incomplete, having lost a number of its original leaves including the first.
The volume contains a collection of some of the oldest poems in Welsh, though many of them, particularly those attributed to the Dark Age poet Taliesin who was active towards the end of the 6th century, would have been composed in the Cumbric dialect of the north. A core of praise poems of Urien Rheged is generally attributed to the historical Taliesin.
The manuscript also preserves a few hymns, a small collection of elegies to famous men such as Cunedda and Dylan Eil Ton and also famous enigmatic poems such as The Battle of Trees and The Spoils of Annwfn (in which the poet claims to have sailed to another world with Arthur and his warriors). Several of these contain internal claims to be the work of Taliessin, but cannot be.
Many poems in the collection allude to Christian and Latin texts as well as native British tradition, and the book contains the earliest mention in any western vernacular literature of the feats of Hercules and Alexander the Great.
Popular culture
The Book of Taliesyn is the name of an early album by the popular hard rock band Deep Purple, specifically referencing the actual document.
Sources
- Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin'', edited and translated by Marged Haycock (CMCS, Aberystwyth, 2007) ISBN 978-0-9527478-9-5
- 'Book of Taliesin'. In Meic Stephens (Ed.) (1998), The new companion to the literature of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1383-3.
- Haycock, Marged (1988), 'Llyfr Taliesin'. In National Library of Wales Journal, 25, 357-86.
- Parry, Thomas (1955), A History of Welsh literature. Translated by H. Idris Bell. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
External links
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