The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen

Written by Gillian Clarke

Narrated by Gillian Clarke and Ceri Wyn Jones

The timeless and compelling 'word-music' of one of Britain's oldest cultural treasures is captured in this new bilingual edition.

The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year AD 600. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the Angles, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down in early Welsh by two medieval scribes. It is composed of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell, and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics. Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today and underscoring that, in a world still beset by the misery of war, Aneirin's lamentation is not done.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Release date: Jun 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9780571352142

Gillian Clarke

Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008-16, and co-edited The Map and the Clock: A Laureate’s Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland (Faber, 2016) with Carol Ann Duffy. Her numerous books of poetry include Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998), Making the Beds for the Dead (2004) and Ice (2012) and Zoology (2017), all from Carcanet, and Selected Poems (2016) from Picador. She received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, in 2012, the first woman to receive the latter.