Nature and Medieval Literature

By Stephen Knight

This book begins by considering ecocritical approaches to literary texts and then moves to a discussion of the ways in which Welsh, French and English authors recount the Peredur/Perceval story. The study then embarks on full-chapter studies of the treatment of nature in a range of major authors and texts, including the work of Chaucer, the Scottish Chaucerians (Dunbar and Henryson), the medieval and early modern outlaw myths (particularly those concerning Robin Hood), the medieval English romances, and finally a selection of medieval English lyrics. The book argues that while some texts represent the actual forces and patterns of the natural and animal worlds, other texts use the natural and animal worlds both as a way of understanding nature itself and as a basis for a critique of the human and increasingly urban world of the medieval period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781837721047

Stephen Knight

Stephen Knight was a journalist and the author of ‘Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution’ and ‘The Killing of Justice Godfrey’. He also wrote a novel, ‘Requiem at Rogano’. Stephen Knight was the writing name of Swami Puja Debal, a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He died in 1985.

Book preview

PREFACE

The seven essays in this book derive from my lengthy career as a university lecturer in literature – not only English – when I focused on medieval materials, some of which, like the myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood, have extended until the present. In recent years, I, like many others, have become concerned with the state of the natural world and the relations, both highly positive and also somewhat threatening, that human society has with its physical context. It seemed sensible to explore the ways in which medieval texts themselves represented the world of nature. While in recent decades there have been increasing numbers of studies in what has come to be termed ‘ecocriticism’, many of these have tended to be conceptually analytic, seeking to identify the origins and the categories of the literary and natural interface, and, it seemed to me, often not paying detailed attention to the ways in which writers and their texts actually responded to the natural world. It appeared to me well worth analysing major texts that I knew quite well from teaching, and to see just how they represented both nature itself and also the ways in which human attitudes responded to that ambient physical world, and, in some cases, used its values as a judge on our own physical and attitudinal existence.

The essays are inherently separate, and not conceptually or thematically interrelated, because the genres and the periods involved vary considerably in their responses to the natural world. However, there are links and parallels between them, as between the early internationally varied romances of Chapter 2 and the wide range of usually later English romances in Chapter 5; or between Chaucer’s nature-oriented approach and that of the slightly later Scottish Chaucerians, both developed as with Henryson and rather restrained, as in the case of Dunbar. The simple issue of book length stopped me venturing into discussing other intriguing authors, such as William Langland, whose late fourteenth century Piers Plowman responds in varied and interesting ways to the natural world, and later re-workers of the romance patterns discussed in Chapter 2, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach with his own Parzival, and the internationally varied versions of the tragic saga of Tristram and Isolde. I have, in further space-saving, offered in Chapter 5 only brief accounts of two important texts, because they have received nature-oriented analysis by good critics; namely, the late fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Arthuriad.

In the development of these essays on nature and medieval literature I have received support and assistance from a number of sources. Prime among them has been the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library: I researched and drafted these essays during our region’s lengthy period of lockdown during Covid-19, and for months when the library was closed its staff were generous enough to post books to readers, including some from the excellent Australian inter-library loan system, amazingly including at times ones from international locations. I have also benefited from research-oriented finance generously extended to honorary professors like myself by the university’s School of Culture and Communication, and I have received specific help from expert and helpful colleagues Professor Stephanie Trigg and Professor David McInnis. At home I have also been very well-supported, both in general matters and detailed editing by my generous wife Margaret, and in electronic expertise by our daughter Elizabeth and her husband Sean Thompson – even, mostly with research on the mobile phone, by my ten-year-old granddaughter Rosa, to whom this book is dedicated, though she will surely not admire it as much as if it were by J. K. Rowling. Most recently I have received support and detailed help from the editors of this series, also long-standing friends, Professor Ruth Evans and Professor Helen Fulton, and from expert staff at the University of Wales Press – reminding me of the fine time I had as I worked for eighteen years at the national university in Cardiff. Also my warm thanks for their detailed assistance go to head of commissioning Sarah Lewis, and to copy editor Sarah Meaney.

The essays in this book owe much to all these people who have supported me while working my way through the natural – and sometimes supernatural – relations of varied major medieval literary texts. I trust the discussions offered here will be of some interest to the reading public, and will help develop increasing awareness of the amount and the importance of the artistic and human interrelationship with the wonderful, much varied, and today distinctly vulnerable, natural world.

INTRODUCTION

1 Towards Ecocriticism

This book will, over seven chapters, explore and analyse the relation between the natural and the human world as it is represented in a range of genres in medieval British literature and also in related elements of the literature of Wales and France. The analysis will explore how the natural world is seen in the texts involved, and how its varied elements are understood as being related to, even at times opposed to, elements of the human world. By ‘natural world’ is meant the entire domain of animals, birds, trees and flora, as well as natural landscapes and their features, even including weather.

The medieval literary understanding of the natural world is a fairly recent topic in scholarly literary criticism. Nature was, for a long time, the largely silent other in literary critique, but that has now changed substantially as a result of the development of interest in the links between the natural and the literary worlds, including, more recently, in the medieval period – an approach that sees the early period as a preparation for, and in some ways a variant parallel of, the modern situation.

It was not until after the Second World War that the domain now known as ecology – or in literary terms ‘ecocriticism’ – began to emerge. A first move was Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson, an American marine scientist. It had a large audience, being serialised in the New Yorker before appearing as a book, and made a powerful case about the damage to natural growth across the world inflicted by the widespread profit-oriented use of destructive insecticides.

More was to come. On Boxing Day 1966, the UCLA-based scholar Lynn White Jr addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science and according to Michael Paul Nelson, ‘dropped an intellectual bomb’ (2016, unpaginated) when he asserted the wide damage being done to the natural world was not simply caused by modern emphasis on science or profit, but generally, and fundamentally, because of anthropomorphism: humans were privileging themselves over the rest of creation. This meshed with views already expressed by distinguished British historians. The Oxford-based archaeologist R. G. Collingwood wrote The Idea of Nature (1945), which explores the classics and philosophers such as Hegel and explains how humans should understand that they are only part of the necessarily interactive creation. Another Oxford historian, Arnold Toynbee, in Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (1976), stressed early history and philosophy and bluntly asserted that the growing crisis was caused by nothing more than human greed.

An important recurring theme among the historians was the argument that it was from the sixteenth century on, as towns, business and then industry began to grow, especially in Britain, that the natural world was becoming seriously appropriated by those dwelling in towns and making money from exploiting natural products, whether just by increasingly widespread sales or, more deeply, by changing structures through forms of manufacture and developing industry. Another British historian, Keith Thomas, summed this up in Man and the Natural World, 1500–1800 (1983): his account is both rich and detailed – for example, he states that only from the sixteenth century on did families routinely begin to have pets, as a way of seeming to acculturate the natural world.

An influential step was taken when Leo Marx, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). He focuses on Henry Thoreau’s influential study Walden (1854), and sees the rural vision that Thoreau offers as representing an American social and patriotic dream, connecting back to the farming, hunting and exploring practices of the original immigrants. Leo Marx also offers Walden as an archetype of the argument that nature has in modern times been both sidelined and appropriated: he asserts there has been a ‘contradiction’ between commitments to rural happiness and to ‘productivity, wealth and power’ (1964, p. 226).

Thoreau’s position is parallel to that developed a little earlier by the English Romantics: discussing their work is a major element in The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams, a sociocultural critic based in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He sees the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, as rejecting modern exploitative and oppressive forms, and he finds the division of the country from the city to be a basis for the deep social differences of both income and status among modern British people: in the reformist, even Utopian, spirit of the 1970s, he hopes for this major separation to be resolved over time.

Jonathan Bate, in Romantic Ecology (1991), both picks up the developing idea of the ‘ecocritical’ approach and also individualises it, seeing ‘pastoral’ as ‘not a myth but a psychological necessity, an underpinning of the self, a way of connecting the self to the environment’ (1991, p. 115). A richer, if brief, account of the eighteenth century turn to nature was given by Kenneth Clark in his essay on ‘The Worship of Nature’ in his book Civilisation: a Personal View (1969), in which he spoke of Rousseau and Goethe, as well as the English Romantics, as ‘approximating nature and truth’ (1982, p. 193).

2 Medieval Ecocriticism

By the 1990s the subject of ecology and the development of ecocriticism had become fairly widely established in American universities. The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) was founded in the United States in 1992, and in 1993 it established the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. By 2000, several international parallels had been established. These developments would soon lead to modern versions of the theorising previously seen from Collingwood and Toynbee. Examples of this new voice are two books by Harvard professor Lawrence Buell. The first, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995), develops and theorises Leo Marx’s work; while in the second, more ecocritically focused book, Writing for an Endangered World: The Future of Environmental Criticism (2001), the emphasis is on contemporary threats to nature. The Preface begins by discussing ‘the implications of the endangered state and uncertain fate of life on earth for literary and critical studies’ (2001, p. vi).

None of this material deals with the relationship between the world of nature and medieval literature – perhaps understandably, given its American focus of discussion, although it was recognised that attitudes had changed from the sixteenth century on. But nature in the medieval period became a thriving topic by the late twentieth century. An initial contribution was The Cruelest Month: Spring, Nature, and Love in Classical and Medieval Lyrics (1965) by Rutgers professor James J. Wilhelm. This projects classical scholarship through thematic descriptivity into early medieval material, with little social interest. Wilhelm sees the thirteenth-century French troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn as the first major voice to link nature and love, but does not discuss Chrétien de Troyes, presumably because he wrote romances rather than lyrics.

A fuller discussion was in Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (1973) by the English medievalists Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter. They start by saying ‘The natural world presented to medieval man aspects of paradise and perdition’ (1973, p. 1) and develop this essential conflict in some detail: the book is scholarly, but primarily descriptive, rather than analytic. In a later essay, titled ‘The Roving Eye: Point of View in the Medieval Perception of Landscape’ (2001), Pearsall wrote more sharply, noting that just as the general term ‘nature’ was not common in the medieval period, so concept ‘landscape’, a term which came to be widely used, was not then understood and defined as an object of interest and pleasure in itself (see 2001, p. 464), and he sums up the medieval response as lacking a sense of personal intellectual perception. It seems important to recognise his point, that the medieval understanding of the world of nature was not an individualistic structure in which one can see the self in, or even against, the natural world, but it was rather a more generalised and variably located pattern that can help or hinder human operations in a range of ways, as will be seen in many of the texts discussed in this study.

More treatments of nature in literary criticism of the medieval period began to appear in the late twentieth century. An example, referred to in Chapter 5 of this study, is Felicity Riddy’s book Sir Thomas Malory (1987), which offers a good deal of nature-linked commentary on Malory’s extensive Arthurian text, as about the passage on May-time and love that appears in Book 7, ‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’. She sums up that the discussion offers ‘a shifting pattern of contrasts – between summer and winter, heat and cold, remembering and forgetting, true love and negligence, the present and the old days’ (1987, p. 143).

Such content-analysis of the medieval treatment of natural themes was central to a book by Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (1993). This offers essays on English and French romance and is quoted in later chapters of this study, as is Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval Literature (2007), by Gillian Rudd. While both these British authors make interesting comments about the thematic treatment of the natural world, they tend, as if seeking to sophisticate or elaborate their critical descriptions, to explore the past of natural ideas, in the classics and in medieval Christian scholars, and also, especially Rudd, to theorise the understanding of the natural world held by the authors discussed.

A more analytic approach to the interface of the natural and human world was found in some American essays around the turn of the century. In ‘Ecocriticism and Medieval English Literature’ (2000), Rebecca Douglass identified three stages: first, how nature and its inhabitants are portrayed in a text; second, and more important, studying and rehabilitating texts about nature itself; and, third, examining how the texts act ‘in promulgating the dualism of nature and culture’ (2000, pp. 139–40). She also offers a good example of medieval ecocriticism, discussing natural features in Chaucer’s Knight’s tale and Miller’s tale, making comments that will be referenced in Chapter 3.

Another notable essay from this period is ‘Ecochaucer: Green Ethics and Medieval Nature’ (2004) by the American medievalist Sarah Stanbury. She opens theoretically by noting that the concept of ‘nature’, meaning the natural world, is a modern focalised idea, found increasingly from the fifteenth century on, and the classically referenced ‘Dame Nature’ can be seen rather differently in the medieval period as a questionable force, often challenging social and emotional human order. Stanbury argues that medieval material is recurrently posing the question whether nature is seen as of value to humanity, or as appropriated and damaged by it, especially by the powerful and various other profit-takers.

Continuing close analysis of Chaucer and the natural world is offered by Jodi Grimes in ‘Arboreal Politics in the Knight’s Tale’ (2012). She shows how a personal knowledge of royal forest law and hunting recurs through this element of Chaucer’s work, but she also finally feels that Theseus is a positive force vis-à-vis nature – a view which may be somewhat more positive than Chaucer’s final implications about Theseus’s rule, as discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 108–9.

Ecocriticism has also given rise to the consciously challenging theoretical mode of ecofeminism, seeing the pre-modern responses to nature as not only anthropocentric but also androcentric. An essay from 1996 by Lisa Kiser, on ‘Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer’, but sub-titled ‘Ecofeminism and Some Medieval Lady Natures’, sees nature eventually being used as ‘serving dominant ideologies’ (1996, p. 8), including gendered ones. In a slightly later essay, Kiser argues for a ‘nature-culture dualism’ (2001, p. 42), rather than nature being subordinated, and states that in The Parlement of Foules Chaucer shows ‘environmental thinking of a more sophisticated sort than has been claimed in existing scholarship’ (2001, p. 43). This view will be generally supported in Chapter 3.

That approach is developed in Lesley Kordecki’s essay ‘Ecofeminism and the Father of English Poetry: Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls’, asserting that ‘the traditions of subjectivity in English literature are not only exclusionary of woman, but also of animals’ (2003, p. 97). She also says that in this poem ‘The direction is away from the truths handed down in written tradition … to the truths gleaned from active, confrontational, and contemporary voices’ (2003 p. 99) – an observation that is, as discussed in Chapter 3, also clearly the case at times in The Canterbury Tales.

In the most recent period, scholarship and critique continue to focus on the representation and understanding of nature in the world of medieval and literature. Kordecki extended her Chaucerian avian range in Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (2011) to include ‘The Squire’s Tale’ and the ‘The Manciple’s Tale’. A wide-ranging and also theoretically aware account is offered by Susan Crane in her book Animal Encounters (2013), which has chapters on early Irish literature, the wide nature-related reference of the mid-twelfth-century Marie de France’s poetry, and the treatment of nature found in material on hunting and in bestiaries. Finally, she offers some perceptive comments on horse/knight relations in ‘The Squire’s Tale’, as will be referenced in Chapter 3.

3 Ecocritical Approaches in this Study

This study, like some mentioned in this introduction, such as those by Riddy, Stanbury and Kiser, seeks to give a clear – but sometimes inevitably complex – account of just how the interfaces of the natural and the human world were understood and transmitted in English medieval literature and also some connected Welsh and French texts.

The texts discussed have been chosen after careful consideration of which will afford material for an interesting and varied commentary – a process found especially demanding among the many romances discussed in Chapter 5. But not all the other chapter topics were obvious. The difference between the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and the somewhat later Welsh romances, with their Norman-colonial linkage to France, was a developed perception. In the case of the lyrics, I had thought they would not provide material, but when making a short study of some to compare with what I thought would be the fuller treatment of nature in romance, I found plenty of lyric commentary on the natural world, and the chapter emerged.

Overall, the study seeks basically to look in detail at texts that have not yet been analysed properly in terms of their treatment of the world of nature. This is evidently the case with genres that have not received much study, especially of their thematic patterns, such as the popular romances discussed in Chapter 5, and the outlaw ballads and the lyrics that are discussed in the two final chapters of this book. In the relatively rare cases where ecocriticism has already handled texts well, as with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Arthuriad, both well studied by Corinne Saunders and Gillian Rudd, these texts have been treated fairly briefly as part of a climax to the late medieval English romance, a development socially paralleled by the largely overlooked late medieval popular texts, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudeslye and King Edward and the Shepherd, which are also discussed at the end of Chapter 5. These are texts where the insistent populist voice heard in the outlaw ballads discussed in Chapter 6 seems to invade the more socially genteel domain of romance and counter the sophisticated high-level focus of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory.

In terms of Chaucer, there are some overlaps with existing critical analysis, as well as elements of disagreement with it, but it seemed crucial to write a chapter on this author, remarkable in so many ways. For him, nature was both a traditional context of romance and gentry activities and also a basis for the survival and the cultural self-realisation of ordinary people. In general, he seems to have perceived the natural world as a field of forces that were not being either controlled or valued sufficiently in the complex social and political world that he knew so well, and so potently wove throughout his varied, elegant and, in this as in other thematic areas, demandingly analytic poetic fictions.

Similarly, the treatment by Chrétien de Troyes of the natural world is elusive, complex and full. The chapter on his major nature-focused work Perceval, contrasting the French with the Welsh and English versions of the story, is both an archetype of the early romance attitude to the natural world, and also an important predecessor for the chapter on later English romance. The Chrétien chapter was originally planned as a contrastive study, with both Yvain and Perceval being treated in a multi-contrastive way, but the draft soon showed that there was far too much material for that structure: the discussion of Yvain and its parallels will be published separately. In Chapter 4, it was of interest to see how the British north realised the interplay of nature and humanity in the two major ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ – and, perhaps surprisingly, it appeared that Dunbar, usually regarded as the more sophisticated of the two, was in this context found to be basically a strong but limited parallel of their model Chaucer, while Henryson, particularly in his Morall Fabillis, went much further than both those others in terms of nature-related complexity. Henryson explores the world of nature with considerable detail and intelligence, in some fables offering a sympathetic reading of the animal world and its feelings and in other fables using those structures to critique human patterns and practice.

This study, across some five centuries and recognising wide social, topographical and generic varieties in the contexts of the texts discussed, offers an account of the ways in which medieval authors, popular and serious, religious and decidedly secular, scholarly and casual, represented elements of the world of nature. It suggests how those features were perceived, admired, deployed and appropriated by the humans who encountered them, either in the wild or in agriculture, or as they filtered into and operated in the developing towns.

From early chivalric aspirations to animal interaction in distant Scottish moors and towns, from the emotion-oriented activities of people in widely located romances, and from the mysterious supernaturality of the Welsh Mabinogi stories to the blunt social dissent of the late popular romances, from the exotic melodramas faced by noble ladies to the elusive resistance of outlaws in the forest, there is a rich, subtle and consistently interrogative medieval literary set of responses to the ambient natural context, even in the relative brevity of the lyrics. Medieval authors provide insistently a view of the multifarious and consistently innovative ways in which they perceived, and powerfully transmitted, central and crucial aspects of the natural world as it appeared to operate in terms of the human context in that period.

    1    

NATURE AND MEDIEVAL WELSH LITERATURE

1 Early Poetry

In the earliest Welsh literature that has survived in writing, nature is a recurring presence, but it is not seen as something admirable because it is different from human society, as it will be in the Romantic period, nor largely ignored as too plain to be considered, as it will be in much courtly and intellectual poetry and prose of later periods. Rather, natural forces are available in medieval Welsh writing to compare, contrast and interrelate with human beings. In both poetry and prose, the world of nature is seen as one that can penetrate and participate in human activities in both beneficent and hostile ways, at times involving god-like figures. This process of nature may merge into the supernatural. Rhiannon, the potent lady of the first and third Branches of the Mabinogi, rides a horse that at a walk outspeeds the galloping men sent by her future husband Pwyll. Culhwch, young hero of Culhwch and Olwen, will, with the help of ‘The Oldest Animals’, fulfil the very demanding marriage requirements of the brutal giant father of his beloved Olwen. Her name means ‘white track’, and daisies spring up in her footsteps. Although Brynley Roberts calls this a ‘fanciful etymology’ (1991, p. 74), the text makes it seem authentic to her positive role in the mix of nature, supernature and human society.

The earliest Welsh literary material is heroic poetry, which can include wide reference to warrior-like animals and also to ones who both assist and benefit from the actions of human heroes – including feeding on men killed in battle. It can be hard to date these poems with any confidence, as they mostly appear in manuscripts written as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but some dating can be made by scholars on the basis of the forms of language used. It is generally accepted that a number of the texts were in something like their surviving form before or soon after 900 CE.

One of them may well be earlier than that: Y Gododdin describes a battle that occurred around the year 600 CE when the lord of the Gododdin tribe, based in the region around Edinburgh, gathered 300 mounted warriors from across the Welsh-speaking world and marched 150 miles south to fight the Anglo-Saxons at the battle of Catraeth in North Yorkshire, now known as Catterick. The Celts lost, and according to the text only one warrior survived: almost every one of the 103 stanzas celebrates a different dead hero. The poem, which is found in the late thirteenth-century Book of Aneirin, may possibly be by Aneirin, a famous poet who lived in the period of the battle.

It is common throughout the poem for the heroes to be likened to noble and powerful animals. In stanza 4 the son of Ysgyrran is described as ‘Diademed, to the fore, a wolf’s fury’ (Celtic Literature Collective, online: a first quotation of a text will reference the source fully; following ones will merely give page, stanza or line numbers, when they are available: if they occur in the same paragraph of this study they will be given together). Somewhat later the poem says this about the hero Caradwg:

Like a wild boar, three lords’ killer,

War-band’s bull, in strife a slayer,

He gave the wolves food with his hand.

(stanza 30)

Splendid as well as fierce is the boar-like Beili, who ‘made a pact in the front of the line’: the ‘pact’ this warrior-beast makes is to pray ‘Lord save us’ (stanza 42).

Another stanza, switching to a short line, celebrates Merin ap Madain. First he is seen as ‘Snake with fierce sting’, then he becomes:

Terrible bear,

His anger served

A feast for birds

(stanza 63)

Nature, in its conceptual linking to man, may be exotic: the animals through the poem range from eagle, lion, dragon and stallion, the four most commonly cited, to wolf, bear, bull and, perhaps surprisingly, a snake, as quoted above. Crows appear recurrently to feast on the heroes’ victims: the first stanza recounts that Owain provided ‘foodstuff for crows’, driving home its point by remarking on his burial place: ‘vile, his cover of crows’ (stanza 1).

The poem keeps up its noble but also tragic discourse, linking the heroes recurrently to the natural world: the penultimate stanza is the one most often quoted, because Arthur is cited as an even greater hero than the nature-linked man of the Gododdin war-party, Gwawrddur, who ‘brought black crows to a fort’s / Wall, though he was not Arthur’ (stanza 102). The final stanza restates the warrior-nature links, saying of ‘The long line’s leader’, Cipno fab Gwengad, that ‘His hand made a banquet for birds’ and he was a ‘Dreadful bear in the onslaught’ (stanza 103).

One poet who certainly wrote in the period around 600 CE was Taliesin. While the Book of Taliesin, surviving from the early fourteenth century, contains material that seems relatively recent, scholars agree that twelve of its poems are probably from the master-poet’s own time. One celebrates a historical lord of the north, who would be the romance hero known as Owain to the British and Yvain to the French. Here the poet says of the battle of Arfderydd, between British Celtic forces, in the year 573:

Owain dealt them doom

As the wolves devour sheep;

That warrior, bright of harness,

Gave stallions for the bard.

(trans. by Anthony Conran, in Jones, 1977, p. 2)

In the context of battle, nature can be more than a domain of comparison for human qualities. A long poem also found in the Book of Taliesin is ‘Cad Goddeu’ (‘The Battle of the Trees’). This has sometimes been thought to be by Taliesin himself, but it is highly imaginative, unlike the orderly, focused poetry usually attributed to early bards like him, and it also offers, in a mode dissimilar to his other work, in Nerys Ann Jones’s words, ‘an extensive catalogue of trees and shrubs’ (2019, p. 22).

The narrator starts asserting the human-natural connection by claiming his powers to change identity, even to become part of physical nature:

I have been a tear in the air,

I have been the dullest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book in the origin.

I have been the light of lanterns,

A year and a half.

I have been a continuing bridge,

Over three score Abers [‘estuaries’]

I have been a course, I have been an eagle.

(trans. by Celtic Literature Collective, online, p. 1)

The speaker then becomes a bard, but in deeply imaginative circumstances:

I sang in the van

Before the King of Britain

I goaded on horses,

Fleet of foot.

I fermented fleets

Laden with merchandise.

I pierced a scaly monster.

A hundred heads it had.

(p. 1)

Then he reports, more obscurely, that:

I am not he who will not sing of

A combat though small,

The conflict in the battle of Godeu, of sprigs.

Against the Guledig [‘Warlord’] of Prydain,

There passed central horses,

Fleets full of riches.

There passed an animal with wide jaws

On it there were a hundred heads.

(p. 1)

The poem becomes more specifically Christian:

There was a calling on the Creator,

Upon Christ for causes,

Until when the Eternal

Should deliver those whom he had made.

The Lord answered them

Through language and elements,

Take the forms of principal trees,

Arranging yourself in battle array.

(p. 1)

The army of trees is duly established, and each tree is described as having human qualities:

The birch, notwithstanding his high mind,

Was late before he was arrayed.

Not because of his cowardice,

But on account of his greatness.

(p. 2)

Many more battle-ready trees will be described in this remarkable poem. More usual in medieval Welsh poetry than this soaring mythic imagination is a focus on the beauty of nature and what it means to the speaker of the poetry – sometimes in negative mode, as in the thirteenth-century poem known as ‘Sadness in Spring’:

Maytime, loveliest season,

Loud bird-parley, new growth green,

Ploughs in furrow, oxen yoked,

Emerald sea, land-hues dappled.

When cuckoos call from fair tree-tops

Greater grows my sorrow;

Stinging smoke, grief awake

For my kinfolk’s passing.

(trans. by Gwyn Jones, in Jones, 1977, p. 18)

A group of poems that link the heroic and the natural worlds are those that deal with the myth of King Arthur. The richest is ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’ (‘The Spoils of Annwfn’), which is in The Book of Taliesin. Some scholars feel it may be by Taliesin himself, or that it is at least meant to seem that way, as there are links to other Taliesin poems probably of the period around 600 CE, but the language suggests composition in this form in about 900 CE. Basically, it deals in a rich and elaborate way with a raid led by Arthur on ‘Annwfn’: sometimes given as ‘Annwn’, this is the Welsh name for the Otherworld. The poem seems to tell of a raid of ‘three companies of warriors’ (‘Preiddeu Annwn’, trans. by Sarah Higley, The Camelot Project, online, unpaginated and without line numbers, 2007), but only seven men returned, with the lord of Annwn’s cauldron, which ‘will not boil the food of a coward’. Natural references are made in the poem: one speaks of Otherworld ‘beasts’ with ‘their heads of silver’: other strong nature connections are against monks, who are said to be ‘a choir of dogs’ and ‘like youngling wolves’.

More nature-contact occurs in a poem titled both ‘Arthur and the Eagle’ and ‘Dialogue of Arthur and Eliwlod’. Arthur sees an eagle high on