Welsh Court Poems is the first of ten volumes in the new Library of Medieval Welsh Literatureseries, which aims to make Middle Welsh literature available to English-speaking scholars and students who wish to study it in its original language. In keeping with that aim, Welsh Court Poems makes the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries available for the first time to this readership--presenting thirty-three of the 236 poems published by the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. Each poem appears in the original Middle Welsh accompanied by a full scholarly apparatus in English, providing a point of entry for any scholar interested in Middle Welsh poetry itself or researching comparative literature in other languages, other periods of Welsh literature, and medieval history.

For over a thousand years, Arthur has had widespread appeal and influence like no other literary character or historical figure. Yet, despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters are still shrouded in uncertainty. They are mostly found in poetic texts scattered throughout the four great compilations of early and medieval Welsh literature produced between 1250 and 1350. Whilst some are thought to predate their manuscript sources by several centuries, many of these poems are notoriously difficult to date. None of them are narrative in nature and very few focus solely on Arthurian material but they are characterised by an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences in the courts of princes and noblemen the length and breadth of Wales. They portray Arthur in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They also testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures. Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry, the fourth volume in the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series, provides discussion of each of the references to Arthurian characters in early Welsh poetic sources together with an image from the earliest manuscript, a transliteration, a comprehensive edition, a translation (where possible) and a word-list. The nine most significant texts are interpreted in more detail with commentary on metrical, linguistic and stylistic features.

The saga englynion are among the most appealing medieval Welsh poems. Despite some difficulties, their style is generally direct and their contents interesting to modern readers. In these poems the anonymous poets speak as characters from story. The full narrative setting has been lost, but enough can be reconstructed to appreciate the poetry. This selection includes dramatic dialogues and monologues exploring the acceptable limits of heroism. The old warrior, Llywarch Hen, mourns his sons’ death in battle and his lonely old age full of regrets. Heledd, the only major female character in the saga poetry, laments the loss of her family and her country to the invading English. A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems, the fifth volume of the Library of Medieval Welsh Literature Series, presents edited texts from the main manuscripts. The introduction offers a guide to interpretation, dating, and metrics, while a full glossary and explanatory notes make these poems readily accessible to the reader.

This anthology of Welsh poems from c.575 to c.1525 offers the general reader the most substantial collection of medieval Welsh verse yet rendered into English, in translations that will support the claim that this poetry is one of the finest literary achievements of the Middle Ages. Drawing on Professor Clancy's acclaimed Medieval Welsh Lyrics (1965) and The Earliest Welsh poetry (1970) this comprehensive anthology presents over 150 poems, eloquently translated that render poetry as poetry. A lucid introduction, ample notes and a glossary provide the background needed for a full appreciation of the poems.

Among the most enigmatic and fascinating of early Welsh poems are the sequences of stanzas commonly categorized as gnomic. In their most typical form they juxtapose vivid natural description with generalisations about the physical world and about human life, combining an evident delight in weather and the changing seasons, landscapes and seascapes, and birds, beasts and plants with a serious and often witty concern for the moral and practical aspects of daily life. The origin and function of these stanzas remains a puzzle; some may be associated with particular situations in narratives now lost, but as a whole they appear to have developed at an early stage into a recognised genre of their own. They may be supposed to have a philosophical purpose, serving to assert a continuity between the natural and moral orders; on the other hand they may be read simply as a repository of folk-wisdom. While their interpretation remains a matter for discussion, their language is comparatively simple, and they thus provide an engaging window on the ordinary conceptual world of mediaeval Wales. This volume presents texts of the gnomic stanzas from the most important collection, that in Red Book of Hergest, and from some other manuscripts, with a few other poems containing related material, some of them edited in English for the first time, together with a literary and linguistic introduction, explanatory commentary and extensive glossary. Nicolas Jacobs is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

In Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively. Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.