A few days ago I thrilled seeing the written word converted into a brilliant film for TV. Years ago I thrilled reading Sir Walter Scott's excellent adventure stories Rob Roy, Westward Ho!, Ivanhoe, etc. With music specially composed for the programme by Georgia Ruth.After having been unduly assaulted by Jerry Zucker's unacceptable interpretation of British folklore in `First Knight' (1995) (qv) with an overaged Richard Gere doing his best which is not much to be a romantic young dashing philanthropic Lancelot, it was a blessing indeed to come across this 1997 version of `Ivanhoe' from the BBC, shown here over Christmas on a regional channel in two hefty parts. Her translation of Aneirin's words - the first complete one by a poet - read by Lisa Jen Brown, provide the backbone of the programme, and the poem's history and resonance today is explored through interviews with Gillian, theatre director Mike Pearson, and Ieuan Jenkins, who recalls his experience of serving as a young soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the Gododdin's ancient tale of warriors, far from home, serving a nobleman and paying with their lives, seems both timeless and timely.īetween the Ears: Rhythms of Remembering enters into the world of The Gododdin, weaving extracts of Gillian Clarke's new English translation of the poem with an immersive soundscape and music.
The epigraph to David Jones's First World War masterpiece In Parenthesis is taken from The Gododdin, and it collapses the distance between the 20th century and the 6th century: 'Sennyessit e gledyf ym mhenn mameu' - 'His sword sounded in the heads of mothers'. The Gododdin also deals in what we would now call collateral damage: the bereaved and the bereft. Its tale of the pity of individual lives ended in battle, often young lives, carries clear relevance today. The Gododdin, largely forgotten, re-emerged in the early twentieth century. 'Madog cut down men like rushes, but was shy before a girl' 'At court the quiet one, Erthgi made armies groan'. The characters of the fallen are here preserved like bog-men of fifteen hundred years ago.
Their names in themselves are a form of poetry, the naming a sacred act of commemoration. What we hear is an evocation of the men who went into battle, hopelessly outnumbered, and were cut down.
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And we know that the poem was composed by Aneirin, who must have been present at the battle.Īneirin recorded what he witnessed in a series of 100 elegies for the fallen. We can identify the lord, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, who gathers the Celtic warriors together from his own tribe, calling for help from Gwynedd in present-day Wales. The time is the 7th century the site of the battle near Catterick the context, a warring world of rival tribes and chieftains. The Gododdin were a tribe based south of present day Edinburgh, who, as Britannia was reshaping itself in the post-Roman era, were fighting off incursions of Anglo-Saxons from the east. The events commemorated are real, but took place before Wales and England even existed, and long before there was such a thing as the English language. Written down by two scribes in the 13th century in a form of proto-Welsh - Brythonic - then spoken from Scotland down through Cumbria to present day Wales, it's as strange yet accessible to Welsh-speakers today as Chaucer is to English-speakers. The oldest Welsh poem - a battle elegy from around 600AD - it was passed down orally, possibly in the form of song, for hundreds of years. The Gododdin occupies a unique place in the literature of the United Kingdom. A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen, bringing to life one of the oldest, yet enduringly relevant, treasures of European literature
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