Welsh poetry from the 15th century paints a vivid picture of a flooded Welsh landscape
Yesterday, the weeping was the river Alwen’s water
God Caused rain to pour over the minstrels;
The water of the river Dulas, Dee and Alun
Noah’s water all in one.
The full lake is a sea in Penlily
A sea in Gwynedd because the death of Einion…
From: The elegy for Einion ap Gruffued of Llechwedd Ystrad in Llangywer, translated by Eurig Salisbury
Guto’r Glyn is widely regarded as the most prominent Welsh poet of the fifteenth century. In a remarkable way, many of his 120 poems and especially in his many elegies and poems of compassion, paint a vivid picture of a flooded, wet and tearful Wales. In these poems “rivers and watercourses were used to great effect”.
One of the conclusions, which the authors reach in new study, is that floodplains in the Middle Ages, did not “look at all like what we (normally) experience today. Rather they were patchworks of dry and marshy environments, perilous to cross.” Since then, channel engineering, river regulations, drainage and cultivation of the fluvial plains have of course changed the landscape beyond medieval recognition.
However, using poetry like Guto’s, the authors of this article find, that it is possible to reconstruct past climates and landscapes. Though not in a scientific way, the authors stress. “Rather, it has shown how creative sources can be used to demonstrate cultural attitudes towards the landscape, while at the same time providing a basic level of reliable information about the nature of that landscape, even when used imaginatively and metaphorically”.
Further, by reading the fluvial landscapes of Wales through the poetic renderings of Guto, it perhaps becomes plausible to envisage a future, where flooding is no longer a “100-year-event” (a Noah’s Flood) but a climatic condition, we have to learn to live with in ways reminiscent of how people in the Middle Ages had to come to terms with it.
Highly imaginative and a great joy to read, it is definitely not a pity geographers and environmental planners are treated to this poetic rendering of past landscapes and future challenges. Nevertheless, the article deserves to be read by a host of other medievalists!
SOURCE
‘The tears I shed were Noah’s flood’: medieval genre, floods and the fluvial landscape in the poetry of Guto’r Glyn
By Griffiths, H.M. and Salisbury, T.E.
Journal of Historical Geography, 2013, Vol. 40, 94-104.
Dr Hywel Griffiths is lecturer at Aberystwyth University, Geography and Earth Sciences
Eurig Salisbury is Research Fellow at Guto’r Glyn Project at Wales University. He also is also a successful poet. He won the Chair in the National Urdd Eisteddfod in 2006, and came second in the Chair competition at the National Eisteddfod of Wales on three occasions, in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Consequently, he enjoys studying the work of the Poets of the Nobility on a personal level as well as professionally, though he is sometimes envious of the high status that the poets once enjoyed in Wales
A new edition of Guto’s work was published in 2012 by the AHRC and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, which funded the Guto’r Glyn project. The translation here is by Eurig Salisbury, who is one of the authors of this article.
FEATURED PHOTO:
Flooding in Wales © Diana Ashworth