Ys celuit ae dehoglho. Interpreting a dream?

Abstract

Abstract:The second poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW Peniarth MS 1) is known by its first line as Breuddwyd a welwn neithiwr ‘I had a dream last night’. This poem is incomplete due to the loss of a leaf or, more probably, a quire, and it is the only poem in the Black Book which A. O. H. Jarman did not fit into a category in his edition of the manuscript. Indeed, the poem has been little studied, with discussion generally amounting to a passing reference to the form of the work being a list of metricized proverbs. It is this disconnect between a poem which purports, or is purported, to be about a dream, but that is said to be composed of proverbs, which has led to difficulties in its categorization, and it is this same disconnect which is immediately interesting. By breaking the verse down into its constituent parts, it is possible to argue that the poem as it now stands is a composite work and that, at its core, there is a coherent proverbial poem around which marginal verses were accumulated through several stages of copying. The first part of this paper seeks to explore this possibility, while the second part presents a discussion of the potential relationship between Breuddwyd a welwn neithiwr and later proverb lists.