Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts: From the Welsh Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by Elis Gruffydd (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts: From the Welsh Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by Elis Gruffydd
• Peter H. Goodrich

elis gruffydd, Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts: From the Welsh Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World. Introduction by Jerry Hunter. Translated by Patrick K. Ford. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. 158. isbn: 978–0–520–39025-6. $18.95.

Among the most important (and lengthiest) works in the Welsh language is the universal history written by a professional soldier who spent most of his life in [End Page 102] Calais. As a trusted servant of Sir Robert Wingfield during Henry VIII’s reign, Elis Gruffydd nevertheless retained his fondness for his native tongue and homeland in north Wales. Although not a bard or university educated, he was distinctively literate, finding time among his duties to pen four works, the most important of which is the Chronicl Cwech Oes y Byd of over 2400 pages, completed in 1552 and excerpted in this new translation by Patrick K. Ford. For those who can read Welsh, it is available online from the National Library of Wales in two manuscripts: NLW MS 5276D and NLW MS 3045D.

Professor Jerry Hunter’s knowledgeable introduction provides a fine insight into Gruffydd’s life and work, providing not only the biographical facts but the flavor of what it meant to be a sixteenth-century Welshman of the lesser gentry. Professor Ford’s translation originated in a graduate reading group that was cut short by COVID-19. It is a canny selection of highlights that will be of special interest to Arthurians and those interested in British folklore. Like Ford’s earlier translations, such as the The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (1977), which I assigned several times as a course text, this slender new volume is both clear and direct in style, while remaining faithful to the flow and even quirks of Gruffydd’s composition. Many Arthurians and Celticists have long wished for such a book.

Gruffydd spent untold hours using ‘a dizzying combination of sources [some no longer extant] in a variety of languages’ (p. 2), adding personal comments and recollections. As Ford notes, the Chronicle was inscribed in Gruffydd’s spare time— sometimes hastily—and presents the reader with difficulties beyond just length, such as non-normalized spelling, scarce punctuation, haphazard capitalization, and vagaries in pronoun reference. Both Hunter and Ford are to be commended for their scholarly stubbornness in persisting with the study of the author’s entire oeuvre and making at least this small portion of it available to modern English readers.

The translated texts are divided into three sections: ‘Earliest Times, Biblical and Ancient’ ending with ‘The Origins of Britain’; followed by ‘Merlin and Arthur’; and lastly by miscellaneous ‘Tales of Magic, Prophecy, and the Supernatural’ which include two on Gwion Bach-Taliesin that supplement Ford’s still-in-print Mabinogion volume. Ford does not always follow manuscript order, but occasionally groups related texts, for example those featuring Gwerthyrn/Vortigern. He also situates the Sword in the Stone story after Arthur’s early battles to consolidate his kingdom and Merlin’s demise before the remaining Arthurian material despite its placement later in the manuscript. One of the Arthurian texts is unique, in which Arthur gets the worse of a rivalry with the writer Gildas’ brother Huail and cross-dresses to dance with a desirable girl. Drawing from a welter of sources, Gruffydd occasionally gets something clearly wrong, as when, faced with competing versions of Merlin’s death, he writes about the Lady of the Lake that ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth says that from fear of her life she fled from the island to Gascony, from fear of the people who kept calling about Merlin’ (p. 91).

Because he employs abundant Welsh and early medieval material, it can be easy to forget that Elis is a Tudor-era chronicler, heir to rich, varied, and long-standing traditions in universal history, Arthurian legend, and early modern folklore. His [End Page 103] texts often remind us of this, as when he expresses rational skepticism regarding Merlin’s construction of Stonehenge or...