Customer Reviews

The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age North Britain

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If perchance you are seeking a good translation of "Aneirin's" Gododdin, this probably is the one to get. Dr Koch has managed to present a very thorough reconstruction of this epic poem, with the full apparatus you'd expect from a scholarly book such as this one. Indeed, you get a long and precise discussion of the text in the introduction, an Old/Middle Welsh - English facing translation and complete footnotes to help you make the best out of the text. Be warned, though. This book isn't for the faint of heart nor for the neophyte who expects an introduction to the subject or to the field of Insular Celtic Studies. The author expects the reader to be at the very least familiar to the setting of Dark Age Britain. Yet, since you are reading this, surely this warning is useless. All in all, the best your money can buy if only a bit mind-boggling in its sheer complexity. But for this, it is I who is to blame !

The basic aim of this book is to show that Aneirin, who lived in the 7th century C.E., could have written the "Gododdin," which was first transcribed (that we know of) in the 13th century C.E. To do this, Koch works backwards from the text we have in the Book of Aneirin. The first half of the book is the introduction, which as O.J. Padel noted read more like working notes than anything intended for public consumption, and surely not for the casual reader.

This is a brilliant work in its own right, but readers looking for a good English translation of the Gododdin might be better off looking at Jarman's work, which is quite poetic and is bilingual between English and modern Welsh.

If you have never met _Y Gododdin_ before, don't start with this book - go look for a copy of A. O. H. Jarman's bilingual edition instead. On the other hand, if you are already an enthusiast, buy it by all means - you will find much here to interest, intrigue, educate, challenge and possibly annoy you. The long introduction is practically a book in itself, if a rather dense one; the translations (there are, in a manner of speaking, two - Koch's reconstructed Old Welsh version of the medieval manuscript, plus his English translation) are also interesting, if very literal-minded. I do recommend this book - but not for beginners.

This is a very, very loose reconstruction of the text, based on Koch's own theories about the Celtic proto-language that Old Welsh dveloped from. This 'proto-language' is itself little more than a theory and therefore the validity of the work is dubious. Most of the "evidence" presented here has been disproved by Graham R. Isaac ('Readings in the History and Transmission of the Gododdin'; 'Gweith Gwen Ystrat and the Northern Heroic Age of the Sixth Century'). Although a fair attempt at the impossible, this book is at best misleading.