Creative bilingualism in Late-Medieval Welsh poetry

Hopwood, Llewelyn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1584-6047 2021. Creative bilingualism in Late-Medieval Welsh poetry. Studia Celtica 55 (1) , pp. 97-119. 10.16922/SC.55.5

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Abstract

This article considers why bilingual poets from medieval Wales exploited their various languages as avenues of creativity. It discusses five poems from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that synthesize Welsh and either English or Latin to varying degrees. The article untangles the conscious and often complex linguistic integration, using the term ‘extralinguistic bilingualism’ to do so with two exclusively English poems that nonetheless use Welsh strict- metre and ‘orthography’, one of which is a series of once anonymous English englynion recently found to be the work of prolific fifteenth-century poet Tudur Aled. By examining the poems in tandem and by contextualising their apparent isolation within Wales’ contemporary linguistic landscape and within the phenomena of multilingual poetry, Marian lyrics and ‘aureate’ diction, the impetus behind their curious hybridity is queried. It is argued that comedy, piety, and literary craft are key considerations, which are all connected by an overarching concern for relative linguistic prestige: the perceived divergence between the social and literary status of each language.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Welsh
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D111 Medieval History P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PB Modern European Languages > PB1001 Celtic languages and literature P Language and Literature > PC Romance languages P Language and Literature > PE English P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Language other than English:	Welsh
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
ISSN:	0081-6353
Funders:	Arts and Humanities Research Council, Thomas Charles-Edwards Scholarship in Celtic (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 December 2022
Date of Acceptance:	7 September 2020
Last Modified:	29 Feb 2024 06:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/154707

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