David Callander - Dissonant Neighbours: Narrative Progress in Early Welsh and English Poetry

CONTENTS

I t is a pleasure to recognize here the many debts I have incurred in producing this book. Firstly, I would like to thank my family for their constant encouragement, even as more than one house began to fill up with the books I amassed.

The number of scholars and others who have helped with this work is too numerous to list, but includes: Barry Lewis, Bethany Christiansen, Wyn Thomas; for inspiration and support at Oxford, Helen Brookman, Thomas Charles-Edwards, Heather ODonoghue, Olivia Robinson, Daniel Thomas and Marion Turner; at Cambridge, Ben Allport, Ben Guy, Silva Nurmio, Alex Reider and Myriah Williams. I am particularly indebted to my doctoral supervisors Richard Dance and Paul Russell, and examiners Marged Haycock and Emily Thornbury.

I would like to thank University of Wales Press, especially Llion Wigley, for their support, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

I am grateful to the AHRC for funding my research and to the Leverhulme Trust for funding research in Germany. Besonders danken mchte ich auch Prof. Dr Stefanie Gropper, Prof. Dr Bernhard Maier, Dr Eva von Contzen und Prof. Dr Monika Fludernik.

Yn olaf ac yn bennaf, hoffwn ddiolch i Rebecca am ei chymorth ai chariad.

NARRATIVE PROGRESS IN EARLY WELSH AND ENGLISH POETRY

T wo short sections of this book are published elsewhere. Parts of the Introduction are published in different and more extended form in Die diachrone Entwicklung der Erzhlung in der kymrischen Heiligendichtung. Certain sections of also appeared in Laamons Dialogue and English Poetic Tradition, published in English Studies , 97 (2016).

E arly Welsh poetry is difficult, or so the old saying goes. Yet where exactly do we locate this difficulty? Certainly there are philological problems, with numerous hapax legomena and doubtless much textual corruption, but these issues are common in early medieval poetry, whatever the language. When the claim is made that early Welsh poetry presents particular difficulties, it is worth bearing in mind the words of Hayden White:

We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, narrative .. is translatable without fundamental damage in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not.