Historically, the idea of Britain is closely tied to Wales and the Welsh people, who saw themselves as the sovereign rulers of the island nation of Britain, cruelly dispossessed by the Saxons. This chapter traces the historical processes by which the kingdom of England first asserted and then legally established its right to include Wales within the nation of England, appropriating Britishness as a proxy for Englishness. This ideological strategy, first normalised by the Tudors and resisted through Welsh literary production, continues to the present day. In the twentieth century, the rise of Anglophone writing in Wales challenged the link between the Welsh language and Welsh nationhood, but increasing immigration and the achievement of devolution in 1999 encouraged a more inclusive and multilingual national identity. Though political devolution has enabled Wales to define itself as a substate nation within a federated state, the ideological impetus to claim Britishness for itself continues across the border in England.

To some extent, this chapter follows on from those by Annalee Rejhon (chapter 9) and Luciana Cordo Russo (chapter 8) in this volume. In her chapter, Rejhon considers the two earliest Charlemagne texts to be translated into Welsh, Cân Rolant (from the Anglo-Norman Chanson de Roland) and Pererindod Siarlymaen (from Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne) and suggests they were both adapted in the first half of the thirteenth century. Rejhon considers in detail some examples of references to these legends in the work of three twelfth- and early thirteenth-century court poets of Wales, the gogynfeirdd, references that were inspired by Anglo-Norman Charlemagne texts circulating in the courts of the English king and the Welsh princes. Cordo Russo’s chapter focuses on techniques of translation in the Welsh texts, comparing the two earlier texts with the later one, Otuel, translated early in the fourteenth century.

In this chapter, I will look at the legacy of Charlemagne in Welsh poetry of the later Middle Ages, in the work of court poets composing from the middle of the fourteenth century to the later fifteenth century. These poets had the advantage of access to all four of the Charlemagne legends available in Welsh versions, and the detail of their references indicates the familiarity of the poets and their audiences with the legends as an assimilated tradition of military, chivalric, religious, and imperial achievement. While the gogynfeirdd, court poets who praised the Welsh princes from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, made relatively few references to the Charlemagne legends, preferring to attach their aristocratic patrons to the familiar prestige of native Welsh heroes and saints, poets of the fourteenth century drew more freely on international popular legends including those relating to Charlemagne and his knights, with a focus on the latter rather than on Charlemagne himself. The names of Roland, Oliver, and Otuel, in particular, appear fairly frequently in the poetry as paradigms of chivalric action for uchelwyr, literally ‘high men’, that is, men of the Welsh gentry, many of whom gained significant military experience fighting for the English king in wars against Scotland and France. In the fourteenth century, uchelwyr patrons of the new court poetry that emerged after the fall of the independent princes in 1282 were keen to claim legitimacy as the heirs of the Welsh princes.

This volume traces the reception and subsequent dissemination of the legend of Charlemagne across several Northern and Celtic-speaking realms in the Middle Ages and beyond. The geographical area spans the margins of the known medieval world in the North and North West and encompasses a broad range of languages and cultures that nevertheless share a common cultural heritage and intersecting pasts. Since 1932, when Hector and Nora Chadwick proposed the idea of a generic pan-European ‘heroic age’ beginning in the Greek classical age and spreading to the Germanic- and Celtic-speaking peoples of early medieval Britain, the Norse and Celtic worlds have been recognised as regions closely connected by geography, politics, and cultural production. Though the Chadwicks’ concept of a widespread unitary ‘heroic age’ characterised by a typology of texts and contexts has its difficulties, their comparative studies of the ‘island literatures’ of Iceland, Britain, and Ireland helped to position these vernacular literatures as a cultural matrix of sea-borne insular traditions.

While the Chadwicks assumed that this shared tradition was largely oral, more recent studies have focused on manuscripts and mobility across the communication pathways linking the north-western islands. Parallels have been found between Norse and Irish saga literature and between Welsh and Old English elegies, while the role of sea links in supporting cross-cultural influence has been at the heart of much scholarship. While earlier studies tended to assume a shared ‘heroic age’ culture, recent scholarship has focused on the transmission and reception of widely known texts in the insular world, including the Trojan legends, the stories of Alexander, and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

This is the context, then, in which we came to consider the transmission of the Charlemagne legends in the Norse and Celtic worlds. What is new about our book is its comprehensive account of the Charlemagne legends in Irish, Welsh, and Norse, brought together here for the first time, and our perspectives on textual criticism applied to borrowed texts with several cognates. Moving away from the Chadwickian focus on a singular literary community existing before the Norman conquest, we are interested in literary movements in the same region after the conquest, when vernacular texts began to travel more widely in a number of directions.

The large body of surviving poetry and prose from medieval Wales contains many references to the performance and practice of music, to musical instruments and to the reception of musical events by both noble and urban audiences. The medieval Welsh word for music, cerdd, also signifies ‘craft’, ‘song’, ‘poetry’ or ‘musical instrument’, indicating the close links between music, poetry and the craft of making instruments. It also indicates that both music and poetry were regarded as a type of professional craft, moderated by their own particular standards and hierarchies. The commonest entertainments offered at the courts of the nobility in medieval Wales were poetry, storytelling and music, and these three arts were closely intertwined. Well-known examples include the poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1325–60) to his beloved as she plays the harp, while other references can be found in the prose tales of the Mabinogion. However, the private entertainments of the nobility and gentry were not the only occasions for the performance of music; travelling minstrels also performed in the streets of towns and at local fairs. This chapter examines a range of such references to music, performers and instruments in medieval Welsh literature, looking at the different kinds of entertainers, their professional hierarchies, the patronage of nobility and gentry and the popular entertainments characteristic of urban culture.

At least since the nineteenth century, with the popularity of Matthew Arnold's idealised view of a culture he described as ‘Celtic’, Wales has been regarded from the outside as a ‘romantic’ place. Arnold did not entirely invent this view of Wales but was drawing on earlier traditions of poetry and travel writing by English writers who each thought they were discovering something new about the landscape and history of Wales. This view of Wales as somewhere undiscovered, somewhere beyond everyday experience, and thus in some sense threatening to the prevailing order of English hegemony, is actually as old as the early encounters between Britons and Saxons in the sixth century, but the origins of the Arnoldian version of Celticity can be located most securely in the centuries from the twelfth to the fifteenth, when the genre of medieval romance flourished and then declined.

In this chapter I aim to explore ways in which medieval insular romance worked to construct a place that we might call ‘romantic Wales’, that is, an imagined geographical and topographical site where romance phenomena (mystery, adventure, love) might be found, a place marked for romance like the crusader cities of the East or the enchanted forests of Brittany. But what was the nature of this geographical site which was called ‘Wales’, and does it map onto what we now think of as Wales, as it appears on a modern map of Britain? My approach to answering these questions draws on the field of spatial humanities, especially the assumed link between space and ideology, such that ‘places, including geographies in the medieval context of the romance, did not simply serve as settings or backgrounds and may have been carefully selected to serve an ideological purpose or awaken meaningful associations’. Romantic Wales as an imagined site in medieval literature comes already endowed with a whole set of ‘meaningful associations’ which enable romance writers to use it as a kind of shorthand for the adventures that are to come.

Like other imagined spaces in medieval romance, the idea of ‘Wales’ was not stable throughout the Middle Ages. I want to suggest that before about 1300 romantic Wales existed immanently across the whole of the territory, from the Norman lordships to the lands of the independent Welsh princ-es. After 1300, following the loss of native Welsh rule, romantic Wales no longer comprised the whole geographical country but was reduced in size, occupying only those lands in the north and west which had once belonged to the native princes.

On the history and major movements in the editing of medieval texts, with a detailed case study that permits a step-by-step explication of how one can go about editing a text that exists in more than one instantiation.