Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe, eds. Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages 9. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. Pp 432. $100.00 (cloth)

Abstract

The first in this series of handbooks for Arthurian literature in medieval European traditions, The Arthur of the Welsh, appeared in 1991, and we have awaited this most recent volume ever since. Edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe, Arthur in the Celtic Languages is the first-ever single-volume survey of the corpus of Arthurian materials from Celtic nations, bringing together chapters on Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, and Breton Arthuriana (regrettably, as the volume editors note, there are no known references to the Arthurian legend in either written or oral traditions in Manx.) Where The Arthur of the Welsh focused on the medieval tradition, Arthur in the Celtic Languages covers materials from the medieval through the present day, a welcome expansion for those Arthurian scholars equally or more interested in medievalism. This book, as rich and vibrant as the cultures it examines, offers readers a solid introduction to its subject while also gesturing toward the many ways its contents might galvanize further original research and lines of investigation. Each chapter is at once a deeply learned discussion of what is known and is an inspiring guide for imagining what else might be discovered, testifying to both its authors' magisterial knowledge and its editors' skill in harnessing that knowledge in service to the field.The book is organized into three parts. Predictably, given the extant corpus of premodern Celtic Arthurian materials, part one, the chapters dealing with the Welsh tradition, constitutes over half of the volume's contents. These chapters revisit, revise, and extend the work conducted in the earlier Welsh volume, providing a badly needed update reflecting current field methodologies and preoccupations. Adding part one and part two, featuring the Breton and Cornish materials, the overall Brythonic discussion makes up twenty-one chapters and more than two-thirds of the book's pages, with part three, the Gaelic materials, making up three chapters and a little over fifty pages in total. This proportion is also to be expected, for, as Lloyd-Morgan and Poppe note in their introduction, "the oldest vernacular texts in which reference to Arthur is made are Welsh" (4), and "Arthurian traditions appear to have been more extensive and popular in the Brythonic than in the Gaelic-speaking world, and together the traditions of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany occupy an important position in relation to the development of Arthurian literature" (2). Also of note is the relationship of Arthur to these particular places in comparison to his place in other literary traditions; Lloyd-Morgan and Poppe point out that "it is important to realize that the Arthurian traditions in the Brythonic languages from the earliest sources to modern times reflect a strong awareness that Arthur is an indigenous figure, not an exotic import as he would be in all other languages" (2). While there are significant texts in the Irish and Scottish Gaelic traditions, as noted in the chapters by Poppe ("The Earliest Irish Material"), ...