Trioedd Ynys Prydain and the Transmission of Medieval Welsh Narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Dissertation Advisor: Catherine McKenna Author: Celeste L. Andrews

Trioedd Ynys Prydain and the Transmission of Medieval Welsh Narratives

Trioedd Ynys Prydain are a series of closely related texts, appearing in manuscripts from the second half of the thirteenth century forward, which serve as compendia of cyfarwyddyd (storytelling material) organized in triads, or groupings of three. Texts of these Triads survive in nineteen manuscripts dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. This dissertation examines and contextualizes those nineteen texts to better understand how the cyfarwyddyd contained within them developed and circulated over that three-century period. It approaches this effort in two ways. The first is to closely examine individual triads to identify their sources and better understand their transmission history. Part 1 consists of case studies of six triads, all of which belong to the category of “expanded narrative triads,” those triads which resemble narrative prose passages. I argue in these case studies that these triads should be considered authored texts in their own right, and that each reflects the creative choices of its individual author. The second approach, in Part 2 of the dissertation, is to think about how each surviving text of Trioedd Ynys Prydain came to be. I argue that the texts can often be shown as collections of multiple shorter, earlier texts which have been compiled by scribes and copyists. I have called these “microtexts.” For the purposes of this dissertation, a “microtext” is a sub-section within a text of Trioedd Ynys Prydain which likely has its own transmission history and should be considered its own discrete part of the larger text. This dissertation argues that close readings of three texts of Trioedd Ynys Prydain – those in Peniarth 47, the Red Book of Hergest, and Peniarth 50 -- provide convincing evidence that the scribes who developed these texts did so by compiling several shorter collections of Trioedd Ynys Prydain together. These shorter collections which were compiled together are microtexts. Taken together, these two approaches demonstrate that Trioedd Ynys Prydain are authored texts that have been composed, expanded, and re-worked by the individuals who worked with this material over a three-century period between the thirteenth and sixteenth.