The Medieval Welsh Englynion y Beddau: The ‘Stanzas of the Graves’, or ‘Graves of the Warriors of the Island of Britain’, attributed to Taliesin. Ed. Patrick Sims-Williams. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2023, xxi, 372 pp.

This is a book for the specialist but general readers will be introduced to a cryptic yet fascinating sub-genre of Old Welsh poetry, englynion (pl.), that memorialize on a fixed template the deaths and burial sites of legendary and more recent Welsh, British and even Anglo-Saxon kings and legendary chieftains with information on where and how they died in battle, occasionally at whose hands, and where they are at rest, with telling details on this basic data. Some burial sites are associated here with megaliths and tumuli. “The graves may have held different meanings for different elites – secular or religious – at different periods. While some sites may have retained the same association for centuries, in other cases the poems’ interpretations may have been transient, ad hoc, or even, for all we know, fanciful or controversial” (6). New details are offered on paramount heroes such as Arthur, Gawain, and Merlin. Although the verses are ascribed to the legendary poet Taliesin of the sixth century, Sims-Williams dates the composition of the englynion to the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries. A typical stanza reads: “Whose is the grave on the bank of the Rhydnant? / Rhun (is) his name, of undoubted talents, / A king was he; Rhiogan killed him” (239, I.60). The Welsh poems are sui generis, with some debatable Irish antecedents. Popular knowledge of the encoded information on these heroes has had a long life, right up to the present. As for growth and transmission, St. Beuno’s church at Clynog, Carmarthenshire, may have been an early patron in fostering this fundamentally and initially local poetry. But,“we find so many inconsistencies that it is hard to credit that they reflect a unified system of ‘bardic instruction’, already they seem to be in the hands of exegetes, splitting hairs and reconciling contradiction by means of new contradictions” (81).