Canu Llywarch Hen

Canu Llywarch Hen (modern Welsh /'kani 'ɬəwarχ heːn/, the songs of Llywarch Hen) are a collection of early Welsh englyn-poems. They comprise the most famous of the early Welsh cycles of englynion about heroes of post-Roman North Britain.

As edited by Jenny Rowland, the contents of Canu Llywarch Hen are as follows:

The poems contemplate martial, masculine culture, fate, and old age from a critical standpoint. As the with other so-called 'saga englynion’ (pre-eminently Canu Urien and Canu Heledd), there is considerable uncertainty and debate as to how the poems of Canu Llywarch might originally have been performed. It is usually assumed that they must have been accompanied by some kind of prose narrative, to which they provided emotional depth; but this is not certain.

In all the independent witnesses bar NLW 4973a, the Llywarch Hen poems are preceded by the englyn-poem Claf Abercuawg, which in the White Book is entitled 'Englynion Mabclaf ap Llywarch' (‘englynion of Mabclaf son of Llywarch’). However, modern scholars do not see it as linked to the Llywarch Hen material.

The poems are attested principally in the late fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest. They were also included in the White Book of Rhydderch, but are now lost due to damage to the manuscript. However, they are attested in two later manuscripts descended from the White Book, Peniarth 111 (made by John Jones of Gellillyfdy in 1607), whose spelling is very close to the White Book's, and London, British Library, Add. MS 31055 (made by Thomas Wiliems in 1596), which is a less conservative copy. Some other late copies of lost medieval manuscripts of the englynion also exist: National Library of Wales 4973 contains two copies of the cycle, both copied by Dr John Davies of Mallwyd, one of Wales's leading antiquarians and scribes of his day, before 1631. The first copy, NLW 4973a, derives from a lost manuscript closer to the White Book than the Red. The second copy, NLW 4973b, is more complex and may represent a conflation of multiple medieval sources, but seems to have at least some independent value as a witness to the lost arhcetype of the poems. It is fairly clear that all these manuscripts descend from a lost common original, to which they are all fairly similar, making the creation of a critical edition of the poems relatively straightforward.

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